The Fountain of Youth World Summit with David Wolfe, nutrition authority and author of Sunfood Success System.

Kevin: I’m excited about this talk today and let’s get right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about, ah, how you started in this and your own personal story?

David: Well, I think I got oriented towards natural foods when I first came to California when I was seven years old. That was the first time I had ever eaten an orange or a tangerine off of a tree and that memory has continued to stay with me and it’s probably what got me started. I ended up growing up as kind of a San Diego, Southern California, Los Angeles surfer and pretty much was oriented, I think, genetically towards natural healing and health because both my parents are medical doctors and they met in medical school. In fact, I was conceived in a medical school library!

Kevin: Okay.

David: So in some strange way this is something that was probably preordained. I got deeply involved in natural diets when I went to college because I started buying my own food. I realized I was allergic to quite a few different foods. I had no idea that food allergies even existed before that, particularly dairy products. So I stopped eating dairy products and upon doing so I thought I’d better study this subject and began to research nutrition and read books on nutrition and inevitably that led me to what was really easy and simple, which was just eating an orange, eating an apple, eating natural foods. It’s the fastest food. Being a very busy person studying a lot in school at that time, going for three different degrees at once that just made the most sense to me, natural, original food, raw food. And eventually after a number of years I became a raw food eater, meaning that I would eat salads and I would eat fruit. I would eat nuts, and seeds, and eat seaweed and all kinds of things like this because it was — it took no preparation.

Kevin: Right.

David: And that’s — that’s led me into transforming what was a hobby of nutrition into a career because people would always ask me, well what are you eating? We want to know what you’re having. Can we have what you’re having? And eventually it led to a book, and several books, and lecture tours and a whole of fun in between.

Kevin: Sure. And a lot of people come to you for nutrition advice. What do you think is their mindset when they’re introduced to your philosophy on eating?

David: I think the general mindset out there is open. People really want to believe, with all the choices we have, and all the knowledge that’s available, people just want to know the simplest way to do the right thing. And that’s my job to connect people with simple foods that are great for weight loss that are fun to eat, that taste good, that are natural, that have the minimum amount of processing so that they can arrive at the end of their day and go, you know what? I did something good for myself, for my family, for the planet.

Kevin: What are three or four things that you can identify that you basically can tell just about everyone about weight loss, a key to weight loss or success in nutrition?

David: Well, I think the key to weight loss is you want to get more bang for your buck. You want more nutrition, less calories, more fiber. Well, what does that equate to? It just means eating more plants. It means eating more salad. It means eating more vegetables. It means eating more fruit. It means eating seaweed, and nuts, and seeds and things of this nature; and less of everything else. So my approach to eating really is really enticing because you get to eat things that taste good. It’s not dogmatic. It’s not a something where okay, you can’t eat this anymore. You have to eat this. It’s just simply eat replacing, because there’s only so much we can eat in a day, some of the other choices, for snacks, for example, with healthier choices, replacing, say, a big dinner meal with half of it being a salad. So, again, we’re getting more nutrition. We’re getting less calories and we’re getting more fiber and that provides us a satiated feeling but it begins to increase our metabolism so we start dropping that weight. I even go into specifics about foods that speed up metabolism, which is a very important thing for us right now. For example, kelp, powered kelp, it tastes like salt. You can sprinkle it on an avocado. You can sprinkle it on a salad. You can sprinkle it on a steak even. You can put it on anything.

Kevin: It comes from seaweed by the way just so…

David: Yeah, kelp is a seaweed and it’s probably the most important seaweed for us today with all the chemicals and toxins in our environment because it helps protect our immune system. In fact, in the 1930s it was found out that iodine, which is prominent in kelp seaweed, was the most powerful mineral for your immune system and wow, what an incredibly powerful piece of information. It also helps the thyroid and it helps speed up metabolism. So it helps us to lose weight quickly.

Another thing that’s really powerful in that is coconut and coconut products. So any kind of coconut products generally helps to speed metabolism, provides us with the right kinds of fat and oils and especially if those foods are raw. If that coconut is raw we get the right type of fat. Saturated fat is a critical part of being healthy. Even though we’ve heard so much propaganda to the contrary, most of the saturated fat we’ve heard about has come from, for example, animal products or something that’s a steak or something that has unsaturated fat that has been cooked. Now, once that saturated fat’s been cooked it then does become problematic but in it’s raw natural state, as the Polynesians discovered over thousands of years, there is no connection between heart disease and coconut because the saturated fat in coconut is almost always consumed in its raw natural state.

