The Extra Scoop: EMFs, AI, Radiation & the Digital Health Myths We Need to Debunk

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0:59Welcome to The Extra Scoop, our expert-led bonus episodes, giving you the need to know on the topics everybody is talking about. That's right, from gut health to sleep, hormones to skin, we are cutting through the noise with top experts, so there is no fluff, just facts. Exactly, it's all quick, practical, evidence-based advice to fit into your busy lives. So this is The Extra Scoop, let's get started.

1:28As our listeners may know, our Extra Scoop episodes are all about taking the topics everyone's talking about and quickly breaking them down for you so that you have expert-led insights that lead you informed and empowered when it comes to your well-being. Since the beginning of the Wellness Scoop, we've wanted to speak about the impact of technology, not only on our mental well-being, but also on our physical health. So we're really excited to explore this today with Dr. David Robert Grimes, a physicist, cancer researcher, and science widely respected for making complex scientific ideas accessible.

2:05And of course, for his fearless approach to debunking misinformation around topics like vaccines, climate change and tech health scares. So it's an absolute delight today to welcome Dr. David Robert Grimes. Hello. Good morning or afternoon, depending on what time you're listening to this, I guess. Thank you so much for joining us. Honestly, there is so much to talk about today, so many topics that it's going to be a challenge on our side to keep this concise for listeners. But I guess just to get right to it, you have recently compared social media to the tobacco industry. There is obviously, it's such a pressing conversation at the moment.

2:42We've seen shows like Adolescents come to the forefront and really sparked this huge debate, I think, across the world on the impact it's doing. I wondered if you could talk us through your idea behind that and what your solutions are. And is it as bad as everyone says it is? It's worse is the general answer. Let's jump straight into it. The piece you're referring to is I think I authored for Scientific American back in April. And I made the comparison that the closest historical analogy we have to social media giants is the tobacco industry. Because they know their product is harmful, their own internal research shows their product is harmful.

3:18And yet, because that engagement that they rely on as a source of revenue is so important to them, they have just simply disregarded the harms it causes whether that's to democracy or to public health or to the mental health of the people on their platforms again recently sarah winn williams books i just finished it the careless people came out as well and if you had a low opinion of social media before then you'll have an even lower one at the end of it all right and there's a few reasons for this. Social media is, you might argue, and I mean, the very tech libertarian version of it is it's just a platform for people to express ideas.

3:57And that's kind of true, except it's deliberately false. And I'm going to try to unpack that to see where that comes from. So the idea that we are neutral arbiters of information is completely nonsensical. It doesn't make sense. So I mean, I wrote a popular science book about this called The Irrational Ape. The psychology of how we deal with information is not that we're incredibly partisan. We tend to seek out information that confirms our biases. We are far more likely to emote first in reason later. And for this reason, messages that are sent on social media tend to target us emotionally. They tend to aim for outrage and inflammation.

4:34They are the biggest single predictors of virality on online content if it makes you scared, angry, or outraged. So any negative emotional feedback. We sit here and think we're very rational about how we process information. We are not. We are incredibly emotive. There's two major drivers. One is that we have cognitive problems that we, you know, for example, we don't realize that a post on the New York Times is probably more reliable than our racist uncle's Facebook page. That's called source neglect. We do that a lot. And the other part of it is socio-effective. That means that if someone we like and admire is spreading a certain message that we do a monkey see, monkey do.

5:08If the Cardassians are telling you to take, you know, an MRI scan you don't need, you want to be a bit like the Cardassians for reasons that are beyond me, but some, they have a lot of followers. So people do, but there's lots of this. I mean, as a joke recently, I pointed out that, you know, people selling supplements online, things like that. That's also socio-effective by the way, they're all the exact same. Just to make a point, I got my own supplements branded. It says in the back, it has my face on it. And it says in the packet that supplementation is useless and there's no good evidence for it.

