Why I Have More Energy & Sleep Better in El Salvador (EMF, Grounding & Homes)

Michael Cobb, thank you so much for taking the time to visit with me. You popped up as I was doing a little circuit on some EMF building biology components and, Andrew McAfee, Danny Scallion, I've got a lot of friends in this space. And so when I was looking at some of the conferences and seeing some names and trying to, scalp some information, I saw you and saw a project that you were working on in Latin America and all kinds of different components. And so I just wanted to have a conversation with you because I am obsessed with El Salvador.

Michael's background (Belize 34 years ago; mortgage, development, and FSC-certified teak)

I've been down there four times this year, about to go back in another couple weeks. And you have so, such experience. And so if you don't care, give us that little elevator pitch on why in the world Latin America even popped up in your world.

Yeah, sure. Well, Logan, good to be with you. I enjoy sharing my experience and, visions of where things can go as well for folks. So, thank you for having me on.

I went to my first, kind of cult business trip to Central America about 34 years ago now and loved it. And this was Belize. We my buddy and I, we each bought condos, but we started seeing business opportunities that were in fact the very first business there was no it was a hole in the marketplace. It was there were no mortgage services, right?

You're up in Arkansas, Little Rock area. So, if you wanted to buy a property in El Salvador, you've been down there a few times this year. Like, no bank in Little Rock's going to lend you money to buy a property in El Salvador, right? And the banks in El Salvador won't lend you a foreigner money.

And so there's this big hole in the marketplace for funding financing like mortgage financing. So my very first business I started 33 years ago now was a mortgage company in Belize to provide financing to North Americans buying property first in Belize and then it grew and now we serve folks all over all over Central America and the Caribbean. That was our first business. Second business was a development company because you know we started to see that you know if you had back then this is you know 30 years ago right?

If you had half a million dollars, you could buy like primo stuff, right? And so you were kind of getting a product that met your expectations, but if you had $1, $150,000 to spend on a property, it might be built really well, like the bones could be really solid, reinforced concrete, like a great building, but like the light switches would turn on when down and the and there'd be one outlet in the living room or all the door handles would be at the wrong place or the mirror like the light in the mirroring in the bathroom would have big shadows on your face. And we kind of looked at that and we said like we can fix all of this stuff for free, right? It doesn't cost any money to put the mirror and the lights in the right place and the countertops at the right height and outlets cost 10 bucks a piece, but okay, you add 10 more outlets, it's 100 bucks, right?

So, it's like everything we saw we could fix for free. And so, we started our development company and that's now 28 years ago. And then we also read some articles about reforestation projects in in Panama, a reforestation incentive law that was passed in the early 90s and we we bought a 100 acre cattle pasture back in 1998. And we planted a 100 acres of teak trees which we are now harvesting.

We built a sawmill a couple years ago. We started a sawmill. It's up and running. And we've continued to plant.

This year we've planted 50 more acres. I think we've got about 800 acres of teak in cultivation between Nicaragua and Panama now. So, kind of three different businesses, but but they all kind of looked at the marketplace and said, "Where can we make a difference? Where can we serve a need that's either not being served or we could serve it better or in the in the case of teak timber a marketplace for renewable sustainable agricultural development.

Our teak plantations are FSC certified. So like, again, doing it the right way, the responsible and sustainable way to do business. And it's been a great ride. So that's that's it in a nutshell.

Little, a little quickie.

Why Logan returns to El Salvador and the case for health-focused stays

I love that. I love I love all that because the whole teak aspect is something that I've looked into a little bit because a lot of what we do is permaculture and regenerative agriculture. And so like utilizing some livestock with the plantations, the tree plantation, like there's a lot of things that, we've played around with looking at, but I, Dr. Jack Kruse is a mentor of mine.

Love him. And he's the whole reason that I went down to El Salvador. And Mike, when you are there versus say Arkansas, the way you feel is kind of mind-blowing. So for me, it's like I have energy.

