The Rich Roll Podcast - Darin Olien On The Toxic Products That Are Destroying Your Health (And The Planet)

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Today’s guest has a name for the pernicious ways in which the many products we routinely use are actually harming us in very real but often invisible ways: fatal conveniences. Everything from deodorant and denim to detergent and dental floss—even seemingly innocuous things like carpet, crayons, and candles, unbeknownst to most, are abound with chemicals either unproven safe or demonstrably harmful. And yet, these things are used ubiquitously in our daily lives without a second thought. Here to help us make sense of this insanity is wellness expert Darin Olien, returning for his fifth appearance on the show. If you are new to this superfood-hunting adventurer, Darin has devoted his life to advancing human health, ecological preservation, and sustainability. He’s the New York Times bestselling author of SuperLife and cohost of the Emmy™ Award Winning, #1 Netflix docu-series, Down to Earth with Zac Efron.  In case you’ve missed my previous conversations with Darin, be sure to check out episodes #153, #268, #382, and #542. Darin is a friend, a mentor, and my go-to counsel when it comes to better aligning my life with my values. This might be the most powerful and impactful of our conversations to date. Show notes + MORE Watch on Youtube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: InsideTracker:  insidetracker.com/RichRoll Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll Birch Living: birchliving.com/richroll Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RichRoll  Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. There's 9,000 different forms of PFAS in our environment. 9,000. Just as a context, almost everyone has it in their blood. 9,000, just as a context, almost everyone has it in their blood. Let's become aware of this stuff so that we can make another choice. We all know that avoiding highly processed food

is a powerful step to eliminating toxins from your diet. But what about the chemicals that we put on our bodies or absorb into our skin from our household products or even our clothes. Today's guest, Darren O'Lean, who you may know from his many past appearances on the show or perhaps from his star turn as Zac Efron's co-host on the hit Netflix series, Down to Earth, has a name for the pernicious ways

in which the many products we assume are safe are actually harming us in very real but often invisible ways. And that term is fatal conveniences. I'm talking about everything from deodorant and denim to detergent and even dental floss actually abound with chemicals. So today we attempt to make sense of this insanity, how to know what products are safe to use and what we should avoid. You're in very good hands because Darren, when he isn't traipsing the far corners of the globe or working on new sustainable solutions for agriculture, energy, and industry, has spent the better part of his entire life studying this very topic,

all of which he condenses and shares in his fantastic new book, Fatal Conveniences, the toxic products and harmful habits that are making you sick and the simple changes that will save your health. I think this just might be the most powerful and impactful of our five public conversations to date. So get ready to take notes

and be prepared to be educated, to be nourished, and most importantly, be empowered. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care.

Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, support and empower you to find the ideal level of care providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com

is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, enough. Let's do the thing. Well, good to see you.

Thank you for coming back. I was thinking about the many times that you've appeared on this podcast. You've always been such a popular guest. This is your fifth appearance. So I think we've logged somewhere between eight or 10 hours of conversations. Amazing.

Going all the way back to our first episode was 1 53. That was way back. Wow. Yeah. How many are you at now? So we're in this mid seven, seven 40 something. I don't know, 750. That was in this back room,

just like in this little engine engineering room or something. I can't remember where the first one was that we did. Was it at my house or? No, no, no, it was at your partner's business. Oh, yeah. I mean, we've had a few locations, but we got our HQ here. You've been here many times,

but not a guest on the podcast, so welcome. Thank you, man. Yeah, man, we've covered so many things over those episodes. We've talked about super foods, man, we've covered so many things over those episodes. We've talked about super foods, of course, plant-based nutrition. We went deep on water and hydration. We talked about Verrucas and all the work that you've done

in the rainforest and the various regions across South America and all your travels. We've talked about breath, brain states. We talked about down to earth, I think, the last time you were on, which was mid pandemic. Right. So lots happened since the last time, man. Another season of down to earth.

And now you've got this new book, Fatal Conveniences. So congratulations, buddy. Thanks, dude. Yeah, man. I know. Two and a half years of... Dude, I know how long and how hard you've been working on this thing,

like an albatross around your neck. A lot went into it. I loved it. And I think it's really gonna help a lot of people. It's really powerful. My experience in reading the book was weirdly this strange combination of it both being on the one hand,

like a very breezy, easy read, like it's very easy to kind of like go through it. And at the same time, this extremely dense, comprehensive, almost research paper where you basically canvas every single thing that's out in the world trying to kill us. And the main takeaway is kind of, you know, goddamn, it's hard to be a conscious human

in the modern world, isn't it? It's fucking inconvenient. It's very inconvenient. You know? Yeah, yeah. You know, this one, this shocked me a bit. I naively said, I'm gonna write this book because I, you know, in parallel to 30 years of kind of the start of understanding this with my dad, which we can unpack and talk about a little bit.

But this has been a part of my life ever since then. So I'm like, yeah, no problem. I know a bunch of this stuff. Let's write a book. I'll be able to crank it out in six months. I literally thought that. That was the first kind of idea. And then two and a half years later.

Yeah. Because it's like when you really, it's like as anything, Rich, right? When you really look and really ask questions and really ask questions and really start to study something, mostly it's more complex than you can possibly imagine. Anything in life, all environmental issues,

all of these chemicals, why they're there, why they're not there, whatever it is, it's always very complex. And so that's why flippantly in this world, when you're seeing people just making comments and this kind of click baitable stuff, it doesn't do a lot of service to the complexity of things. And our mutual friend, Paul Hawken is such a great example

of inviting the powers that be into the conversation and into proactivity of how to make changes. And even on down to earth, when we sat down with the professor who wrote Black Yumu, I'm losing track of his name right now, that we go into all these complex issues and he says, we say, what do we do? And he literally says, have tea and talk about it

with each other so that we come together. So it's like, so that being said, every chapter in that book is so complex and so big that easily could have been a book. Yeah, of course. I mean, that's a really powerful perspective that as you mentioned is applicable across the board to whatever subject matter you're trying to understand.

We go into these things thinking we have an idea of what it is. Oh, it's a black and white, it's us versus them. We see a lot of that on the internet. The algorithm favors the us versus them model and amplifies that. And a lot of so on the internet. The algorithm favors the us versus them model and amplifies that. And a lot of, you know, so-called, you know, quote unquote experts, you know, spewing here and there

in a way that makes it sound like they know what they're talking about, but not necessarily, you know, is that a good arbiter of true wisdom? And mastery, as you know, is the capacity to really immerse yourself in a subject matter where you go on that journey where you think you know,

and then the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. And then ultimately through lifelong dedication, you come out the other side and have some level of wisdom matched with humility and you're able to communicate it in simplistic terms. And I think a lot of people, particularly on the internet, are pretenders to that level of mastery

and they hide behind a lot of language and a lot of phraseology that makes people think that they know what they're talking about, but real mastery is being able to condense it down and explain things simply with that level of humility. And I feel like on some level, I don't, you know, like not to overly project here, I don't know that you would consider yourself a master

on any of the subjects that, you know, these rabbit holes that you went down, but you were able to communicate really complex stuff in like I said, a very readable way. And each one of these chapters is a launching pad or a starting gate for somebody to go deeper into their own exploration. Yeah, I think what you said, I agree a thousand percent.

And that book is definitely an example of knocking me back a notch thinking i know and and sitting me in the seat of like this is number one so shocking i don't know how many times rich going through each chapter and each research i was like what the fuck is going on like I don't I'm reading it and I still don't understand why this is happening right so that coupled with just the enormous amount of research that was used and cited and helped guide you I'm going oh my god I'm going, oh my God, I'm a forever student, forever student of this modern day conundrum that we're in. Because we all were born into it, all of us, right? And we weren't even given our first breath and we were already inoculated with chemicals

in the umbilical cord. And it shows up many different studies, many different ways. And that's the shocking thing. And did you have a choice? Did that little baby in the womb have a choice in utero? No. So, all of this stuff, yeah, man, it knocked me back. I wanted to quit.

My researchers, going back to the table, this isn't working, this isn't working. And then you realize, wow, I team and professionals to amass this knowledge and to try to put it. And now to answer one of those things about trying to make it palatable and digestible for someone, a technique that I constantly use, shout out to my brother, Troy. that I constantly use, shout out to my brother, Troy. He doesn't know this, but I constantly listen through his perception of the world. So it was sort of written with him in mind, like he was the audience member that you were writing for.

Cause if he doesn't, my brother's like, if he learns something and he can understand it, it's not all people are like this, but he goes, Oh, well, why would I do that? Why would I drink out of this microplastic induced estrogen mimicking phthalate filled plastic water bottle? When I can just go, all right, I got tested well water and I'll use a glass. Why would you drink out of plastic now knowing what it is?

So with that, I don't mean this disparagingly, but just a simple common sense filter of looking at the world, I wanted to make the book with infinite complexity, make it so that my brother, my mom, Midwestern roots of family and people and friends could read this book and go, okay, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I think you succeed on that front. On the one level, you can read this book and basically the thesis is, is like everything we use, buy, eat, wear, everything we sleep on, everything we use to keep cool or clean ourselves or our stuff is bad and is trying to kill us, right? It's like kind of, you know, dispiriting and dystopic in many ways.

And it's easy to obviously be overwhelmed by that and perhaps freaked out. It's a matrix like experience as you kind of describe in the book. But it's paired with solutions and an optimistic kind of tonality to it in that it provides all of us with a kind of call to action to reclaim our sovereignty.

And I know sovereignty is a big, that's big with you to really recognize our own agency and shoulder the responsibility that we all have to make better choices for ourselves. And on some level that's empowering. And those choices, you know, one single choice by one single person isn't gonna change the world.

