I hope everybody’s doing good in the craziness of the world right now. Shit’s wild, dude. With Venezuela, with Minnesota, with Iran, stuff’s just popping off. You should see the debates section of the Discord. It’s madness. Nobody likes what’s happening, right? Maybe the people in Venezuela would be happy, but America is getting involved in a lot of different things, the imperialists if you want to call it like that.

So tonight’s episode is about the 5G conspiracy. When 5G was coming out there was some worry. We were a little concerned about what was happening and if this technology was going to be okay. Was it like a Y2K kind of fear? Honestly, it was. I actually wrote down a bunch of things that we were scared about, technology that was coming out. And then it was like we can’t live without it now.

One was electricity. What is this sorcery? Imagine you are a farmer living in the early to mid 1800s and all of a sudden somebody says they’ve invented this power, this energy, lightning that shoots through your home and creates a light bulb. It creates light, and it makes things activate without you touching them. I could imagine the fear involved in that. It’s like sorcery. Look what happened with the Salem Witch Trials, a guy looked at someone the wrong way and ended up dead.

Or imagine telephones. That must have been terrifying. For the longest time you had pigeon carriers and Western Union and letters being written, and you’d have to horseback them across or in best case through a train. Then all of a sudden somebody says, hey, there’s this thing where you can talk to your wife via a wire. Can you imagine something that catastrophic happening in your lifetime? It takes me eight months to get correspondence with my cousin across the country.

The other things were radio waves and X-rays. You don’t know what those waves are doing. To be honest, I’m still sketchy. I went to the dentist and they put a bulletproof vest on me and I’m like, why? Am I okay? And then they leave the room. I’m like, why are you leaving and I’m still here? The whole time I’m terrified, thinking they’re shooting some sort of alien ray into my body.

Then what about microwaves? Microwave ovens. They’re going to cook your food in one minute. It’s literally a block of ice and then a minute later it’s edible. Unbelievable. Then televisions, color television. What is this sorcery? You sit there and all of a sudden somebody’s like, you get this new box, and there’s humans on the box. It reminds me of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Mike TV.

Even elevators, when they came out people were terrified. I still don’t like elevators. I don’t like enclosed spaces, and it’s just a big rope pulling you up. Mine is that it’s just going to fall. Then Wi-Fi, coming a little closer to now. I still don’t understand how it works. How is this possible? And yet I’m so pissed if it’s not lightning speed. I remember doing dial-up, logging into AOL, and my mom couldn’t make phone calls because I was on the internet.

In the 19th century, people were terrified of vaccines when they came out. In the beginning you’re like, what is this needle, you want me to put something in my body? It’s weird that they were afraid of that but they were fine with bloodletting. Trust me, we’ll literally drain the thing that keeps you alive. Does it make you feel better? They were trying to deduce what was happening, figuring there’s stuff inside us making us sick, so maybe that’s tainted. But how did they even know that you make more blood?

Then when computers came out, early critics warned that computers would eliminate memory and make humans intellectually lazy because we’d be too dependent on them. They were right. They legit predicted that. You know how close we are to Wall-E. We’re this close to Wall-E. There’s also Y2K. It wasn’t really a technology thing, it was a database thing. They thought the internal clocks on the computers would reset to zero and wipe out all the data, putting us back to square one, but they just fixed it by reprogramming it.

And remember the whole Mayan calendar thing? 2012. It’s over, boys. And then the Mayans were like, we messed up. We should do an episode on that. They just ran out of calendar space. It just ended.

So what exactly is 5G technology? 5G stands for the fifth generation of mobile wireless networks. It’s an upgrade from 4G. It promised faster data speeds, greater capacity, and lower latency or response time. In practical terms, 5G is designed to make downloads blazing fast, potentially 1 to 10 gigabytes per second in good conditions. It’s a lie. It’s fast, but it’s not that fast. It was to enable real-time video chat, VR, and even remote surgeries.