5:36I don't sell these. I give them as paperweights to friends as a reminder, not to be sucked in by online scams. But the reason people go for that That is because they trust the person putting it up. That's parasocial. Social media amplifies that massively. That's one of the major problems. The other problem is we are not very good at assessing the quality of information that we come across. And this is why misinformation thrives. Apart from the fact that it is a motive, like you never see a happy misinformation story. You see stuff that deliberately outrages you and makes you mad, right? Or makes you divided against something.

6:08That's what it typically tends to be. but because we don't parse that very well we are very susceptible the idea that we are immune there's just a platform and it makes a difference when the algorithms are also pushing content towards you if you click on a racist post for example so a lot of my work i have to look at anti-immigrant racist invective because it often is from the heart of right conspiracy theories i get so much of that put in my feed now because i clicked on it for research purposes before i obviously know it's nonsense i write about it a lot but that's what it does and this is an adolescence you mentioned earlier on if you start looking at andrew tate content for example you'll get nothing i had to write a piece on andrew tate a few years ago and i mean for about six months afterwards all i was getting was whether i wanted to join andrew tate's academy but the algorithm will push content it thinks you want because you've looked it up before what does that do it silos you into echo chambers now people will say well you know newspapers are partisan too kind of newspapers have journalistic standards they have independent bodies that can assess them for factual accuracy, they can be held accountable for what they write.

7:11Social media companies cannot. And that's where the difference is. They're making a lot more money. They're also ruining journalism because they're giving that content out online and now journalists, newspapers can't afford to pay their journalists. So we're in a very strange space. I feel that's the rant. I'll stop now for a second, take a breath. It's fantastic because you've summed up, I think, everything that obviously is a bit twisted with the world right now. And it preys on our negative emotions, we know that bad news spreads a lot faster. It's more clickbaity. Lots of people that have very polarizing views or really extreme things to say, they're the ones that get projected on this algorithm.

7:47So can I ask you in particular, let's talk about the physical impacts now. So we talked, I'd say that's a little bit about mental health, what we've just discussed, and the workplace and the economy and everything that's kind of twisted in this strange world of social media that can we go into items that are also being fear mongered left right and center the only the other day i saw on my feed something like you know the headphones you know the new apple the airpods basically are radiating inside my head like a microwave or so like wearing a microwave on my head and as this guy walking around with this silly little cardboard box that looked like a microwave he put it on top of his head so he should have kept it on so i mean Ideally, that would be the end of that content.

8:29He just puts, I'm a silly person. Here's a box on my head. That'd be great if social media had more boxes on heads. I mean, what he was saying though, David, was drastic. So he was basically saying that it increases the risk of cancer if you're using mobile phones, you're sleeping with it next to your head, you've got a microwave in your house. What are the risks here? Are there any risks? Right. This amuses me immensely because on my other hat as a cancer researcher, I've looked at and before then as a physicist working with ionizing and non-ionizing radiation I want to say I find this hilarious I don't I find it really draining and I've written papers on this at a review for JAMA Oncology a few years ago about microwave radiation or radio frequency radiation to give it to more broad spectrum thing so to put things in perspective right your microwave operates on a really different principle of dielectric heating than mobile phones do right so this is when people can try to compare it to a microwave they don't actually understand what's happening that's the first thing because to make a microwave work you need to have it in a chamber that's tuned you need a resonator you need a magnetron there's a reason you know you don't just randomly have microwaves in your house you need to actually have them in boxes but that's put the physics aside for a sec so when we use our mobile phones or bluetooth headphones whatever else we are using radio frequency radiation usually between 2.4 and 5.1 gigahertz right and people hear radiation they go oh that's scary radiation simply means the transmission of energy through a medium.

9:54It's not like, you know, we're surrounded by radiation right now. Do you see the light around us? Light is a form of radiation, right? It's on the electromagnetic spectrum. And to put it in context, I point out that the lowest energy light, which is red light, right, is between 10 and 15 ,000 times more powerful than the highest energy radio frequency radiation. And you look at this spectrum, if you were afraid of your phone, you should be afraid of light bulbs. Spoiler, please don't be afraid of light bulbs. But this is the level of what they're doing here. And it's a real logical fallacy. And I know I get really annoyed because I picked them apart in the book an awful lot.