But, you know, in macro, you scale that up. And the more consumers are conscious of those choices, the more our capitalist society responds to meet that demand. Totally. And that's the inclusive, like, you, like you bring people into the conversation. I mean, that's really the macro thing here. It's like we can point fingers

and say these people are bad or evil, this product should be banned, et cetera. But ultimately change is forged through mature conversations with people in the seats of power who can change the course of how we do these things, right? And if you alienate them and don't create a welcoming environment to have that conversation to begin with,

you're never gonna get off the dime. Yeah, yeah. And that's the, on the one hand, you and I have been in the health space for a long time. I wrote Super Life, super stoked to write that as my first book and kind of get this foundational principle out and then then it finally dawned on me you know and harper came back like hey man like we can write another book would

you and i'm just going just like blaringly obvious was this invisible hard to pin down world of chemicals and EMFs and toxicology that is- Pervasive. Pervasive everywhere that is hitting us on so many different angles, hundreds of interactions of lab created chemicals every day, all day, that literally disrupting our endocrine system,

disrupting and lowering testosterone, thyroids, pituitary, you name it, and it just keeps going. So I'm like, thyroids, pituitary, you name it. And it just keeps going. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm writing something on the one hand of super life trying to help people get better. But then this invisible elephant, right? In the room of our world is just screaming in my head.

And the full circle, because my dad was the first teacher, as a teacher, he then taught me, hey man, in order for me to be around you, and I was studying college, I was soaking up physiology at the time, but I still thought my dad was weird. But my dad was the first one telling me

and through his discovery of he was chemically sensitive. Right? And then I'm like, dad's crazy, right? Maybe he was the angry dry drunk most of my life and now something else is happening. But then when he'd say, hey, man, he'd send that care package to me in college. You're coming home this weekend. Well, you got to do laundry with this unscented brand, this bar soap, this shampoo, this conditioner,

and don't wear these kind of clothes. this shampoo, this conditioner, and don't wear these kinds of clothes. When I actually then did it, because in order to hang out with him and see him, I had to abide by these things. I then started to realize how desensitized I was from all of these things. And I started to feel better,

even though I didn't know I was not feeling all that optimal. And then, so that was the start. And my dad's mystery became him being the first person to start in, not the first person in his area and maybe Southern California to really start to investigate this through multiple doctors that were trying to figure out why he had neurological decline, he had depression. He literally could not,

his endocrine system was being hijacked. His nervous system was being hijacked. His stress response was being hijacked. So finally he was able to get to like, oh, well there's the Azo dyes coming off of my favorite Harley t-shirts, you know, my blue jeans, my paints, my fire retardants, my, you know, any smells, perfumes, parfum,

all of this stuff. Yeah, all that cologne you were wearing back in the day. Right? Totally. Trocard noir. Totally. All over Big D. My God.

Freshman year in college, right? Sure. Yeah, I mean, the thing that's so interesting about this, you know, and I've heard you share about your dad many times, but I learned a lot more about that backstory that I didn't know. And for those that are listening or watching, it's easy to think, well, Darren kind of jumped

on this fatal conveniences idea when he started doing segments on his podcast, talking about this, those got popular. You started making reels on Instagram, little videos, like little nuggets on this concept. But it really does go all the way back to your childhood and this condition that your dad suffered from at a time where, you know, not only was that weird,

like I can imagine, you know, how other people responded to that. You talk a little bit about it in the book, like people didn't know what it was or what caused it or the fact that you would have to jump through all these hoops just to be in his presence must have been very foreign and perhaps off putting to a lot of people.

Yeah, it was really hard for him. I mean, here's the male figure in my life who's kind of being, you can't see what's going, you can't see what the abuse that's happening inside his head. So he's just nuts, right? He was, you know, he must be crazy. He was a veteran, you know,

and then you tell on top of the whole thing, I didn't know the whole story of the keepers of the dragon and his experience on this aircraft carrier during the Cuban missile crisis, which is wild. Yeah, so he started putting pieces together that I didn't even know he was involved in that till that Kevin Costner movie came out talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

My dad started crying in front of me, first time I've ever seen him cry. And I finally asked him like, why are you so emotional over this? And then he, you know, told me this whole thing. He was one of the keepers of the dragon, which they called this small group of people that took care of the atomic bomb,

that loaded it up, that got it ready, that was a partial engineer job. And so these guys were the harbingers of this nuclear bomb. And so he was around that. So that obviously the stress and the craziness of that, he never shared it. But the one thing that it left him with was a absolute annihilation of, of his thyroid. Right. So then,- The radioactive exposure. Yeah, I mean, so he was already hijacked

from an ionizing radiation, which pulls apart electrons and destroys DNA and very acutely has an affinity for the thyroid. So he didn't have that. And so as I'm putting these pieces together and seeing kind of the front row of his life, and then it's almost like, if you have this glass here, his immune system, his liver was compromised of alcoholism

and then this compromised endocrine system and a thyroid that was gone. And then you add on top of it, this exposure, this level of depression that would come in and had very little resiliency. So it's as if I took this water and I filled up this glass and it kind of spilled over he had he did not have a normal level of resiliency to just kind of live his life right and I'm very um I my

conclusion is that that led him down with forced retirement with a disability because he couldn't educate his wing at the college, right? He couldn't do it fast enough to get people to like, hey man, I have this thing called chemical sensitivity. He would make, he was a teacher, so he'd make tapes. He would find all the research and he would send it to everybody, all of his colleagues and everything else.

And then he had to retire. And then slowly he had to start giving up parts of his life. And he was very sociable. He loved connecting with people. He cared deeply. And when things were kind of being taken away from him because of this invisible thing that he couldn't, abuse started showing back up in his life

after 30 years of sobriety. I'm convinced it's an absolute strong situation that led him to feeling not so great. And then ultimately alcohol claimed his life. Right, forced isolation leading to that relapse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's tragic. It's really sad, but it's also powerful.

It's perhaps the most powerful example that you have to kind of set the stage to talk about these invisible forces that are at play that we didn't consent to even before birth, as you mentioned. And you quote an amazing study that I think that is the Environmental Working Group did where they tested like umbilical cords of babies and realizing how rife with all kinds of chemicals

and toxins existed there prior to birth. 200 plus. And over 75% of them are known problematic, cancer, uterine problems, birth defects, et cetera. And that's how we're starting life. And you're like, that's a, and now with pre and pro floral alkali substances called PFAS, these things now are in over 90%

of Red Cross did this, over 90% of everyone's blood is PFAS and that's for everyone listening, that's in a class of compounds called forever chemicals, forever, right? And that is, I was thinking on the way over, I was like, what's the most startling? Cause so many times how many swear words are in here

when I'm going through research going, what the fuck is happening, right? How is this possible? PFAS is pretty gnarly because not only are they forever chemicals and we've had examples of them too. We've had examples of other forever chemicals. DDT was banned in 1972.

And guess what is in over 90% of all teenagers today? DDT. Yeah, I saw that in the book. That was shocking. Cause you would think that's a bygone, like that doesn't exist anymore. We got our shit together when it came to that. Yeah. And it's like, and this is where it goes into,

again, Rich, we have so many rabbit holes to go down. Let's try to keep it on the rails. But it goes and people are going, yeah, but how is it that these things even exist? And there's a million examples in the book, right? How are these things even in the book? Well, there's a couple of ways to answer that. There's plausible deniability, right?

So plausible deniability is basically, well, if we don't test it in our product, then we don't know what's there. We don't know what's harmful. And then if you look at some of the studies, you're clearly showing in other randomized controlled trials that it's causing harm in mammals and mice and all these other things. So the game, let's just come out with the game. The game is we're going to put whatever we want for the most part in these products.

And then if there's a problem and if there's an overwhelming amount of a problem, then the quote unquote government regulatory bodies will step in and then do something about it right so you know we talked i think before we even recording like it's a moving target like this book every week there was more stuff coming out and even before being done and now there was Simply Orange got busted by the Coca-Cola company and full of a bunch of crazy stuff. But you know what they found? 200 PFAS chemicals in that being sold.

Simply Orange is a orange juice brand. Yeah, it's an orange juice brand by the Coca-Cola company. So they didn't test it. So they quote unquote didn't know. Right, so yeah. Just to kind of tie the knot on PFAS and we can talk about that more if you like. That was something that I talked extensively

about with Aaron Brockovich with respect to water and what's going on with water, shocking. You can go and listen to that. We spent two hours talking about PFAS. And then I had Greg Renfrew on, who's the founder of Beauty Counter. She created this amazing company to produce personal care products for women that were toxin free and has been a loud and very powerful voice on Capitol Hill lobbying for change.

But, you know, some of what she shared, you know if this has changed, but she shared that the United States had not passed any major legislation on the safety of ingredients and personal care products since 1939. And essentially, the kind of quote that you have in the book on this is that she talks about is this burden of proof, right? Like basically it's not a situation

in which the company who's about to put a product on the shelf has to prove that it's safe. It can just go into use and only when evidence mounts that it's dangerous, not just dangerous, but that the danger is overwhelming and impossible to ignore, will the government get involved or people file lawsuits or what have you. So that's all broken and reversed.

And when you look at the very long list of chemicals that find their way into all of these products that are just sort of like, well, they're safe, or they do these internal studies, right? Like they either don't study it before it goes on the shelf or they do a self-serving study to say, yeah, we've looked at it, it's safe. And it's kind of a roulette wheel, right? And meanwhile, we, you know, another kind of overarching theme in the book that you make very clear is that we're living in an experiment.

I'm glad that you've had a couple bad asses on this podcast to talk about this because I need to. This is as way through the legacy of my first teacher who was my dad. So I have to talk about it and I know it's affecting people. And then, so yeah, I mean, the PFAS thing is so crazy. And so it is absolutely reversed. So we think this is the internal fatal convenience of regulation. That in and of itself is a fatal convenience of how this is happening.

It's a twilight zone of an experiment as opposed to shouldn't it be proven safe before we can blast it out to our children and put this very easy, wipeable baby bib on our beautiful child when that easy, wipeable baby bib is full of PFOS because it's a non-sticking, easy to wipe off. And just for context for everybody, because they should go back and listen to those other podcasts that you've mentioned. It is a grandson of Teflon, right? It's this fluorine reaction, chemical reaction that goes on and it shows up just to give a couple examples. Every time you see something saying like a wrinkle free, run the other way.

When that mascara doesn't come off, don't use it. All of these things and packaging, not that you and I partake in fast food, but that the food doesn't stick to the wrappers, PFAS. Yeah, that was the fast food wrapper one was one I didn't know. Yeah. Talk about, explain that one.