You have to think, if you look at 2026 that we’re in, imagine how many FaceTime calls are happening simultaneously across the world. The amount of traffic and throughput it has to produce is psychotic. That’s why you have to upgrade the system constantly. G means generation. 1G was the old analog cell phones, the ones that weighed like 18 pounds and were like a backpack. 2G brought texting, basically T9. 3G enabled basic mobile internet, like downloading a ringtone.

We had 3G on the early iPhones, and you’re like, sweet, I can use Google Maps now. 4G gave us streaming and mobile apps, that’s when you could watch a show on your phone, or share that Instagram reel instantaneously. And now 5G is poised to connect everything with unprecedented speed. LTE stands for long-term evolution. In simple terms, it’s a wireless broadband standard designed to make mobile data faster, more reliable, and more efficient than older networks like 3G.

Remember there was 4G, then 4G LTE, and then 5G after. Although sometimes on my phone nowadays it’ll say 5G and it doesn’t even work. When my phone goes to 4G it’s useless. And then you know you’re in trouble when it just says LTE. You can’t even make a phone call.

So how does it work? Like its predecessors, 5G transmits information over radio waves, a form of electromagnetic radiation, to wirelessly connect phones and other devices to the internet. 5G signals are sent out by base stations or cell towers and received by your phone’s antenna. One big change is that 5G can use higher frequency radio waves than 4G. Traditional 4G networks mostly use frequencies below 3 GHz. In addition, 5G extends into frequencies around 3 and a half GHz. These higher bands are often called millimeter waves because their wavelengths are just a few millimeters long. Millimeter waves allow huge data rates, but they don’t travel as far and can be blocked by buildings or even trees.

This will all make sense if you’ve ever been into hand radios. A good explanation would be AM/FM radio. AM radio is very low frequency, huge waves, and you can broadcast it across a different country because the waves are so big they bounce off the stratosphere. My friend Ryan is into the hand radio thing and he said he talked to a dude in Russia the other day. For a higher frequency you have a smaller wavelength but you’re able to pack more data in. That’s why if you’re driving down the street you see those little towers, which are essentially repeaters. You have to have a lot of them in order to transmit that much data. You’ll see them on top of buildings and inside them. If you’ve heard of whole home Wi-Fi, it’s the same concept, where your router is broadcasting the signal in your home.

If you’re pumping shitloads of data, the walls will stop some of it, so with whole home Wi-Fi you have routers in other parts of the house to spread it out. So comparisons to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth help put 5G in context. Wi-Fi uses radio waves to connect devices, usually at home or in an office via a local router. Most Wi-Fi today broadcasts on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. These frequencies overlap with the microwave region of the spectrum. In fact, the 2.4 GHz band is the same band used by microwaves and cordless phones. Bluetooth, which links gadgets like headphones or keyboards to your phone or laptop, likewise uses 2.4 GHz.

The big difference is range and purpose. Bluetooth is very short range, only around 30 feet or 10 meters. Wi-Fi has a medium range, a few hundred feet in a house or cafe, but it also depends on the power of your router and other factors. Cellular networks like 4G or 5G cover much larger areas. Also, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth typically use unlicensed spectrum, frequencies open for public use, whereas 5G uses mostly licensed spectrum owned by your carrier. So you can hop on free Wi-Fi at a cafe, it’s an open domain, but I can’t just connect to Verizon’s 5G at a whim because it’s licensed.

All three of these technologies, however, are forms of what’s called nonionizing radio frequency radiation. They send data by oscillating electromagnetic waves at those microwave frequencies. That means 5G signals are fundamentally similar in nature to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Just think about that, we’re literally broadcasting data on electromagnetic waves. It’s still sorcery to me. When you really think about it, who figured that out? And only a very few amount of people actually know how to harness the technology, while the rest are big wigs going, so can I stream on the internet?

When I was in recruiting I worked a lot of network engineering and data center type jobs. My father-in-law used to be the VP of sales for a company that made what’s called a ROADM. If you really want to figure out how stuff’s happening behind the scenes, it’s like Oz. A ROADM is a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer. Look that up and come back to me when you’re confused.