10:29But one of the problems here is some radio frequency or some radiation, I say specifically, can be dangerous. X-rays, gamma rays, photons, they're higher energy photons. They are damaging because they have the ability, they have enough energy intrinsic in those little quantum packets. This is, I'll spare you the physics but they're called photons they're they're little packets of energy they have enough intrinsic energy to damage dna bonds which is why for example x-ray exposure can cause cancers eventually can cause damage to dna which eventually becomes cancer visible light doesn't have that energy radio frequency doesn't have anywhere near that energy and due to a nice quirk of quantum mechanics it never can now you can add it all up to get enough energy that's why visible light doesn't causes any harm and neither is radio frequency.

11:13So they taken a grain of truth that some radiation can be harmful and they extrapolate it to all radiation is harmful without even realizing they've skipped orders of magnitudes on the radiation spectrum. But as you noticed in that video, he said he was quite extreme. This person is one of two things. They either don't realize how uninformed they are, right? Which is possible because, you know, particularly if it's a man, no offense to my gender, but we're famous for being confident without being informed. and the second part of it they may well know it's nonsense because this is old nonsense i've been writing about um bluetooth paranoia since what 2012 like i mean i've been running a long i feel very old now uh i've read it was a long time right it's nonsense but it's engagement because like every time one of these videos goes viral and i've done a few videos debunking this stuff even though i've done loads of stuff debunking this i will suddenly get a message going i'm really concerned about this should i be concerned and i'm like they've just reanimated the algorithm them to get content because again this shows the point fear spreads fear spread it's contagious me doing a video going uh that's probably fine i would not worry about that at all there's much more important things to worry about and that's not going to cause any harm that's not going to get the clicks what's going to get the clicks is if i put a box on my head and say you're wearing a microwave on your head all the time oh my god particularly if i'm american for some reason i don't know why i've done that in my head and that's something we have to train ourselves to not react to these people make money off that so i don't know this person in particular uh firstly they're not creative because this has been done a lot but what i will say is that's really old stuff and whether they know it's wrong or they are too uninformed to realize it's wrong i think the end consequences are the same they're scaring the bejesus out of people over stuff they do not need to be scared over well i mean the clarity is phenomenal because i think it's such a great analogy for what we see online now.

13:05And I know for Ria and I, it's such a point of frustration on a day-to-day basis in the sense of obviously for us, it's so much about what you're eating and your diet, but telling people to eat a vegetable stir fry and how to cook it in 15 minutes just doesn't have the cut through. It's like, here are the five foods that will kill you tomorrow. And that sense of preying on people's fear is, it's so, so powerful and it is absolutely terrifying. And I think, you know, there's a trend going around at the moment that I've seen, it's like the things i have in my house to protect my health and things i've seen is like emf stopping stickers basically on phones like when we were like i mean i'm not sure if you're you're my age when we were teenagers they used to sell these light up things you could stick to the back of your old nokias they were like two euro i can't believe they're now selling them probably like yeah bespoke versions of them and they do nothing they just light up i saw one necklaces that um the mom had given the children's it's like to block the raise we actually were moving house we were looking at people's houses and we went to a house where they were like oh yeah we don't have wi-fi in the house now we only have plugins so there's no emf rays in the house obviously people are scared of 5g um phone masks that's been thing to talk about and i just wanted to essentially for people like a tickless microwaves 5g phone masks emf blockers it is essentially nonsense what we don't want is too many x-rays in our life absolutely yeah yeah i mean and that's why medical professionals will tell you, yeah, we control x-ray exposure.

14:32We don't control your exposure to sunlight. Well, actually sunlight, this is like caveat with sunlight because sunlight has ultraviolet radiation in the spectrum as well as visible light. So when people go, well, the sun is harmful because I can hear people already in my head going, well, David, you said, well, actually, yes. The ultraviolet component is why you wear sunscreen because that is part of the solar spectrum. But the visible light, if you shine a torch in yourself for hours, it's not going to give you a canter. No matter how bright you shine the torch in yourself, because it's not capable of breaking DNA bonds, which is a prerequisite for something being a carcinogen.