I don't have to just pound coffee all day. I lose weight without trying and I eat whatever I want. And so like a lot of the aspects that we get into on especially this channel and within my work is the physics of why that is, right? So I'm trying to build out experiences to where I take Americans or especially, Arkansas out of that community and go down there for what I refer to as like health vacations.

And now this is a lot longer than just like a week, a few days. And it you go and you heal because like it's happening like we see it. I've experienced it. I took my mom down there about a month ago and she's like I get what you're saying.

And so with that said and one of the biggest reasons I wanted to talk to you is where you stay matters. I have stayed at 13 different place. I counted it up last night for before this talk. I have to say that 13 different places in El Salvador and how I feel in those different houses, resorts or whatever is massive.

That is a huge variable on how I feel versus being on the beach or up in the mountains or on a volcano. Your project that was in Nicaragua is focused on a lot of the things that I believe is why I feel different. Okay. So, do you go into a little bit on what you have found as a developer on the other side of that?

Right. Cuz I can't in good faith just say go stay anywhere in El Salvador or Latin America and you're going to feel great because that's disingenuous. True. Right.

It's not. And so what have you found out from the developer, from construction, from the projects that you've done on what matters there and how we can view finding the right places to stay?

What makes a place healthy (local food, grounding on volcanic sand, near-zero EMF, community)

Yeah. So, so a couple things. One, I mean what you just said about feeling better when you go there, right? Just having a sense of healthfulness.

A couple things really lead into that and food is a big part of what where you are, right? Permaculture, but also, what we're putting into our bodies and then the Jack Kruse stuff. So, I'm going to kind of bounce around a little bit. I'll be like a pinball.

Bing. So, so I think first and foremost, when you it depends on where you stay. If you go to what I'm going to call like an all-inclusive American resort, it could be a Riu, which is a Spanish chain or whatever, right? But, but you go to one of those big all-inclusives, chances are they're bringing in all of the processed, base and materials for their production of food, right?

They're buying the big, big aggro kind of stuff, containers of things, and it's it's basically it's it may not be coming from the states, but it's the same as we have in the states. On the other hand, when you stay at a small hotel, let's just call it that. Small resort, small hotel, chances are they're buying in the local marketplace, which are generally unprocessed foods, I lived in Nicaragua for 14 years and, we had a coffee se friends of ours own a organic coffee plantation called Selva Negra up in the mountains of Nicaragua and they, phenomenal, but they also have organic farms. So they have you know all the you know truck vegetables you know tomatoes, carrots, beets, you know whatever I mean just cabbage, lettuce, all that kind of stuff.

But then they also have pigs sheep and cows. So they have cheeses and meats and eggs. They have poultry. And so we would get it's incredible.

We would get a coffee sack delivered to our house delivered to our house every Tuesday morning and it was you know this much full of fruits and vegetables and just the fruits and vegetables part right. This coffee sack delivered to our house $8. Okay, now that if you went down to Whole Paycheck, I call it a whole paycheck, Whole Foods, right? Go down to Whole Paycheck and buy a tomato, it's $8, right?

So, so one of the things that we found living in Nicaragua was, our quality of life went through the roof from a healthy eating standpoint, organic, free range, hormone free, all that kind of stuff, right? And our cost of that dropped to, 10 cents on the dollar, right? It was insane. We couldn't eat that.

We could not eat the bag of fruits and vegetables every week. We'd give it to friends and whatever, right? So I think that the first thing about going overseas to a place like El Salvador, Nicaragua, probably less so Costa Rica and less so Panama, but certainly El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras. I put Honduras in the in the grouping.

Is that you're going to get really great food stock, right? It's it's it's a lot of it's heirloom, right? A lot of it just truly heirloom stock, right? They're just they're they're seeding it from the plant and you know continuing it on, right?