Because 5G can use higher frequencies, people sometimes wonder if these new millimeter waves are some kind of new radiation we’re not used to. But electromagnetic waves at a few tens of gigahertz have been used for decades in other areas. For example, airport security body scanners use millimeter wave scanners to safely scan clothing. So it’s the same technology, millimeter wave, on those scanners you walk through at the airport. You know, the things that violate your privacy. Totally safe, totally legit.

All of these wireless systems, 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, occupy the nonionizing portion of the spectrum, meaning their frequencies are far too low energy to break any of the chemical bonds in our body. For comparison, X-rays and UV light are ionizing radiation that can damage your DNA. 5G radio waves have millions of times lower frequency than X-rays and even lower frequency than visible light. Ionization just means an atom is gaining or losing electrons, called a valence electron. When something gets ionized you’re either adding an electron to it or taking one away. Nonionizing means you’re not doing that, so they’re saying it’s not manipulating your body.

When 5G began rolling out in 2019, it didn’t take long for public anxiety to emerge. Almost every new communications technology in history, from electricity to radio to Wi-Fi to microwaves, brought some health worries or conspiracy theories in the early days. 5G was not the exception. Long before any talk of viruses or pandemics, a number of citizens, activist groups, and even local officials were voicing concerns about 5G’s potential impact on health and the Earth. The crux of early 5G fear was the word radiation. People heard that 5G would use higher frequency microwaves and it sounded scary. Would these new 5G towers bathe us in a dangerous amount of radiation? By the end of the 2010s, videos and articles were circulating online claiming that 5G causes cancer, infertility, DNA damage, and other alarming health effects.

Think of a microwave. A microwave is nonionizing radiation. What it’s doing is causing the molecules to vibrate. Vibration creates friction, which creates heat. So if you vibrate all the molecules in your TV dinner, it creates heat, and there’s water in it that creates steam, and that cooks the food via vibration. But it’s not causing electrons to fall off and change the molecular structure of your chicken. That’s how nonionizing works, it makes a molecule vibrate and the vibration creates heat.

Some pointed to the necessity of many small cells for 5G and argued that the density of antennas would drown communities in radio frequency emissions. Others revived an old theory that has cropped up with each wireless generation, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the idea that some people get headaches or illness from Wi-Fi or cell signals. Despite a lack of robust scientific evidence for this, it became one of the scariest parts of this new technology. It’s a valid concern. You’re literally being bombarded by radiation. You go to the beach, you’re in the sun, you walk outside. The sun is literally a giant nuclear reaction blasting out radiation, and that radiation keeps us alive. Without it we legit die. But when you’re in your home you’re shielded in some sense from that radiation. Now in 2026 you’re not, you’re constantly being bombarded by other radiation. So I think it’s a super valid concern.

In short, a segment of the public viewed 5G as an untested, potentially harmful experiment happening right above their heads. By 2019, organized activist groups had formed, spreading petitions and staging protests under banners like Stop 5G. I don’t remember any of these protests. I remember a little bit of it. For example, January 25th, 2020 was promoted as a global day of protest against 5G. Now keep in mind it was overshadowed by something that happened a couple months later in 2020.

This is literally January 25th, 2020, a global day of protest against 5G. In the United States, a group of residents in Asheville, North Carolina, gathered in Pack Square Park that day carrying signs and warning of dangerous 5G effects. They echoed an international appeal that called 5G a massive biological experiment on the public. Similar grassroots protests and city council meetings against 5G popped up in Europe and even Australia. Some local governments took these worries seriously. For example, in Belgium, officials in Brussels in early 2019 halted a 5G pilot, citing the region’s strict radiation rules and public health concerns. From small towns in America to big cities in Europe, a message was spreading that we don’t want 5G in our backyard until it’s proven safe.

You know how long it would take to prove safe? It’s not unfounded though, or crazy, to want a technology to be tested. It’s a totally valid concern. Especially when you have kids, you wonder, is this phone going to mess them up, especially because we’re on it all the time now, non-stop.

