Where this practice came from
The Man Who Sold Cable
Health 2: The Cheapest Thing ยท Episode 1 · the first of eight stories
Clint Ober spent his working life in cable television: he entered the industry in the early 1960s, and the company he founded in 1972 became, by his own account, the largest provider of cable installation and marketing services in the country.
That matters for what follows, because cable is an industry that is obsessive about grounding. A cable system is a vast network of conductors, and if any part of it is not properly connected to earth you get interference, noise, and equipment failure. The entire craft of installing it involves making sure that stray charge has somewhere to go. A grounded system is a quiet system.
The story Ober has told, in his book and in interviews, is that in retirement he was sitting outside, looked at a cable installation, and had the thought that the human body might be a conductor sitting in an environment full of electromagnetic noise, insulated from the earth by rubber-soled shoes and floors and beds.
For most of human history we were in electrical contact with the ground. Bare feet, leather, dirt, sleeping on or near the earth. Then, over a fairly short period, we put insulating soles on everything and raised ourselves off the ground.
That is the idea. Reconnect, and something changes.
I want to give this its due before I take it apart, because I think the idea deserves more respect than it usually gets from people who dismiss it.
It is a genuinely interesting observation. The change it describes is real: rubber and synthetic soles are recent and near-universal. The mechanism it proposes is at least physically coherent, in that a conductive body connected to earth does equalise potential with it, and that is measurable and not in dispute. And it comes from someone who spent decades thinking professionally about exactly this class of problem, which is the kind of cross-domain transfer that occasionally produces something real.
It also has the shape of an idea that is very hard to test and very easy to sell, and both of those turned out to be true.
Ober went looking for researchers. He funded studies. He wrote a book with co-authors. And he built a company selling the products, which is where this gets complicated, and where it stops being a story about an idea and becomes a story about who pays for evidence.
Next episode: what is actually being claimed.
Wren
The record says this much; the scenes between are imagined. The rest of the season, and the sourcing behind it, runs a few times a week at Wren. One page for the whole practice: /practice/.