Yeah, so I mean, they use this, again, they're taking what is thankfully, how many years later being banned in the coding of pans, which is the kind of the origin story of Teflon. Yeah, we all know as children of the 70s, we all remember that the nonstick pans and all of that, that, you know, finally were banned. But they're still then they're like,

well, okay, well, let's just use it in these other areas where we don't have to, that no one knows about them, no one needs to talk about them. So Gore-Tex, right? So rain resistant, stain resistant carpets, food packaging. So all of these slippery kind of surfaces, they're all derivatives of this known probable,

as they say, carcinogen and endocrine disruptor. So just as a context, almost everyone has it in their blood. And also to understand that the numbers are staggering. There's 9,000 different forms of PFAS in our environment. 9,000, right? So we're getting hit unknowingly and we're not voting for that. So, I go back to, okay, let's become aware of this stuff

so that we can make another choice. And that's really where all of this comes from. Like Rich, just to be straight up, I did not wanna write, I didn't wanna have to write a book like this. But when you realize the regulation bodies aren't regulating, they're just reacting to that cascade that happens

that then the government has to step in. But the Toxic Substance Control Act, so think about it. The Toxic Control Substance Act was initiated because of PFAS to then give permission for the regulatory bodies to then regulate. You're like, what? What?

Like everything I'm reading this, all of this stuff and it's everything's the opposite. Like you said, and this is where people going, I don't get it. So if I go into a store and if I don't know which product to choose that doesn't have these things in, you're getting exposed to not only PFAS, but BPA, BPH, PCBs, DDTs, heavy metals. And the next question is, how is that possible?

And the first answer I would say, I don't know. Yeah, that was my obvious next question. Given that there are good faith actors out there trying to influence the landscape. We mentioned the environmental working group, like they do great work, you know, people like Paul Hawken, yourself, you know, they're out there, you know, trying to educate the public, but this seems to be really locked in.

Like, what is it about our system that is so resistant to protecting the public when it comes to this kind of stuff? I mean, dude, I mean, the only place I can go is we've created a false God, right? And that false God is this prophet over the health and safety, like it's reversed. So, you know, let's just put all this stuff up

and if it's a problem, we'll deal with all of this later, you know? And so I don't understand it. I don't know why it is, but that whole thing is reversed. And, but, you know, I always go to the optimism of all of this stuff. The optimism is having these conversations so that you and I can amplify the message of regular people realizing that this is what it is. There is a huge amount of chemical exposure. On average, an average woman every day is getting hit with over a hundred different chemicals, all of which are some sort of form of endocrine disrupts and carcinogenic,

ammonium salts to the breast tissue from deodorants, you know, it just goes on and on and on. So this is in order for us to change, we need to face it. We need to go, okay, this is realism 101. What's happening? This is what's happening. This is why I had to hire 25 people and fact checkers and pay them and like work my ass off

to get through all of this stuff so that we can face this honestly. And then the optimism comes by the 8 billion people we have. We have the numbers. So as we wake up, as we then go, oh, okay, well, I'm not saying don't use cell phones, don't wash your hair, maybe do a little less of them, right? That we can change from not this to this, right?

We have better solutions. Obviously a third of the book is littered with solutions for these things. So that's the hope, right? And I use this example, Rich, of like, you know, you and I spent a lot of time together and we know that in order to have real good relationships, you gotta face not only yourself with radical honesty,

you gotta face people and people in your life with radical honesty and have these very healthy but direct, truthful conversations. This is the same thing, right? I wish this wasn't the case i wish all these chemicals weren't blasting you and me and our children with all of this stuff but it's it is what we were born into so i i'm not okay with it i saw my dad suffer firsthand and I just want to face it honestly to then uplift, support and create the waves of continued change so that we can celebrate the people putting lavender

in as opposed to a trade secret endocrine disrupting carcinogenic property of a formula that they weirdly don't have to disclose because they just call it a trade secret. Like let's not reward that. Let's reward the people, the companies that are trying to do the right thing. It's better for you. It's better for the people around you

and in the case of colognes and perfume, and it's changing my microbiome on my skin affecting the sebum production because i've put some sort of weird ass lotion on my body all of these things how they are created what they are from in the environmental side of things where the production side of things are also an equally destroying parts of the environment so as it hurts you it hurts the environment so you want to be an eco warrior clean this stuff up in your in yourself clean up all all of these exposures. And it's not about trying to be perfect. It's just trying to make one better choice every time because that's the journey of life anyway.

Yeah, sure. I love the idea of radical honesty and kind of emerging out of this state of denial. There's a sort of blissful ignorance about how we make our consumer choices, right? We've talked a lot about factory farming and the ag-gag laws. Like there's a lot of money to erect barriers

to prevent the level of transparency that would connect the consumer with how our food is actually made, because it's important. And if people knew, maybe they would think twice, right? So there's a lot of interest in maintaining the status quo and preventing any level of radical honesty because people like things that are convenient and they like things that are easily accessible and cheap.

And that's what we have right now. And just go to the mall and knock yourself out, right? And to have this conversation is to tell people like, hold on a second, you might wanna know that all these other things are happening. Some people are gonna be very resistant because to know that requires them to then have to consider their choices.

And that's uncomfortable. That is like, you're asking a lot of somebody to do that. And yet here we are in the situation we're in with global climate change and all of that, like there's never been a more urgent or better time nor a more receptive global audience to these ideas. So yes, this conversation is overdue and we're dealing with a capitalist system

that's very entrenched in a certain level of status quo. They like it the way that it is. They don't want people to know that the jeans that they're wearing have a bazillion downstream negative implications, not just for the humans that are wearing them, but for the workers that are manufacturing them and for everything that like, you know,

ends up in the water table as a result of the dyes and the runoffs and the microplastics, et cetera. It's quite shocking to hear all of that. It is a matrix situation and it's a lot, like it's overload. Like if you sat down and read this book from beginning to end, your head would explode, right? So like, how do you even, you know, begin?

I mean, I guess before we go any further, maybe like give me your definition of what a fatal convenience is. We're like 40 minutes in and we haven't even like defined what we're talking about here, but I think people get it, but go ahead. Yeah, well, you know, a fatal convenience is you're doing something,

I can easily grab this water and drink it. It's convenient. Many places around the world can turn on, don't have access to clean water. So that's a convenience. The fatal side of it comes in. Here's that nasty PFOS that shows up again. Here's the nitrates that come by the runoff of the glyphosates and the fertilizers and everything else.

The microplastics are now showing up in the waterways. So it's things that you're doing, living your modern day life and not realizing have kind of a punch to your system, your life that you're not realizing. You have, you know, people having more and more depressive disorders, more and more endometriosis for women, like the list cancers, all of these things, cardiovascular linked to some of these perfumes and things like that. So we can naively move forward, but our biology, our chemistry, our being is being affected by these things every day, all day. And so to pretend, sure, it's shocking to people. And I think the biggest thing is it starts to rewrite

your idea of reality. Because if you start to really grok what we said earlier about wait what that they can just put this stuff out on the market and aren't really responsible unless there's an overwhelming response then we'll step in that has to many people don't get that many people in the world don't realize that this is an experiment and they're putting 60 to 80,000 chemicals in our environment every year. And of that only about 1500 are tested and just individually tested. None, zero zilch are tested as they interact with themselves or us. are tested as they interact with themselves or us.

So it's an impossibility for, in some cases, to find one smoking gun, right? In another instance, to really get your head around all of this exposure and then so you go, wow, not all products, most of which in the personal care space and beauty space and clothing actually have very dangerous consequences. And it's not that you're putting on the pair of blue jeans

and it's killing you tomorrow. It's this accumulative body burden. Right, so the rebuttal argument to all of these chemicals and all of these products that, you know, billions of people are using every single day is that they are being delivered in such micro doses as to be, you know, to be, you know, neutral and not harmful.

Like they're benign, they're inert because it's so tiny. So the response to that is twofold. On the one hand, it's what you just stated, this idea of allostatic load. Like over the course of your lifetime, yeah. But you know, yeah, like in this one laundry detergent or in this bar of soap or whatever, it's so microscopic, you don't have to worry about it. But you know, you wash your hair, you do soap, you do it then,

then you eat the cheeseburger for lunch, and then you have the Monster Energy drink, and then you put on your blue jeans. Like you're basically like just constantly impulsing your body through hundreds, if not thousands of different chemical inputs every single day. So there's that load over time

because a lot of these chemicals have a short half-life compared to the forever chemicals, the PFASs, right? So there's a conversation around that. And then second to that is, and I found this very interesting, I learned a lot about this in your book, is it ignores the infinite complexity and interplay of all of these different chemicals

interacting with each other, which makes it impossible to study or evaluate because you don't know what the chemical from your Monster Energy drink is going, what that is gonna do when it interacts with, you know, the glyphosate that found its way into your system because of the factory farmed, whatever that you ate. Yeah, it is. And that's where it gets just completely crazy. Right. And so you talk

about these half-lives. So you've got like things like BPA and phthalates, which have sometimes just a few hours or maybe a day or so. And then that's where, well, it's fine, right? It's fine, there was some studies on it, but that's not the real world. When you actually look at the studies showing real world, like one of the shockers was oxybenzene,

which is in most of the sunscreens. Like, yeah, they studied it, like, oh, small enough doses, but how it's applied and what shows up in the blood was somewhere between 500 times more. So it's in the real world is massively different. So these people, if they do do studies, they it's so limited and not realistic. And like I said, none of them are the interaction.

So, okay, you woke up, you went in a shower, it wasn't filtered. Okay, so you've got microplastics, PFAS, volatile organic compounds, VOCs, all while you're showering, right? You're using a body wash, you're using a shampoo, you're using a conditioner, all of that, parabens, phthalates, fragrances, right?

Then you're getting out of the shower and you're putting on a lotion, right? Well, first of all, you're drying off with a towel. That is what, you know, like has all these dyes on it. Right, so that's full, again, you can literally- You've been awake for five minutes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then maybe had a glass of water

that you didn't filter or whatever it is. And then, yeah, so now you're, so exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure, then you're putting on your mask, mascara and your makeup and your, God forbid, you ever use regular perfume after reading this book again, there's great, again, there's amazing choices, essential oils and things that are-

Frank and sense and myrrh. Like, gotta get like biblical. Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, come on, rose and lavender and like, there's just a great companies that, and it's also gifting to other people around you. So the point is that, okay, some of those half-lifes of the parabens and the phthalates

and maybe even the fragrances are a few hours, but you're also reinfecting yourself all throughout the day, right? And then you're putting on your deodorants and the ammonium salts are interacting and proven through carcinogenic activity of binding to the and clogging up the pores and creating all kinds of xenoactivity. of binding to the, and clogging up the pores and creating all kinds of xenoactivity.