So some scientific responses came. Health authorities and scientists tried to calm the fear. In early 2020, the international radiation watchdog updated its safety guidelines for 5G frequencies and stated there’s no scientific evidence that 5G poses a threat to human health. The chairman of ICNIRP acknowledged public concern but affirmed that decades of research on radio frequency exposure informed their guidelines, which already covered the entire range of 5G frequencies. He emphasized that proper 5G installations operate well within safe limits. In March of 2020, a UK government report likewise found that 5G exposures were a small fraction of the allowed limits set by the standards and similar to existing mobile networks, even when tested at full capacity. As the World Health Organization pointed out, the main effect of radio waves on the body is tissue heating, but at the frequencies and power levels used by 5G, any heating is negligible and confined to the skin, not underneath it.

See, that’s the thing though, do you really know? One correlation I always like to make with the 5G argument is to look at fertility and birth rates. You have blanketed 98% of mankind with incessant constant radio wave bombardment. So homies aren’t dropping dead in the street because of 5G, but what are the ancillary effects? Why are most of the nation’s birth rates at all-time lows? I should probably do more digging on that. You could trace that back to the food. I think the food is the biggest problem, but who’s to say 5G isn’t a participating factor? But you don’t know. I don’t know.

There are so many different health issues these days and nobody can source a single cause. It’s probably a combination of a lot of things, but I wouldn’t knock the fact that it is microwave, it couldn’t be good for you. We just said we’re going to vibrate your cells non-stop all the time. I’ve heard also that AirPods, because of the Bluetooth, are not something you want to use all day long because it’s actual microwave radio frequencies right next to your brain. There was another thing about one of the iPhones failing all of the radiation standards, the newer thin one, it’s like three times over the limit of radiation you’re supposed to have. I got the headphones you plug in for that reason. You shouldn’t use Bluetooth so much anymore because it’s bad for your brain. I still do, but I know I shouldn’t.

Alongside health concerns came the first conspiracy theories. Even in 2019, fringe outlets like Infowars and state sponsored media like Russia’s RT were publishing sensational stories dubbing 5G the possible global catastrophe. Why are the only two things you cite Alex Jones and the Russian propaganda machine? I’m pretty sure Alex Jones put out like 70 5G scare episodes. By late 2019, some conspiracists such as British figure David Icke had adopted anti-5G rhetoric, though it remained a niche topic in conspiracy circles at the time. Little did anyone know that the simmering stew of suspicion, that 5G causes cancer, 5G is a weapon, 5G is a plot by the elites, was about to boil over in a big way with the arrival of COVID-19.

So in early 2020, the world was gripped by COVID-19. The fear of unknown viruses, lockdowns, and our sudden dependence on the internet created a violent atmosphere. It was the perfect breeding ground for more conspiracies. And into this storm came a bizarre idea, what if 5G caused the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a stretch. But what if the radiation or vibration subtly weakens your immune system, not to the point where you drop dead, but then a regular virus comes around that 100 years ago maybe wasn’t a big deal, and now you’re slightly weakened, and it starts killing people. But then wouldn’t that mean old people who didn’t have a 5G phone wouldn’t be affected? It doesn’t matter, you drive around and you’re getting hit by 5G, there’s towers everywhere. It’s not just your phone. You work in an office building, you drive, you live next to people, it’s everywhere. But again, it’s kind of a stretch.

We also know people who have those EMF screens. They turn their Wi-Fi off at night and put their phones in another room, in Faraday cases, so it blocks all radio frequency. Mine’s under my pillow. One of our daughters sleeps with hers in physical contact with her body. Mine is this far away from your face every single night. I was watching Bravo thinking, I’m definitely going to die of brain cancer.

In January 2020, as Wuhan grappled with the first major COVID outbreak, a Belgian doctor gave an interview to a local newspaper suggesting he had doubts about 5G and wondered if there was a link to the virus. No evidence really, it was just a newspaper interview where he said, I wonder. Around the same time, a Twitter post from January 19th speculated about Wuhan’s 5G rollout and that the date coincided with the virus spreading, insinuating a connection. By late February and March, as COVID was spreading, fringe groups that had already been fearful of 5G said it was the real culprit.

