Toxins in Your Home? Mold, VOCs & Everyday Stuff That’s Secretly Ruining Your Health!

It doesn't matter how efficient we are if we're all dead. If you want to know if your air quality is good, stop testing your air. Start testing your dust. Over 50% of the global population deals with at least one chronic condition.

Go to every room in your house that has an air freshener and throw it away.

That's usually an indication that you have mold spores in your air.

This is the first month that the US Government has outlawed the only type of light bulbs that are good for you. Our government has completely given up on any kind of standards that are around human health. They are not your friends. And listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. I will not buy a fabric couch. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is you usually breathe a lot more of whatever foam is in there. The other one is it's a huge dust cloud and there's usually a flame retardant. Leather couches are the way to go because you can wipe dust off leather. And when you jump on a leather couch, you don't see a cloud of dust unless you just didn't dust it with a cloth. So for air quality, that and carpet seem like the worst things you could ever have in your house if you wanted to live a long time. Am I off base on that?

No, you're not off base at all. I mean, I purposely don't have wall to wall carpets anywhere. If I ever get carpets, I get small little area rugs as a decoration and I try to get ones that are washable just to make, you know, the cleaning process easy as possible. I also don't have these long threads where it just acts like a sponge. You know, you got to start making these decisions. Like you said, leather couches that you can clean, less fabric, less carpeting. This is going to help with our air quality in our home.

And if you want to get really sick really fast, go to a thrift store and buy a fabric couch. The chances of that being Moldy are like 99%.

I would agree.

Okay, so the big takeaway so far is that if you've had mold in your house, even if you had the drywall taken out and all of that that you need to go through and micro clean everything, I'm assuming with a HEPA vacuum cleaner.

HEPA vacuum cleaner, microfiber towels and botanical solutions are probably the best thing to do to wipe things away.

Like ecos. Probably.

Ecos is great. Yeah. There's so many products out there, it's hard to keep track of. But any botanical disinfectant that you like is going to be sufficient to remove the byproducts of mold.

I think it's also a good habit to have a dust cover on your mattress, one that's waterproof. That way you're not going to be getting dust. And if your mattress may have had some stuff on it, you're isolated from it, and I've done that for many years, it's less likely to get damaged in a moldy environment, and it's less likely to cause damage to you if it has mold on it. Is that good advice?

Oh, yeah. I just literally made that same recommendation one of my clients earlier today. I mean, it's. I think it's. Protecting your mattresses is a sound investment.

What percentage of illness do you think is caused by environmental error factors?

Really great question. So, according to the Cleveland Clinic, you know, disease is caused by four major contributors. Viruses, parasite, bacteria, and fungi, which obviously, part of mold is. Mold is part of fungi. You know, it's interesting because over 50% of the global population deals with at least one chronic condition. So that is astounding. 80% of the homes in the US based upon a study done by John Spangler in 1994, had a history of. Sorry, 50% had a history of water damage. 80% of those had a history of mold. So that tells you that, you know, if I'm looking on my street right now, every other house, at a minimum, has mold. And that's alarming. So if we start to add all these statistics together with 20,000 breaths per day, I mean, I have to think that at least 50% of the global population is dealing with environmental toxins and is suffering because of it.

It's not just mold, though, because I promised listeners that we were going to talk about air quality in general. Formaldehyde is an issue. My. My former wife trained at medical school on cadavers, and she breathes so much formaldehyde that she got sensitized to it, probably via mast cells, come to think of it. And from then on, whenever we would go somewhere that had high levels of formaldide, like a mobile home or something, or an rv, she would just get severe reactions like. Like disabling reactions, like drops in blood pressure and stuff like that. Just from formaldehyde. Tell me about formaldehyde or other VOCs and other toxins that are in homes and in home air specifically.

Yeah, so formaldehyde is a big one, mainly because everything that we buy these days comes to our house in two days. We have no idea where it came from. And a lot of the countries that we buy these products from don't really regulate formaldehyde nearly as much as, let's say, Canada, for example. And so a lot of our stuff contains high levels of formaldehyde that perpetually off gas into our environment, essentially creating these tiny particles that we breathe in with every breath that we take. And this is everything from baby furniture to, you know, wood floors, you name it. So all of the stuff we fill our house with, unless you specifically know to get formaldehyde free versions of things, you know you're going to have it. I'm pretty sure even there's formaldehyde in the magic eraser. You know, I mean, this is, this is the kind of breath that we have here and it can create a lot of issues. I mean, I once saw this woman which was in Brooklyn, New York or Queens or something to that effect. And she had literally red skin, you know, head to toe, crazy rashes and stuff. And we found just crazy levels of formaldehyde in her place. You also have VOCs. That's another. It's like, it's almost like the cousin of formaldehyde, because if it doesn't have formaldehyde, it's probably got some other VOCs you don't to want want.

And that's a volatile organic compound. What are other examples people have heard of?

Okay, so with volatile organic compounds, the probably the best thing to register this would be when you paint. So you paint a room, right? That smell that you were smelling is actually the VOCs that are coming off the wall as it cures. You know, there's anything with adhesives, bonding agents is going to have VOCs. So you, maybe you got a brand new vanity from, you know, some store yesterday and you're installing that. Well, they're going to have adhesives that glue it all together that could be off gassing for a while. Caulking. Silicone things that we use inside of our homes all the time can contain high levels of EOCs. Plastics, lots of plastics and stuff like that can off gas carpeting. Carpeting has high levels of EOCs if you put in new carpeting. So, you know, it's, it's kind of all around us and creates another barrier to poor air quality or having good air quality. And then we, you know, with, with that mold also produces VOCs called MVOCs. So if you have, you know, mold and bacteria and VOCs and formaldehyde and all the amazing things that we have out there in the environment, yeah, we really Create this situation where it's this perfect storm. We're overloading our immune system, and we're paying the price for it. People often ask me all the time, you know, why is this becoming such a problem today? You know, mold's been around forever. You know, we've been breathing inside of spaces forever. And, you know, I think we have a little bit of amnesia there. A little bit, because obviously there's. We've been living a little bit longer here and here. Actually, last year was the first year that our longevity declined. You know, when I look at this, if we look at the history of what's going on here, back in the 1970s, we had Richard Nixon in office. Richard Nixon, and, you know, China and Russia, they're all getting together and they start this feud about energy efficiency. And this is where I think we really just.