Kevin: Okay. Then why do we hear that coconut oil is bad for you?

David: Well, it fits into the issues of our day in terms of marketing of foods. And that is there’s very major interest out there. There’s the soy interest. There’s the corn interest, which feed the cattle industry, which feeds the dairy industry. And the soybean industry has a cheap raw product they can create, which is hydrogenated oil. They can take a soy oil that’s rancid and bubble hydrogen gas through it and turn it into something that looks like coconut oil and is extremely difficult for the body to deal with. It’s a Trans fatty acid. It’s a rancid fat. And they use propaganda against coconut and tropical oil products in order to drive them out of the U.S. market to be replaced by cheaper alternatives “soy products,” hydrogenated oil products or hydrogenated corn oil products. And this is really something that in the last about ten years has finally reversed. People have finally realized oh, actually coconut is good for me and the Polynesians never had heart disease. In fact, it’s the hydrogenated oil that has been most connected to the whole syndrome of heart disease.

Kevin: Sure. And the coconut oil speeds up metabolism?

David: That’s exactly right. It’s an incredible weight loss food. In general, if we are able to eat on top of those two things, kelp and coconut oil, in general if we’re able to eat more vegetables we’re going to get more nutrition. We’re going to get less calories. We’re going to get more fiber. We can snack on that stuff all day, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, things like that; right at our desk or whatever we’re doing and not have to worry about gaining weight. In fact, we’ll probably lose weight if we snack all day because we keep our digestive system active. We increase our metabolism and we can get things moving quicker due to all that fiber.

Kevin: What about some of the diets out there like the South Beach Diet? A lot of people come to me and they say protein, protein, protein, protein. Tell me a little bit about protein and what you have experienced with it.

David: Well, the best sources of protein are from plants because they’re A.) The cleanest sources. One of the problems we have today is the animal food industry cannot be trusted. If we want to do a little research on this we can even go back to Upton Sinclair’s incredible book written in 1930s about the meat industry back in the 1930s, how toxic it was; all the way up to John Robbins “Diet for A New America” and even the exposés that we find in “Fast Food Nation” and more recent writings. What we discover is that the fast food industry is an industry. It has lost the love. It has lost the compassion. It has lost the care for detail. These are things that I am intimately concerned with when it comes to food because, you know, we’re sensitive to subtle things in food. Everyone knows that mom’s home cooking tastes better. That’s just a fact. So if we have food that’s treated with love we know it tastes better. But if we have food that’s treated with unconsciousness, greed, the bottom line then that food cannot be nutritious. I don’t care how much protein it has. Too much protein is a major toxic issue to the kidneys. It’s very problematic for heart conditions and generally becomes over time sluggish. So we have to be very careful that we get our protein from plant sources so we get real protein. For example, hemp protein; it’s a complete protein source. It contains the sulphur (sulfur) bearing amino acids, which create not just muscle but flexible muscle, which creates the neuro transmitters for proper brain chemistry. We can get our protein, for example, from spirulina, which is a super food that has been eaten, in say, Mexico for thousands of years and maybe unknown to our listeners but it’s something we want to explore if we really want to get the right kind of protein.

Kevin: Tell me a little bit more about spirulina.

David: Spirulina is a microscopic alga that grew in the biggest city of the world for thousands of years and even still today is Mexico City. Now, how in the world did they feed all those people in Mexico City? I mean when Cortez arrived in 1520 in Mexico City him and his men could not believe what they had seen. This was a city bigger than all the cities in Europe. It was a city that fed itself primarily on the protein source called pirulina, which is an algae. It’s a spiral algae. They grew it in the volcanic lakes and the highland planes in the Mexico City region and they would just dry it on rocks and sell it in the market and it turned out to be, when western analytical science got a hold of it, the highest protein content food in the world.

Many tourists return to Ireland year after year and use these holiday homes as a base to explore Ireland and are enchanted by some of the coastal villages and rolling hills. The Emerald Isle, Dublin, Cork and Belfast are just a few of the popular locations families come to and stay in one of the many holiday homes.

Dublin is an extremely popular capital city; tourists come here on vacation or for long weekend breaks. Many couples come here on a romantic break and choose to say in a holiday cottage or self catering apartment which is available to rent direct from the holiday home owner. Cork is another popular holiday home destination, families return to Cork year after year to stay in one of its charming country cottages.

