Know Your Physio

Eric Ritter: Are You Being Slowly Poisoned? Lead Detection Breakthrough That Can Save Millions of Lives!

• Eric Ritter • Episode 119

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In this compelling episode, I have the pleasure of welcoming Eric Ritter, a passionate advocate for environmental health and lead exposure awareness. Eric, with his deep-rooted passion for science and an innovative approach to lead detection, is at the forefront of a crucial mission: to safeguard our homes and environment from the invisible dangers of lead contamination. His journey from a science enthusiast to an entrepreneur developing accessible lead detection technology encapsulates a profound commitment to public health and safety.

Our conversation with Eric takes us through the intricate world of lead exposure, its widespread implications on human health, and the groundbreaking work he's doing to combat it. From the science behind lead's harmful effects to the simple yet effective strategies for mitigation, Eric provides a comprehensive overview that is both enlightening and alarming. His initiative to make lead testing accessible and his advocacy for informed and proactive measures resonate with a universal message: the importance of protecting our health and environment from insidious contaminants.

This episode is an essential listen for anyone interested in environmental health, public safety, and the empowering role of citizen science. Eric shares not only the technical aspects of lead detection but also personal stories and insights that underscore the urgency and significance of his work. Join us in this informative and inspiring discussion that sheds light on a hidden hazard and the remarkable efforts to eliminate it.

Key Points From This Episode:

What Sparked the Lead Poisoning Prevention Movement? [00:05:34]
Can Lead Really Glow?[00:08:14]
The Truth About Lead-Based Paint Laws [00:20:32]
Is Your Home Safe from Lead Paint? [00:26:11]
How Lead Paint Altered History [00:32:55]
Lead in Gasoline [00:34:17]
How Does Lead Poisoning Affect Your Health? [00:39:53]
Is Lead in Your Veins? [00:41:32]
Living Without Food Might Be Your Best Bet [00:55:39]
Is Your Chocolate Poisoning You? [00:56:58]
Is Your Water Safe? [01:00:45]
Could Lead Be the Reason for ADHD? [01:05:45]
Lead's Deadly Impact: Are You at Risk? [01:08:56]
What's Really in Your Tap Water? [01:14:52]
Your Child's First Test Kit [01:21:31]
Zinc Oxide: A  Game Changer? [01:24:50]
Are You Lead Poisoned [01:29:49]
Breaking Bad IRL [01:38:55]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

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Andres Preschel: If you had the chance to put a message, like a word, phrase, or sentence on a billboard somewhere in the world, what would it say and where would you put it?
Eric Ritter: I would say test with kits, not kids. I mean, if I touch a lead weight and then I, if I wipe it on my finger or my hand, and then I spray it with a spray and I shine the light on it, you'll see the glowing lead on my hand. It actually does come off far more than you would think. And it's invisible. When lead is getting on stuff, you can barely see it. It's so small and it's sticky. It deforms easily, you know, if you push something into it. And that same is true with tiny pieces of it. It'll deform into the crevices of my hand. I love science. I've been totally addicted to science. Since I was, I remember I was in elementary school, I was reading a book about black holes and I was like, my mind was completely blown. I was like, wow, this is insane. Um, so ever since then, I just always loved to consume scientific material. And it's not always that confusing. There's a lot of technical jargon and it may seem overwhelming. Some of the math involved is confusing, but at the end of the day, there's words that indicate what all these things mean and it could be found out. And I just, I love researching stuff because knowing more is the number one tool that has helped me in life. Like if I don't know about something, I am at risk for sure.

Andres Preschel: There is only one supplement that I think almost everyone on this planet should be taking and that's a full spectrum and highly bioavailable magnesium supplement because, well, let's face it, ever since the industrial revolution, our soil has been depleted. of magnesium and therefore our food is depleted of magnesium and on top of that our modern environments which are inherently overstimulating and stressful are constantly depleting our body of magnesium and unlike other nutrients this is not something your body can produce on its own it literally needs to get it from the diet and one individual kind of magnesium alone is not enough. You actually need seven different kinds to support over 300 biochemical reactions that help regulate your nervous system, red blood cell production, energy production, managing stress and emotions, etc. And so the folks at Bioptimizers have made it very easy and convenient to add back in what the modern world leaves out. They've created Magnesium Breakthrough. Now I've been taking this for the past two years and the biggest benefits that I've seen are related to my evening wind down sessions and my sleep. I tend to be pretty overactive in the evenings, just totally overthinking everything that I do. And this has helped me wind down and get more restorative, more efficient to sleep. So I wake up feeling way more refreshed, more energized, more clear, more ready for the day. And the way that I see it, sleep is upstream of essentially every other health and wellness related habit and decision. Because if you're sleeping better automatically, you're gonna have more regular cravings. You're gonna have higher insulin sensitivity You can derive more of all these inputs like fitness, right? You make more gains you gain more muscle you burn more calories and you wake up feeling refreshed so that you can do it again and again and again and And then beyond the fitness, you have more energy to go for a walk, to do fun activities with friends. You are less stressed, so you can socialize anxiety-free. And you're also going to be retaining, refreshing, and refining your skills and information much, much better. So you won't forget any names. And, yeah, I mean, like I said, over 300 chemical processes that you're supporting with magnesium. And sleep, I mean, wow. Better sleep is just a better life in general. So, I found that extremely helpful on a personal level, and I'm sure that you guys will find it helpful, too. Your mind and body, and maybe even your spirit, will thank you. So anyway, if you want to get a sweet little discount off of this amazing, amazing magnesium supplement from Bioptimizers, all you have to do is visit the show notes. So you scroll down right now, takes just a couple seconds and boom, you'll have access to all seven different kinds of magnesium that your body needs. All you have to do is hit the link and use code KYP from Know Your Physio. KYP. That's all. Enjoy 10 to 22% off depending on the package you choose, whether or not you subscribe. I'm obviously subscribed because I don't even want to think about whether or not I'm going to get this essential supplement in the mail. And yeah, hope you guys enjoy that awesome stuff. And that's all for now. I'll see you guys on the show. Eric, here we are in another physio podcast. I am a big fan. I've been a big fan now for a couple of weeks, but the instant that I came across your work and your enthusiasm in helping us become aware of, well, how prevalent lead is in our everyday lives and really in everything that surrounds us and the impact that it can have on our health and well-being, I instantly, instantly, instantly knew intuitively that I had to get you on the show to help make this information more accessible to all of the citizen scientists that tune in. And so with that being said, man, welcome to the show. It's such an honor to have you here.

Eric Ritter: Thanks for having me, Andrew. My pleasure.

Andres Preschel: So typically the way I start these shows is I ask, why? You know, you're certainly passionate about what you do, but if we can start there, why don't you tell us a little bit about why you do what you do, man?

Eric Ritter: Well, I mean, the short answer is it's my job. I do it for money. And I know, I mean, it's kind of an uncomfortable thing because lead poisoning prevention is super important. And like whenever money gets mixed into anything, like that's an obvious ulterior motive. And the reason I got into lead poisoning, like lead identification, really, in 2019 was because I saw that there was a product on the market called LeadCheck, and it was a patent-protected product, been sold by 3M for about 10 years. Prior to that, it was sold by another company, a private company. And it was grossly overpriced, and it was grossly overengineered, and it was engineered specifically to protect it. And I don't even know if that patent would have held up. Nobody ever tried them and said, this is obvious. This isn't something that you can patent. And so for the last 25 years, basically, from early 90s until 2019, they had free reign. And they were charging $5 per test. And I had already been selling reagents. And reagents are a mixture of chemicals that identify other unknown chemicals via color change. They're a very low-cost way to do so. And I was already selling a different kind of reagent, and then Amazon made me stop selling that one. So I looked for other ones, and I saw that there was this lead opportunity. And I said, wow. I did some rudimentary testing, and I figured out a way to make the same product effectively at 10 times cheaper. So I said, OK, I mean, I think this is something I can offer. This is a superior value to what's out there right now. And then it went from there. A few years, obviously. And about a year and a half ago, a scientist from Columbia University reached out to me and he wanted to innovate a new soil test kit. And he had a methodology that he devised based on an EPA method. which measured the bioavailable lead in soil by doing an acid digestion and then adding the active compound in my swabs, which is called sodium radisinate, to a filtered final product. And that would turn a shade of orange or red or purple, depending on the concentration of lead in the soil and then of that, whatever migrated into the liquid. And so, you know, I worked with him for a few, I met with him a few times at his lab. We did a little bit of stuff with that. And then he told me about this, the glowing lead test. He said, there's a group of the Netherlands who's come up with this. And I was like, wow, that's insane. So I looked up, you know, information about it. And I said, wow, this is like, actually awesome. This is so much more exciting because swabbing is not fun. It is not fun to swab the surface, squint at the swab, and then say, is this positive or negative? Like the swab may become dirty. A color change from orange to red isn't exactly the most obvious thing ever, but it was like that was the status quo. And so I just fully jumped into that. And I tried to partner with some people in the industry, but there was no partnering available. I just, I was just, You know, the way that the information gets out there now isn't really the kind of information that I would digest or that any of my peers would. And I'm 31. So people my age are most likely to have children. And if they're going to scoff at the kind of information that's out there, a different kind of information has to go out there. It is. And I know social media is the kind of media they consume predominantly. And so, interspersing some information with some entertainment is a really effective way to get people to think about something that, I mean, it's 2023. Light is so, like, forgotten about generally.

Andres Preschel: Right. Yeah, I think, you know, I understand that there is obviously a financial incentive for you, but I think I'm more impressed by how you do what you do. you know, like the kind of enthusiasm that you bring to an otherwise, I mean, I think for a lot of people, mundane topic, like who wants to go out of their way to test for lead? Uh, but I think that the enthusiasm that you bring to this topic and showing us how, uh, empowering that can be. And in fact, doing the research just the same time, because we have plenty of research to support how dangerous it is, especially the chronic exposure. Um, I think that's priceless, man. And I really admire the way that you do it.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, thank you. And I have to admit, I'm kind of addicted to testing for love. It is. Maybe it's because like, yeah, it glows. And like, I could stare at that glow all day. It's absolutely mesmerizing. That's awesome. It's like, yeah, well, it's, it's like kind of compulsive at times, actually, because I'm just, you know, I just run around.