15:04And what I found really, this is a trivia thing. You can shield yourself from EMF, if you wanted to, with a Faraday cage. This is a physics thing. And years ago, they're basically chicken wire. And it's just the way it induced things, whatever's inside that gets shielded. There was a bunch of anti-5G people that bought these Faraday cages on Amazon to shield their house from 5G and they put them around the house and they all went onto Amazon and complained that their, their wifi signal in the house dropped. But it was hilarious to me because it showed they really didn't understand the fundamental physics of the problem they were talking about.

15:38They were very confident about it. They were very insistent. They didn't need this stuff or they needed this stuff, but they, they didn't realize what they were doing. And this is why a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I would always say, if you hear something scary get three different sources to verify whether it's true or not and make sure they are trusted ones and again i keep going to the the analogy in my head you know something that is in the new york times probably more reliable than you know your conspiracy theorist cousins instagram page and yet people treat these things like they are because i mean one's more engaging i mean the article i wrote for jam oncology on radio freeze radiation was just basically yeah we've looked at all the epidemiology we've looked at all the biophysics and it turns out nothing.

16:19It's not going to do anything. That's not exciting. It's exciting for me, but it's not exciting. I'm not going to get major clicks with, guys, it's fine. Don't worry. Be chill. Be cool, man. I know. Maybe that's why we should set up a brand just called Be Chill, dude, and see how far we can go with the Be Chill. Should we drink arsenic? Probably not chill, but can we use our phones? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. David, I think what's really reassuring is the fact that the science obviously is concrete. And when you explain it in that way, it's really reassuring. You mentioned something like a little bit of knowledge is dangerous.

16:52And I completely agree because it's almost, I can relate to it in my world of work, there's lots of health coaches or different people that aren't specifically qualified in nutrition, yet they go into that world. And of course, you can do more harm than good sometimes, but unintentionally, a lot of people don't realize because they don't have the full grounding. It's such a difficult world to navigate. I think one of the questions before I move on to AI, because I really want to pick your brains on AI, is that you said microwave should be in a confined space. So I can almost, you know, it's a little box and that's where everything happens.

17:24And that's where the magic of the cooking and the process and everything begins. But what about if you leave the door open? So I had so many questions from people that said. It'll make no difference. No difference. But here's the thing. A microwave works by dielectric heating and it needs a standing wave chamber. So it's only going to like you can do this. one of the experiments we used to do with undergraduates is you get a really long bar of chocolate and you put it in the microwave for just a few seconds and you actually notice a standing wave pattern on it those they're called resonance chambers they're tuned to work and to amplify the rays in a certain way as you'll notice the microwave door is actually there's a little grill on it that's actually a faraday cage right there even if you did get for some reason a defect in it that would bounce it back also i mean i need to hasten to point this out your house is not a resonance chamber it is not exactly tuned and it doesn't have a giant magnetron underneath it that's the heavy part of a microwave to make sure that all stays in one place so worst case scenario if you ran a microwave with the door off you just get really inefficient microwave oh fantastic also who is oh who is able to open their microwave door mine since i've been i've had them in the 80s they turn off when you try to hit the door you hit the button the door opens the whole thing stops that's a basic switch i think the fear is so big of these things now that It's almost that even when the microwave is off, but the door is open, it's going to be admitting.

18:42Look, we're all scared of things like cancer, aren't we? Ultimately. And the idea. I mean, I say cancer is a consequence of living long enough in a lot of cases. The primary cause of cancer is aging. It's primary cause. It's like going to Vegas and rolling an awful lot. You're going to roll snake eyes eventually because again, cancer is probabilistic for the most part. We're exposed every day to agents that might cause cancer and our DNA is super good at repairing stuff. But one day it's going to mess up. You'll die of something else before as well. Heart disease is the leading cause. So, you know, you've got two ways to go.