We.

We executed before we looked at consequences. Since then, we have made several strides forward in energy efficiency. And like you said earlier, I mean, we're. We're. We're absolutely trading energy efficiency for health right now. And so it doesn't matter how efficient we are if we're all dead. Right? You know, when you look at all of this, it's the craziest thing. We seal these buildings with spray foam top to bottom. It's the new thing. Why is. Why spray foam? You get the better R value per square inch. Okay. With that being said, there's no fresh air exchange. You know, our homes have historically been breathed really well. You had used to have these walls that would actually, they're like a balloon frame. So you would have a wall chase in between your interior and exterior wall that would go all the way up and down. They got rid of that. We're starting to build them tighter. And then it just went worse, switching from, you know, regular insulation like fiberglass or wool, to spray foam. And even in attics, like, if you understand building pressurization, air is going to rise. So when humidity comes into. Into play, because it's summertime, let's say that hot, humid air is going to rise and it's going to get trapped in the attic. And typically, when you look at these homes the way they're designed, you got no ventilation in the attic because they're spray foam. So all that humidity just stays there and just fills the house like a balloon. And then what else do we get? Well, mostly our H VACS are in the attic in these designs. And so now we get mold growing and bacteria growing in our attic. Now it's sucking into the H Vac and spreading, spreading across the house. And then we wonder why, you know, we're not feeling so well and nobody's even talking about it as a big problem. It's a very small few people like you and me right now.

I would go so far as to say that cheap energy is fundamental to human freedom and human health. Because if you can't afford to heat at home that has proper circulation so you don't get mold and bacteria growing all over the place, you're going to get sick. And when we talk about freedom, if you're sick, you have no freedom. And if energy is so expensive that you can't drive to the store, then you have to walk to the store and you just lost your entire day. So I'm a huge fan of whatever is going to give us energy. And I don't actually care that much about carbon dioxide because I know we can hack carbon dioxide. All we have to do is restore cows and soil. It's just not useful to build a home that has a slightly lower bill to the electric company. But you're literally talking about tens of thousands of dollars that are going to go towards healthcare as a result of that. It just doesn't make any sense. But people haven't seen the connection yet. Totally. I'm all about reducing chemical poisoning and we have to do that far ahead of fixing the CO2 problem. CO2 is long term. Right now they are spraying poisons in your home and on your food and they're putting it into the walls of your home and it's growing there from mold that matters right now. And if we ignore that for a long term goal, you have to ask who's directing that? Because it doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's trading, it's trading one thing for another that we just can't afford to trade.

What do we do about VOCs in our hubs? So, I mean, I have around the house a bunch of air filters with charcoal in them that are HEPA and some ionizers and some other various random air filters. I'm kind of an air filter fetishist at this point. I live in a seven year old home too. So what works best, you know, when.

People do like remodels and they're really sensitive to VOCs and they just couldn't afford to use like VOC free alternatives and things of that nature. We recommend baking out the house, it's called, where you actually just get heat up the house, which is going to help these VOCs dissipate faster. And then, like you said, you know, carbon filtrations created, trapping VOCs into the carbon filters. So it's kind of that process of exchanging the air heating up the house and then carbon filtration. You know, the good news is over time that these VOCs will lessen, but unfortunately, it could take years for them to fully off gas. So you have to keep that in mind. Do everything you can. Get a lot of air exchange. And certainly these tighter buildings are not helping. You know, there's a good, a good little tidbit that I found on the EPA's website in an article for should I use bleach? And the EPA says no, because, you know, the object shouldn't be to kill mold. Even dead mold may cause an allergic reaction in some. Now, you know, of course they use the word allergic instead of, you know, what, what they really should say, but at least they kind of preface that with the. The objective should never be to kill it. Because the truth is we don't, we don't really know what happens as you break down a particle, you know, into smaller fragments. I think one thing we do know is when you kill something, like you kill a weed in your backyard, what does it do? It shrivels up. It dies. But there's still evidence that there was something there, you know, and you ever watch a CSI crime scene, right? Somebody gets killed, well, they. There's still a body there, right? There's still something always left behind. And when we're talking about microorganisms, we don't really understand yet what these particles left behind can really do to us. And if it's part of the, the overall health problem that we're experiencing, because obviously we have homes that have water damage, and maybe it dries up, maybe the problems resolved, maybe the mold dies off and breaks into smaller fragments and, and we're still seeing that affect people. So we just want to be cautious about that aspect.

We do. And it sounds like your, your mega point here is you really, if, if you've had mold, you really, really, really need to clean exceptionally well because it is like a chemical, a chemical waste site and probably air filters as well to keep the dust down. I find dust in my air filters all the time. Like, I don't know what the heck it all comes from, but it's always there. So I open up my air filter and, God, look at that. So other than those two things, you know, wet mopping and things like that, what else do you do for cleaning?

Well, let's. Let me. Let me kind of make a step by step process for you that I think will be very helpful. You know, your house is water damage. You're going to open up these wet walls, you're going to find living organisms like mold and bacteria. You're going to remove those. That would be considered the traditional remediation process. But then beyond that, what's not included in the traditional remediation process is all of the particles that have been created over the time, however long that mold or bacteria has been there. And so now you want to look at my H Vac system. Right, because that stuff is going to be drawn into your H Vac system. I hate to break it to you guys, but those filters that you buy at Home Depot or Lowe's, they are not efficient enough to remove something as small as mold or bacteria. And so all that stuff is getting in.

Should I buy a different kind of filter? Is there a special name to look for?

Yes. So the highest efficient filter that you can get in today is MERV16. Ones that you get at Home Depot are probably MERV8 to MERV12 or something to that effect. MERV16 can remove as small as 7 nanometers in particle size. So now we're getting into some viruses and things of that nature, which are obviously much, much smaller than mold, toxins, bacteria. That's really what we want to start moving forward to. Now they've put that technology more in commercial buildings as of late, but there are residential products that you can get, but people don't know about them.