The way it used to work, right? Anyway, and then it's organic because you know chemicals are expensive. People are inexpensive, right? And so, you can you can you can find the expensive fertilized chemical processed pesticide kind of stuff in the major supermarkets, but if you buy local, you buy at the side of the street, you buy, you [snorts] know, at the farmers market kind of stuff, you're you're really going to get organic really great.

So, I think first and foremost, if you're not staying at the all-inclusive Americanized resort, you're going to be healthier just because of what you're consuming just right off the bat, right? That's the first level of healthfulness, right? And then I think, we kind of get into what Jack's talking about. Jack Kruse is talking about, now you're talking about specific locations and what are the what are the physics of those locations.

You know he actually he does a lot of work in El Salvador's written a lot about El Salvador but at our Grand Pacifica project we have a lot of the very similar beach sand components a lot of it is volcanic and there's some black sand beaches and one of the things that he talks about which I know you know is you know being barefoot being grounded to the earth you know I is critically important and so when you come to a place like Grand Pacific in our case or the different resorts a few of the resorts in El Salvador that you're familiar with. Like all of a sudden, you're going to get a grounding that's that's that's profound, right? So, you're eating healthier, you're inputting really healthy products into your body. You're you're and then you're grounding either through barefoot or through your you know your contact with the natural environment.

Doesn't have to just be barefoot, but barefoot's the best, of course. So, I think those are the kinds of things that make a big difference in terms of how you feel when you're there, but also when you leave. And I'll just add a third element, which is the low EMF. We have a huge property.

It's it's three and a half miles of beachfront property. It's a mile deep. It's a giant rectangle. And there's a place on the property that's a bowl and basically the bowl faces the ocean.

And we hired Kathy Cook, a building biologist, to come out and look at and do some measurements of the EMF readings in this area that I think we sent you a copy of it. It's it's almost zero. There is no such thing as zero anymore, but it's like it's almost zero in this bowl. And so we've really preserved this that's about 40 acres, 40 some acres, but call it 40 acres.

We've preserved it as a place that we will in the future develop as a low EMF neighborhood. You know because it is special in that way. I mean it's truly special in that way. Very few places I know down in Greenbank, West Virginia, you've got the you know you've got the cell free zone because they got the big radio antennas and things like that.

So there are some places in the in the US specifically that have very low EMF. They tend to be remote and they don't tend to have the secondary benefits of oh the farmers market's you know a mile away I can go buy fresh stuff all day any day right and I or I can have it delivered right whatever it is right and then and then the then and then the bigger piece of it which is in some of these places like green bank I think there is a community but community is really important being around people that you can communicate with you can identify with they identify with you're not a freak well maybe you are a freak but you're around other freaks, which is just fine, right? I'm a freak. I admit it.

I'm a freak. So, I think it's important to find community, whatever that is. And, and I think so when you can match up a bunch of those things, like life becomes really fun and meaningful. And when we can help other folks find it, because there are a lot of folks that want it, that need it, but don't know how to get it, right?

And when we can help other folks get it right, we can have this wonderful successful, life for ourselves. But when we help other people get it, now we're layering on this thing called significance, which is what we do to help others and leave legacy and as I say, leave the wood pile a little higher, right? And so I think these are the kinds of opportunities that you're bringing to your listeners. And it's a common area for you and me, Logan.

We want to do it. We want to enjoy it ourselves. We want to have it for ourselves, but we also want to make sure other people know about it and can help them, achieve it as well.

Sun, rhythm, and consistent light cycles

Absolutely. Another component [clears throat] down there is sun, right? We've been told to be scared of the sun, demonize the sun, and and we think that the artificial light has no effect, and it's a massive effect. El Salvador 13 north latitude is you've got, 5:30 sunrise and 6:00 sunset, like, basically every day.

Yeah. And you get timing, you get consistency, and you can be in the sun and get a rhythm. And so, Mike, something I want to pick your brain on is I've stayed at a friend's house down there and it was right after he closed, right on when he bought this and slept terrible. It was it was horrible.