The thing is, maybe they’re related, maybe not. We’re in Florida so we had it different, but other states and countries, you couldn’t go outside, you couldn’t even get sunlight. So you’re stuck inside breathing the same air, locked to a computer, not doing anything productive, just watching the news, scared, eating junk, no fresh air, no sun. By the time the conspiracy reached Facebook and WhatsApp groups in March, it split into multiple storylines. Some claimed that 5G signals weakened your immune system. Others insisted that 5G towers were directly spreading the virus itself, either by emitting deadly radiation or even acting as a vehicle for the pathogen. I think that’s super unlikely.

Celebrities started coming out in support of the theories. In the US, actor Woody Harrelson shared an Instagram post about his 5G fears. Actor John Cusack tweeted ominously about 5G until backlash prompted him to delete his post. I love that he tweeted about 5G using 5G. Musician M.I.A. also voiced anti-5G sentiment on her social media. Each such endorsement poured fuel on the fire. Honestly, the fact that they support it makes me not believe it. It actually makes me more against it because I just don’t trust them at all.

The most shocking effect of the 5G conspiracy theory was actual real-world violence and vandalism. In April of 2020, reports emerged of telecom towers in the UK being set on fire by individuals who believed the 5G rumors. Within weeks there were 30 acts of arson and vandalism against phone masts across Britain. Attackers would often film their handiwork and upload the videos as proof of the resistance. By mid-April, 80 recorded incidents of harassment were reported to telecom engineers. They were literally harassing these guys who were just trying to feed their families.

In the Netherlands, half a dozen 5G masts were torched by vandals. There was graffiti left that just said fuck 5G, like that’ll show them, they’ll never build again. In Canada, several cell towers were burned in Quebec. In Australia, there were more movements in Melbourne and Sydney, with protesters including some known antivaccine activists holding rallies against 5G as well as other grievances like big pharma and later lockdown measures. So in Australia it was more like everything, not just 5G. In the US, the 5G conspiracy didn’t really result in physical protests and attacks, it was more just online, classic America, from my couch talking trash. In just a few months, the narrative of 5G had flipped from a wonky internet discussion to a full-blown panic with vandalism and arson.

So here are a couple of the fact versus fiction claims. One is that 5G spreads COVID. This theory asserted that either 5G signals help the coronavirus infect people or that 5G directly causes COVID-like illness. From what we can tell, that’s not even possible. First of all, you can’t transmit a biological virus via radio waves, that’s science fiction, that’s Star Trek. We can’t even get back to the moon yet, but we can transmit viruses with radio waves? If you could see Eric’s face raging over there. So that claim has no evidence. It goes back to people being scared of something they don’t understand. We don’t know if it’s weakening your immune system, but it’s obviously not spreading COVID.

The next one is that 5G radiation weakens your immune system. This is one I can get behind. Numerous studies have found no credible mechanism or evidence that the very low energy radiation from cell towers can affect the human immune system. The levels of radio frequency energy we absorb from 5G are extremely small, similar to what we got from 4G for decades. Here’s a good example though, look at the Grand Canyon. It was just a small bit of water, but erosion over time is a thing, and you have exposure non-stop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s a slow erosion process.

The next one is that 5G causes cancer and DNA damage. Dose matters. Ionizing radiation like X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet can break chemical bonds in DNA, potentially leading to cancer. But 5G frequencies are nonionizing. They are not powerful enough to damage DNA directly, and decades of research on RF exposure from cell phones have not established any consistent link to cancer at exposure levels below the international safety limits. But times have changed. Just in our bedroom we have the Wi-Fi, both of our phones, our watches emitting frequency, our daughter’s smartwatch, the TV, my computer, my work phone. That seems like a lot. It’s like if I shot you in the face with a Nerf gun a trillion times, eventually you’d probably die. The first billion you’d be fine, but eventually you would die.