That's a fantastic piece of advice. Get a MERV 16 filter. This is something you can do for what, like a hundred bucks or something?

I wish. Because a MERV 16 filter has to be pretty thick. You know, they're going to cost probably anywhere between, you know, 1500 and 2500.

Because, Christ, seriously, 2,500 bucks for a house.

Well, let me break this down. It's not like a filter that you throw away every month, right? This is something that gets installed into the return duct. The biggest challenge that they had in engineering something like MERV16 is if you filter out tiny particles and you have thicker filters to do that. You obviously have to not be able to. You have to do that without restricting the airflow. You're gonna freeze your coil and have all these other H Vac problems. So it's got different chambers that kind of the air goes through that gets filtered as it goes. That's the only way to really make this work. And it also has to be electrically charged. So you're talking about like it almost looks like a 1996, you know, computer modem that slides into your return duct. And then as you change your filter, which by the way, you only change about every year and a half to three years, then you have that, it's a big, probably one foot by three feet filter that you're kind of sliding in and out.

I'm looking online, I'm seeing Linux MERV 16 replacement filter 16 inch by 25 inch by 5 inch for 142 bucks. Is that not good enough?

Well, that's the replacement filter, but you need first the starter kit that installs it into the unit to be able to.

Okay, so it's a furnace upgrade, a one time furnace upgrade. After that, your furnace intake upgrade. After that you, you end up with exactly. Filters.

Yeah. And you know, even if you get the top of the line needed at 2,500 bucks a pop. Right. Think about it from this perspective. You're protecting something that's worth 15, 20 grand, you know, and once that gets contaminated, you know, if you ever look at an evaporator coil, it's like a million pieces of metal welded together. Cleaning that thing is very difficult to do. And so protecting that to have up, you know, really optimal air quality is, is a sound investment.

Now a lot of the upgrade collective, by the way, if you're listening, you can go to daveaspree.com and sign up to be a live audience member. They're saying like if you do MERV13 is better, that it ruins your AC. It seems like there's a lot of pushback even from people who aren't AC experts saying that this is going to be really rough on your house. True.

Yeah, it's. So this particular unit that I know of is a MERV16 unit that has the pressure drop of a MERV8.8. So for those that are talking about MERV13 filtration, yes, MERV13 is obviously more restrictive than a MERV8. MERV8 is the ideal restrictive airflow in this sense. But if you get a product that is engineered properly, you can have the pressure drop of a MERV8. As I was talking about different chambers as the air passes through.

This is really useful. So if you're remodeling and you have control of that, that does sound like a good investment to make sure that you have that ability to really properly filter your air. Plus bonus point, if there's forest fires in your area, things like that. It's just you're going to live longer as a biohacker. You could invest unlimited amounts of money and energy into biohacking your health problem.

Is you want to spend the least.

Possible to get the most benefit. And I've got one for you. And it's simple. It's blood flow specifically to your brain and the parts of your body that may not get enough. To get the most out of all of the supplements you take and all the tech you use, you've got to have blood that goes where it belongs. To protect the fragile inner lining of every blood vessel in my body, I use Arterosil HP and I have for seven years. It's from a company called Calroy Health Sciences and they have researched their formulations to the ends of the earth so that they actually work the product Vasconox HP provides long lasting nitric oxide support about 24 hours according to an open label published study. Far longer than typical nitric oxide bead supplements. So if you're ready to stack your hacks get more benefits in less time. Go to calroy.comdave and they'll give you a great deal. All of your other hacks will thank you. H Vac kind of is necessary where I live in Texas because you need AC because it's really hot here. But for a lot of people like when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, you just need baseboard heaters. It seems like those are actually a lot better from an environmental perspective. There's no duct work, there's no recirculation of air, a lot less dust, easy to clean. Yeah. You know, and they're cheap too.

And they're cheap.

Yeah.

I mean, you know what, in terms of heat source, that's great. Obviously they don't really provide ac, these base port heat units. And so there's always. It's AC is the monster here because any evaporator coil which basically provides us that ac, it's going to condensate. You know, it's, it's designed to pull the moisture out of the air to cool it. You know, there's any coil is going to push off probably like 45 to 55 degree air. So you're going to have condensation due to the temperature differentials of the room that you're actually cooling or where that H Vac unit is located. So people don't realize that you're always going to have this wet environment in your H Vac unit when you're using ac. And that's true of even if you Just have the. In the wall units. Right. So the, the biggest complicated part is the coil itself. And if you don't filter the coil, the mold that's among us is going to get to it and it's going to start to grow on it. Same same thing with bacteria.

Wow. So there's a lot to be done around acs. So if, if someone's listening to this going, oh, man, I do absolutely has health problems, and I don't know what's going on. It feels a little bit overwhelming. So you can clean everything in your house or hire a cleaning service. New little tip there. If you're hiring a cleaning service, tell them they can only use your chemicals and your tools. The last thing you want is from some stacky botras mold bomb house. They bring a mop from there into your house. It's like swapping Q tips with someone. Just don't do that.

Yeah.

But aside from having a cleaning service come in and just only use your stuff, including rags and everything. Okay. What do you do about your H Vac? It kind of feels a bit overwhelming. If you don't have 2,500 bucks to do. Should you have it cleaned?

Well, you can have it cleaned, and cleaning it can be pretty expensive, too. The typical going rate of a good company to come in and clean your system is about a thousand bucks. So when you look at it from that perspective, the 2500 doesn't seem so bad because without it, you're definitely going to need to clean that thing at least once a year to really maintain and prevent these, these small particles from forming living organisms around that coil. You obviously can do those two strategies, whatever makes more sense for you. But if you can't get the MERV 16, get the best one that you can afford. I mean, basically how it works is the higher the MERV rating, the smaller the particle it can remove. And so you want to really think with that. Some of your guys were saying that going MERV 13 or higher could cause problems. The other thing to consider is too, is where do you put this filter? Right. So you don't want to have a filter at the unit, a filter in the grills, you know, at the returns. It's just too much filtration. It's going to restrict too much airflow. You want to pick and choose one and get the best filter you can, either at the return grills or at the actual unit itself. And cleaning's cleaning's huge. I mean, cleaning's a huge part of maintaining air quality. As a matter of fact, if you want to know if your air quality is good, stop testing your air, start testing your dust.