Andres Preschel: I think that compulsion is serving a purpose. You're showing up consistently, you're creating value, you have enthusiasm, and that's something that the algorithm really favors, gets it to more people, and then just really helps you have this like exponential exposure, you know, day after day. And that's what we need to see a significant shift in our culture so that we become healthier society.

Eric Ritter: I couldn't agree more. Interspersing information with entertainment has got to be the best way to learn it. Because I was a terrible student when I was going to school. It was not entertaining. I was like, I have to sit here, I have to look at this. And I'm like flying my pencil around, you know, as a kid, like I'm not ready to sit there for a long period of time. But when the information is something that I'm motivated to learn about or it's entertaining, I could sop it up really quickly. And the science stuff is awesomely entertaining to me because I can effectuate results out of thin air. And a lot of times, I just love doing this, getting on a a research paper or a patent application, reading about it, and then doing a little remix, seeing what I can come up with. So I can do this here and abstracting from the methods that they've done and then applying it to stuff that I want to get done. And that's like, it's, it's so much fun. And it's been, you know, it's been a good, uh, a good five years of doing this and the last, um, like year or so I've gotten so much more into it. That's when I got that XRF gun. And I just became so much more involved because I saw this as a really key opportunity. Like now that the lead could glow. and that the cost per test will decrease even more. And the fidelity that I could get on this wall behind me, if I have a swab, I'm going to swab one tiny section. But if I have a spray, I can spray all around, and it will take me way less time, and it'll be way less difficult to determine what the results are. So I just said, no one else is doing this. And researchers do research. they don't necessarily do stuff in the real world. And it's tough to bridge that gap sometimes, I think, from understanding something intellectually to actually effectuating it in the environment. So that's where I come in, because I will do it. Like I'm, you know,

Andres Preschel: I'll do it. I see videos of you, you're running from house to house, literally running. The client is running after you. You can test the windows that are being renovated into this space and how people cheap out on renovations and then the paint ends up having the lead. I love the approach, bro. And I'll tell you something, there's a really famous quote by Richard Buckminster Fuller. It goes, if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool the use of which will inspire new ways of thinking but you're an exception in the sense that you're doing that but on top of that you're teaching people and They're your students without feeling like they're students because of the enthusiasm that you bring to the testing So in my opinion You're an incredible educator Absolutely, well

Eric Ritter: That's great. I mean, that's giving me goosebumps. I really appreciate that so much. Because I wouldn't be able to educate in a dry way. I would get bored of myself if I stood here and exclaimed. That's why the reels are great, because they're under a minute and 30 seconds. I really have to condense it. I haven't done anything long form. Because it's like challenging. Like, you know, it's challenging for me. I've never done it before. And I got a lot of stuff, like I'm running a business. I do, you know, I'm, we're buying a big warehouse, or we, I'm buying the warehouse. I'm trying to get this, and the test itself is, the glowing test is pretty complicated. It involves methylamine, a basalt of methylamine. So the DEA controls it. So I actually had to get a DEA license to manufacture with it. It's so insane. And that was crazy amount of work and cost and complexity.

Andres Preschel: Which I wasn't prepared for. That's the root for innovation, right? There's a barrier of entry. Most people aren't willing to do the difficult work to make this legitimate, but you are. You're an innovator, you're an entrepreneur, and you're providing a priceless solution for so many people. And even beyond the test, even beyond selling the test, because yeah, people can buy it and then they can test, but it's also like, again, just having the awareness. If you have the awareness, you don't even need a test. People can digest your material and just be more intentional about choosing the right products or paint or XYZ, you name it. I think the awareness is even more valuable than the product, but of course, the product is priceless too. Yeah, I really admire the mission, man. What do you think? Can we get into some of the ways that most people can reduce their exposure to lead? What would you say is like the low hanging fruit?

Eric Ritter: The lowest hanging fruit is probably, I mean, well, the most, the biggest issues are paint, water, could be food or like items that you have around your house like that's basically or like it could be soil too but that's very area specific and I know that lead poisoning from soil exists but I don't know that that's the chief or even one of the top three in the U.S. so the easiest one to do that everybody could do right away if they have a screwdriver or a coin is test their water supply to their house. So the service line is going to come out if they have a basement or it could come up from the floor it's going to go into their little water meter and then feed their whatever the setup they have heating system in the hot water tank and all they got to do to understand if that pipe is made of lead is scrape it and if it deforms and there's a silvery metal that means that it's made of lead. If it's hard and silver is steel. If it's copper color, like a penny, that's obviously not lead either. And this is a really good low cost way. There's like an incredible push in the US. The US government pledged like $300 billion over the next seven or eight years to remove all the lead service lines from use in the US. And they, yeah, that's, and it's an incredible cost. And the scary thing is that, Like that's just the easiest one for people to do, you know, and it's going to like give them the understanding like there could be lead in my water. And if you have hard water and a lead service line, you're probably fine. If you have soft water, meaning acidic water, there's no buildup or scale on your showerhead, for example. It's possible that lead is leaching into the water at a higher rate, and if you do have a lead service line, it's definitely recommended to let the water run for like a minute. Don't use hot water, because that would remove some of the scale, potentially, if you're going to drink it. If you're cooking food, I know the hot water heats up faster, but it's not advisable to use hot water. Because there could still be lead in the solder, additionally. So water is one of the biggest and easiest ones to avoid. And filtering your water obviously will help too, but it's not guaranteed that it's going to scrub all the lead out of the water. The other one is paint. And if you live in a house before 1978, that's like a free test. If you live in a house that was built in 1990, it's not going to have a wood paint side. Unless you've imported objects like an old table or antique doors or something. But people typically don't do that if the house is newer anyway.

Andres Preschel: I live in like an Art Deco building in South Beach. Yeah, I think it was built in like the 30s or 40s or 50s. It's an old building. It was renovated, like as you can tell, it was a fully renovated unit, but I'm curious in that case to renovate, and this was like a A really nice renovation. My landlord is awesome. She has really high standards. But even then, should I be concerned about, let's say, the lead that could have been used in the original layout and original layers of paint?

Eric Ritter: Probably not. I mean, if the wall is painted over and it's not deteriorating, you're not going to have lead coming off of that. There's a chance, of course, that the renovation was done completely improperly and there could have been residual dust all over everything. But, you know, typically people, when they renovate, put in the floors last. So, you know, over any dust that could have accumulated. But the real risk is during the renovation. It's when the walls are being ripped down, if paint is being stripped off of the stuff. That's when it dusts. Exactly. And like lead isn't a danger on the wall. If it's on the wall, it's intact. And I'm not directly chewing on the wall. Although there is a risk, you can't see it here, but a windowsill. I took both the EPA hazard inspector, or it's called risk assessor, and the EPA lead inspection courses. And I did this like sometime last year.

Andres Preschel: And I did this not because I- The courses. Sorry to interrupt. I just want to be clear for those who aren't aware. It's an environmental protection agency has a certain standard and they offer these courses.

Eric Ritter: Yes, and this is really an interesting situation, because the lead inspectors detect lead-based paint, and that term, lead-based paint, is really crucial, I think, because it's determined by lead paint that's over 5,000 parts per million, or one milligram of lead per square centimeter. Below that, it's not regulated and there's no protections if you have it in your home and there's no requirement to renovate in a certain way. And this one milligram per square centimeter or 5,000 parts per million was decided upon in the late 80s and early 90s. I think it was based on the ability of x-ray fluorescence spectrometers to detect lead in the homes of people because the government in 1992 with Title 10, which is a federal bill that was passed that had a lot of funding attached to it, really sparked the initiative to start detecting lead in people's homes. And they chose this number rather arbitrarily. This is a crazy fact. I really abhor conspiracy theories, because I think that they're just completely out there a lot of time. And this isn't a conspiracy, but For whatever reason, I mean, the reason is they couldn't effectively detect it. I mean, I'm giving everybody the benefit of the doubt here. In 1973, the Consumer Product Safety Commission determined that lead-based paint would be 600 parts per million. That's about nine times lower than the current limit, and that was in 1973. And then nothing happened until 1988, when they decided it would be one milligram per square centimeter. And the reason why they chose that is because the way an X-ray fluorescent spectrometer works is it shoots X-rays, which is just a really short wave version of light that is outside of our visual spectrum. It's way shorter than UV light, for example, which we can't see either. And it goes in, it penetrates surfaces, and it hits the atoms that are big enough. And that's why if I X-ray my arm, you wouldn't see any of the soft tissue, but you'd see the calcium and the phosphorus in my bones because it has a wider cross-section. So, When the x-ray has hit that atom, it causes the electrons to jump to a higher energy state and actually reflect the x-ray light back. And some of that light is seen by the detector's sensor and then the operator can know that there's lead there or other elements if they're looking for other elements as well. And so when they rolled out this technology, it was terrible. It was actually in this very nascent stages. It used radioactive isotopes. I think they're made of cadmium, like radioactive cadmium isotopes, and they would house them in probably a lead-lined box with a shutter, a physical shutter, and the shutter would actually open, releasing some of the x-ray radiation that's always being produced. That would hit the surface, and then some of that light would bounce back, and the detector would read it. But they were so bad, because this is in 1992, like, I don't even think they had real cell phones that wouldn't, like, fry your brain that were, like, the size of a brick in 1992. They still fry your brain. Yes, good point. Yeah, but those looked like they would. Like these, at least they look innocuous. So they were terrible and they set this limit so they could be used because the chemical detection technology that they had at the time was even worse. It was either the oldest known lead detection reagent that I know of is called potassium chromate, and that's toxic. Chromium is not good, and that will turn the lead yellow, but again, toxic. And then the other one is sodium sulfide, and that's pretty toxic too, and it stinks. So nobody's going to want the federal government having people coming to your house, putting this stuff on your walls. And that sodium sulfide had a lot of false positives for other elements too. So there was really no options, but the government knew they needed to do something about this lead-based paint because it was everywhere. It was, at the time, in almost 75 million U.S. homes. The actual number might actually be 76 point something million, I can't remember specifically, but it was a lot of the housing stock, and there was far less homes than there are today back in the early 90s. So the government knew they had to do something, and at the time, that x-ray fluorescence spectrometry rollout was the best thing that they came up with. And I think that it is really a commendable effort because they did spend significant amounts of money remediating, letting federally funded housing and it screened a lot of the projects. But now this is like 30 years later. And I was at the EPA conference in November and they're not going to lower the limit. They were completely dismissive of any ideations regarding lowering the limit because We spoke earlier about the $300 billion that they pledged to get rid of the lead service lines. There's still 36 million homes with lead-based paint in them. How much would that cost? That would probably be close to a trillion dollars to actually remediate all of that. And it's so disruptive. Imagine they're going to dig up your front yard and replace your service line. That's disruptive. Now you have a house. I got stuff in my house. What am I going to do with all this stuff? They're going to abate the lead in my house? That is absolutely crazy. So it's really convenient. So here's where the magic of the fluorescent test comes in. I can identify surface lead, which is the most dangerous kind. Because if there's no lead that's exposed, there's no risk right now, unless I expose it. So if there's surface exposed paint, and here's the thing about paint, is it's most dangerous if it's deteriorating. That's the first part. The second part is if it's on a friction surface, that's definitely going to deteriorate, albeit invisibly. So if I have lead on my deck, and I'm walking on it, I'm probably generating a little bit of dust. And eventually, you know, after 10 years, you'll see, like, a track mark where the feet were going. But, like, where did all that dust go? Like, it just got tracked on my shoes, it went into my house, who knows where it went. So if you're walking on a surface that has lead paint, lead-based paint or lead-containing paint, some of that lead is going to defray and get into the environment. If lead is on windows, that's a huge risk factor because windows that have friction surfaces where you open and close the windows, especially older windows that aren't vinyl, they'll release a lot of lead dust. And what's the other one? Like a door jam where you're shutting your door. Anything where the pain is getting impacted and may cause a release of pain is certainly a risk for the pain.