19:13You're going to go heart disease or cancer. Take your pick. And if you want to look at a long-term way, that's we all die and something is going to kill us. But the obsession with fixating on things that have no real risk factor or nothing's going to be accumulative and living your life based on that fear makes no sense to me. I think that's such an apt point. I have one quick question, final one of microwaves, and then I want to pick up on what you just said. On microbes, it was whether or not it kind of nukes your food, which is, you know, and that damages all the vitamins and minerals on your food, which I think is the other concern.

19:44But on that point, I think it's health anxiety is such a huge topic at the moment. And it's so perpetuated by the online world because to your point, David, that fear and misinformation are so deeply connected. And that's what really fundamentally runs the algorithms now. And I just wanted to pick up on the health anxiety point. But first of all, could you confirm that if you do cook food in a microwave, you're not destroying all nutritional content? God, no. What microwaves are very, very good at doing is vibrating water, right? That's how they work, which is why if you put a bowl of cornflakes, dry cornflakes in the microwave, you'll be surprised to find it doesn't heat up because it's dehydrated.

20:21There's no liquid in it to vibrate. So all the microwaves do is shake water and they shake it enough to cause friction that warms it up. That's why you can heat things very efficiently with them as long as they are liquid based, which is most of our food. Most of us don't just eat cornflakes all the time. But yeah, it's not nuking your food. It doesn't destroy the nutrients. It's still there. I know. I came armed with the whole, I've got my science of plant-based nutrition book next to me and all the different methods of cooking. And yeah, you definitely retain nutrition by using the microwave.

20:51That's for sure. It's just don't overcook your food, guys. I think that's the same with most things. But can we move on from obviously health anxiety and microwaves and all sorts of things? We could go on forever because there's so much. But can we talk about this new technology, David? And I've never actually had a chance to speak to you about this yet. So I'm really excited to pick your brains on the subject of AI and chatbots. And I just cannot get over the fact that, you know, they weren't part of our lives even during the pandemic. and now do you think with this new technology there's long-term risks perhaps for the younger generations because they're growing up with this tech at their fingertips you know do you think it's how they learn academically my big concern with my kids is of course there's chat gpt and all these different things i don't want them to learn the skill to write no tools themselves and this goes for to a degree for social media tools themselves are in and of themselves aethical they They don't, a knife, for example, is very good at slicing meat, but you could also use to kill someone.

21:51It's how you deploy it that changes the ethics of it. Now, with large language models, which is what we talk about AI, as we were talking about, one of my frustrations, and I particularly hear policymakers talking about it, is they don't seem to understand what it is. So my other hat that I wear is I'm a chartered statistician. All these models are, is they search vast databases, a.k.a. they steal stuff out of books, the internet, Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Exchange, right? massive amounts of data, and they use statistical associative models, which means they go, well, when people were searching for like chicken and cook, they went together.

22:26And if you do this enough, humans ask very similar questions. You can come up with relatively good prediction models based on this. Now you need, we've known this since the fifties, by the way, the actual idea of a large language model is this is the fifties. But to do this, to make it convincing, you need massive computing power because you need to be able to take huge amounts of data and shift it all together. But essentially it's a shuffling mechanism, right? When people go like, why doesn't AI just, you know, sometimes AI will tell you something's just absolutely wrong. And you'll go, well, why did AI not, you know, tell me that was false?

22:57Because AI doesn't have a concept of true or false. AI has a concept of what people have associated with what. It's like a slightly cracked out version of Google search. It's like, you're interested in this and that, and other people are interested in that. It doesn't intrinsically know if it's lying to you. It doesn't intrinsically know anything right and the problem is people seem to think that ai models have some great wisdom what you can extract from them sometimes is what associations they have made and that can be useful for example i'm often coded for what i do i do a lot of um coding of health interventions and i have to actually write code and or matlab whatever else and what saves me a lot of time is i know how to write that loop i've written million of them before but i'm going to say chat chibi just sort this out for me and it'll give me a workable version i can use as a basis The reason it does that really well is that it has stolen all the data on Reddit and Stack Exchange from programmers and statisticians over decades.