Okay. Testing dust. You have some sort of dust testing thing. Tell me about it.

Yeah, it's called the dust test. So very easy to remember. What it uses is, uses MSQ PCR technology. So DNA analysis. Yes, we're all having code flashbacks with the word PCR here. So with this technology, you're identifying and speciating different species of mold bacteria, you know, mycotoxins, different mycotoxins you can have in your home. And I think it's really important that we start looking at that. Not because of the technology or anything else, but because of actually it just makes more sense. When we test the air, we're only really capturing A, within a small proximity of where that actual pump is located and B, you know, dust is too big to fit inside of this cassette. So you're going to be missing all the mold that's settled in your dust. You're not going to get an accurate read of what you're actually being exposed to. But since we know that we breathe in our dust all the time, I'm literally seeing dust particles around me as this. The light is right in front of my face here. It's a problem. And if we test our dust, we will more than likely find what we're being exposed to. And if it's abnormal, then we will by doing air tests.

Wow.

Okay. And I think there's a case for AHHR tests. There's a case for a dust test. And you said you developed it. I know that your, your book and all of your stuff about what you do just for the resources for cleaning and all that is atthemichaelrubino.com. do you have links to your dust test thing there as well?

Yeah. So you can go to the dust test dot com.

Okay.

Or you can go on the michaelrobino dot com. Check that out. I didn't develop the technology. It's existing technology that's around, but I did develop the ability to bring it to market for consumers so they can do their own at home testing instead of. Because most labs they sell to professionals. You need professionals to come in and do it. And it's just too costly for folks, you know, trying to get more direct to consumer so that people can buy the test, do it themselves, get the data they need. And we partnered with emsl, the largest lab, largest environmental lab in the US to do it.

Got it. It's it. It's kind of funny. For a long time, if you wanted to do A lab test to find out what's going on in your body. You had to go into a doctor's office and pay for a visit, even though you didn't really want to. You're like, I just wanted my vitamin D levels, thank you very much. No, no. I have to decide whether I'm going to allow you to have your vitamin D levels. And it's like, stop it. And I think there was some of that going on with the home environmental lab testing. I believe that you have a fundamental right to use any technology you want to know anything that we can discover about your environment or about your home. And anyone who tries to get in your way of doing that, they are not your friend. Like, they have an economic interest in making you do more work than you want to do. And I'm lazy. And I embrace my strategic laziness. By the way, guys, my new book, it's going to tell you why you're lazy, too, and why that's a good thing for motivating yourself to do things better. But nonetheless, no. Just no. So thank you for making it so I can buy what Formerly I had to spend a lot of money to have someone come out and swap some dust that I could swap myself. I think that's really cool.

Well, that's it. I mean, we need information. We need to be empowered to make decisions and make the right decisions. And it should be based on data. Yeah. It shouldn't just be some guy coming into your home and saying, your home looks fine, or, you know, oh, this is a problem. Let's rip all the walls down. I mean, you should know the information that it can tell you what's the best course of action to make my environment safe and healthy for myself and my family. And so, you know, I think creating products that put that information into people's hands is, is. Is a vital thing to do.

My biggest takeaway here is to upgrade the filters on my furnace and to double down on dusting and cleaning and like, HEPA vacuuming, book spines and all that. And just to keep the dust down, no matter what it takes. And tons of tips and tricks in here. Thank you so much. Do you worry about CO2 levels in your houses?

You know, that's a really good point you bring up. And I want to make it clear that green building does not equal healthy building.

Not even a little bit.

I wish it did. That would be great. But unfortunately, we can't have both of those things at the same time because it does take extra energy from some of these systems. You Know, back in the 80s 90s, they made a lot of these homes super airtight in an efficiency goal to try to lower carbon reduction. But the problem with that is when we made these airtight homes is we forgot to let them breathe. Now in a commercial building it's required to have so much CFM per hour of air exchange. But in a residential home, that's not required by code. And so unless you specifically ask for that, or install an energy recovery ventilator, heat recovery ventilator, fresh air system, your home is not breathing. And that's where we start to see a lot of these problems. Because when we have a mold problem now, it's amplified because we're not getting fresh air. And to flush that out, also the CO2 levels are going up. Any of the VOCs or the chemicals that are off gas and are starting to now build up in the home. And so to ventilate the home to bring fresh air, and now we have to either heat it or cool it. And that does increase energy costs.

It's a tough call. So if you seal the house, then you're going to get a terrarium where mold grows, but you'll spend less on heating and cooling. Or you move air from the outside in, you filter it carefully and you recirculate some of the air through a HEPA air filter. But to do that it takes more electricity and it costs more to build the building. Does this mean that people should move into big residential apartment buildings? Because there are codes that require that.

You know, I think what it comes down to, instead of building a huge 6,000, 8,000 square foot home, maybe we just downsides just a little bit and we focus more on the health so that it evens out in the long run. Because I ultimately, like you said, it is more important that we are healthy and that our brains are thinking properly, especially these days. It is so important that all of us are top notch on our game with our thinking. And if we're not living in a healthy building, that's not going to happen. So to me that's probably the most important thing that we can focus on.

Okay, so I agree with you. It's better to have a smaller place with high quality air and low volatility outgassing furnishings. So I focus on quality over quantity for living space. And if you're lucky, you can get some of both. But truthfully, I would rather have a thousand square foot home that was clean than a 4,000 square foot house where we had to cut corners and paint it with things that make you just tax your system all the time with some mold in the ceiling and all of that. So it is very important that you're comfortable in your home. But maybe it's not a size issue. What, what besides mold are the top five pollutants indoors for people today.