Andres Preschel: So, so basically what you're saying is like controversy aside, as a matter of fact, that the limitations of our ability to measure the lead is what the EPA basically based their health standards on and they haven't changed those standards and it hasn't been a legitimate like disclosure of that limitation either.

Eric Ritter: Certainly. And why would they disclose it? I mean, that is not something that I would disclose if I was in charge. It's really embarrassing. Yeah, it's really insane. And here's the most craziest part. And this is where I really get going to get my tinfoil hat for this one. Not really, but they changed the rules for an EPA recognized chemical test in 2010. So that company that was selling the proprietary lead check technology They sold the patent to 3M in 2010, the same time 3M opens what they called the ETV program, Environmental Technology Verification, where they funded research into, do these chemical tests work effectively to identify lead paint, lead-based paint? And so, you know, obviously 5,000 parts per million is pretty high. That's 0.05% lead. Or is it 0.5%? No, it's 0.05. Because a part per million is out of a million. So 5,000 parts, it's a kind of a confusing metric because there's no weight or volume associated with this dimensionless. So I could have one part per million bananas in apples. If I have a million, if I have 999,000 apples and one banana, that's one PPM banana in the apple matrix. So I forgot what we were just talking about because it was such a crazy metaphor analogy. Oh, the 5,000 parts per million is pretty high. So the false positive rate for the 3M, as it came to be known, 3M lead check swabs was like 99%. Because if you have lead paint that's 3,000 parts per million, and the lead check swab turns red, that's actually a false positive, because it's not identifying lead-based paint. So after they did this, they recognized the lead check swabs, State of Massachusetts sodium sulfide tests and another test called DLED, which also will result, sorry, which also, 3M's lead shack swabs, State of Massachusetts sodium sulfide tests and DLED's sulfide tests were all recognized. After that, they changed the rule Not only do they have to identify lead positively above 95% of the time, if it is in fact present, they have to not detect it if it's below the limit. And they didn't set the cutoff at 4,999. They gave a little bit of leeway. So they did 0.8 to 1.2 was like the margin of error, milligrams per square centimeter. And that would be about 4,000 parts per million to about 6,000 parts per million. Although those two things aren't directly correlated, but we don't have to talk about that because it is just confusing for no reason. So they did give a margin of error, but no chemical test can actually say no, there's no lead here at 4,000 parts per million, because it is still a lot of lead. It's readily available for a chemical reaction to take place, and our eyes can pick up the change in color really easily. So this made it impossible for me to get my swabs recognized by the EPA. Not because they don't detect lead easily, it's because they detect it too well. It's a really uncomfortable position because let's say I were to devise a method where the swabs would not show lead. I wouldn't even want to sell that because you're going to find that your 3,000 parts per million lead containing paint says no, there's no lead. And that's terrible for the consumer. Now the person's going to scrape all the paint and they're going to inhale a lot of dust and say, oh, there's no lead. We're good. Like, no, there still is lead there. It's below the limit, but the limit is based on the bureaucratic process of, you know, it's a really, it was a really big job. And I'm not saying that the federal government did something like horrible here, but it's just, it's such an intractable position. I mean, they did something horrible when they allowed the lead industry to sell lead paint for so long. And that was a huge, But in, check this out, in the 1800s, it was already worth like $88 million. In the 1800s? Yes, that was like a $5 billion company in the 1800s. Oh, so $88 million in the 1800s, which is today $5 billion. Yes. Oh my God. 1886, the National Lead Company was worth $88 million, $1886, which those are like the best dollars to have. And so they had so much sway, and for so many years, because lead is great. If you have lead in the ground, in property you own, you're rich. It's so easy to obtain. It's almost on the surface. You don't need to go crazy mining for it. In order to refine it, all you need to do is take, in the US it's called galena, It's an ore of lead. All you have to do is take that, cook it with some reducing agent like coal, and then you have lead metal. And then in order to make it into paint, all you have to do is put some acetic acid on it, let it be exposed to some carbon dioxide, and then it'll turn into the insoluble white lead carbonate. poof take that literally do nothing add linseed oil and then grind it and then all the water will be expelled leaving you with white lead paste and now it's ready to sell and lead paint is actually a very good paint it lasts for a very long time and you don't need advanced polymers to keep it intact for a very long time so it was actually a good product in the sense that it like was technically a good paint but it's not good for human health um Obviously, but uh, no, they had a crazy racket.

Andres Preschel: I mean, I think this is a, in a way serves as like a metaphor for most industrial products nowadays. Like there's, there's a lot of compromise when it comes to the health and wellbeing of the consumer, right? It's like they're mass producing this out of convenience and low cost, but it's, And then they're hiding it effectively. I mean, I know that we're flirting with the borders of controversy here, but they're kind of just like hush, hush about it. So basically, if something happens, if you disappear one day, we'll know it was big lead that took you out, essentially.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, for real. Yeah, I know. It's actually pretty freaky because I don't want to get involved in controversy.

Andres Preschel: I'm laughing, it's like a nervous laughter, you know what I mean?

Eric Ritter: Yeah, you're on the hook too here, because you're putting this out there. I haven't talked about this on my channel, by the way, on Instagram. I'm not going to say, hey guys, Big Galeta's built. Because Galeta still is sold, it's still mined, and it's Unfortunately for the lead industry, it's used predominantly in areas of the market where it can be reused. So like batteries, like you can recycle batteries, but you can't recycle paint. You can't recycle bullets. So those are like the best ways to sell lead because it's never coming back. No one's going to resell it on secondary market because it's gone at this point. is pretty treacherous and that we haven't gotten to the worst part yet is lead in gas. That was the biggest environmental disaster in human history. It contaminated the entire planet from New York City to Antarctica. All the oceans have lead or have lead deposited in them. In the 1970s, there was like two grams of lead per gallon of gas. Pretty decent amount of lead, and this is the crazy part, and this is like, this is well known. Veritasium on YouTube did a great breakdown on this. What's his name? Veritasium. I think I'm pronouncing it right, but yeah. How do you spell it? But V-E-R-T-A-S-I-U-M. Nice. But he did a part of the thing. It's like a 20 minute video. It's really great and informative on Somebody named Thomas Midgley jr. Who worked for a GM? He was tasked with producing something that they could sell that would be proprietary that would allow the gasoline not to knock And for anybody who doesn't know what knocking is, it's probably because it doesn't happen anymore. Nobody's car knocks. Like, that would be crazy. And if anybody's noticed that there's always ethanol in the gas. And ethanol is a really effective anti-knocking agent. And all knocking means is when the cylinder compresses the air gas mixture before it detonates it with the spark plug. it would explode. So if I just compress a lot of air really quick, it's going to heat up. And if I have pure gasoline with no ethanol and no tetraethyl lead, for example, it will explode potentially if it's hot enough and enough compression. And that causes the, it explodes prematurely. It makes a horrible noise and it decreases gas mileage by a significant amount. So Thomas Midgley Jr.' 's job was to identify a compound that they could put in the gas that would prevent the engines from knocking so they could achieve higher compression ratios, better gas mileage, basically just make better cars. And cars were really taking off. And this is in like the 1930s, I want to say. And they already knew, they already knew that ethanol was a very effective anti-knock agent. but it was too late to patent it. It was already known to everybody and they couldn't control it. The petroleum industry doesn't own farmland. And I wish that they would have just bought a lot of farmland and found a really effective way to grow tons of corn and make a lot of ethanol, but they didn't. And so they made this tetraethyl lead. It worked. They could control the production themselves.

Andres Preschel: They used to patent ethanol to have the same effect and reduce knocking, improve the mileage, et cetera.

Eric Ritter: Exactly, literally. So they eventually found that tetraethyl lead was really effective at doing this. And they built a big plant. You know, a bunch of people died right off the bat. They were getting severe hallucinations. And because, you know, I can imagine in the 1930s, people working around any industrial process, there was no OSHA regulations. Radium girls. Tetraethyl lead. Exactly, yeah. This was like the radium boys, but it was the lead boys. And they had like some, yeah, not fun to work there.

Andres Preschel: Jesus.