When visiting Belfast, you must also visit Donegall Square and see City Hall. Ulster Museum has remnants from the Armada shipwreck, the Early Ireland Gallery and Irish antiquities. There is an Irish collection of about 20,000 volumes in the Linen Hall Library. Tourist can stay in large country farm house or beautiful holiday cottage and sample some of the local pubs. Crown Liquor Saloon is the most popular pub in Belfast.

There are several musical programs in the Grand Opera House. There are tropical plants like banana, sugar and coffee in the Palm House. There is a high walkway in the Tropical Ravine. The architecture of the Queen’s University is well worth a glance. Beautiful mosaics can be seen in St. Anne’s Cathedral. This is an Anglican church. Near to all of these attractions are beautiful holiday homes and self catering apartments available to rent.

There are pubs, entertainment venues, galleries and restaurants in the Golden Mile. Several murals are painted on buildings in Culturlann Macadam O’Fiaich. Murals also exist in the Fernhill house. These are regarding the Protestants who live in the Shankill district. There are forty endangered species in the Belfast Zoo. The Belfast Castle offers a comprehensive view of the city.

Another reason why families come to Ireland and stay in a rented holiday cottage or apartment is the golf. Ireland is home to more than four hundred golf courses. Players of any skill level can adjust themselves to these. These courses offer scenery, challenge, design and a unique location. In Ireland, golfing is the biggest single sport holiday enticement. Many courses are pay and play ones.

This island is a paradise for keen fishermen. The coastline extends over 3,000 miles. The riverbank is 7,000 miles. In the countryside, there are hundreds of bogs and lakes. Fishing has become an interesting activity due to low levels of pollution and moderate climate. There is a high yearly rainfall to maintain the levels of the streams, rivers, lakes and inland bogs. You can find sea trout, lake or brown, there are also fresh water fish and pike. The marine environment in Ireland is warmed by the Atlantic drift. So, it supports warm and cold water species. For sea fishing, there are more than eighty species of salt water fish. For coarse fishing, there are tench, eel, perch, rudd, roach, bream and pike. For game fishing, there are sea trout, trout and salmon. The fishermen can stay in a country cottage or farmhouse whilst on vacation in Ireland.

If you are planning for spend your vacation or holidays tour at this adventurous place full of nature beauty, then there several kind of hotel available in the Ladakh. Hotels in Leh ladakh are classified into several categories like A, B, C and D. The hotels of A categories are very great comfortable and full of all essential equipments important for the need of the guest and travelers. For the example Hotel De-Wa-Chan is an ideal hotel located at the country side by the bank of Holy Indus river in Leh ladakh. Due to the incredible and beautiful surroundings of the hotels in ladakh, the guest feels like heaven. The hotel provides all the great facility with Air Conditioned rooms, hot & cold water, Internet, Telephone, Library, delightful garden, dining by offering varieties delicious foods and continental foods and stunning views.

Tourist has great scope to tour the region of India. From historical aspect, a tourist can travel – St. Paul’s Cathedral, Victoria Memorial, Vidyasagar Setu and National Library.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is situated beside Victoria Memorial. In Kolkata it is known as “island of attractions”. It was built in 1847 by Bishop Wilson in Gothic Revival style. It is one of the most attractive places for tourists in Kolkata.

Victoria Memorial was built in the memory of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom between 1906 and 1921.

In Kolkata Vidyasagar Setu is known as Second Hooghly Bridge. It is a beautiful bridge on Hooghly River.

National Library of India is the largest library in India for public records which is situated in Kolkata.

For a tourist Tipu Sultan Mosque of Kolkata is also attractive place. It can’t be a holiday destination but it can be a place of learning about culture, history and society for travelers.

Dakshineswar Kali Temple is one of the holy places of Kolkata. It is the place of Marxist-Leninist party also in India.

In the modern Kolkata there are many parks and traveling places to travel. We most like the Science City, Eden Garden, Millennium Park, Birla Planetarium, Salt Lake Stadium, Calcutta High Court etc. which has been developed by Kolkata government. It is much congested metropolitan city of Kolkata.

In the transportation – Taxi, Metro, Bus and Trams are common. Tourists not prefer to travel the city but it is one of the best cities of India. People of Bengal are much polite and know the Bengali and English language.