So, yeah, mold I would say is number one. Second I would say is EMF exposure. We have so much technology around us, the WI fi, the Bluetooth, the computers, the laptops, the cell phones, and now 5G outside. But our technology is going through the roof and a lot of it now is wireless. So that exposure, I would say would be the second leading cause of the illness and stressors on the body. Then after that, I would say would be the chemicals that we're bringing into our house, the personal care products, the cleaning products. If you're still using the fragrances, the plugins, that's not a good idea. What you're building your home with the off gassing, the formaldehydes, those are probably third in line. Then I would say probably water quality. There's not very much water in the United States that you can drink out of the tap safely, or at least that I would drink after doing thousands of tests. Highly recommend filtering your water. And that also goes to what you're bathing and showering in, because you can absorb just as much that way as you can drinking. So those, and then I would say air quality, just in general, focus on the particulates, the things that we're breathing in. Smoke season. You know, east coast got hit pretty hard this year with the fires, which they normally don't. West coast usually gets it. We've actually been pretty lucky out here this year. But those are probably the five main things that we, we focus on that we see in the environment affecting us.

All right? So I'm surprised EMFs are the second thing after mold. So you look for mold, then you look for EMFs, and then you look at general things like water quality and air quality and chemicals. So how do you know if you have mold in your home?

So mold needs water to grow. So if you've ever had any water damage, any water leaks, any flooding, if you got a five year old that loves to play in the bathtub and turn it into a swimming pool every night, this is the kind of things that we look for. Also looking for bubbling in the walls, expanding, just things that don't look right, looking underneath your, your sinks. A big trick I like to do is go into the toilet and lift up the toilet tank and you can see if there's any kind of mold growing in there. That's usually an indication that you have mold spores in your air. It's like a perfect petri dish in your house. Also, if you're going into your house and you don't feel very good, and then you go on vacation or you go hiking, or you're. You go out to the beach and you feel great, and then you go back to your home and you feel horrible, that's a really big red flag that you got something going on.

I wish I could hear you say that twice, because so many people say, I'm not stressed. I'm on vacation. It's like, no, you're in a different environment, and your environment is making you weak. But you don't know. You haven't learned to recognize the pattern yet. When people have mold, it increases their sensitivity to EMFs. It increases their sensitivity to formaldehyde, to all the other fragrances. It can actually cause mcs, which is when you're sensitive to chemicals. I've had that since I was a teenager because I grew up in a basement with toxic mold. And I would just hold my breath walking down the, like, the fabric softener aisle at the grocery store because I would just get dizzy and it would smell really bad. I saw an interesting statistic. 75% of homes in the US use air fresheners. These are endocrine disrupting chemicals that mess with your estrogen, your testosterone, with your brain, with your children's development. Because it smells pretty. Because someone convinced you that your house shouldn't smell like a house. Or even worse, you're using it to cover up the musty smell, which is caused by toxic mold. So one of the things you could do right now as you're listening to this show is you could go into your car, you take those dumb little pine tree things, throw them away, and never buy another one. And then go to every room in your house that has an air freshener and throw it away. And if you were to do that, you say, but I might smell something. Yes, that would be your house. If it smells bad, you should clean it or get an air freshener or, sorry, get an air filter. Or maybe you could get some essential oils in a diffuser if you want to do that. This is how healthy homes are made. But if you're doing that right now, the effects on your iq, on your hormones, they're meaningful. And there's no regulation of the stuff that's in those.

Yeah, there's a point I want to make. If it's One takeaway from this is that clean does not have a smell. If you go into a house and it smells, it's usually because of a biological, a chemical or some sort of particulate. So if you smell something, we need to address it. Like you mentioned, a lot of times, we'll have a biological smell. Maybe it's pet urine, maybe it's a little mold. And then we, we want to go and cover that up with an air filter, which now is a chemical. And now. So now we're adding a third.

An air freshener. An air filter will get it out of the air. An air freshener will mask it. I. I use the mask for clarifying that.

Yeah. The air. Yep. So, you know, the Glade plugins and stuff, the chemical stuff, that's what we're talking about. Candles, you know. And so we try to strive for no smell, a neutral smell into a house, so that when we walk into a home, when we're done with it, it should not have a smell.

I totally agree. You might get a cooking smell for a brief period of time, and you don't have to hide that with a fake chemical smell. Like cooking smells dissipate and they are air pollution when you think about it. So what I like to do, especially when I'm cooking, is I turn up the air filters that I have and I turn on the vent hood so that that way I can get as much of that out. Because cooking fumes are the number two source of indoor air pollution after smoking, if you still smoke in your home. I noticed that I had a problem with that in my home in Canada, where we actually upgraded the hood on our stove so that it had an outdoor vent instead of recirculating the air. Because every time I would cook, my air filters wouldn't suddenly recognize that the indoor air quality went from blue all the way to red. And then they would turn on full volume. Like, wait, my whole family is breathing this? Every time I cook something on the stove that's not cool.

Yep, correct. And that's, you know, a point source in the house that we have pollution. That's what the vents are made for. You know, in the laundry room and the bathrooms and kitchen, we typically have these exhaust fans. And so these are sources of pollution in our house that we want to exhaust. So if you're cooking, and especially if you're using gas, you need to be using that version vent all the time. And so that's one way we're going to exhaust it out. Now, the other thing you mentioned with air Purification units, either standalone unit or a built in H vac system where we're pulling the particles out of the air. So we got that and then we got bringing the fresh air in, exhausting the stale air. And those are really the two ways we hit air quality.

Very good advice on what to do there. Um, I haven't solved the cooking thing. I still notice that the air quality goes down when I cook indoors. But I want to ask you this. How important is the gas stove versus electrical?

With the electric range you're going to have an EMF filled from it. You're going to have a magnetic field. So if you're standing next to it, you're going to be exposed to this magnetic field. Now I prefer gas but I also very strict about making sure that I'm ventilating properly. I have a pretty strong fan. I crack the door a little bit in the kitchen to make sure we have good positive airflow going through the house. Then I also have air filters one in every room just to kind of as a backup. But yeah, every time you know, we cook inside we're cooking fish or something, it's they're going to kick on for a little bit. You're going to filter that out. But super critical with gas. Make sure exhausted out. Otherwise I don't really feel like it's too big of a problem. But just make sure you're managing that.

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If you had a.

Choice to improve the quality of human lives and you could ban either gas stoves or politicians, which one would you ban?