Eric Ritter: Wow, man. So yeah, so that was a really wild turn, and there was so much research by researchers, and they said, wow, this lead is super prevalent in the environments coming out. But lead is never found in soil, naturally. 10,000 years ago, there was no lead in the soil. There's lead in all the soil now. If I take my XRF gun outside, there's 25 parts per million in my front yard, you know. If I go two towns over, there's 50 parts per million, maybe. Depends on how close you were to a lot of gasoline being burned, basically. And in cities where there was a lot of cars and not a lot of airflow, there was a ton of lead pollution there. In fact, people who were born, I mean, people who lived in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s all had lead poisoning. I mean, that's really crazy to say, because it's kind of uncomfortable to say, oh, you had lead poisoning? And people don't like when I say, hey, you likely had lead poisoning when you were a kid. But it's true, because there was so much lead in the air, the average blood lead level of an American in 1970 was 17 point something micrograms per deciliter. And right now, the limit for kids is 3.5. And over 10 is a super risky situation.

Andres Preschel: So like in big cities, so a place like New York, I mean, it's almost a guarantee, even nowadays, that most people have blood poisoning. Is that what you're saying?

Eric Ritter: Well, it depends on how old they are. So if you were born in 1996, they had phased out lead gas. So if you were hanging out in the city.

Andres Preschel: I hadn't, for example.

Eric Ritter: So you're good. So you don't have blood poisoning, necessarily. If you weren't exposed, you don't have lead poisoning from lead in the gas. I mean, that's a really crazy thing about burning. In 1960s and 1970s, it was two grams per gallon. They lowered that to half a gram per gallon in the 80s. But that's still an appreciable amount. I think in 1980, they burned like 250 million gallons of gas per day. which is a staggering amount of lead that got into the environment. And, you know, it was, it is just totally insane. So, um, you know, it costs the economy tremendously and it costs, you know, human health and wellbeing tremendously because apart from the acute effects of lead on children being the loss in IQ, the increase in ADHD type symptoms and, um, I mean, that's really kind of like the limit on kids because they're not going to have the cardiovascular effects. And the cardiovascular effects, there are some cognitive impairments seen in older people with high levels of blood lead, but not like in children. However, adults suffer from cardiovascular problems when they have a lot of lead in their blood because lead is electrostatically similar to calcium. And so it'll go where calcium goes. So calcium goes into the nervous system, and it's used to moderate how neurons communicate with each other via the calcium-gated ion channels. So if these calcium-gated ion channels are filled with lead, they're going to fire much more frequently than they would otherwise. It basically lowers the action potential for the neurons to communicate. So when this is happening in the cardiovascular system, that increases blood pressure. And that leads to LDH, left ventricular hydroprophy. Hypertrophy. Hypertrophy, yeah.

Andres Preschel: Left ventricular hypertrophy. That's cool, yeah. Overgrowth of the left ventricle. Due to high blood pressure. It's the bad kind of left ventricular hypertrophy.

Eric Ritter: No doubt. And it's even worse, too, because we know that calcium gets deposited in the arteries. Yeah, there's calcium.

Andres Preschel: And that's where ethyl is. It's just absolutely terrible.

Eric Ritter: So throw some lead in there, too. And now you have lead in your blood going where the calcium would go normally. It's even worse. And so ischemic heart injury and cardiovascular disease are the two principal risk factors towards people who are adults with lead poisoning. and this is well documented, it's an astonishing number of people who die every year. It's 400,000 people in America die every year from heart attacks and ischemic heart injury who wouldn't have otherwise died from this. And this was, I did a video on this a little while ago and there was like, it was a huge meta-analysis where they followed so many people and they excluded so many confounding factors as a peer-reviewed study. And it found that lead significantly increases the risk of death from cardiovascular issues.

Andres Preschel: Can you, can you send me the link to that study so I can add it to the show notes here and other people can dig a little deeper into the research and the outcomes? At some point, I mean, you don't have to do it now. You know, at some point. I also wanted to kind of like, obviously, you know, there's all this bad news and I think a lot of people tuning in anticipated the bad news, but I mean, I certainly didn't expect the extent of the bad news to be what it is. And I'm sure there's more, but I would love to help people really be proactive. And so maybe we can talk about some of the ways that they can reduce lead exposure. If I may, if it's all right with you, I just did a quick, Google Scholar search and I looked up because I was thinking maybe you know I know chlorella for example spirulina are really good at detoxing things like heavy metals like mercury and arsenic for example and I just did a quick Google search here at the Google Scholar and I found this study by Zhai, Z-H-A-I et al. in 2014 published in the Nutrients Journal. It's called Dietary Strategies for the Treatment of Cadmium and Lead Toxicity. I just want to get your take on some of this. There's so many dietary strategies that seem to be helpful. And, in fact, chlorella and spirulina do help. So, I'm going to make sure to link this in the show notes, but check this out. So, there's a ton of nutrients. I'm just going to read them off real quick. I'm sure you've heard a lot about these. There is zinc, selenium, and iron. Then there's soybean, apparently, garlic, ginger, onion, green tea, curry leaf, quercetin, I don't know how to browse it. Antocyanin, I guess we can find it. It's a blue pigmentation in blueberries. It's very powerful antioxidant. Curcumin. Naringenin. And Orisonol. Pururin. Anyway, but there is a paragraph here on chlorella and spirulina, which I use on a daily basis to mitigate my exposure to, let's say, mercury and arsenic. I do eat a lot of fish and I'm aware, for example, through the EWG website, which I'm sure you're familiar with. It does a really good job of showing people instantly what's in their water. So they have this tap water database, ewg.org, and then look at the tap water database. For example, in my case, I'm in South Beach. I'm in the 33139 zip code. The levels of arsenic are like 250 times the EWG standard and I can't even imagine what it might be for lead. So I take this stuff regularly, the spirulina and chlorella from a brand called Energy Bits. They're super clean. But it's incredible here, like this paper for example, just a quick search and now there is some people can do through their diet to mitigate and reduce the exposure. And I'm curious, so my follow-up question for you is, do you know if lead like mercury, for example, does it bioaccumulate? Like do we kind of just like, you know, retain more and more and more of it? Like as we age, if we don't mitigate exposure, does it just continue to accumulate or does our body have a way to discard it in some fashion when we're exposed?

Eric Ritter: Yeah, we can excrete lead, but slowly. It's a heavy metal, so like mercury, it definitely bioaccumulates. And other two elemental supplements that were covered in that study were magnesium and calcium. But I think it's important to understand that that study was done on rats. And there's another study too. Yeah, but I mean, I love rat studies. A rat study is good for me, you know, in any case. Pointing it out, very important. And there's kind of a catch-22 with supplementing things like calcium and selenium and stuff like that is that too much of it is also bad. And so there's still no consensus amongst experts on dietary strategies to reduce lead exposure or lead uptake from the diet other than get adequate amounts of all those nutrients. And so there's no miracle toxin flush for lead the strategy is to get enough calcium that your body isn't like really fiending for calcium, where it wants to suck in anything that looks like calcium. And that's especially important in women who are pregnant or nursing, because they're using a lot of calcium to make the baby and to make the milk. And there, I saw a study, and I was going to do a video on this like yesterday or today, but I've like been debating it a little bit because I don't want to alarm anybody because really like if the mother has low blood lead levels, like under 10 micrograms per deciliter, which nearly everybody this day and age has under that. There's no reason not to be pregnant. There's no reason not to nurse because the amount of lead that gets into the milk is pretty low. So, as scientists all say, you know, nursing is safe. It's safer. It's better than bottle feeding or, you know, breastfeeding is better than bottle feeding and stuff like that. But as far as the supplements are concerned, just adequate intake of all those nutrients is going to do a lot in terms of reducing blood low levels. And that comes predominantly from diet. So we all intake lead all the time. Apples have lead. The amount of lead in an apple is minute, but it is there. Because if lead is in the soil and the plants are growing in the soil, it's going into the food. So that's something to keep in mind.

Andres Preschel: So basically it's like, I mean, first of all, human beings aren't big rats. So thank you for pointing that out. And second of all, it's like we can supplement this stuff because yes, you can argue that it might cataract and detoxify the lead. But if you take supplements and you do this every single day out of this fear, it can be you know, if you take too much, that can also have negative effects. So it's, it's, we were saying is basically, it's like, it's better to get it from food naturally and to just be aware of the light exposure because that'll help you effectively like micro dose these things, but at a level where it's protective, but not where it is now, like totally going in the opposite direction and giving you issues because you're over consuming the stuff that's supposedly helping you.

Eric Ritter: For sure, yeah. Too much selenium and too much selenium zinc or calcium is not good. And that's why they don't recommend, even people who have very high amounts of lead in their blood, like chelation therapy is only recommended for people who I think have above 40 micrograms per deciliter, which is quite a lot. And it's just a tricky situation because the lead does get everywhere. It gets into your nervous system, it's in your bones, and it's really hard to get out. So like the best thing people can do is really to stop getting exposed. And if you're an adult, It's not so bad. The lead will go into your bones or it'll get excreted and then you won't have too much trouble unless you experience severe osteopenia or osteoporosis. And people do get, but like the amount of lead in, you know, you were born in 1996. I was born in 1992. The amount of lead that we're exposed to is likely very low compared to people who are older. So we don't really have to worry about that too much. Like, I never had a blood level of 17, but everybody who was alive in 1975 who lived in New York City, for example, probably did. So as they age, the migration of calcium out of their bones will also be along with the migration of lead. And that's something to be concerned about. Luckily, not for the children born today, because nobody who's 30, 25 to 35, let's say, or 25 to 40, having children would be like kind of poisoning their child just by gestating. So it's definitely a balancing act, you know, with the supplementation of nutrients. But here's another. So there's the water, paint, Occupational exposure, if you work around lead, that could be big. Obviously, if you work in some kind of lead smelting environment, but that's relatively rare. There's like five lead smelting plants in the US now. Don't quote me on that, but there's not very many, because they are incredibly bad for the environment, as you could imagine. And many of them became Superfund sites. And even if they weren't Superfund sites, they were like, should have been, but they don't make every site that's contaminated a Superfund site.

