This is a YouTube video titled "Mattress Smarts 101 for High-Performance Sleep with Jack Dell’Accio" featuring a discussion between Dave Asprey and Jack Dell’Accio recorded in February 2022. The content is a detailed conversation about the use of flame retardants in mattresses, regulatory challenges, and innovative solutions like using Kevlar to create safer, chemical-free mattresses for better sleep performance.
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You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Now, before we get into performance enhancement from a mattress, where we're going to go, there's one other thing that's been a real pet peeve of mine for a long time. And it was in my first book, but I knew about it since, you know, five years before that. The state of California, probably sometime in the 80s, said, we are very concerned about, about children smoking in bed so the mattresses could catch on fire without the children getting out of the bed. Therefore, we are going to mandate, even in children's mattresses and adult mattresses, six pounds on average of flame retardant endocrine disrupting chemicals for your own safety. And because California has so many people, people who manufacture mattresses for California said, well, we'll just use the standard for every mattress in the country instead of having a special California edition. And this led to, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer, other endocrine disruption, children's behavioral problems. And it was actually probably meant to be good. It was definitely an evil act. And it was funded by chemical companies who make flame retardants. They put lots of money into lobbying to force the mattress companies to do this. You might not know that, but if you don't buy a bed that has chemical free flame retardants or just no flame retardants, because frankly, who cares at this point point, since we don't smoke in bed anymore, then you're getting these automatically. And when I was deciding whether I wanted to have Jack on the show, I'm like, all right, tell me your flame retardant story. So Jack, how do you do this?
Well, flame retardant, that was a big deal for us because that's again, we've done everything to eliminate toxins.
It flies in the face of what you believe in.
Exactly. And so we were even questioning maybe we're not selling in the US anymore. Yeah, good for you.
That's integrity.
Because obviously our products made in Canada, we don't have any of these flame retardant laws. And flame retardants today are way much more of an issue for me than they were even five years ago because now they're getting into their phase changing chemicals and to stabilize those additional chemicals. But what we basically did initially, we were basically encouraging our customers to get doctor's notes so that we can sell them the mattress without any flame retardants because we were not making any flame retardants.
So this is an example of the chemical companies using the regulatory powers of the government to create a monopoly. That kind of shit pisses me off. Sorry.
I. Keep going then. We've seen that the US Producers of organic mattresses, how are they getting around it? They were getting around it, but not in a very straightforward way. They were. They were getting your organic wool, and then they were doing separate treatments to that wool because wool on its own is not a fire barrier. So they would. They would kind of.
My ship catch on fire a lot.
Yeah, so. So that was not an option for us and wool, then other nesting grouts. So we didn't want to get into allergens. We don't want to. You know, we didn't want to just be shifting over. Then we. We did find a. A Kevlar net, so. So we basically put this Kevlar neck and we sent it into the labs, and we made sure that we had zero off gassing that was tracked.
Kevlar is chemically inert, and that stuff does not off gas that I'm aware of.
No, exactly. So basically, we've opted to basically put a Kevlar jacket on all of our beds. It had the right flexibility, so we're able to get all the benefits of the surface of the bed without any of the Kevlar.
Is this actually a bulletproof mattress?
That's a good one.
I can't believe I didn't think of that until now. So you're saying, all right, and this actually makes me happy at a soul level, you're saying, all right, we'll follow your stupid rules, but we'll do it our way.
Sure, Exactly.
And so you did what they said, but not what they wanted. You didn't buy the chemicals. You bought Kevlar, which is more expensive instead. But you created a superior bed with that. So, all right.