Ooh, that's a tough one. No politicians for sure.

All right, maybe those decisions are not our government's decision to make for us, just like lighting is also our decision, no one else's. As we're recording this, this is the first month that the US Government has outlawed the only type of light bulbs that are good for you, which was incandescent and halogen. So now you can only buy the ones that create lots of EMFs and lots of visual stress and that dysregulate our bodies, which are LED light bulbs.

Yeah. So if you were to say, what's the sixth thing that affects us? I would say lighting. Lighting is huge. It's what you talk about with circadian R rhythm and red light. You've been talking about that for years. So that's super critical in the home to make sure we have our lighting dialed in. But not just the color spectrum, but the flicker rate, which is where we get into with the LEDs is they have a flicker rate, and that's what makes them efficient. They're on for a period of time, then they're off and on. This has happened so fast that to us, it kind of perceives like it's natural light, like the sun, but if you measure it and then the brain knows that it's actually a flicker rate. And that actually affects quite a lot of people. I've had odd people tell me, I'll go into their home. They say, well, I don't really like having the lights on. I don't feel that great with the lights on. I said, what about when you go outside? Does the sunlight bother you? Well, no, the sunlight doesn't bother me. That's fine. Okay, well, it's not the light that's bothering you. It's that flicker rate and that too much blue light in it. That's. That's the problem.

I. I'm a little torn because you mentioned earlier candles and air pollution, and I would rather have candlelight than LED light in the evening because LED light is so disruptive. I can see the flicker. A lot of people can't see it. I have a very fast brain, and it's just not good for you. And I know what it does to my sleep. Why are candles bad?

It's not necessarily the candle or the flame. It's what they're making the candles out of. So if we're using petroleum based candles and then they're adding fragrances into it. Now we're releasing those particles into the air and we're bringing it in. If you were using natural beeswax with essential oil, that's not a problem. It's what's in the candles that you're breathing in that's the problem.

Right. So they're putting the same stuff that's in Glade air freshener into a petroleum or a soy based candle and then it makes little basically exhaust into the air. A pure beeswax candle also creates air pollution. It's just less harmful air pollution and I would rather do that than bad lighting. It seems like you can get wax based LED candles that are dim enough that they don't create too much of a problem. I actually have those all over my house because it's easy and low cost and it's a lot gentler light than having these direct overhead LEDs. Now that I can't just have a normal light bulb. Okay. So light pollution is a part of it. Your company test my home is an interesting, interesting company. It seems like we're going to need a lot more of this over time because our government has completely given up on any kind of standards that are around human health. It's more like which industry profits most by them forcing you to make your house the way you don't want it to be. Let's talk about some of the other stuff that's going on in, in your home. So mold. Yes, we've talked about that and I've done several episodes about it. Homebiotic is one of my companies that makes a probiotic spray that you put in your house. And it's something that I feel like, like there's a good body of knowledge on it and it's getting stronger and stronger. And I'll just say to sum that up for people, if you smell musty stuff, you probably have mold problems. If you don't smell musty stuff, but you don't feel good and you don't have another excuse, look for mold. You can hire, you can hire Ryan or one of his guys to come out and take a look. If you're in one of the five locations and it's testmyhome.com right?

Right.

Yep.

Okay, cool. One of the things that drives it though is humidity. What is the right range of humidity to have inside your home?

Ideal for the human is 45% humidity. Anything over 60% and we start getting cold surfaces. We can have condensation and really anything over 80, then you're really in the more of the danger zone where we're going to have spontaneous mold growth.

I was in cart. Where was I? Yeah, I was in Cartagena, Colombia recently at a hotel. Actually at a couple hotels. The outside humidity was 99%. It was crazy. And of course the AC is on running full blast in the hotels because it is really hot. And if you open the door to your hotel room to the outside, within one minute the floor would have standing water from condensation. That hot, wet, dense air hitting cold floor. And to the point there were cold. You know, there were signs everywhere saying watch out, you could fall down. But everywhere, everywhere smelled like mold. I was in the Sofitel, which is a nice hotel. The bed sheets smelled like mold because you can't seem to get away from it. What do people who live in really humid environments, how are they ever going to have a place where there isn't mold indoors? If they have air conditioning, they have.

To build their homes accordingly. And I don't know down there, but I know in Mexico we have a lot of concrete. You don't see drywall down there, especially along the coast. It's a lot of. You don't see carpet as well. It's cement floors, it's cement walls, it's brick. It's material that is not conducive to mold growth. But they also keep it really clean too. And that's another thing is you gotta take the food source away. So mold needs water, it needs a food source which can be an organic material, and then it needs a mold spore. So mold spores are gonna be in the environment everywhere. We can't really control that moisture. We can control to a certain extent, except for in the situation you're talking about. So then the third thing is let's take away their food source. So we can take one of those legs out of the three legged stool. We're not going to have a problem. So that's typically how we address it in humid climates.

I've seen locations where the air conditioner, because it creates moisture, they actually put the moisture to evaporate inside the home, which is going to create mold. Right. So a good air conditioner is going to channel the moisture into a drainage system that goes outside the house. Right. That's really important. What about carbon monoxide?

Yeah, so that's a silent killer. That's a dangerous one. You hear these tragic stories or families fall asleep and they never wake up. And we don't want that to happen to anybody. And that comes from burning fossil fuels. So our cars put off carbon monoxide. Your water heater can potentially put off carbon monoxide. Now they should have ventilation systems that pull that out to the outside. But sometimes those fail, sometimes those get plugged up. I was actually staying in an Airbnb once when I went in and it just didn't smell right. And I'm doing some investigation. It was the basement level of a house that in the mechanical room they had the fresh air return that came in to supply air to vent the heater to go out. Well, they had stuff to pillow in it. And so I, I called the guy up, I said, what's going on? Why is there? He's like, oh, well, that blows cold air in, in the winter time. So we plugged that up so, you know, to save some energy. Well, I said that's your fresh air intake system which provides the ventilation for your water heater. That's super critical to have that and, you know, taught them a little lesson about that. But it's really important that we check these systems and check the ventilation on them and make sure that they're out ventilating properly. And there's carbon monoxide meters that you can buy that I would recommend put next to any gas appliance that you have in your house because heaven forbid anything horrible happened like that to you.