And I'm sure this Salvador, right? This is El Salvador. Yeah. Right.

Right there on the coast, Libertad area. And [snorts] so the next day, a guy that has become a good friend, his master electrician, Hugo, he comes in and he's like, "Oh, wow.

EMF and electrical grounding in the home (panel location, concrete shielding, bedroom choice, post-travel effects)

Yeah, this is a nightmare." the m the main wasn't grounded. The outlets weren't grounded, the And so he went through and did this whole EMF mitigation, put up some things around like the mini splits. And so that next night, slept like a rock.

So the exact same place, right, just doing the mitigation had a huge impact. So that's what I was saying is like I can't just blanket tell people to go anywhere without some a consideration there. And so like how have you viewed that within your project your projects and then yeah this can be a little hard for me Logan because I my mom always said if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all. Okay.

And I live by that because I don't throw anyone else under the bus. But I'm going to softly do that a little bit. The building codes in Latin America are pretty good. They are.

The problem is that, not every I'll just say it this way. Not everybody, maybe many, sometimes most developers just simply don't build to the code because there's really not a very thorough inspection mechanism in place or in some cases any inspection mechanism. You go get a building permit, literally you pay your fee at the office and you go away. Nobody ever comes to your site to inspect anything, right?

And so you might have the right architectural drawings showing the grounding on the electrical, for instance, but if you don't put it in, nobody ever knows. I talked about some of the things in why we started our development company. Countertops that were too low and you'd bang your knees trying to slide the bar stool underneath or, door handles at the wrong height or the light in the mirrors here so your face is in a shadow. Like those are all like I would call them easy things to notice, right?

The stuff that's hard to notice are things like a big enough electrical service. And that's important, right? For two reasons. One, you don't want to keep blowing a fuse every time your split turns on, right?

Which, a lot of times, they're saying, "Oh, I can buy a house for, $60 a square foot." Yeah, you can. They can build a structure and it's a house for $60 a square foot in Latin America. But you know what? It has a 30 amp panel box.

Like the first time your split goes on, you're blowing the fuses, right? Like there's a hundred things in a house that make it not what I want. If you're okay with that, fine. You run fans, run fans, right?

And you don't want grounding on your electric, no problem. You don't want hot water in your bathroom, no problem. Like, all those things cost more money, right? But yeah, you can have a house for 60 bucks a square foot, but it's probably not it's not a house that I want to live in.

It's certainly not a house my wife wants to live in, right? And so, I think, one of the things we said was we're going to come down and we're going to do it to we're going to build not only to the code because the code's pretty good. We're actually going to build to the code, but we're also going to build to a North American expectation standard, right? And not a not a not a legal standard, not an engineering standard, although that's important, too, but an expectation standard, right?

And so, when you overt tax an electrical system, right? When you run it at full out plus, they're all they can all go 10% more than what they're rated or whatever, right? But you do that like you're starting to strain your electrical components, right? You're creating a lot of noise, electrical noise in the system if it's not grounded.

And, holy smokes. Now you're talking about tons of electrical EMF, right? And you're talking about a ton of EMF flying off of it. And so, when you when you build to the standard, when you oversize your electrical infrastructure, you build it properly, you ground it properly, and then where are you putting your panel box?

Like you know if you can put it in quote unquote a mud room or the maid's quarters or somewhere that is protected by a cement block wall again now you're kind of mitigating whatever's happening there into the rest of the house so the design of the home itself becomes important for the mitigation of EMF the shielding right I mean and in fact some people go as far as doing Faraday cages right or Faraday fabric I mean there's a fabric that's like a Faraday fabric that you can put into your wall and now if you're building from scratch now if your house is already up, then you have to look at other types of methodologies to mitigate EMF. But just a concrete wall, by the way, does a pretty good job of mitigating EMF. So depending on where your electrical infrastructure enters the house, where it's distributed, how it's distributed, you're right, Logan, all of those things absolutely matter as to the amount of, EMF that you're taking as a as a body, and where you sleep. So where you sleep in a house might make a difference.