So, all of these things, it's that, again, that overall body burden, the accumulation. And that's where, just looking at it all, these are, just think of them as stressors. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress on a cellular deep level. And I think the job is, the intention is to slowly, kind of from the inside out,

opening your mouth extremely vulnerable to the world, right? So choose wisely. what are you drinking? What is it interacting with? What are you eating? What is it interacting with? So what are you, the water, the cans, aluminum, chelating, heavy metals, what's in my food, all of that stuff, and then work your way out from there.

Okay, what's going on my skin? Cause there's a lot of transdermal activity of these chemicals and they're going into your skin. I just did, it wasn't even the book. I just did a fatal convenience. Cause I do these on my podcast all the time. I just did one on the shaving strips. Scared the shit out of me.

And I'm like, I was like, hmm, I suspect something with these. And again, there was monoethylenes in there. There's, which are endocrine disrupting. There's other ammonium salts in there. Think about it. Like the glue for, you know, stripping hair off your face or your legs or whatever. That's yeah.

All of that stuff. So shaving with the strip. So that's- Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. All of that stuff. So shaving with the strip. So that's what I mean. The strip on that lubricating shaving. Oh, on the actual, I see what you're saying. On the razor itself. Yeah, and what a convenience. No shave burns, blah, blah, blah.

But then again, you're shaving and you're also micro cutting. So all those chemicals are basically just going right into your bloodstream. So- Yeah, I would have never thought of that. Yeah. And this is what I mean, like the apathy because we're born into this, right?

And it's all around us. The apathy that we have come accustomed to that we stopped thinking. My whole- But that burden shouldn't be on us. Like, it's not that we're apathetic. Like, are we supposed to go, I wonder if that strip on my thing is gonna harm me?

Like, we shouldn't have to go down the rabbit hole that you went down to figure out whether that's safe or not. I know. That's what I mean. I wish I never had to write this book. I do. You know, I have a busy life. I've got a lot to do.

You know, I took two weekends off in two years because every weekend it was less distracting. And I spent just a huge amount of time on the everyday, all day, Saturday, Sunday, man, I have a lot to do. But it's like, when you you read when you learn the matrix just keeps going man and it just like and you know those things where it's like with awareness and knowledge become you know you have greater responsibility as a result um and being that it was very close to home watching my father suffer, my whole,

like it's a little, I see life in fatal conveniences now. You know, the greatest kind of inspiration for learning about fatal conveniences is leaving my environment. Yeah, where you control every minute detail. And I just go out and going, oh my God, people still use that.

Like I went home and I saw my mom still using Vaseline on her face, right? That's just straight up petroleum wiping on her face for the last 50 face, right? That's just straight up petroleum wiping on her face for the last 50 years, right? And so I see this stuff happening and I can't help myself, but to go up, I'm always texting my team like, okay, this one's next for the fatal convenience, this one's next.

And that's the job at this point. It's just the book is a conversation starter about a lot of things. That could have been a volume series of 20, all based in fatal conveniences. So my hope is that people can just open it up. Obviously I want them to read it all the way through to get the context of everything

because we dedicated certain parts of the book, certainly PFAS, EMFs, you're setting things up going, okay, this is what's have personal care. All of these things you're setting up so that people have a good understanding of what you're then gonna give them specific examples to, so that they can go, oh my God, here it is again. of what you're then gonna give them specific examples to, so that they can go, oh my God, here it is again. Yeah, before you go and buy a mattress or buy bed sheets

or laundry detergent, maybe just find the pages in the book and refer to that first. Cause a lot of the stuff we sort of know, like whether we know processed foods, you know, factory farming, these things are, you know, things that we should avoid. There's some of the, you know, kind of more obvious stuff, but there's a lot of things in here that are non-obvious. Like I think mattresses is, you know,

would be in that category or, you know, a discussion around off gassing or, you know, some of the really what we think are just completely mundane products that we use to wash our hands or our clothes. Totally, yeah. And you know, the, again, it's this invisible world that I'm trying to make more visible.

On top of that, you talked about the oneness of our own personal ecosystems and the greater ecosystem of the planet. There's of course, the sort of chemical inputs of these products, whether they're food, clothing, personal care, cleaning products, et cetera, on our bodies, in our bodies, what that is doing to us. But then of course, as you kind of,

the nesting egg expands outward, you're like, well, the packaging that it's coming in, or know, the nesting egg expands outward, you're like, well, the packaging that it's coming in, or even if the packaging doesn't seem particularly malevolent, what's the liner inside the paper packaging? You know, what does that look like? And where did that come from?

And how was that made? And is that coming into contact with me? And then there's the manufacturing process itself. Like how are these things being made? What are the things that, what are the inputs that are creating this? What is the carbon footprint of all of those inputs aggregated?

And what is the runoff? Like what's happening to our water table? Where are all the chemicals ending up on the planet? Like how are we processing the waste, et cetera? We know this with, for example, pig farming and all the refuse and how that gets turned into fertilizer and gets sprayed into the air and people have respiratory diseases and all the like,

but it's really not that different with any number of these other industries, particularly clothing, fast fashion. And we're really asleep at the wheel when it comes to that. That was a sleeper for me. When I really started looking at it, oh my God, that's a big problem. Like it's the number two biggest polluter on the planet.

You don't kinda, you can't get your head around because it's easy to demonize a water bottle because it's floating out in the river and the ocean. And then you go, okay, you can get your head around. It's gonna break down and microplastics. Well, most of the clothes are woven with petroleum and plastics and plasticizers and formaldehydes and things like that.

And that tightly formed shirt and t-shirt that you love so much, the elastic jeans. Anything that like stretches a little bit. Yeah, big problem. And people are, women are gonna be like, yeah, that Lycra, not a good thing, right? So that Lycra is a petroleum based, endocrine disrupting and now that And now you're sweating in it.

You're using it. It's close to your private parts. These things, that's constant inoculation of these chemicals. And you think like one of great example is the Iconics, which has a t-shirt and blue jeans. is the Iconics, which has a t-shirt and blue jeans. And some of the shock came by not only the thousands of liters of water, there's one that I couldn't verify,

but I'm just gonna throw it out there for shock value, but I was trying to verify it. It was one report said that it was about 2, 2,500 liters of water from input of growing the cotton to creating one t-shirt. Now I dug into that a little more. It's hundreds of liters without a doubt per t-shirt, but you have 8,000.

You heard that right. 8,000 chemicals that are there to create a t-shirt. 8,000 different chemicals. So you've got the chemicals and glyphosate, astrazine, huge spraying. One of the biggest polluters and uses of those pesticides on your non-organic clothing t-shirt, right? So now you're starting already there. And then they're blasting, you know, before they write, they blast now. It starting already there. And then they're blasting.

Before they write, they blast now. It's a technique. Now they blast with more. Right before picking, they blast with more. And then that goes to the stripping and the spinning and all of that stuff. So those 8,000 chemicals are now what makes that t-shirt not to mention if you have any print on that, that's full of these things called as a dyes that are

not only volatile organic compounds connected to cancer and things like that. So that's a t-shirt man. Like that's fucked up. But what do you say to the person who's like, I hear you, man, but aren't you a little bit chicken little here? I've been wearing t-shirts for 50 years.

Like, I feel pretty good, I'm fine. I don't have cancer. Like, what do you say to that person? Well, that's the thing. You're an alarmist. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's a great question. Like, I'm not saying that T-shirt,

put that T-shirt on today. I'm not saying it kills you tomorrow. I'm saying that T-shirt, be aware of how it was created, all of the things that are definitely in that shirt. And it's again, this growing body burden of all of this stuff. Now it's connected to the destruction of the environment. We can prove that upside down and sideways.

It's more of that chemical burden that's being put on you. So I say not even getting into the horrible conditions of fast fashion, right? Right, it's a human rights issue as well. Human rights issue, the slavery that basically happens in order for you to get that cheap t-shirt. What I would like to say is that if you can resist What I would like to say is that if you can resist getting insecure that you don't have enough clothes and maybe double down on one new t-shirt every year.

And if you can use organic and not sprayed in formaldehydes and phthalates and things like that, anything. So is that shampoo killing you? Is that lotion killing you tomorrow? No, but it's setting the stage for you to wake up one day and really have an issue. Then, and the buildup of these chemicals, we are starting to see it. We see it in these numbers.

So we see it in the plummeting of testosterone. We're seeing it in, like I said, the reproductive issues of women, infertilities of men, the motility, the activity of sperm is plummeting. Dr. Leo Trisande has a great book on endocrine disruptor. I think it's called sicker, fatter, poorer. He dives deep.

I've had him on my podcast. He dives deep in the endocrine disruption. He's got a lot of great numbers on that, but we're sprinting towards our own demise. Like literally the most primal aspect of us as humans to keep life moving, we are neutering ourselves with all of these things, right? It has been shown even with children and diapers, having the plastic throwaway diapers that those kids have higher amounts of phthalates and endocrine disrupting and they don't have a choice.

So my whole thing is then why don't we go back to get those parents organic reusable washable diapers and just eliminate part of that exposure. Yeah, the diapers thing was a trip. I mean, when you imagine a newborn, a pristine newborn, and then you're immediately placing on this brand new human skin, a product that I think you've said

they found glyphosate in disposable diapers, formaldehyde, DBP, DEHP, hormone disruptors, like all this, like it's insane. Yeah, and that's where it's, yeah. And like what that's going on in the world, that can be sold. And listen, if I had a wand and I could let every mama bear

who loves their kids, obviously, and has instinct to pull cars off their kids, right? Want to protect, want their kids to thrive, want them to be healthy. And then you go, they didn't know. They weren't informed at all about these convenience that keep being sold to them. Oh, it's easier, it's convenient, it's dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, pampers this and dah, dah, dah, dah. So if they knew that,

so let's flip on the switch of mama bears to realize that the exposures that are coming, not only the food, the talc that got alarmed. The formula. Formula, the heavy metals, the all of these things, the exposure. And like, again, we go to how is this possible? I don't know, man.