From traveling point of view Kolkata has Diamond Harbor and Millennium Park. From Millennium Park, a tourist can view whole scene of Kolkata.

to websites should not abuse them. Two

Abusers are connected to the PR Society,

Director Gerard Corbett of Hitachi

and Christina Darnowski,

PRS Resource Center.

Tues., July 31

WEB ABUSE IS PR ETHICAL ISSUE

Copyright violation is an easy matter on the web where stories can be downloaded and copied and buyers of single user access codes can share them with friends and business associates.

However, depriving a paid website of revenues in this way is unethical. Those who purchase access codes, including codes to this website, agree to keep those codes to themselves. They are responsible for the security on those codes.

Abusers are readily identified by the number of times a site is visited and we have come across two connected with the PR Society—director Gerard Corbett of Hitachi and Christina Darnowski, manager of the professional resource center of the Society.

Corbett’s codes, on one $295 subscription, turned out to be the fifth most frequently used codes for the period July 1-18. The 10,510 “hits” via his codes were the second highest on the list, surpassing companies paying thousands of dollars for site licenses to odwyerpr.com.

The only codes used more than Corbett’s were the free sample user name and password that we give out so people can sample the website.

Corbett says he has no idea how his codes came to be used so much and says he never gave them to anyone.

PRS Caught Again—Red Handed

Also popping up on the list of abusers is someone from PRS h.q.—Christina Darnowski, manager of the Professional Resource Center (library).

Usage of her codes is in the top 25 and far above usage for a single subscriber.

This is the second time we have caught PRS at this. In early 2005, the web tracking system found that PRS h.q., on one subscription, was accessing odwyerpr.com as much as those paying $5,000 a year.

Rather than file a copyright violation claim, we brought this to the attention of COO Catherine Bolton and suggested h.q. purchase a site license for $3,000 yearly so all 55 staffers could access the site without limit.

This offer was turned down. PRS purchased one additional subscription.

Hitachi is $84 Billion Company

With Corbett, we suspect fellow PRS directors might have gotten the code somehow since they’re probably interested in the stories and editorials we’ve been running about the nominations.

Only two of the 16 other directors subscribes to any O’Dwyer product, a tradition of board members. They’d rather give up their APRs than buy anything from us.

Also suspects are fellow PR people at Hitachi, a worldwide company with $84 billion in sales and 350,000 employees. There are probably many hundreds and even thousands of PR staffers at Hitachi.

Where Are Ethics Board, Fellows?

Ripping off media is an ethical violation in our opinion and we’d like to know where the Ethics Board and College of Fellows stand on this issue.

Linda Cohen of the Caliber Group, Tucson, chair of the Ethics Board, said she is not allowed to speak to us because of a boycott against us by the national board.

How’s that for ethics?

There is not only a communications boycott against us, but members. CEO Rhoda Weiss has yet to appear before a chapter and answer questions of members and COO Bill Murray has appeared before only one chapter, National Capital. He did not invite questions and none were asked. PRS is still withholding the transcripts of the 2005 and 2006 Assemblies from members who have sought them.

Rick French of French/West/Vaughan has quit the 12-member EB but doesn’t want to say anything critical about it. He said pressure of his business and private life is the sole reason for quitting although he “personally wishes the EB had more authority to effect changes within the organization, but that is simply my opinion.” He would not expand on that statement.

Fellows Are Silent

The College of Fellows, consisting of about 300 of the most senior and experienced members and currently headed by 1997 PRS president Debra Miller, is silent on this issue and, indeed, all issues.

PRS h.q., without a single senior PR person on staff, is desperately in need of good PR counsel and it should come from the Fellows. PRS has been unable to hire a replacement for PR manager Cedric Bess who left in March.

We seriously ask what reputable PR person would join the Society under the current conditions? VP-PR Janet Troy, who joined in 2004, was not a member of PRS and told the Bergen Record she was “clueless” about it.

The tradition of the “Fellows” is that it is an honorific that goes on the resumes and biographies and is always attached to their names but it carries no responsibilities whatever.

It’s possible that the Fellows, having spent lifetimes working for institutions, are so “institutionalized” that they can’t possibly say anything against an institution and particularly their own professional institution.

Maybe this will change because problems at PRS h.q. have reached a critical mass.

Fourth PRS Ripoff

The two instances of abuses of the odwyerpr.com codes described above are the third and fourth instances of ripoffs of the O’Dwyer Co. by PRS.