If there's three bedrooms, one might be great because it's got three cement block walls between you and the electrical infrastructure generally and one might be right under it. Right? So again, lots of factors impact how well you feel in that regard. And I don't know that I would have ever taken it as seriously if I wouldn't have had some of these experiences.

And you feel so good down there and then different places you have such a different experience. And so, it's been very eye opening. And then when I get back to Arkansas and I feel like hammered crap, in comparison, like that's really but you've been through two airports. You've been on an airplane, right?

You've been around a thousand million people with their cell phones all active, right? So, so just the coming home, so to speak, puts a ton of EMF stress on your body.

Safety versus perceived risk

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, when you know when I first went down, everybody's like, "Well, don't get murdered. Oh, don't get kidnapped.", so like what is a lot of Hey, can I tell can I tell you what I asked those people if they tell me that?

The first question I have is Thank by the way, I thank them. Thank you for caring about my safety. Because they do they do care about your safety. Or maybe they pretend to do, but I'll take them at their word.

Thank you for caring about my safety. I really appreciate that you care about me this much. Do you do you have a passport? Yeah, they don't.

Only 70% of Americans have a passport, right? So, if they're worried about me getting killed in El Salvador and they don't have a passport, I'm like, well, okay, I understand. Obviously, you don't travel very much. I travel all the time, I actually feel pretty comfortable there, but again, thank you for your concern.

Yeah, I have a passport. I lived in El Salvador for 5 years. I was scared shitless. Tell me more.

I want to know about it. Like that's like the opposite end of the spectrum. I don't have a passport. Like not qualified.

They are simply not qualified to give me advice on my safety in El Salvador, right? Like they have zero credibility. They have care. They care.

I appreciate their care, but from a credibility standpoint, zero. The person who says, "I lived there for 5 years and I was scared shitless for 5 years." Like, okay, tell me more. They have a 10 credibility. They have a 10 on, like I want to know more, right?

So, yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but I'm just like, yeah, I hear that and I'm just like, God, do you have a passport? All right, let's start there. We're we're going to go down and say an extended period this winter down there. And it's it's just such a beautiful experience.

I wish people would have, right? Fear of the unknown is powerful. Right. By the way, I do a presentation.

I've written articles about it. It's in my book. This idea the credibility scale is in my book too by the way. I talk about all this stuff in my book because you know I want people to like if they're really interested like you know they think they want to own a property overseas or they want to invest overseas or live overseas whatever it is right you don't have to buy you can rent you can move overseas and rent right but if anybody's thinking about being overseas as a renter or buyer or you know investor whatever like I want to provide the information in the book that's helpful.

And one of the things I talk about is this idea of risk versus the perception of risk, right? Like I'll give you an example. We all know statistically, factually that driving is like 400 times more dangerous than flying, right? 400 times more dangerous, right? In terms of deaths per year, right?

And when you add in texting, like the number I can't remember, it's like it's like 5,000 times more. It's insane, right? So people will drive to the airport texting on their phone no and for some people they get on the airplane and then they're like this I if you just simply look at the facts like it doesn't make any sense but we're human we feel right this feels very different I can text I'm driving no big deal I get on the airplane and now I'm scared right the exact opposite at a factor of a couple thousand should be true but that's not how we feel and feeling is a big part of who we are as humans, right? And so perception, a risk and the perception of risk are two different things, right?

And I think for a lot of people and I don't know how you do it, Logan. You like I think you just have to drag people, right? Just come to El Salvador. Trust me.

Just trust me. Come to El Salvador. Like I've been there however many times. You've been there 13 times.

Like it's wonderful. It's safe. I'll take care of you. You got nothing to worry about.