So that's especially in your bedrooms. Yep. And I, I've known a, a large number of people who've been poisoned by toxic mold in their homes. But I have a few other friends who are poisoned by carbon monoxide where chronic exposure over long periods of time, not enough to kill you outright, but enough to just weaken you, it can create long term effects and it's hard to heal from. So this is a $50 problem. You get a carbon monoxide detector, you have it running in the house. A lot of modern smoke detectors do that as well. Then, you know, and I, I want.

To point something out with that because they'll talking about will measure down to about 400 parts per million. So they're set to save your life, but they're not the chronic, the long term chronic illness that you're talking about.

Oh really?

We want exposure levels less than one parts per million. So if we have a small leak where maybe it's up to a hundred parts per million, it's enough that over time, chronically, you're feeling fatigued and brain fog and just wore down. And I've seen situations like this where we've gone to a new home and we Test we have sensitive meters and find we have a small leak, not high enough to set off the meters because they set those meter levels pretty high so that every, everybody doesn't call the fire department when they go off Thanksgiving dinner. You know, it's really meant to save your life. So I would recommend in addition to having the meters or the monitors, which will save your life, but also you can go on Amazon and buy an actual carbon monoxide meter that will go a lot lower and just do regular checks just to make sure you don't have those low levels that are giving you that chronic exposure.

How much does that cost for one of those meters?

You get a good one online for 50 bucks.

Okay, so not terribly expensive.

No, not at all.

If you're a parent, this is probably even more important just to make sure that the space for your kids is safe, especially if you're just not feeling right. Okay, what could it be? Look at molds, look at carbon monoxide. Those are those things that are hard to spot. What do you do about VOCs in your environment where you can't, you know, rip out all your carpets and change your walls?

The biggest thing I recommend in that situation is getting fresh air in the home. It kind of comes back to where we're talking about. These homes are airtight. They're not breathing. Crack a couple windows. If you don't have a fresh air ventilation system, then I would say every morning for 15 minutes, go around and open up all the windows, 40, flush all that out, start with brand new fresh air, and then in the evening do the same thing. Now the only caveat to that is if it's high pollution day, if you're in the inner city or if it's a fire day and you, the smoke is pretty bad those days, we want to keep things closed up, but in general, we want to get fresh air into the home. Now. Also, the humidity can be a factor too. If it's a really humid day outside, make sure you have some way to control that humidity if you're going to let all that humidity into the house. So it's, it's not always a cut and dry answer, but generally installing an ERV system that's going to pull in the fresh air, that's going to pull out the humidity it's going to bring. But you know, if you're renting, then it's kind of hard. So, you know, those are some of the things we can do. Fresh air, okay.

Fresh air matters so much. The other thing that I like to do that has Been a practice of mine for years is if you get something that smells like plastic, those are VOCs. It smells like paint. It could possibly be formaldehyde, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But what I'll do is I'll take them and I'll put them in the sun for a day or two, and you heat them up. And if it's winter, then you put them in a closed room with a strong heat source and a cracked window. So what you're doing there is you're baking it out because they're volatile, which means they respond to heat. So you can take a pretty stinky foam thing, you leave it outside in the sun for three days, it's not going to smell very much because you're baking out most of it. And sun can damage some things. But that seems to work well, even with cars. That new car smell, I do the same thing. I put it in the sun, leave the car running all day with the heater on full blast, and a window crack just a little bit. So the inside of the car is just uncomfortable. You would not want to be in there. But what you're doing is you're creating circulation and heat to just get that new car smell out so it doesn't give you a headache every time you drive. Anything else that works for absorbing VoCs.

You can use carbon air filtration. That also works. So air filters, air purification systems that have carbon in it, they need to have the activated carbon and a good amount. Some of these filters just have a little layer over the top, and when the carbon has absorbed to its max, like a sponge, it's not gonna absorb anymore. So you need a pretty good carbon air filtration system. So the. The bakeout process, ventilation, and the air purification, those are really the three main ways to handle it. But my favorite way is to not bring it in the home in the first place, or build a home, if you can, from scratch that doesn't have the VOCs, or buy a home that's a couple years old that's already off gas. And if we don't have the source in the first place, then it's a lot easier to deal with.

So interesting. I grew up in New Mexico. In fact, my grandparents were at Los Alamos National Labs, which is, like, where they invented radiation, as well as a lot of nuclear power. That actually is a very clean source of power. The modern ones, which most of the time, they're harder to build because of regulations. But if you really want lots of cheap power with fully encapsulated pollution compared to coal or even solar, there are advantages. So. But setting off bombs. We've set off about a thousand bombs on the surface of the planet. And it's so weird how the mindset from the 40s and 50s was basically, you know, oh, yeah, let's set off a bomb in the middle of the ocean. An atomic bomb. Like, what could go wrong?

I don't know.

There's a lot of animals throughout the ocean that are going to get a shockwave and you're going to kill them all. But it was almost like complete lack of understanding that we're part of the system. So it would have been better if we didn't have all the. The bombs tested that we have had done. Since that radiation is left over, is there anything we can do to make sure that we don't have it in our homes?

You know, and that brings up a good point I want to talk about. Cleanliness of the home is super important. That will negate a lot of these issues. De dusting your home, regular cleaning, at least wiping down the surfaces weekly, including floors, countertops, Because a lot of the stuff is going to build up in the dust. These particles are going to end up in the dust. And when we measure dust in homes, it's typically made up of dead skin cells, insect parts, insect feces, mold, mold particles, bacteria, pesticides, herbicides. And of course, it could have dust in it from fallout or other chemicals from the outside that's getting in as well. So doing a really thorough cleaning of the house is probably one of the biggest biohacks you can do. Keep a clean home. That, I mean, I can't say enough about that.

Got it. So it comes down to the annoying stuff. Cleaning your home.

Yeah.

What is the ideal cleaning frequency?