Andres Preschel: A Superfinder.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, so the EPA, if there is a situation where there is so much contamination caused by a private entity that they can't be held accountable fiscally, the government will say, okay, we have to clean this up and we're going to designate federal dollars towards this cleanup, and they call it a super fund. Because the company, normally they go out of business or they're you know, a small corporation relatively that like on Long Island, there was one. I forgot the name of it, but they manufactured aerospace parts. And apparently when making titanium, it's like terrible. Well, you have to like pickle the titanium and toxic chemicals. And in port jefferson there was a huge release of toxic materials from the site and you know the company went under and then the government stepped in and spent you know 100 million dollars or whatever they spent to clean it up because otherwise it would just never get cleaned up this company no longer exists and that's obviously like what happens all the time, like big corporations that do a lot of polluting in the course of their business, they fold or they transform into something that's no longer going to be able to be held accountable like that. Um, the Ethel corporation, which made the lead gas for GM at all, they, you know, they don't exist. They stopped existing when the lawyers got busy with it. And that, that always happens. Well, you know, cause America was really made for corporations. The people who started America were like basically corporations. They were all rich and they were like, we're not paying taxes to England. We're about to make our own system.

Andres Preschel: For example, it was like totally polluted with lead at that. And you know, we, we, we have all this stuff that we're manufacturing overseas and the, the, the standards of living there and for the environment. I mean, I can't, I honestly, I'm, relatively ignorant, you know, with that regard, but I imagine that it's much worse over there in those factories.

Eric Ritter: As India especially, apparently India, there's a huge issue with contamination from battery recycling and, you know, other kinds of stuff. I mean, there's a lot of, and so here's the next part, which is lead in the food. And so a certain spice that contains apparently a ton of lead is turmeric. Turmeric has been known to contain a lot of lead. Sometimes they even put the lead in the turmeric to make it better, make it seem better. It really is a wild thing. So turmeric is a spice to avoid consuming too much of it unless you're getting it from a source which is vetted to have very little lead. Another one is chocolate coca powder, which is the processed coca bean. contains a lot of lead. Interestingly, the actual bean of the coca plant contains very little lead, but the shells contain a lot, and the soil presumably contains a lot. And during the drying process, these things are laid out, busted open, laid out in the sun to dry. There's dust and machinery. And so in the processing of the bean, that's where the lead actually comes into the coca powder and then is, you know, put into the dark chocolate. So dark chocolate, turmeric, some like exotic spices, ethnic spices from India, which I can't pronounce any of the names, but they have been known to, you know, they're always on the EPA's lists or the, you know, whenever there's lead education going on. What are the other ones? Root vegetables can contain a lot. Cassava root is a very big source of lead. And it's probably due to where it's grown. And also, like, if you can imagine a root vegetable is super close to the lead source. So it doesn't take much to uptake lead into the actual root itself in regards of like, sorry, in comparison to something like an apple, where the root has to go, the lead has to go through the root up the trunk to the branch and into the apple. that's a long way to go. And a lot of that lead falls by the wayside on its way to the fruit, unlike the underground vegetables. And when a cascade of flour is made, even if it's not getting, it's probably not getting contaminated during the manufacturing process, but it's getting refined and it's getting shrunken down. And so now if it was this much to begin with and it had five micrograms of lead and now it's this big at the end of the process, it still has five micrograms of lead and the concentration has gone up precipitably at that point. So it's something to consider.

Andres Preschel: This is why you became a breatharian.

Eric Ritter: Yeah. Some days, but until two o'clock. But I mean, I don't, I sometimes I eat dark chocolate, you know, I don't freak out about this. Like, you know, if I'm like eating a bar of dark chocolate every day, okay, That's a ton of dark choke. If I have like a couple squares a couple times a week, I'm not going to sweat it. Like, you know, we got to live a little dangerously sometimes. And I'm not a safety nut at all. I'm, you know, I'm like about living life. And I don't, I understand that like safety is something that we have to be safe. Like, you know, I, if I take a risk, it's a calculated risk. I'm not going to do something where I'm like really risking a lot. I, uh, But insofar as the lead is concerned, like if you're not getting multiple sources of lead, if you don't have previous exposure, if you can avoid the big release of like the paint, if you have lead in your soil and you avoid that, like you're pretty good if you're not drinking water that contains lead. You could eat dark chocolate if you want. It's not going to be terrible. But low-level lead poisoning is a thing, especially as we age and we start to run into the cardiac danger zone of the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, so I actually, on the topic of chocolate, I work very closely with a company called The Conscious Bar, and no, it's not psilocybin-containing chocolate. It's just, it's a very high-quality chocolate bar. The beans are sourced in Ghana, I believe, and we've actually had them third-party tested, and they're by far the lowest in all the heavy metals, like by far, by far. They don't even meet, they don't even meet the, I mean, I think the vast majority of organic chocolate far exceeds the health standards, this is like far below the health standards. And it's how we- One of the reasons why we're so motivated to continue to use and source our chocolate from Ghana, the packaging is fully biodegradable and compostable. There's no plastic in it. It's a very clean bar, direct trade. They're delicious, only two ingredients, cacao and dates. Now, of course, I am affiliated and they are a sponsor of this show, and this isn't something that I planned to add in here. For good reason. But yeah, because I'm obsessed with chocolate. But when I learned about the heavy metal that it contained, I instantly had this aversion to it. And so it's one of the reasons why I was so motivated to work with this company. But on the topic of eating foods that we like, and like you described, turmeric, which is something that so much of the Western world now uses. It's like superfood supplement, right, to decrease inflammation and to fight disease, etc. It's like now we're doing ourself a relative disservice if we overdo it, which is easy to overdo. You know, someone finds a good supplement that can help them feel a little better one day, and turmeric certainly has that effect. Chocolate has that effect too. boom, now you're doing it, you have to get every day or every other day or every week and you have this like chronic exposure to something like lead. So that being said, I mean, what do you think people should add into their diet on a regular basis that maybe helps to counteract this or that just happens to be very, very low in lead that still has a host of health benefits?

Eric Ritter: I'm not a nutrition expert. Um, I'm not sure if I specifically on, I, to be honest, I'm not going to step out of my lane and suggest foods that are good, low level, uh, lead stuff. But, uh, you know, just, just, I mean, I think it's just about living a healthy life. You know, like if I'm going to get, let's say a little bit of LVH from my high lead, Okay, that's bad. But if I'm going to get a lot of that from chronic high blood pressure due to inactivity over being overweight, doing unhealthy things, smoking.

Andres Preschel: The influence.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, like lead is not likely to take anyone out on its own. There's a host of factors that come into the play here. So it's good to like understand that like lead poisoning, acute lead poisoning of children is abhorrent. It is the worst. It's the worst thing that could happen to a child. It's terrible. And the children are not, they don't deserve that at all. And the parents don't deserve that either, because it really affects them dramatically also. So for adults who are trying to avoid lead, avoid the big sources and just lead a healthy life. And that, you know, don't eat, you know, pounds of chocolate. This Consumer Report did a thing on chocolate a couple of years ago. And I'm really excited. I just today was communicating with somebody from Thermo Fisher Scientific. And I got a nice, I thought, very reasonable quote for an atomic absorption spectrometer, which is a method of identifying very low parts per billion lead. So earlier we talked about parts per million, and this is a thousand times more sensitive than something that would read one ppm, which the XRF guns read down to like 12 ppm. Is that a lower limit of detection? But I could probably get like, you know, one ppb out of this AAS machine. So I'm really looking forward to doing more. But that's the limit. The limit for bottled water is five parts per billion, and the limit for drinking water is 15 parts per billion. So these are astronomically low concentrations of lead. but they still will accumulate. If I drink one liter of water, that's like, it's 15 nanograms of lead or whatever. If it is, I don't remember if it's nanograms. I don't think it's micrograms. That sounds insane. But the numbers always get, they get away from you when I do those conversions. But it is, you know, very small concentrations of lead in food are unacceptable. And that's, It's crazy because like if there's if the limits five parts per billion in bottled water. Why is it? 5,000 parts per million in Which is that's 10,000 times higher in paint. Yeah, so, you know paint turns into dust when you mess around with it. Yeah, and it gets on surfaces. I made a video where I went into a lady's house who lives in Kingston and her family had been poisoned. That's how I found out about that school or whatever it was. It's like an indoor playground basically in Kingston. where there's lead paint all over the walls and there's lead on the floor and they're probably all getting exposed. It was really messed up.

Andres Preschel: Right, because the kids are moving around, they're, you know, they're laying on the wall, they're scratching the wall, they're going down the slides, running around, like it's just all being, you know, it's all going airborne and these little kids aren't handling it.

Eric Ritter: Definitely, or, you know, the ball bounces, they touch the ball, they touch their snack, and that's how lead primarily gets into people's bodies is They call it hand-to-mouth activity. And all the… It's so bizarre. I don't know if you're familiar or your viewers are familiar with the term Pica. It's eating non-food objects, but they always talk about this in all the lead EPA courses. They're like, pika, pika, like, okay. But like normal hand to mouth activity, like if I eat an apple after I have lead on my hands, it's getting into my body now. If I bite my nails and I've just been doing some lead stuff, I'm going to get that into my body. And so being aware of lead prevents that entirely. So if I know I just touched lead, like I touch lead all the time. I literally touch it every day, probably. But I don't have lip poison. I get my blood tested all the time. And I never have lip poison because I know that my hands are toxic. I'm gonna wash them off. Soap and water do the trick. If you really wanna get it off, use some vinegar. You know, really get it going. But just being aware that you have it in the environment is the principal way to avoid it. Because if I don't know, I'm going to consume it, probably. Just by chance.

Andres Preschel: Just by random chance. Don't pick your nose. Don't put your hands in your mouth. Wash your hands. And you know what's interesting is I'm just reflecting back. You mentioned the whole PICA and you know hand to mouth and all that. I'm thinking back and You know, Matt, I have a very interesting relationship with lead because my whole life, since the age of four, I've been fishing, doing a lot of fishing. I'm sure. I mean, nowadays, not so much. But, you know, when I was like between the ages of, let's say, eight and 15, almost every single day, I was holding lead weights. And dude, I'm sure I put my hands in my mouth, my hands in my face, like didn't wash my hands. So what is there to say about like that kind of exposure to lead? Because my parents also knew like, oh yeah, it's relatively radioactive or whatever, harmful data. But like, is that something that I should be wary of today?