I don't know. But you and I have to continue to talk about it. And I hope that people can just continue to learn and expand and become their regulatory body of their body. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, you can't outsource these decisions to governmental bodies that you're relying upon for solid information.

Like that's really, you know, the kind of drum that you're banging throughout this book. Like you gotta shoulder that responsibility for yourself. This is very much a message around, you know, the grassroots movement and the power of community, the power of the individual to not just have these conversations, to make better choices and to cultivate community around this

so that change can come from the bottom up. We can't sit around and just wait for Washington to deal with it. I had Senator Cory Booker on the podcast recently. And one of the things that he says all the time is change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington, right? Like Washington responds to these sorts of movements.

So that's an added kind of responsibility to shoulder as a conscious citizen, right? And if enough people get together and make their voices heard, there will be a response on Capitol Hill, but to sit on our hands and just wait for that to happen, it's not gonna happen. And when you kind of,

when your eyes are open and you look around and you realize we can't even solve the real low hanging fruit problems, like why do we have single use plastics? Like why is water allowed to be in a plastic bottle anymore? Like it should be, that should be against the law. Like I think most people would agree on that. These are not, you know, partisan issues

by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, you know, we'll get all excited about straws for a minute, or, you know, we get distracted by the wrong thing when we have these real big problems with, so it's not like we don't have solutions to these problems. That's the other thing too. And, you know, you're very robust appendix

and all the resources make clear, like, you know, this doesn't, you don't have to be like Darren and like live in the woods and, you know, in a yard or whatever, like you can still, you don't have to be a Luddite, like you can live in the world and you don't have to be really all that convenience at all. You can just make some better choices.

Yeah, and that's where I'm optimistic. Number one, I want people to live a freaking great life. I want them to, I mean, ultimately the genesis of super life, the genesis of this is, hey man, like let's be aware so that you can actually live a dream that you wanna have and be in this world. And that's really where it comes from. And so we just have to face some of this stuff,

be our own advocacy and flip on that switch of common sense again, that I guess, maybe that's jumping a step because we just first need to become aware of the system that's not in our best interest. But I am optimistic every week. I, and I'm not even being dramatic. Every week I'm talking to an organization, a company that's doing something better, right? If it's, we talked a little bit before we started about like the Michael Works company and the mycelium leather stuff.

And that, you know, people didn't realize like leather has PFAS on it, right? Cause it does, you know, that's slippery stuff too. So it's like all of these things are so affected, but there's great people doing great things. And even in great companies, they're trying to do good. No, there's tons of really cool innovation. So I would agree with you on that front.

I think an added ripple of complexity to all of this that began as something well-intentioned but now has become almost a smoke screen is the whole labeling thing, right? Like now there's all these labels on all these products and we don't really know, like, is this, what does this mean? Like, does this mean anything or was this bought and paid for?

Like, I don't know which labels are important, which ones are just greenwashing. So maybe we can have just a conversation, initially just broadly about what is greenwashing? What is the extent of greenwashing? And how can we, as conscious consumers who do wanna make the right choice, how do we kind of interface with all the marketing

and stuff that's on the packaging of the products that we're looking to buy? Yeah, it's a good one. I mean, greenwashing only came about because of the lexicon that's moving towards, hey man, I wanna have a better choice. A normal person, there was a great study, a normal person doesn't actually wanna drink

out of a water bottle of plastic. They just don't have another choice. If you go on an airline, you're dealing with it. So the lexicon of the people, the population of people do have this awareness. They just don't have many choices. So what happens is these big organizations, doesn't even have to be big,

take this kind of atmosphere and they start labeling things that are misleading and misleading without the proper backing of what they're actually saying, or they're saying natural, it's a classic one that has no backing of what that means plus- All natural. Yeah.

Or they just put it in a green, they just, the packaging is green. Beautiful picture. Just put it, yeah, like you have a couple different varieties of the same product. One is green, I'm just gonna take, that one's probably better, I'm gonna gonna take that. That one's probably better. I'm gonna get that one.

Yeah, it's green. It's got a great picture. And it says, this is a natural scent. Well, you know, having 15 years, 20 years in the supplement world, I knew that there was a problem even then in the flavoring world. This is natural flavor,

but then the FDA had all these loopholes to have other flow agents and things in there. So it's the same that exists in these kind of other areas and fragrances in the sense that, okay, you have natural scent in this example, but then you have trade secrets that could have hundreds of chemicals that are not on any label. And the phraseology you're using is just misleading the people towards this. All you did is not change any formula.

You didn't make it better. You didn't make it safe. You didn't prove that it's safe. You didn't prove that it was actually naturally safe, but you just put a beautiful picture on it. You called it something. And now you're taking the movement that actually does wanna make,

that innately we do wanna make good choices choices we don't knowingly want to hurt our kid by making a a choice of a scented candle that's it got vocs all over in it but they're calling it natural scent you know so all of these things they're taking advantage of an impossible group, large population of people that are not doing the incredible research that it would take to unpack what that actually means in that natural scent. And that's not okay. It's not okay at all.

It would be benign if these things were benign, but they're not benign. They are hijacking our systems. They are affecting us neurologically, carcinogenic, endocrine disrupting, testicular cancers, endometriosis. The list continues and it grows with this mounting kind of loop. So the greenwashing is knowingly,

this is where it comes in. The companies are knowingly misleading people. Yeah, that's what makes it so malevolent, right? I mean, they're leveraging language and loopholes to delude the consumer into this sense that they're making a good choice for themselves. When in fact it's business as usual. And we see this in the animal food industry

with words or phrases like cage free or free range and all of that. And like, and it makes you think, oh, cage free. Yeah, of course. But you don't actually know what that means and the real language that and like, and it makes you think, oh, cage free, yeah, of course. But you don't actually know what that means and the real language that polices, what's acceptable and what's not, I think would be shocking to a lot of people.

And it just drives a lot of, apathy is the wrong word, but I think it lulls people into a sense that they are participating in the solution when in fact they're not. And that's what makes it particularly dark, I think. And I don't know if evil is the right word, but like, not great, right?

And so for the person who, but there are some labels that are good, right? Like if it's EWG, whatever certified, so like if somebody is going to the store and they're like, okay, now there's like 10 different little certifications on every product that is even in the range of being like, oh, this is like a, you know,

like a natural organic conscious non GMO, whatever. What are the labels that are actually legit that people should look for? And what are the ones that are bullshit and misleading? Well, some of the ones that are misleading is recyclable. Like, so you could put recyclable on a packaging, like here's the product, it's in a package, recyclable. And you're like, great, maybe it was a shower curtain.

All of it was made out of plastic. What's recyclable? Is it the packaging that's recyclable? Is the rings of the shower curtain recyclable? Is the vinyl weird thing that you're putting, is that recyclable? You don't know. And most of it probably isn't.

And then just going off on a tangent for a second on recycling, because you're, again, you're wanting to do it. You separate your things and being a good person, I'm recycling, I'm going to the effort. But now new reports even show it's even worse. Only 5% of whatever you think you're recycling is recycled in any storm.

So we failed miserably. So that's like saying, take your little blue bin, dump out 95% of it. And that 95% is, and I say this in the book, is there's no, let me say it this way.

There's no away. Take my recycling away. Go recycle way. There's no away. Take my recycling away. Go recycle it. There virtually is none. It's not virtually non-existent. Only 5%. Right, when you put your refuse in the recycling bin and it comes and it gets picked up by the garbage truck,

what is that? Yeah, like a very small fraction of that. Five percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is really disheartening. So dump out 95% and stare at it and going, could I maybe be a little better at not consuming so much that is using plastic or whatever kind of garbage it is that we think,

and most of it, it's so layered. The sophistication at recycling centers, they can't unravel. Hell, most people don't even know that there's a plastic liner in Starbucks coffee and I'm not picking on Starbucks, but there's a plastic liner in that what you think is a cardboard.

Oh, they're paper cups? Yeah, they're paper cups. So they say, hey, use a paper cup. It's not, it's plastic liner in it. So you can't recycle it, right? You think that you're throwing it in the cardboard, but, and you can't recycle it because there's no ability for most of the recycling centers

to break that apart and to like put it back in the cardboard circulation, put it back in the cardboard circulation put it back in the plastic so all of these things are infinitely complex so even saying those words don't mean much but it's still a greenwashing if you're negligent on what you actually mean right so you know and there's uh i'm not even going, you know, and there's, I'm not even gonna name the company, but there's, cause it would cause me a lot of problems with people I know.

There was one company that's like, hey, yeah, recyclable. And then you gotta eat this thing, this bar, and then you send it back to the company. And like, who's gonna do that? Right. Just take the packaging and mail it back to them.

Yeah, okay, yeah, right. Okay, now you're gonna, so again, you use that as a marketing spin, but the percentage of people actually doing that is a few percent, right, if at all. So yeah, it's a, I forgot the second party question. I mean, the main question, and so what are the labels that are valid

and can give us confidence that we are making a good choice? It's a good one. Yeah. I mean, it's a good one. I mean, this came up in, in Sea Spiracy. Do you remember like the labeling on fish and all of that and how corrupt it was? And it's basically a pay to play thing. Yeah, yeah.

So like the dolphin free was definitely not at all, basically. Dolphins safe. Yeah, dolphins safe tuna, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah, you know, from a, you know, starting from like maybe food

from a low residue pesticide perspective, you can go all the way back to pick number nine on the little sticker on whole food. Four and three is indicating pesticides and GMOs and stuff like that. So if there's no sign, you can look at the little sticker. The stickers that are on the produce. So you don't pick nine.