The first was the copying and sale of our works (and those of many other authors) from 1977-94. Gross profits approached $60K yearly, according to financial records distributed to the Assemblies and press. None of the authors ever got a nickel from PRS.

Another instance was the theft of an entire day of notes from our open PRS conference bag while we were talking to Corbett at the 2003 Assembly in New Orleans. This crime sabotaged a reporter in performance of his duties. Even worse was that PRS leaders and staff showed no interest in our problem, refusing to give us an audiotape of the session which was readily available. A battery of technicians recorded the Assembly.

PRS Is Tight-Fisted with Press

One would think that having made so much money from the unauthorized sale of works of writers, PRS would be generous with them.

Also, PRS is supposed to win the good will of reporters, not their ill will. But the opposite is true. It charged them the full price for attending sessions with meals at the 2003 and 2004 annual conferences.

We were blocked from attending the 2003Assembly lunch because we had not purchased a $35 ticket. The press room at the conference is typically without food while PRS staff has a full boat of pastries, fruit, fruit drinks, etc.

The press room at the 2004 conference did not even have coffee when we used it on Monday. There was no food in the press room on the Sunday of the conference in Salt Lake City last year. After complaining, a small dish of pastries was delivered. The press center, which used to be placed near registration, a hub of activity, in recent years has been placed as far as possible from that. In 2002, PRS gave out 150 copies of its members’ Blue Book to the press. Current policy bars reporters from the online directory.

Companies marketing to blogs and social networking sites are “devoting more of their budgets to PR rather than ad agencies,” says an article in the July 23 Crain’s New York Business by Matthew Flamm…Marcia Silverman of Ogilvy PR Worldwide, chair of the Council of PR Firms, has yet to comment to us on the CPRF’s report (7/25 NL) that (astoundingly) said ad agencies as well as PR firms could be the best at dealing with blogs, social media, etc. What is the CPRF doing promoting ad agencies?! Silverman has not talked to us for at least five years. Almost no executives from PR firms owned by WPP Group headed by Martin Sorrell are available for comment to the press.

Mark Weiner, head of research at Ketchum, sparked many replies to odwyerpr.com when he wrote that PR returns $6 for every dollar invested while ads return about $1.20. Therefore, he says, companies should shift money out of ads and into PR. Some marketers are now favoring PR and direct response ads and are killing their “image” ads since the latter don’t produce tangible results like actual sales or inquiries. But how are the media supposed to exist with few or no ads from these freeloading marketers!?

Also, a reader pointed out to Weiner that PR is often a negative—stopping a story, blocking information flow, preventing a crisis. How can that be measured, the reader asked? PR can also be institutions cooperating with each other to frustrate some action. For instance, the authors who were ripped off by PRS (see above) found none of their publishers would help them. The publisher “institutions” stuck with another institution—PRS. When PRS/Central Michigan sought greater power for the Assembly last year, not one of the other 109 chapters supported it. The chapters (institutions) stuck with PRS. Institutions, especially when cooperating with each other, can trample on the rights of individuals.

An unfortunate result of the estrangement of PRS from the press is that there is no national publicity on the Society’s 60th anniversary. Celebration was to have started July 1.

SURPRISING TRUTH # 1: Anybody can do a background check on anybody, any time they want to. Now I know that I’ve lost some of you who now think that I am off my rocker because you know that there are all sorts of forms that you have to sign with all kinds of legal warnings with criminal penalties and such, but I’ll say it again. “ANYBODY CAN DO A BACKGROUND CHECK ON ANYONE, ANY TIME THEY FEEL LIKE IT.” Because I want you to read this whole article, I am not going to explain those statements until further into the article.

SURPRISING TRUTH # 2: There is no instant national database of all criminal records that you can access. Now I know that you are sure that I am crazy. “Why just last night on Law & Order they got the bad guy’s record . . .” There, you are talking about NCIC, the National Crime Information Center or otherwise known as the FBI files. While the FBI maintains the best and most accurate records, unfortunately, you can’t get them, unless of course you are a federally insured bank, a defense department contractor, a nuclear power plant, a branch of the government itself or some other such entity. A surprising amount of otherwise intelligent people think that there are giant government databases with information on everyone including their criminal history, job history, credit files an even what books they check out of the library and what videos they rent. If that were true, why does it take the government itself four months and $2400 to conduct its own background checks? Don’t believe me? Look here: http://www.opm.gov/extra/investigate/FIN-2002/fin02-01Attach1.asp

SURPRISING TRUTH # 3: There is a big, big difference between everywhere and anywhere. These database companies advertise that they search everywhere, or at least that’s what they want you to believe. Using the word Nationwide is designed to make you think that they check everywhere. The question then becomes, “If you don’t check everywhere, what do you check?” The answer is that you should check anywhere a person has lived or worked. Does it really help to check a database of Orange County, California if the person has always lived and worked in Orange County, Florida or vice versa?