The next one is that 5G is a mind control or surveillance weapon. Surveillance, sure. Mind control, get out of here. They’re definitely surveilling us, but just not through the low frequency tech, it’s through the phones. The next one is that they’ll put microchips in vaccines and then control us via 5G. Here’s the idea, everybody gets vaccinated from COVID and there’s a tiny chip in it, and that chip reacts to the 5G that’s everywhere. But how does a microscopic chip you inject into someone control them, and control them in what way? I don’t know. It’s like the Manchurian Candidate and all of a sudden the whole planet is just saying pineapple, pineapple.

This one does bring up an episode we should do, which is microchip implantation, which is a real thing, where you want to put your wallet and your data in. Look at even Elon Musk doing Neuralink, implanting into your brain. Whereas with Amazon you can go to a Whole Foods and scan with your hand. I saw a guy do that the other day in New York. I don’t know why people are so down for them. You guys realize that’s what they do in China, they’re scanning your face all the time. Oh, you jaywalked, we took the cash out of your account for the ticket without you even being able to dispute it. That’s also like the Minority Report movie where they scan your retina and you can’t stop it. I’m all about it, it’s just so much easier for me. I don’t want to talk, just scan me. I want self-driving cars.

We’ll live till we’re 180. I highly doubt it. With the 5G around us we’re definitely not living that long. Not even the 5G, not with the food that we eat, it’s impossible. You’re ingesting pure pesticide all the time. I’m going to live to 180. I think the preservatives actually might help, it’s like formaldehyde, it’ll just preserve the body.

Those are the main conspiracies about 5G. I understand the fear. Every time there’s new technology there’s a fear involved. I got into a Waymo the other day, the self-driving taxi, and I was a little like, this is scary, and then it’s awesome. You get in and you’re like, holy crap, there’s nobody in the car, and now it’s going to drive in the city. I’m super down for that, I don’t want to talk to the Uber guy. Have you ever been in the self-driving Tesla option? Oh yeah, it’s super cool, a little alarming, but it’s great, it’s actually unbelievable.

So what’s your take? I don’t necessarily think 5G is much different than 4G. I know there are smaller minimal waves, but it’s still so low. But you brought up a great point, which is that you add up all of the things and then you might get a little worried. That’s what I think. I don’t think 5G as a standalone is the cause of all our problems, but I do fully believe it’s a contributing factor, not only in our overall health and wellness, but also in the evolution of more illness happening, the ability for whatever new virus to click and take hold, because we don’t truly understand what it’s doing to your body over the long term. 5G came out what, 5 years ago? So what happens when you have constant exposure to 5G 30 years later? I don’t know. We’re going to find out. And we’re always pushing the envelope with the technology. Wait till 6G comes out, brother.

What do you guys think, does this conspiracy hold any water? First of all, it’s definitely unrelated to COVID. I don’t think there’s any way it has anything to do with the virus. I think there’s a deeper conspiracy when it comes to COVID itself, but I don’t think it’s related to that. Go back and listen to that episode. But we do keep pushing the envelope with technology, and eventually it can’t be good for the environment or for us physically, you can’t argue that. The more we go and the further we go, I do think it becomes worse and worse for us as a society. And why do we need it to be so connected? What about the ’90s when we didn’t have this? The ’90s were fantastic. I miss my parents not knowing where I was. I’m off the grid, on my bike to my homies’ house, like, call the house phone.

I do think there is the aspect that it is a money grab, in the sense that now everybody has to buy a new phone. I don’t really understand why we have to keep going so much further. But people are really smart and there’s always going to be new innovations and new technology, and I do like that about us as a human race. But also, we don’t need any more than what we have, in my opinion. I thought of a new conspiracy. What if the real conspiracy about 5G is more just control, to make people docile? Look, it’s faster, more reels. She did give me an idea, we definitely should do an episode on AI. Just AI, dude. What is the capability of it? You know, T2.