So that's not even, that's just a part of the, they're categorizing for the grocery store. So you can hack your way into know at least what that is. There's the environmental working group has a great list of the dirty dozen. If you don't have access or can't afford organic, then you wanna wash the exposed vegetables and fruit, like things like pears, strawberries, peaches, cucumbers,

like those kinds of things you wanna wash really well and you can eliminate a lot of the residues that way, but you don't wanna just eat those straight away. Yeah, and then of course, organic. Like you want to choose that. I would still wash those foods. And then you all go all, if you wanna keep going, farmer's markets,

know your farmer, how are you growing it? Ask them questions, get to know them and then grow your own food. Let's bring back that piece because that could help a variety of things. Food security clearly could help out a lot. And we have in the late 1800s, 90% of Americans were using their land as their food.

And now 2% of the farmers, of the farmers, of the people in the country are making all of our food. So that's a whole rabbit hole of the agricultural side. So get to know your food, grow as much as you can. But unlike for personal care products or cleaning products, is there any kind of responsible labeling going on in other kind of responsible labeling going on in, you know, other kind of consumer product sectors? Yeah. I mean, you, you can, I mean, the, the best thing is to first

indication is what kind of packaging they're using. Cause you can also see the, the, the, the, the kind of the scope of what the company is trying to do. If they're just standard plastic, then okay. But I would turn it over. You know, it's that whole thing of like, if you can understand what you're, especially like personal care and lotions and things like that, if they don't have, you know, phthalates, well, you don't know they have phthalates,

but if they're in plastic containers, they probably have phthalates in because the phthalates are the plasticizers that make plastic malleable, right? So I think the best thing to do is make sure when they're, if they're saying parfum or fragrance, and they're not proudly disclosing what that is for them. And it's like, this is lavender,

this is rose essential oil, then I would run. Like for sure you're gonna be getting a cocktail. So though, and fragrances are something to become aware of because they're almost in every beauty product, personal care. So if a company is proudly saying what their fragrance is, then that's probably a good indicator of a natural kind of rest of the formula. the rest of the formula. And then you wanna look for whole things that you can pronounce and understand. Yeah, the common sense aspect of it.

I was just wondering whether there's like some kind of, you know, cha-ching thing like right on the, oh, I know, okay. But if there's not like, yes. Campaign for safe cosmetics. I don't know if they have a symbol. EWG does, they do great work. I was still kind of playing with the idea

of doing a marketplace with a kind of verifiable vetting process. I'm actually pretty serious about it. I'm poking around and what that would actually look like. It's massive undertaking, but again, having to create something that you thought was already created by the governments and the regulations and you go, well, okay.

So we as the people have to create it. Yeah, I feel like that should be the case in clothing too. Like who's ever thought of putting a label on clothing about how it was, you know, it's like, we don't even think about that. But if you watch the true cost and you know, Livia Firth, right? Like leading the charge and, you know, trying to, you know, Livia Firth, right? Like leading the charge and, you know,

trying to, you know, bring us into reality on what's going on there. Like there's a lot of work that could be done that seems easy. And for some reason, you know, just, it just takes a tremendous amount of effort to like, it's a Sisyphean task, right? Of pushing this boulder up the hill.

Yeah, cause it's a, you know, we're, again, we're given a system having in it upon birth and to now go about it, you know, again, Paul Hawken, he draw down that first book when he really spent the time realizing if you invest in it, man, it's gonna not only pay your bottom line, but it's gonna pay the bottom line

of being literally regenerative along the way. So- It's in your financial interest to get on board with this. And then his more recent book is just all solutions. Like look at all this stuff that actually already exists right now that we could be doing

if we just focused on it a little bit better. And that's why we need just strong, bold people, business owners, entrepreneurial people that there is more and more capital that's being kind of a swell is definitely coming, but we need strong people to continue to open up this lane so that we can celebrate these solutions. I mean, I'm not gonna say what the project is necessarily, but working on a different television show and it's all based in celebrating the solution of some of these things that, again,

highlight what is going, because I think that within all of this, even if everyone skipped the book and went to the last third of the book, right? And just went to like, okay, well, what's better product. Just tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. Well, it's there, right?

At least again, that's- I like how it all starts with the D, each one of the sections though, starts with the DIY, like make your own, here's how you make your own, whatever it is. And then, hey, if you don't wanna do that, here's five products that are pretty good. Yeah, like baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, these things are great to clean your vegetables

and the, you know, it's super, super easy. And again, we've become delusioned to think that we need to buy this special product that the tell a vision told us to adopt. When it's like you clean your house with some white vinegar and some water and put some essential oil in it. Now it's gifting to your life and your family and your health.

Yeah, and I think it's important to also point out that to your point at the outset of this conversation that these issues are extremely complex and it's not about good guys and bad guys or corporations being evil. There is a lot of really interesting innovation in the kind of startup space, but there's also some really valid

and interesting sustainability programs in the Fortune 500 space. Like Walmart is doing interesting things. I know that you have a relationship with Visa and they're trying to really be a leader in that space. And I was reminded of this episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History. And I don't know if this was SponCon or something,

but he did an interview. He like spent a day at Procter & Gamble with some scientist who worked for, you know, like on Tide or whatever, their laundry detergent. And he was trying to like revise our assumptions around chemicals in cleaning products being bad by illustrating that this guy had come up with a new formula for laundry detergent

that I'm sure had all kinds of chemicals in it. But the big thing in that space is, can you get stains out? Can you clean the clothes in cold water? And through his innovation, realized that his formula would reduce people's reliance on having to use hot water to clean their clothes. So even though it has chemicals in it,

there is an environmental argument to support the viability of such a product, which speaks to the complexity. And I don't know if this is true or not, but like, you know, that's why it's complicated. Like, yes, you use these natural soaps and all that, but you end up having to use more hot water because they don't fucking actually work, you know,

or you have to use twice as much of whatever product because it's just, even though it's not made with all of these things, it just doesn't quite do the job like the fatal convenience does. Yeah, and you pull the string on that. Like, okay, well, what's the big deal? It's hot water. Well, how did it become hot?

Like there was a power input to create that hot water. Right, so you're, yeah, like by using hot water, more hot water with your natural soap, you may in fact be unwittingly making the environmental problem worse, not better. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the amount of hot water, but that is a good example of, it's just like, let's look at this stuff,

clearly minimizing chemical exposure, like being transparent. Cause overnight, if everyone was transparent with what was actually in their products, most of these big companies, they would have to shut that stuff down because it's knowing's knowing there's trade secrets and fragrances and things like that they would have to disclose it would be a

make twitter files look like a little school boy you know so you know this is again you are buying products you are using products in your home, in your car, in your clothing, on your body, on your children, what you're consuming, the water, the things, and you are getting nailed with these chemicals all the time. And it is, I can be absolutely clear

that the accumulative body burden is absolutely affecting your body. Some more than others. Yeah, I don't question you at all on that front. Can we talk about, you know, getting into the complexity of things again. Let's talk about palm oil a little bit. You went deep on palm oil.

Palm oil is in lots of things, food products and other products. And there really is no valid argument to support the continued ingestion of this product given what it does to the planet yeah i mean this is just you know it goes back to the to the superfood hunting side of things a bit when you realize the the massive you know uh work that goes into the production chain of stuff and out of sight out of mind for people when you are destroying rainforests and habitats,

the symbol of that orangutan, I don't know if I've ever told you the orangutan story. I don't think so. The cell phone story of my orangutan that stole it. Maybe I'll save it, but. I don't know, now I feel like I need to hear that story. Yeah, so I mean, just to button up palm oil, there's no real benefit to ingesting it.

And it is one of those things, unless you literally are fair traded and you have an organization that can validate the fair trade of that said palm oil, that would be the only reason to use the palm oil. But anyway, it's a funny story with our friend. Anyway, it's a funny story with our friend. What's his name? The microbiologist.

Compton Rom. Compton Rom. Yeah, I was gonna lightly chastise you for not including Ascended Health in your syllabus of products. Because he makes amazing shit. I forgot kind of all about it in a sense. His I am beautiful oil is like, I use it every day.

I love it. And he's got amazing toothpaste. He's got all kinds of, and they're like, his toothpaste is like a probiotic. Like it's not just not bad for you. It's actually benefiting your microbiome by using it. So Compton, sorry you weren't in the book, but I have big props to you right now, Ascended Health.

He's the one who originally introduced us. Do you remember that? Yeah, that's right. So he and I were in Cambodia and we were hunting. He came with, cause he was like, he was like, I wanna get the microbes of what you're, like, I'm gonna get the microbes, you'll get the fruit or the veggie or the-

You're the super food hunter, he's the microbe hunter. Yeah, yeah. He literally has traveled the world and just he'll like talk for hours about the soil of wherever he visited. He goes, get me, and he was in constant, I was in the Philippines, get me the soil. No, no, no, no, no, no.

It's always interesting when you're coming from the, you know, the customs agent. Have you been in contact with, you know, soil? I'm like, no. Oh, right, yeah, when you fill out the card. No. Livestock. Yeah, livestock and so.

So just a quick story, but it's, so we were in Cambodia looking for a bunch of super foods and the high level minister of agriculture, there was flooding at the time. So he kept setting up meetings, but then had to leave and jump on a helicopter and blah, blah, blah. So he said, hey, just go to my farm.

So I'm like, okay. So gave it directions. We go to this farm, this big gate and kind of what seemed to be a dilapidated zoo. So I'm like, okay, so gave it directions. We go to this farm, this big gate and kind of what seemed to be a dilapidated zoo. And so we're on his farm with all these, you know, mangosteen and moringa and all of these things. And we're looking around and like,

there's literally caged animals here that were saved from zoos from who knows where. So Compton is, he goes, I hear him laughing. He goes, come here. And there was an orangutan in a cage. And number one, I hate all animals in cages. I just, it hurts me to my core, but I never saw an orangutan before.

So I run over there and no sooner did I pull up my cell phone to take a picture of this guy, this big seven foot wingspan orangutan slapped the cell phone out of my hand. It fell down in between the fence. I was behind and the cage and he grabbed it before I could grab it and he pulled it in the cage.

And so now I'm going, oh my God, he has my cell phone. And I see him all of the activity in his eyes. And then he was gonna bite it. And so I started making noises. I didn't know what to do. Compton's laughing his ass off the entire time because it happened so fast. And so anyway, cut to a guy,

a little worker that was there, went in the cage and he got on the back of this big male orangutan and he was wrestling with it. And the cell phone fell. He took it and just flung it out of the cage. I got it. He ran out of the cage and there was another worker that was still in there.