So if there’s no such thing as an instant nationwide database what are these companies selling? First let me tell you what these databases are good for and then I’ll tell you why they are dangerous. In some states of the USA their REAL criminal records are available in some kind of publicly accessible form. It may be on the internet and it may require a subscription or acknowledgement of permissible purpose for its use, but it is available. Texas is a good example of this. For a small fee you can go online and access the REAL criminal records of the state of Texas. Florida, Minnesota and Virginia are other examples of where you can get via these database services what I call “REAL” records. The problem is that these database companies don’t tell the consumer (you) that is most cases and in most areas of the country you are getting either nothing or marginal information at best.

Here’s why. The companies that collect and sell these database records, and the hundreds of companies that re-sell this information do not emphasize the weakness of their systems. This is why they emphasize the words “instant” and “nationwide” in their promotions. Everyone wants cheap and instant as opposed to slow and expensive, don’t they? Can you imagine a website that advertises “Slow And Expensive Limited Area Background Checks.” But, in fact, some areas of the country, like the Carolinas and most of California require exactly that, records that must be searched in person at each local county courthouse.

These companies get records where they can get them for free; usually from a state’s Department of Corrections, which means you are only getting info on a person if he/she has been convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison. When most people think of a criminal history background check they think of all arrests and convictions; both misdemeanors and felonies and the court disposition, guilty or not guilty and the sentence. As you can see, if you are getting only felony convictions, you are getting only a small piece of the pie. For example; a person could be arrested a couple of times for having drug paraphernalia or a small amount of drugs in his or her possession. If the records you are getting only include felony convictions, you would have no record of that person’s drug abuse.

The other problem that these Instant Nationwide background checks have is that in many areas of the country they get nothing at all because the states or the county superior courts or district courts don’t furnish them with free records. Here is another example: Suppose you are a parent in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boston, Atlanta or New Orleans (just to name a few) and you want to do a criminal background check. You go online and type in “background check” in Yahoo or Google and right away you see the ads for the “Instant Nationwide” background checks. You choose one of the websites that offers instant records, you pay your $19.95 or $49.95 and you put in the information on the person you want checked. Instantly the website tells you that there is no record found based on the info that you have provided. You feel great! You go ahead and tell the nanny that she can start tomorrow because she has passed the background check. Here comes the big kick in the gut. . . What the website didn’t tell you is that their database records don’t search any of those areas at all. You just paid $19.95 or $49.95 and got NOTHING, ZERO, ZIP, NADA. Disclosure: Actually the proceeding sentence is not 100% true. In Nevada and Louisiana the databases do search currently incarcerated prisoners in their respective prison systems. So if your potential nanny is in prison right now then it would tell you that he/she is in prison, but I guess you would already know that.

Now to explain the # 1 Surprising Truth: I’ll say it again: Anyone can check anyone, anytime. If you are so inclined, you can check the criminal or civil record (or lack thereof) of your daughter’s boyfriend (I do that on a regular basis) your crazy neighbor next door, your business partner, your doctor, your ex-husband, your mayor or even any of the presidential candidates. In fact, you don’t even have to be a citizen of the USA to get these records. You can walk into the Superior Court (District Court in some states) clerk’s office, in the jurisdiction where that person lives/lived, go up to the counter, fill out a slip of paper, hand it to the clerk and wait for the results. Remember that you will only get the records from that county, i.e., if a person lived in multiple counties you would have to check each of them. The subject of your search could be an axe murderer from the next county over, but your county court clerk would not have a record of it.

OK, now you’ve got the information, what do you do with it? This is the area where the law is concerned; what you do with the information! If you use this information to discriminate against a person, deny them employment, housing or entrance to a school, etc. then you are violating the law and opening yourself to big time liabilities and possible lawsuits. This is what all of the consent forms with warnings are all about. It’s not the getting of the information that the laws are concerned with but the use of it.

In summary, read the fine print and ask questions to get the real records you want.