Eric Ritter: I definitely, I mean, if I touch a lead weight and then I, if I wipe it on my finger or my hand, and then I spray it with a spray and I shine the light on it, you'll see the glowing lead on my hand. It actually does come off far more than you would think. And it's invisible. When lead is getting on stuff, you can barely see it. It's so small and it's sticky. It deforms easily, you know, if you push something into it. And that same is true with tiny pieces of it. It'll deform into the crevices of my hand. It's crazy, even handling those Pyrex, those vintage Pyrex bowls get lead on my hand enough that I can show it glowing. I've yet to do a video about that. I just have, I just haven't been, you know, I, you know, I mean, I only started doing this like a month ago. So I hope to get more of this information out. And eventually I hope to quantify the amount of lead that comes off of all these objects. Absolutely, because there's a lot of objects contain lead. There's lead in a lot of stuff, even at low levels. There's a limit right now, 90 parts per million is the Consumer Product Safety Commission's limit in paint and in consumer goods for children. Consumer goods for children are the only products where lead is actually limited in. So technically, obviously a fishing weight exists, you can sell that legally, because that's not intended for use by children.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, but a lot of kids using that to, you know, fish, fish, shop their little docks. You know, what's interesting is I was diagnosed with ADD from a very young age, ADHD. And now I'm curious the role that lead may have played in that diagnosis or exacerbating the symptoms. Like I just, again, another quick Google scholar. I mean, there's a lot of research on lead available. So like this study, the association between lead and attention deficit slash hyperactivity, it's sort of a systematic review. So a study of studies and the evidence from the studies allow us to establish that there is an association between lead and ADHD and that even low levels of lead increase the risk. That's nuts, man.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, and it makes sense because lead acts, so there's, I forgot one actually, in terms of like children's negative effects from lead. So the IQ loss comes from lead acting inside the cell. And the mitochondria of the cell, and remember we talked about the cells, the neuron cells, they fire more rapidly because of the extracellular lead in those calcium-gated ion channels. Inside the cell, the mitochondria needs to work harder. to sustain this extra activity. And mitochondria always produce some reactive oxygen species as a function of the electron transport chain to make that ADP into ATP. lead gets involved in that and it makes more reactive oxygen species, sometimes those neurons could actually die. And so that's where the lack of IQ, the IQ loss comes principally from that. But the ADHD symptoms come from the fact that those neurons are now firing more randomly. I heard the word aberrant firing in a Harvard study I was reading. There's A really important thing to be said about something called synaptic pruning, which is, like, it may seem ironic or counterintuitive that neurons would disconnect from each other to make us into more functional adults. But children's brains, they're super interconnected. There's no patterns, there's no default mode network established for them to kind of like associate things with other things and move around in a really efficient way. So they're just like super inefficient. They're all over the place. They basically, every kid has ADHD, you know, to some degree, just like a puppy does. But as they age, a lot of those connections stop being connected because they're not being used and other connections are being used more. And that's how we learn to control our impulses and to act in a more adult way but when lead is causing all those neurons affected to fire extra all the time that means that the neurons can't they there's no reason for them to disconnect because they're apparently being used and this is like speaks yeah and this speaks to a big you know, idea that, like, we're people as a product of evolution. And evolution doesn't care about our well-being. It just cares about life continuing. And so, all these functions happen whether they're good or bad for us. So, it's really important to moderate what we take into our bodies and into our brains, obviously, to, like, have the best like human experience possible. Cause it's not guaranteed. Cause we could just consume stuff and not think about it and it's going to be terrible. And um, you know, like lead is obviously a big, it could be a big part of that. And I think that that's, you know, it's, it started out for me like this is a great way to make money. This company, 3M, Leadcheck, asleep at the wheel. All the alternatives are terrible. I can easily take the sodium radisinate, break it down, put it into isopropanol, get it onto a swab, and then sell 30 swabs for 17 bucks and make money and provide a good product. But once I got into not only the science of it, but really the human cost, and I've seen the human cost up close, it really caused me to feel a lot of empathy for the people affected. And it's like, it's not their fault. Like they didn't make money off lead for hundreds of years. You know, that was like a small insular group of people who happen to own lead mines. It's like the slackers, like, did they really have a choice? Like they were already on a yacht thinking about how they have to continue the business. So it's a sticky situation when we have economics just going, you know, with, with things that are potentially dangerous. And that's why I feel really fortunate to sell something that is not dangerous. I mean, lead detection is great. I also sell smelling salts, which are maybe not so great, but like, I don't think they hurt anyone.

Andres Preschel: Smelling salts for fitness? Yeah. Dude, I mean, I'll tell you what, I think that like, What you're doing, I mean, you're obviously filling a gap that is absolutely essential. I feel like the vast majority of people who seek to fulfill this gap out of just, I mean, general context, like it's dangerous. Here's a better way to test it. You're going to be safer. Like I'm really impressed by your vast knowledge of like the underlying science, particularly the neuroscience of how this can influence someone's health and wellbeing. How did you acquire this, this vast, you know, scope of the, of the science?

Eric Ritter: I love science. I've been totally addicted to science since I was like five. No, since I was, I remember I was in elementary school, I was reading a book about black holes. And I was like, my mind was completely blown. I was like, wow, this is insane. So ever since then, I just always loved to consume scientific material. And it's not always that confusing. There's a lot of technical jargon and it may seem overwhelming. Some of the math involved is confusing, but at the end of the day, there's words that indicate what all these things mean and it could be found out. And I just, I love researching stuff because knowing more is the number one tool that has helped me in life. Like if I don't know about something, I am at risk for sure. And you know, when I was younger, I was like, You know, I was graduating in 2010. Like, when I graduated high school, I was addicted to opiates. So, like, at the time, I was like, hey, if I'm not careful here, I might actually die. And so, like, it's paramount to understand things. Even when I was doing that unsafe, terrible stuff, I still was always like, hey, I know what not to do here. Absolutely. Like, I'm absolutely not drinking any alcohol when I'm out taking this other stuff, because I will die. So, uh, I got off that in 2012 though, so I love it. I love that, not being addicted to opiates. It's huge. But I'll be addicted to anything. I'll be addicted to lead. I'll be addicted to researching stuff. I'll be addicted to, you know, doing business stuff. Like I just, I'll just, you know, I really type of focus in on things and that's really why, I mean, I've spent so many hours on Wikipedia. I've spent so many hours reading these research studies and they're easy to, they're easy reading. You know, there's no emotional stress. It's just, It's just like watching Netflix for me.

Andres Preschel: I just love learning. Wow, man. Well, I think this passion for learning and also, I mean, I think this is between the lines, but taking calculated risk is something that we have in common. So I really appreciate you just having such a complete scope of the science and this really complete perspective because it really kind of helps incentivize us in an even more powerful way, and shows us how empathetic you are towards what can't happen unless we take the right steps. So I really can't thank you enough for that, man. Thank you on behalf of all the citizen scientists and the world tuning into your content. And before we conclude, I mean, dude, I'd love to have you back. This has been absolutely wonderful. But before we conclude, I would love to go into, I think I'm blanking on the question now, Give me just a second. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So when it comes to like water, for example, do you have any particular recommendations for filters, whether it's a basic, you know, like a Brita, like a pouring filter or like an in-house system? Like, do you have any recommendations to effectively filter out the lead and other contaminants and heavy metals?

Eric Ritter: Again, not super good pregnantation, like reverse osmosis is going to be probably the most effective filter you can get. It's expensive and like a lot of dramas is really wasteful. Only one fifth of the water goes into your house with a reverse osmosis system. But, you know, I predominantly drink water from my fridge that has a filter, you know, built in filter. But I feel confident that I don't have a lead service line in my house. And typically the lead doesn't come from the source. It comes from the service line going into the house. So if you have a house that's relatively new and You can also test the solder of the joints of your pipes if you have copper pipes for lead using a fluorescent test kit. And so if you don't have lead in the solder and you don't have lead in the service line, you're really, it's really unlikely to have lead in it, actually, interestingly, unlike that arsenic you're talking about, arsenic is normally coming from the environment. It's actually coming from the reservoir. It's naturally occurring.

Andres Preschel: What's wrong with the EWG, whereas I just checked and lead isn't on there because it doesn't come from the environment, but it is still going to be in your water because of the filtration systems or the pipes that relay the water to your home?

Eric Ritter: Exactly. Yeah. It's not even in the mains because the lead is too soft to sustain the pressure. So it's in the service line that goes into your house if you have it. So, you know, again, I mean, testing your water service line is great. I was astonished to see that that was even an issue, but they don't know how many there are because there's not, like, who knows? Like, you know, when people bury stuff underground in the jumble of doing a job, you know, it's hard to remember. And that happened a long time ago. They haven't used lead service lines for a long time. But, you know, filter the water. You know, don't, I don't think bottled water is necessarily that healthy either because of the amount of plastic that, and who knows what the deal is with that. I'm not an expert in plastic, but I like to avoid it when I can. But, you know, that's generally it.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, and something that I want to mention with regards to RO is that reverse osmosis, I mean, it gives you pure water, but if it's lacking those minerals, then osmosis happens in your own body. And then to match that, you know, the water they consume, you know, through gastric emptying, your cells, again through osmosis, will leach out the minerals. And so, if you just drink pure RO water, you're going to leach out minerals in your own body. So, what I would make sure to suggest is that if people use RO, which as you said, you know, it's great, it's very clean, just remineralize the water. So, I'm actually looking forward to having an expert in water on the show. I want to have a few people on the show that are experts in water, and I've done a lot of research, so I really seek to improve the water quality in my home across the board. Everything from the shower to the sink in my bathroom to my drinking water, and then even what's going into my washing machine. And there's a few things that I've done that I can maybe suggest, but again, I look forward to having an expert on the show to fill in the gaps here. I actually just ordered a filter, a five states filter from the Greenfield water solutions. So for those tuning into no bad Greenfield, this is his dad's company. Um, but check this out. It has the five stage filter. It filters out 99% of lead. Let me see. Let me see what it did. That sounds great. Yeah. So check this out. It has five stages. And this is, I'm not affiliated. I'm just, I happened to come across this and I think it's great. So as a pre-carbon based hydrogen catalyst, um, to adjust the pH, it filters out fluoride. It removes contaminants using electro adsorption technology. So using electrical charges to capture the limiting contaminants, it then structures the water. and it energizes it using a harmonizer. And then there's an optional add-on that I got, mineralization, so it adds magnesium and some calcium. So yeah, it's not cheap. It was $1,200 to get this under my sink, but I'm confident that it'll be better because my other alternative was to have water delivered. I was doing the I was getting water and plastic for a while. It was BPA-free plastic, but even then I just didn't feel very good about it. Then I started doing the mountain valley and like the glass, um… Five-gallon things. Yeah, exactly. But that was just like too expensive over time. So I got this and I don't know, I hope that this is the best that I can get for now. But the reason why I'm so big on water and why I'm sure, you know, you're so big on water. It's like we do this every single day. You know, we use water every single day. Most of our bodies made of water. You might as well invest heavily into water. So anyway, yeah, I mean, There's a lot that we can do. I'll tell you what, based on the conversation around nutrition that we had, I'm gonna go out of my way and see if I can find nutritionists that are well-versed in the lead considerations and other heavy metals and have them on the show as well. So I'm gonna do my best to answer some of these questions that we've laid out for ourselves and for the listeners. Yeah. With that being said, man, I really can't thank you enough for the, for the work that you're doing and how educated you are across the board, uh, to help support the points that you make here and that are motivating us to, to be better. Um, my last question here for you is before we conclude is if you had the chance to put like a, a message, like a word phrase or a sentence on the billboard somewhere in the world, what would it say? And where would you put it?