23:51So it has a great repository of expert knowledge because that was experts. However, it also steals data from places that are absolute garbage, like 4chan, right? So it's very easy if you don't know your subject area well enough for it to give you absolute nonsense. Also, often, even though it steals good data for me, for example, about half the time I'll put the code in and it won't work because it's stolen the wrong kind of code. And it doesn't know. It doesn't know it's lying to you. So while it's very good for writing a cover letter, for example, it has billions of cover letters on the internet.

24:26It's really good at them. So if you said, write me a cover letter, it'll write you a very passable cover letter. But if you wanted to give any depth or specifics, it's going to fail. Or it's going to possibly write something absolutely wrong. BBC did a study a few weeks ago. where I say studies wrong, but they fed their stories into ChatGPT and said, summarize this. And in almost all cases, it summarized at least something wrong. Like a friend of mine works, I won't mention the newspaper, but they're journalists for a certain paper and they got an in-house AI software. And whenever they put in a suicide, it will come back and suggest that it might've been murder.

25:00Because online, that's always the, you know, it looked like a suicide, but it was actually murder. So, so much data it has to train on that, that it actually, they have to check up. obituary notices to make sure it doesn't start saying that they were murders. So the problem is they're fine, but it's a regurgitator of what already exists. It doesn't create anything original. And I think it's really important for people to realize there's no originality. Intelligence is a misnomer. It's not thinking. It's doing large processing of statistics. And you have to take that with a huge pinch of salt. So David, listening to you there, it sounds like obviously social media over the last decade in particular has kind of massively spread this new era of misinformation and challenge for consumers and people online to understand what's correct and what to follow, what not to.

25:46But it sounds like AI is going to really double down on that. To your point, if you're not an expert in something and you don't have that base knowledge, it's very difficult for you to decipher whether or not what you're being told is correct. Absolutely. It's like, imagine there was a version of wikipedia that didn't actually have references so for example if i go to i love i'm a huge fan of wikipedia i think it's one of the best things humanity have ever done on the internet and that's there's not that many good things we've done on the internet let's be fair but the the english language version in particular has an army of volunteers army of references like i always say to students it's okay to start on wikipedia just don't finish there because everything is hyperlinked go in there and just check the source and check it for the gd and usually it is although my wikipedia is almost inherently entirely wrong.

26:30Yeah, mine is. Mine is as well. And I won't touch it out of principle. No, they won't let me change it. Every time I change it, they change it back like I'm born in the wrong place. So what you need to do is upload a birth cert, basically, with you right there and say, actually, and the talk page, you have to go, actually, I actually was born here. And of course, it's not perfect, but I think it's one of the better things. But imagine there was no reference, no talk history. There was a thing you went in and it changed every day. That's what ChatGPT is. and people think it's a reliable source.

26:59I mean, it's very good at making it like as laziness in areas I know well. I tell it to write code for me when I'm too lazy to write the code myself, but it's code I could write and I can check from a scan if it makes any sense. I've also occasionally got to write like, you know, I need an ethics statement for a grant and then I'll read and go, okay, 80 % of that is usable and 20 % of that is garbage and luckily I know which 20 % is garbage. If I was starting from scratch and I thought these are the best things ever, it would be a big mistake. Again, it's like a kitchen knife. Perfect tool for saving you some time on mundane tasks.

27:34Really bad tool if you think it actually has any knowledge or depth, because it doesn't. I think what's been so helpful about this episode is just a reminder that if you don't really know what you're talking about, which I do not when it comes to technology and AI, things can appear very scary. And when you hear someone like David break it down and say, look, and he's not remotely worried about these topics and he's explained the science, it's extremely reassuring. And AI is very new, everybody. We're all trying to navigate it. David just saying, I write codes. I don't even know how to write code.