Then when they get there, like all of a sudden the perception of risk goes away because now it's experiential, right? And their experience there is safe, wonderful, friendly, warm, healthy, and like, wham, it just, converts. But up front, it's hard. I agree with you.

It's really hard. Yeah. I, I'm more concerned with going to downtown Little Rock, honestly, than I am to go fly into El Salvador. Right.

Just is as you should be. Yeah. So, what with as long as you've been in the Latin America countries and experience, what is your forecast?

Regional outlook and the "time machine" development curve

What do you think is going to play out, especially with El Salvador's completely flipped the script, right, with what Boulli has done is unbelievable. So, what do you see as in that forecast? Yeah.

Well, like Central America's too big. That's like saying, what's the future of America? Well, I think certain states are going to do better than other states and certain areas of certain states are going to do better than other areas in the state. Right.

So, I but broad, let me answer it as broadly as possible. I think I think Central America as a region of developing countries is going to continue to be vibrant. If you look at their growth statistics across the board, they're usually double what US GDP growth. In Latin America, it's almost always, five to eight.

So, it's double, right? Now, they're much smaller economies. They're, as a development, they're much quote unquote further behind, right? Some more so than others, right?

And so, so, so you've got more dynamic growth. So, I think the growth potential just generally in economic terms is going to continue to be strong and robust for these countries. I think different countries are going to have different levels of growth. Something like you mentioned B Kelly.

I mean Blly did two brilliant things. One, he, solved the crime problem. I know that didn't make a lot of the Hollywood set very happy, but whatever. It made I'll tell you what, it made it made millions of Salvadorans very happy.

And they actually don't give a crap what, hundred people in Hollywood think, right? I don't either, right? Mill millions of El Salvadorans are much happier because they can sit on their front porch and not worried about getting shot, right? So, so he did wonderful things there.

The other thing he did was he made Bitcoin legal tender, right? And so, by being the first country out there and now a few others have followed on, but by being the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender, he really stuck a, stuck a very important, stick in the ground and said, "Hey, we believe in this. We're going to support it." And what we've seen, you said you're going down there for a Bitcoin conference coming up. We've just seen tons of investment in the crypto space.

Not limited to Bitcoin obviously but a ton of investment and it's high-end investment. It's not it's not it's not you know it's not Mchiladoras, right? It's not you know underwear factories. So I mean no big deal.

I mean hey look I wear underwear and it's got to get made somewhere, right? You know and El Salvador made a lot of underwear for a long time, right? A lot of garments and right and that's great because it is employment, right? But when you start to bring in knowledge investment, right, and knowledge workers, it changes the dynamic of foreign investment in significant ways.

Blly is was way ahead of the curve on that for sure. Cracking down on the violence and the gang stuff. He took good care of that. And so I think El Salvador has a very bright future for a long time.

I really do. Panama is a logistics hub. You got the canal, right? You got the canal that makes it a logistics hub, but now they're, they're a financial services center.

They're tourism. So they got a lot of various elements to their economy. Costa Rica really hangs its hat on tourism and I think will continue to be the leading tourist destination in the region. Belize, English speaking, we do a lot of work in Belize because quite frankly, it's the easy button for many Americans and Canadians.

Like I don't have to learn a new language. I can read the contracts, right? Like everything's in English. So I think Belize for a lot of those reasons plus it's Caribbean you got the reef and jungle and ruins and Mayan ruins and stuff.

So I think there's a lot of reasons Belize will continue to do very well. The three countries that are really going to you know probably struggle the most but probably conversely offer the greatest upside opportunity you know Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. You know I'm a big fan of Nicaragua. I lived there for 14 years.

We have a beautiful community that we built there. I'm I'm I'm bullish on the country. Obviously, they're they've, they become part of the axis of evil according to the current administration and some of the neocons. But again, these political things, go in waves and they can be long cycle.

It could be decades, right? Doesn't have to be four-ear cycles. It could be decades, right? But I think ultimately, Nicaragua is probably going to do pretty well.