Eric Ritter: I would say test with kits, not kids. And this is a huge one. This is a huge one. And it really breaks my heart because I've gotten, like, I, you know, get phone calls from people who buy my lead testing kit. This is the one that they buy now. It doesn't glow, it swaps. And it's for sale on Amazon. I've never done any advertising. I don't really believe in sales because it's so sketchy. Because if I'm a salesperson, the number one thing I can do for myself is sell you whatever I'm selling. So if I'm selling you something bad, it's not going to help you. If I'm the best salesman in the world, that puts everybody else at more risk because I could potentially sell you something that's junk. So insofar as this lead thing is concerned, I've gotten a lot of phone calls and people say, oh, they have a question about the swaps. And I always ask them, why did you buy these swaps? What compelled you to buy these swaps? And so many times they say, my child has a high blood level and now I'm trying to find the source. And I'm like, obviously like, Okay, so the kid, the child, was the de facto first test of the environment. Nobody knew anything about the environmental lead contamination until the child was tested by their pediatrician, which doesn't happen all the time. It's actually a random sampling and So not every child is tested and the CDC estimates that there's 500,000 children right now with lead levels above the action limit of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter. So, but there's obviously more since not all children are tested and they're only tested in between the ages of one and three. So that's a lot and I don't sell 500,000 test kits a year. So there's a lot of children who are tested positive for lead and it's insane. Like there's no reason to use a kid as a canary for lead, like that's crazy. So test with kids, not kids is like, I think is a great slogan. It sounds great. Wow. And it is, it's like scary because the number one bestselling lead test kit in America right now is children. And I don't think that that's right at all. So I really want to change it. And that's why I started making these videos is because if I can get you to buy this, And then you test, and then you say, whoa, all right, you're about to have a kid, or you have a child, or you can just move into a new spot. I haven't even gotten into the home testing. I've only been doing these consumer products, like these secondhand objects, or the bottom of a cup, or doing a study. But the big thing is, when you're buying a house, considering buying a house, if the house is teeming with lead, exposed lead, maybe that's not the best house to buy. And this is a really uncomfortable topic, because obviously a lot of people's net worth is tied up in housing. but like you know I don't want to like put people out for taking their money away but like there's they have lead like you know if you have kids maybe don't move into a house that has a lot of lead paint or if you do make sure you get it renovated responsibly don't move in and then start doing DIY you know on the weekends and then you know making your children yeah it's insane on family I know I'm always like and you're killing your family trying to establish a new home for the family For sure, and this is where the trauma ensues. There's a lot of guilt on parents who have lead-poisoned children, because they could have ostensibly avoided it. And this is an insane thing to have happen to someone who's not prepared for that level of trauma, and then what happens thereafter. The trauma response is strong, especially when kids are involved, and it's horrible. I definitely, I think the testing, and even if I don't, you know, like there is really technically no patent on this. Like this, the people who made this tried to patent it, but they're not going to be able to get it because it's already obvious. It's already out there. They did the research years before they applied for the patent and they use the same liquid. So I have a patent pending for mine, but this on specific aspects, because that's how you write patents. You don't just try to patent the method. That is foolish, because it's hard to patent methods when it's obvious that somebody was skilled. So anybody who wants to make lead tests, I encourage them to do so. I wish that more people did, because right now it's me. in a bunch of people importing bad lead test kits from China.

Andres Preschel: And I don't know, you know, like… The lead kits probably have lead on them.

Eric Ritter: I don't know if they have lead on them, but they are notorious for false positives because instead of looking like this, they're orange right in the bottle. And so instead of having sodium redesonate, they just have free rhodizonic acid, and that's way more reactive. And they're activated with water, instead of mine's activated with vinegar, because you need a little bit of vinegar to leach the lead into the solution and enable it to react with the sodium rhodizomate. But theirs just rely on water, and then the rhodizonic acid does the work to decouple the lead from whatever it is attached to, but it has a lower pH. So it can also decouple zinc oxide. which is in paint. It's in like a lot of modern paints have zinc oxide and it will turn purple also. I made a video where I smeared zinc oxide all over my face. I said, I hope this isn't lead. And I tested it with a swab and like it turned purple. Like, did I just smear lead in my face? No, but it looks like I did. And I might think that I did. And that might wind up costing me a lot of money. So like, you know, it's crazy. And, but so I don't know, I don't know why nobody does this. It's not that hard to do. Like, it's fun. I love taking some stuff that's not worth that much and then making it worth more. That's a great job. That's a great hobby. Like, it's really fun. And so I'm looking forward to just, you know, reducing the cost even further with this glowing test. And it is fun to test, I swear. I'm, like, really gonna rise out of finding lead.

Andres Preschel: I'm gonna add the link to the Amazon. The Amazon link, I'm gonna add it to the show notes so that anyone tuning in can get their kit as well.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, anybody can get one of these right now. This is like a more boring version, which relies on Sudden Reducing. I'll be selling the floral spec, one I've been using in the videos, in probably like the next couple weeks, once the DEA approves my license. But they could sign up for that on detectlead.com if they just drop their email in there. I'll email everybody when I get everything up and running, but I just have, you know, once I get this warehouse going, I got a cage in there to store the methylamine. It's like insane, but it's gonna be a lot of fun. So maybe next time I come back, I'll do the podcast from inside the cage.

Andres Preschel: Amazing. Yeah. And, and then I actually have one more question because I actually do have a kid now and so I'm, I'm very much, you know, very motivated. I'll show you.

Eric Ritter: Man.

Andres Preschel: Here's my kid.

Eric Ritter: Oh, yeah.

Andres Preschel: No, I have a little dog. His name is… Looks just like you. Yeah, thanks. His name is Darwin. And no, but on a serious note, you know, what about when it comes to our pets? You know, our, you know, if pets are exposed to a certain kind of lead, whether it's in the, I don't know, a dog park, in the soil or in their food. I mean, I feed them human grade food, but is there anything that I can do to, you know, prevent lead poisoning in Darwin, for example?

Eric Ritter: don't renovate your house if it has lead paint. Like a dog will certainly pick up a lot of lead dust on their paws and, you know, they'll probably lick whatever. So they would definitely get, you know, the lead paint is huge. If you have lead in the water, don't feed them tap water that you wouldn't drink. Don't feed them anything that you wouldn't eat. And the dog park being contaminated with lead, maybe but it's you know who knows it's it depends and the soil test kit that i work on i haven't like actually commercialized it yet but i have done a lot of testing on that and it is it's a great one too because it will really show you you know you actually wind up using these same swabs in some digestive soil in the test tube and you dip it in there it'll turn purple if there is lead so when that comes out people could test soil but Uh, you know, most of it just avoid making a huge mess of paint. If you buy like secondhand furniture and you want to strip off the paint, definitely test it before you do that. If it has lead, you know, better off test it when you're going to buy it. I don't know. Don't take it home. Don't take things that are sketchy into your house.

Andres Preschel: Well, this is, again, I really value this for some reasons, but I'm actually, this year I'm planning on buying a home, and so I'm going to be very diligent about doing all that kind of, you know, doing all the testing, because I would hate to be somewhere that has the lead, obviously. I just didn't even think to consider that when buying a home.

Eric Ritter: And there's one more thing about the buying the home is if you wind up owning a property that has lead, All homes built before 1978 when they're sold in the U.S. require a lead paint disclosure form to be issued to the buyer. And this is normally just like checked off as the seller says they have no knowledge of any lead in the house and they sign it. And so you get the paper, and now they're excused from any liability. If the house has lead, it's not their responsibility to test it, but if they know about it, it's their responsibility to inform you. So if you buy a house, wind up having a problem, or you find out that there's a lot of lead in there, you're kind of obligated, legally and morally, to tell the next person, which is obviously a really, nobody does this. I've never seen a lead paint disclosure form once that says, yes, I know that there are lead hazards in this home. Nobody would say that because it's going to be a serious bargaining chip. If I'm buying a house and they say there's lead paint, I'll say, okay, I want 20% off depending on the price of the house or whatever it is, because it could be very expensive to clean up properly. And there's obviously more liability on somebody who knows about lead paint versus somebody who doesn't. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, definitely. It's definitely worth it to check out because that's a, and that's part of the trauma too, is having your home become like a contamination vector and the financial costs. Cause it's like, Oh, I'm going to spend 20 K on this renovation. Now it's 120 K sometimes. And that's not fun.

Andres Preschel: You know, tests don't guess. And is it, is it easy to get like a lead, lead tests in your blood work?