I would say at least weekly going through. I'm a little bit more of a clean freak just because of all the testing that and the nasty stuff that I see. And I know what's in the air and in the dust. So I'm pretty. You saw, I got air filters in every room and we clean. We have a cleaning crew that comes in once a week and they wipe down every surface. So I think that's. I don't think you need to do much more than that, but at least a good weekly wipe down.

Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to do, but it's worth it. I have an air filter in every room, and you can see how much dust those things pick up. You look in the filter, you're like My God, that would have been on a surface or I would have been breathing it. And anything new, like new clothes or new sheets or towels, whatever, anything I buy new, new things gets washed before I do it. There's proper ventilation for the, for the dryer because dryer exhaust puts a lot of small particulate plastic into the air. It's a big deal. Talk to me about noise pollution and why you include that in what you test.

So this is actually one of my favorite topics. People don't think about noise as a stressor, as a pollution, but it absolutely is. Think about a dog barking at four in the morning or someone else's baby crying or think about your least favorite type of music playing at the park when you're trying to enjoy yourself. These are causing stressors on the body. And so we have subharmonic frequencies that we can't hear that can affect our body. We can have, for example, let's say the refrigerator motor, every time it kicks on, it makes this whining sound. Or the H vac system has a leak in, it has a high pitched frequency that goes on long term day in and out. These things can truly affect the body and provide stress on the body. Now the flip side of that, think about your favorite song. I have a couple favorite songs that I love to listen to that just put me in the right mood every single time. And so music and auditory responses to the body are definitely very powerful. There's, I just started doing this, it's called New Calm, I think. But you, you put it on and it's, it's, you know, helps soothe the body. But there's a lot of things like that meditation and it's all stimulated with the sound. So I think like you said, we underestimate the sound a lot.

Talk to me about all the stuff you're tracking. So eight sleep. You guys make a mattress, you make a sleep pad that has some cooling tech, but you've got quite a bit of, of sensors in there. So walk listeners through the kind of data you're looking at that you're feeding into the AI model so we can learn how to sleep better from robots.

Yeah. So our Hero product is really the COVID right now that is the largest part of our sales. And so is a cover that you can install onto any mattress. And it does two things. On one side, it will change the temperature of each side of the bed based on your biometrics and you will get better sleep and I can share more data. And the other thing is tracking everything about your biometrics so let's start with the tracking. So we reached 99% accuracy at tracking your heart rate and your HRV compared to a medical grade ECG. If you think of that for a second, 99% accuracy without wearing anything, you just go to bed as you did for the rest of your life. And this device has that level of accuracy. It's pretty insane.

How are you doing that? Is that just microphones embedded in the COVID or what is it?

No, it's the technicality. The technology is ballistocardiography. So you're substantially sleeping on a stethoscope that you don't feel right, is a microfilm as a sensor and is picking up vibrations. And so it's really like when the doctor puts a stethoscope on the back, on your back, and can pick and detect everything about your heart rate and your respiration. We do the same, but with AI machine learning. And then we, we stream the data to the cloud where our algos are able to identify heart rate, respiration and sleep stages.

So your mattress cover the eight sleep. I guess I started to call it device, but the pad, if I tap my finger on it, you would know like on a touchscreen that that's where I was touching.

Yeah, if you just hit the floor, we could see the vibration from the floor to give you a sense of how sensible.

It's like an earthquake detector on your mattress. But the idea here is that you can detect the smallest of movements. And as a former entrepreneur in the wearable space, just getting heart rate from the wrist the way your Apple watch does today, that was really hard a while ago because of all these artifacts. But we didn't have machine learning algorithms. We had to kind of make them up ourselves. Cells. And what you're doing is you're taking what would be a big jumble of data, you know, covers moving and, you know, who knows what other like sounds from the city even you're going to be picking up. Right. And your AI model filters that out and then is able to get 99% accurate as a wearable. You said ECG, not EKG though, right?

No, both even EKG. So comparable compared to an EKG, we are 99% as accurate as the EKG.

So you can refer to rhythmias and things like that.

Yeah, we forgot the legalese. Right. We cannot tell you, you have everything. We are not FDA approved, so we are not a medical device. But if you ask me what we can see in the back end, we can see cardiovascular diseases and you wear nothing. And we have 100% retention, right? Once you install this product, you keep using it. It's not like a wearable that you need to charge it. It's always there. So maybe you don't have a cardiovascular disease today, but you might have it in two years. And if we do our job well, we can help you. Because of law. What we cannot do is for now we cannot diagnose any medical condition right now.

Can you tell me to call my doctor and look or say you have signs maybe of this?

We can show you a graph, right? That is what we can do and use. Start saying there is something wrong, right? Which is almost becoming even a moral problem at certain point. Because our now machine learning will know that you might have a certain medical condition. But we are not an FDA approved device yet. And so we cannot tell you. And another thing that will be interesting for you is this for cardiovascular problems, right? Then we are reaching 99% accuracy of respiration, which means we will be able to detect snoring and sleep apnea as well. We already see it in the back end and same legal issues. So it's just a matter of getting the FDA approval.

Snoring fortunately isn't a medical condition. You can report on snoring.

Exactly.

So we have deep apnea and you just gave it a new name that wasn't a medical condition. And just like let's do that. You don't have cardiovascular disease, you have rdovascular disease. It's a new thing we made up. Telling you it's legally okay.

It's more than lying. Let's say.

This is why I'm not an attorney.

Okay.

That's all I can say.

I'm so intrigued just at the size of the data. My predictions. Over the next three years, huge swaths of unknown things about humans are going to be unleashed. Because we've had enough data from a few years of monitoring and now the AI will self learning systems are just coming online. So it's like the great enlightenment of the human condition happening because of these biohacking technologies combined with hard hardcore tech.

There is another interesting thing here that in the past we had consumer devices and we had medical grade devices, right? Medical grade devices were looking, now they look ugly. They were terrible, terrible user experience. You didn't want to use them. Think of CPAP machines. Consumer devices were not accurate enough. These two things are merging now, right? Your Apple Watch is becoming a medical grade device. Aslib will become a medical grade device and they still look great and is a product that you can use every day with a great interface, UX and ui. So this is how the world is changing.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.

100% retention, right? Once you install this product, you keep using it. It's not like a wearable that you need to charge.