And it was a little tricky for him to get out. He didn't get hurt. And they saved my cell phone and it was stolen by an in Cambodian. In some kind of weird Cambodian tiger King situation. I don't know how we got to that. That's wild man in some kind of weird Cambodian Tiger King situation. Totally. Yeah. I don't know how we got to that.

What were we talking about? Palm oil. Right. Orangutans. Yeah, so I mean, palm oil, no bueno. No bueno. Basically. If there is a controversial section in this book,

aside from telling people not to eat meat, you're gonna get some people pushing back on that probably, because this is not like a plant-based manifesto. I know you and I know where you stand on nutrition. There probably will be some people who are like totally on board and then they get to that and they're like, whoa, hold on a second. We can table that though,

because we've talked through that. Normal eating of meat, that full of chemicals, you know that growth hormone antibiotic resistant activity. I actually gave good solutions for people who wanna eat meat in that section. So I swallowed my pride and said, hey, I'm under no delusion

that everyone's gonna go plant-based tomorrow. So in that instance, you have a section where I've vetted some companies so you can go and have a better choice. Second to that is the section on electromagnetic radiation. So let's spend a couple of minutes kind of exploring that. This is really the invisible elephant, the truly invisible elephant here.

And it's a topic that I admit, I don't know very much about. I know that there's a certain kind of conspiracy minded camp that will go to great lengths to make sure that they are in an environment where there is no, you know, EMR or whatever, you know, Faraday tents and all the like, right? So walk me through like a very basic understanding

of what we're talking about here when we're talking about EMRs, EMFs, wifi, microwaves, the differences in these various forms of radiation that we expose ourselves to, whether it's through x-rays or when we're, you know, at the airport going through scanning, what should we truly be concerned about? What is safe, what isn't safe?

Because I think in addition to there just not being a lot of education around this, there's a lack of understanding. There is a sense like, yeah, I don't, this probably isn't so good, but like this is the way we do things and we're just gonna have to live with it. And then there's some more kind of radical thoughts

around 5G, et cetera. I mean, that's a topic that is radioactive in its own right to even talk about because it got co-opted during COVID and it made just having any kind of reasonable conversation about it impossible. So let me just, I'm just gonna throw that radioactive isotope over to you

and you tell me what's what. Well, the first thing is without a doubt, it's a perfect fatal convenience, right? And we absolutely need more studies. Absolutely. There's enough data to show that there's a problem from my perspective, just brain imaging of a cell phone up to a child's head,

showing the radiation going all the way through the skull because not only the skull thickness, but the immune system as well. So you're really talking about, I mean, this is infinitely complex, but you're talking about, so ionizing radiation. So if there's a spectrum of frequency, ionizing radiation is X-rays,

radioactive isotopes, uranium. It will rip your DNA apart, electrons, and it will affect you, and epidemiologically it will affect you, right? That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about non-ionizing. The assumption that sets this up, I think, from a bad trajectory The assumption that sets this up,

I think from a bad trajectory is assuming that as long as it's not ionizing, it's safe because we're not seeing it directly ripping apart the DNA. There was a lot of research that was that, you're right it gets so wacky when it comes to looking at this it's just like oh my god why is it like literally looks like a weird lady talking about area 51 but when you really start digging and I believe me, this was my probably my longest chapter because I had to get through,

I had to reach out to researchers to point me into different directions. The Invisible Rainbow was a good research, a good book by a doctor that I could at least go, okay, that's, you know, even starting the look at the history of just electricity. So I think about the consumption of information. Let's start with, yeah, the beginning.

Let's start with Edison and light bulbs and go from there. Yeah, so, but it's important to get, I'll just make it short, but it's important to realize that there was data to show when we put up the first telegraph that that was causing harm in migratory patterns. And then as we continued UHF

and things like that in the frequency generation and radio frequency, they saw that there was some pretty direct correlations to extincting the red sparrow. And there was even some anecdotal evidence to show that even tracking devices were messing with migratory patterns of cats, of other mammals and things like that.

So every time you have electricity, you have also a magnetic field and we are magnetic, right? So we can, easy one is the heartbeat, right? And so diagnostically, we know this and we use that. So we are sensitive. And just to add another aspect to it, my dad, chemical sensitivity, 20 years ago, I meet a doctor, Dr. Mohsen Hermanish, Quantitivity, 20 years ago, I meet a doctor, Dr. Mohsen Hermanish, who changed kind of the way I looked at nutrition,

came from sixth generation herb farmers. And then he was a mathematician as well as a master in understanding nutrition on a cellular level. He was the first, but he gave me the term fatal convenience. He was the first person but he gave me the term fatal convenience. He was the first person 25 years ago to say, electrically our DNA is sending signals through the RNA, right?

And chemically too, but electrically those things are happening. And so the instructions of the proteins going to replace maybe senescent cells are a part of the process always, millions and millions and billions of times a day. And he started pointing, 25 years ago, he started pointing me to research to go,

this is the electric field of a cell phone is affecting that dna and now i was looking at uh many studies showing that the gylomas where you'd have a cell phone up to your head was creating these tumor like none and not even like but these tumors. So then multiple studies showing that. So you're like, okay, well, let's study it some more instead of blowing it off. So these kinds of things started to show up. Now, the other areas, which was weirdly similar to a chemical exposure of a phthalate or something

that it would show radical oxygen species, like free radicals, as like the mechanism of cellular metabolism was being thwarted and stressed. And then you would see things that really scared me that I didn't know. And there was one study that showed that this protein, albumin, that is not supposed to be in the brain,

showed that by the exposure of a cell phone frequency, opened up the blood brain barrier to allow that albumin to show up in the brain, which had a cascade of problems in the brain. So similar to the exposure, I saw stress. I saw free radical oxygen species. I saw stress of the immune system. And these things.

And then obviously the blood brain barrier, which is a really bad scenario to open up. And those came back in many studies and my fact checkers check them again. And I was like, oh my God, this is like a chemical exposure. And the other part of it was lowering sperm counts. So this exposure of a cell phone, and then you're going, wow, the proximity is an issue here.

So the proximity of this device in your head, on your laps, in your pockets, and the workout mama who's putting the cell phone in her sports bra, these are problems. And these are proximal problems. And again, this was, dude, this was a rabbit hole, right? And I had to conclude, I had to stop some of this stuff because I couldn't find enough information,

but the history started me on this path. I'll say it here. I believe that the telecommunications business knows about this stuff. They know about these studies. Something interesting happened. I didn't really talk about it in the book, but in 1993, the EPA, which I think was right in terms of it was their responsibility to study the electromagnetic fields of cell towers and cell phones, that they had their guy study this the electromagnetic fields of cell towers and cell phones

that they had their guy study this and found many of the things that I explained to you and said, okay, you guys hired me. We need to tell the consumer. And overnight it was shifted to the FCC and the EPA's funding dried up. So now- What year was that? How long ago was that? 94.

And there's documentation on this? Yeah, I read countless articles. I even read an old fax that was this guy's report. So now the FCC holds it. So now the FCC is 20 years behind the technology. And they're only basically saying things are safe based on thermal reaction. If it burns you, then it's not safe.

They're not taking into the account the frequency waves, the one, two, three G, fourG, 5G, all of these things and the magnetic fields that come with all of this stuff. They're not including that. They don't even mention any of it when it was showing up in the initial study. So yeah, man, this is crazy that all of this stuff, but the thing that kept coming up over and over again

is without a doubt, there's real data to show that a child's immune system is compromised. It is affected and you are stressed out. You are stressed out. I'm stressed out on a molecular level. Not from what you're looking at on the device, but from the device itself.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, do you have a sense of ongoing research and studies that are occurring now around this? Are people, like, I guess what I'm saying is, or my thought is, certainly we should be studying this. This is ubiquitous. We all use these things. I know what it's like.

I used to hold the thing to my ear. And if you're on a long phone call, like not only does it start to get hot there, like it doesn't feel like I start to get a headache. Like I'm like that, I know that that's not right. I don't know what's going on, but I don't do that anymore, right? But I use Bluetooth and I use wifi and, you know,

we run our studio with tons of electronic equipment and, you know, there's all kinds of waves and frequencies pinging around constantly. And we just, this is part of what it is to be a modern human being in the developed world. And, you know, look, I listened to the radio when I was a kid and I had a TV like you did with the antenna and that's coming through the air and I'm okay.

So is there really anything to worry about here? And you know, if you wanna talk about 5G, then you might as well put your tinfoil hat on and go talk to David Icke and you guys can chat about the lizard people, right? Like you can't, it's, but we have to be able to talk, we have to be able to like have a rational,

evidence-based, science-backed conversation about this thing that is in the hands of billions of people all over the world. 100%. And unfortunately through all of that, it got co-opted into all these other side conversations about, I just wanted to bring it down to what is it doing? And there's multiple studies showing

that it's causing an immune response. The blood brain barrier freaked me out. The lower immune system that's not kind of up to par yet as a child is they're much more affected uh it is causing stress and so uh it definitely needs more studies and it definitely needs the attention that it deserves and the FCC has to update their understanding, not even their understanding, but their health measures. Right, I mean, the FCC, sorry to step on your words,

but the FCC, its mandate is to regulate the communications industry. It's not set up to look out for the health considerations of what these communications companies are doing. That's the Department of Health and the Environmental Protection. There are other organizations that it sounds like, based on what you said,

were divested of their authority to kind of police and regulate that. Is that the case? Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I don't know what really happened, but I just know that that switch happened, that the EPA definitely was studying telecommunications kind of through the funding, I think,

of the telecommunications companies. And then when the researcher, I forget his name off the top of my head, Carlos something. And then he came out with, Hey man, this is what I found. And he was wanting to share it. And then let's tell everybody. And, you know, again, I know this sounds weird,

but if I wasn't reading it, I'd be like, what the hell? Like, again, what the hell shows up in a lot of these things in the book like what the hell is the pfos doing on my child's diaper and my like why is elastane in my clothes it's causing me stress so so this one was a massive one, I'm worried because obviously, one, two, three, 4G, 5G, they're all here. It's just because we're switching to 5G and it's a little different millimeter wave, it doesn't travel as far,

so they have to put up more towers. And that means just more electrical pollution. And then on top of it, about 40 to 50,000 satellites, these micro satellites that they wanna blanket the earth so that we can quote unquote, use this facetiously, smartify the world. Hey man, like let's study this stuff. I don't want the electrical pollution

of things that I'm seeing strong indicators that we at least let's fricking study it. Like, so again, let's have a conversation. I'm not the expert in it. I don't know, but I've read a huge amount that says, this is not clean. There's some dangers present here. There's this Swedish study that you talk about in the book

that describes this thing they call the microwave syndrome, in which in this study, there was a couple living in an apartment that began to suffer from a long list of symptoms like fatigue and they couldn't sleep, nosebleeds, tinnitus, skin problems, dizziness, concentration issues, heart palpitations, all of which decreased or disappeared within a day

after they moved to another home with significantly lower radiation. All the conditions they suffered under exposure to 5G radio waves are identical to those first described more than 50 years ago by people who received whole body microwave radiation. Now, is that a study if it's a couple of like it's almost anecdotal.