Eric Ritter: Yeah, and I should have said this earlier, actually. Quest Labs, and I'm not affiliated with Quest Labs at all, but for $50, I can go on their website and I can sign up to get my blood tested for lead. And then they'll tell me, $50, and I'll go there. I'd make a video about it because that's like, it's so easy to do and it's only 50 bucks. So like it's not really that much money and I can see if I'm being exposed. So that's, you know, I could use myself as a vector as a, um, I could use myself as a metric for contamination on, you know, just like a child would be if I just test my blood, but if I'm already in the environment. it might be a good idea, and that would alleviate a lot of the concern, especially if I find lead. Am I being poisoned? I don't know. And then, you know, you can find out. So yeah, Quest Labs, around me anyway, $50, go in there, they'll take your blood out, give you results in like five days, and then they'll tell you down to, it's not super granular, it only detects down to one microgram per deciliter. But that's about three times lower than the limit for kids. And if I had one microgram of blood per deciliter, I wouldn't be worried. Because the negative effects for the cardiac stuff start to go in around like the 5 to 10 range. And anything above that is definitely really concerning. I saw a guy on Instagram, he actually was shot by his father-in-law by accident, in a hunting accident. with some birdshot in his hands. He showed me the pictures, and he had so much lead shot in his hands. So definitely avoid, you know, anybody with a gun pointed at you, because if you have lead bullets in you, they will really hit like blowable, like 40.

Andres Preschel: I mean, the intention is to shoot something that you're going to eat, and so the pellets can then get on the meat that you're going to consume.

Eric Ritter: That's another concern, and I haven't really delved too deep into that. But that's an interesting view because that can be definitely a concern. Obviously, if there's birdshot and you eat one pellet of it, obviously not all of the lead is going to go into your body because the surface area is pretty low. And what's kind of good is that lead only goes into solution in an acidic environment, and our stomach is a very low pH. But once the stomach empties, the alkalinity of the small intestine will prevent any further degradation of lead samples, and we won't get further poisoned. So that's why the EPA method relies on a one-hour incubation time with a hydrochloric acid to simulate what it would be like if you ate lead, and it was in your stomach, and then it was discharged. And different kinds of lead will be different levels of bioavailable. Like metallic lead is relatively low versus organic lead like the lead carbonate or the tetraethyl lead from gasoline. Those will really easily be disassociated by the hydrochloric acid. So it's really complicated. The soil matrix is so complicated because you don't really know what kind of lead is in the soil. You can make a guess based on what is in the area, like if there's an old barn, or if there's a deck that's been sanded, or if you're at a racetrack, but it's hard, or there's smelting going on nearby, but you can't really be sure, so. It's a lot of fun for me. I love doing this stuff, this research and stuff.

Andres Preschel: I have a quick, fun little story about, I have a fun story, it's a bit karmic in the sense that, well, I'll just get to the story and you'll understand, but for any vegans tuning in right now, I would suggest that you conclude the podcast now before I get into this very graphic story. My friend, Andrew Van Timmerman, he tunes in frequently, so I'm sure he'll appreciate the shout out. Andrew and I were hunting in Michigan and we shot a deer, we shot a doe. He shot it right through the heart. But we didn't know this until we were actually gutting the deer. And I was gutting it, I reached into the chest cavity and I literally ripped the heart out of this animal. And we went to go eat it, but we realized the bullet had traced through the heart. I know this is a big rabbit. So now I'm just like, it's karmic in the sense that, you know, that's how we killed the deer. Now this is how the deer is killing us.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, for sure.

Andres Preschel: But anyway, the rest of the deer was delicious. But I mean, I'm definitely going to be a little more mindful about You know, eating something I've shot with a bullet because, you know… Yeah, if it touches it, it would have gunshot residue on it for sure.

Eric Ritter: There's a lot of research, not research, but there's like a bunch of stuff online about game wardens using lead tests to monitor bowhunting-only areas. Oh my God. So you kill an animal and you're like, oh, I bowhunted this. And he's like, did you? And then he swabs the wound. Yeah, they'll see that there was, there's lead on that and they'll say, you didn't bow hunt this dude, you shot this. That's how much lead is in it.

Andres Preschel: There's enough lead in the bullet to detect whether or not you killed it with a bullet or a bow and arrow.

Eric Ritter: Yeah. The lead really comes off. Like it's easy to get it to come off. Do you want me to show you? I could grab, I could show you real quick. Yeah, go for it. All right. I'm going to run downstairs. All right. So here I have some lead metal.

Andres Preschel: Oh my god, that's a huge chunk.

Eric Ritter: So I rub it on my hand a little bit, and then I'll spray with the spray. I'll see if I can set up the light so it's a little more dramatic. Let's see if you can see it.

Andres Preschel: Yeah. Yeah. The green marking on your hand. Yeah.

Eric Ritter: That's lead right there. And you would have never seen it. This was not, this is invisible with the light off. Wow. But it's super visible with the light on. And that's why this spray or the liquid is a light years ahead of the swab. So easy, so fast. Probably game wardens will love it, because it's more fun to find glowing lead than it is to find red lead.

Andres Preschel: That's for sure. Dude, I mean, all the different niches you can get into with your product and your approach, I mean, it's insane. I love helping people. Oh, you're going to be worth $88 million in the 1800s, if you know what I mean.

Eric Ritter: I hope so. I mean, there's 36 million homes with lead in them right now. And I'm like, and if anybody watching can't afford a lead testing kit, hit me up for one. Buy one on Amazon, message me on Amazon. I'll give it to you, give you a refund. Like costs should not prohibit anybody from testing. And the people who have the least money need the testing the most. It's a very tenuous situation to be impoverished in the United States or anywhere generally, you know, and there's a lot of, There's, I'm really, I'm really looking forward to, cause I don't like, I don't really want to, you know, like money and everything. And it's a lot of fun. It's very addictive to get it. But then like, you know, the high is fleeting and it's empty, you know, and you know, I gotta, you gotta give it away to get something out of it. Really. That's what I've found. And it's a lot less fun than I thought it would be in the beginning, you know, like, because you can't just buy a bunch of crap and expect it's going to help you out. But like enabling other people to do good, you know, with, you know, economic power is something awesome. And I'm really looking forward to putting people on in other countries, especially to make this stuff for free or for a low cost. Like I'll give you everything at cost. Like I don't need to make money off of people in Africa. I don't need to make money off of people in South America. Like they should be able to just sell it, you know, for their own markup. They should have a hundred percent markup or whatever, infinite markup, you know, as it were. But that would be killer. That would be my, that is my number one goal is to get rid of as much of the lead poisoning in the world as possible by flipping typical economics on its head, enabling people who are hustlers who want to do stuff, like hooking them up. Like I want to be the plug for the lead juice. And it's like, I, I, once I get this license, cause the bromides really, Yeah, the Methylmonium Bromide is really expensive, but it can be made by salting Methylmine with Hydrobromic Acid, and those are very cheap. And once I get this license, I can make unlimited amounts of Methylmonium Bromide, and I can distribute that in a format that's not even regulated, since there's other constituents to the spray that aren't Methylmine, and if the Methylmine is diluted enough in the product, It's not regulated because the DEA identifies that people aren't reasonably going to be using this. It's a stupid law anyway. That's why Breaking Bad, as a random aside, Breaking Bad enabled, not enabled, but Breaking Bad used methamphetamine as a plot point because it's useless. In order to make methamphetamine, you need another constituent that's a Schedule II drug in the United States. You're not going to be able to buy pounds of Schedule II drug. So the methylamine's not worth anything to a person on the street. The primary diversion place is Mexico, because apparently they can get phenyl acetic acid and make actual meth there. But I thought it was interesting, because I was like, they were like, oh, we got methylamine, we're good. Like, no, you guys aren't. You can't do anything with that. But that's why they did it, because it's AMC. They're not teaching everybody how to cook methamphetamine.

Andres Preschel: Amazing. I mean, these are the things that only people like you can pick up on.

Eric Ritter: Yeah, I was way more entertained by that than the DEA agents, surprisingly. They didn't find that funny or cool. They were like, yeah, they make the meth blue sometimes. It's bad. I was like, yeah, I know it's bad, but like, light it up.

Andres Preschel: Well, Eric, it's been such an honor and pleasure, man. And I'm so happy to help you, uh, carry your, your, your mission, your mission and your message forward, man. It's the least that I can do. I mean, hopefully I can get my hands on, on this new incoming kid and make a video about it and publish this. And it just helped the, the, the people tuning in to be more informed and more aware and safer in the long run. So I really, man, on behalf of everyone tuning in, I can't thank you enough.

Eric Ritter: And thank you so much for having me on. I've never been on a podcast before. This was a lot of fun. You seem like a great guy. And this is a great format. I know that there's a lot of value to this. And I'm impressed that you've done it, because this is a daunting task for me, doing a podcast. I haven't been in social media in like 10 years. And it's really stressful. But I know how to do it, obviously. You know, it's stressful. So, so, you know, good for you. I mean, you're really doing it. And I think that you also have a very good positive message. You're not selling smoke. You know, you're selling ways for people to enable themselves to do better in life, often for low cost or no cost, which I really appreciate too.

Andres Preschel: Thank you, man. And I'll tell you that I started the podcast because I was so afraid to engage with experts that I know I needed to engage with to carry the science forward. And it's been a huge growth project for me. I mean, tremendous beyond, again, like just beyond belief. So I, you know, suggests that this thing that you're so afraid of, continue to pursue it. It's going to give you growth personally and it's going to help everyone on the receiving end to grow so much and to be healthier and to be better. So, you know, here's to, to more growth through discomfort, man.

Eric Ritter: Yeah. I, I'm into that. That's definitely a, that's a big one in life, which isn't, isn't immediately obvious to me anyway, to be fair, but it's great. But yeah, thank you again. Yeah, for sure.

Andres Preschel: We'll see you soon. All right. So that's all for today's show. Thank you so much for tuning in today. For all of the show notes, including clickable links to anything and everything that we discussed today, everything from discount codes to videos, to research articles, books, tips, tricks, techniques, and of course, to learn more about the guest on today's episode, all you have to do is head to my website on dresspershell.com, that's A-N-D-R-S-H-E-L-L. E-S-P-R-E-S-C-H-E-L.com and go to podcasts. You can also leave your feedback, questions, and suggestions for future episodes, future guests, so on and so forth. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you on the next one. Have a lovely rest of your day.