Like I don't know that you can really extract from that anything all that meaningful from a scientific perspective, but from an anecdotal perspective, like, okay, well, that's sort of concerning. Yeah, yeah. And again, I gave those examples simply because it's happening to many people, similar to my father, like two great tech wellness companies.

One's literally called Tech Wellness. Another company out of the UK is called Conscious Spaces. Both of those women who started those companies were electro sensitive. So they started minimizing companies. We're not talking about the famous sticker to put on you. We're talking about blocking devices. We're talking about plugging back in, turning off wifi, turning off at night.

And that's the thing, if people like, one of the minimal things that you can do is turn off your wifi at night, right? That's a stress that you don't need and you're not using. So, and cause we go on to talk about the multiple mice studies that start to show up around the blood brain barrier, the immune response and things like that. So yeah, there's a anecdotal, there's tons.

Yeah. Similar to my father. It's a trip, man. Did you think when you were putting this book together, like maybe I should just leave the whole 5G thing out of it? For sure. Yeah. Yeah, but there's too much compelling information to just leave it.

You know, it's like, it's the 5G side of it is we are, think about the theme here. All of these fatal conveniences that we're talking about, they haven't done the proper studies to deem them safe. And it's the same playbook. They haven't proven that 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G are completely safe. So I'm just raising my hand going, hey man, before we're blasting us all the time, 24 seven, and we don't have a choice, let's dig into it. Tell me that it's safe. Not just, you know, of course it's safe. And no, we need double bind control trials

to show me, to prove that, please disprove the research studies that I read. Please disprove them. Show me. Like we need this kind of action and actionable things. And the awareness that I hope everyone starts to understand is there are things that are going on in this world that unfortunately have greater motivations

than the health of us and our environment. And we need to hold more accountability for some of these people so that we can you know again we have numbers on our side so let's turn on that common sense and just ask questions man like let's ask for these things for change and ask these questions so that we can like go okay prove to me they're safe and i'm good. So I, in the meantime, I use blocking safe sleeve on it. I use these other companies. I plug back in, by the way, plugging in a lot faster. And-

Yeah, just ethernet it. And you do, you're like, oh, here are some cases you can use and here's some other thing. You can go all the way to the extreme using the Faraday temp to like really block it out and go full Ben Greenfield on the whole thing. But there are very simple fixes that are not that inconvenient.

100%. Which is the case for all the categories throughout the book. So again, in the appendices, all sorts of suggestions, products that you vetted, et cetera. But I think, you know, to kind of close this out and, you know, bring this to some level of finality for today, there is a sense that I have

that one could read this and be like overwhelmed. Like, okay, well, like, okay, you don't have, you only have to change one thing, which is basically everything. Like every single product in your house, every appliance that you have, the paint on your walls and the car, you gotta have to change one thing, which is basically everything. Like every single product in your house, every appliance that you have, the paint on your walls and the cart, you gotta strip out the carpets and throw your mattress out

and like get rid of all your clothes. Like it's a lot, dude, right? So if somebody is embarking on this journey and they're like, okay, well, I gotta start somewhere. Like what are the things that are the most important to address first, maybe paired with the easiest changes or most convenient changes to make to launch somebody on their own version of your journey?

Yeah, great question, Rich. I mean, I think of it in this way, go in to out. So the vulnerability of opening your mouth and consuming a liquid or water or food, start there because there's plenty. So probably the easiest one is filter your water because we know that that's affecting 98% of many parts of the country in PFAS and microplastics.

So filter your water, an RO system, distillation, RO is super easy. RO is reverse osmosis. Yep, reverse osmosis. And again, like I've said many times before, add some unrefined salt. And also not all Himalayan salt is created equal. Not all salt is, it can be microplastics

and that stuff too. But so go to places like Real Salt. There's a mine in Utah or the original Himalayan salt. It's got a long, great track record, things like that. So add the stuff back in. And then, you know, what else are you consuming? So looking at your food, containers wrapping your food, hot food wrapped in plastic is a perfect prescription for phthalates, PFAS, microplastics, estrogens, all of that stuff. So minimize that, right?

And then minimize ultra processed food because everything from heavy metals and PFAS and other bisphenols are showing up also in that. So food is a good water beverage food. And then longer things that you're putting on your body so what i mean by that is lotions that are staying on your body these things you should be looking for natural products many of which i've vetted in there that are clean and healthy for your skin and doesn't disrupt that precious microbiome.

And then things like shampoos and conditioners, they're not staying on the largest portions of your body as much. But then again, just think of it, keep going out, improve your bathroom situation. I have this great company that I like called Bite, Bite Toothpaste. Yeah, they sent me some of their products.

They're incredible. They're like tablets for brushing your teeth, right? So you throw a tablet in, you bite down, you just brush normally. And then it's all compostable, refillable glass jars. You're eliminating the harsh chemicals, then stabilizers and things in your toothpaste because that's a chemical soup.

So again, that's going in your mouth, dental floss. That was a big one too. So that slippery little sliding, guess what that is? PFAS man, don't put that in your mouth. That's crazy. So, what I do is I get a bamboo, charcoal, dental floss, I just wet it. And it's basically as good.

So just wet it first, boom. You don't have to put PFAS in your mouth ever again. I'm disappointed that you don't make your own dental floss though. Weaving it in the back 40. Sorry, Rich, I'm running late to the podcast. I got this yucca. Yucca plant would be good.

Actually pull that apart. That would actually work. I'm gonna do a reel on Instagram just for you. All right, good. And then work your way out. Work your way out to your clothing and be more responsible like that. Work your way out to your home. What kind of cleaning products, things like that, work your way out to your home, what kind of cleaning products, things like that,

and just keep moving forward. You don't have to be perfect, but you're just moving forward to clean up your environment so that you can have the best life ever. Right on, man. I love you, buddy. You did a great job with this book. It's a real act of public service.

And I think it's gonna do really well, man. Can't wait for it to be out in the world and start impacting people so we can change the world. Thanks dude. Yeah, it's like a guide. I think that I hope that people can just open it up and learn a little something every day and start applying it.

So that was a big lift for sure. Yeah, and anything else up on the horizon that you wanna talk about? Yeah, I've got a lot of shit going on. We could spend five more hours talking about all the projects you got your muddy paws in. Yeah, I mean, down to earth. Season three?

It doesn't look like it's gonna happen. There's some challenges with many different things, but I'm not gonna divulge it, but I hinted at it. I am working on some really cool other television projects that I'm stoked about. And again, all solution-based moving forward, still working to build out my house. Yeah. Still in the year working on getting the sustainable housing project up on its feet. Yeah. And I got a new partner with Barucas with Steve Fabos and we cleaned up a lot of things. So I'm so excited for that business

and that nut to get out, putting my formulator hat back on. So I'm formulating some stuff with the nut and other super foods and stuff. So that I'm stoked about. And then, you know, working in the clean energy space with my crazy friends in the science community and clean energy tech. So that's some of the stuff that people don't know much about

because it's not public, but we're working with governments around the world and New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and here in the States too of creating clean power. And that's a whole nother thing, but it just helps to, you know, we're here. And so I just wanna give it my best. Right on man.

Yeah, well, maybe you can come back and we can do a whole clean energy conversation. In the meantime, Barucas, you know, we didn't even mention Barucas until the very end here, but is it available nationwide? Can people overseas get it? If people wanna, you gotta check out Barucas Nut. Go listen to our other podcast about it,

but a delicious, super nutritious, super food nut product that is your company. Yeah, it's the greatest nut ever. I mean, it literally checks all the boxes and meaning that it's, we had a, which maybe you didn't know, we had a third party Swiss company do an audit of our process

of how we collect the nut, how we work with the nut, how we deliver the nut and the whole process of fair trade and planting trees and supporting the biome and the whole process of fair trade and planting trees and supporting the biome and the saharu and we we rated higher than any company that they've ever tested so we're a carbon sink by us literally just being in business today and we're still improving on

that process so yeah people can get the product nationwide. I really hope that the UK and other places open up soon. But it's delicious. It's my passion. It kind of represents the superfood side of me because it gets to support the people there, help a biome that's being hurt with deforestation. And the customers get to not only have the micronutrients

of a wild food, but they get to enjoy it as well. And all your guests now will be. Yeah, you gotta keep us stocked over here. I will. I will happily pawn them off on every guest that walks in here. So I assume it's in, I know it's in a variety of supermarkets here,

but should people try to buy it online or should they look for it in their natural foods market? Well, you can certainly help us out by asking for your local grocer to carry it. And then we're gonna do some bigger campaigns, but you can get it online. And most people don't know we have an amazing butter and we have the chocolate covered

because in the early days we were to be stocked up and then we'd lose, we didn't have the mechanism sorted out so we would be starting to stop. So now we're guns blazing. Barucas.com. Barucas.com baby. In the meantime, pick up Fatal Conveniences and just sit quietly at home

and await Darren's next appearance on the podcast, whenever that might be. All right, like I said, I love you, buddy. And I'm here to support you. Love you, thank you, brother. Cheers, peace, plants. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest,

including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books,

the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis.

The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management.

And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

Namaste. Thank you.