Your Home Is Making You Sick: Biohack Your Space w/ Toxin Testing - Ryan Blaser | 1082 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly you're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about what's going on inside your house. What toxins are there? Well, bottom line is most of the world is toxic, and it's been that way forever. And if you don't believe me, try eating some rocks. There's minerals in there that are toxic. You could try eating anything growing in a forest. And unless you know the small percentage of things that are edible, most of that stuff is toxic as well. Right? So it's not like there aren't toxins in the world. And it's not like we don't have systems to deal with them, including our brain, where we only eat the stuff that's edible. And, you know, we figure out what makes us weak. And even the things that do make us weak, we can usually handle some of it. And then our body has systems to say, well, that wasn't good for me, let me get rid of it. Problem is, you may have a little bit more variety and a little bit more quantity of toxins and types of toxins that your body can't recognize or isn't equipped to deal with because they aren't things that ever existed on the planet until we figured out how to make them. So today we're going to talk about toxins that are overlooked in your house and what you can do about it. And our guest today is Ryan Blazer, who's founder and CEO of Test My Home. They're an environmental company dedicated to, well, improving your health by changing the environment around you. And in case you forgot the definition of biohacking, it's change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. So this is a part of core biohacking, and it's one I think a lot of us just don't think about. We take our supplements, we do our cold plunges, we do all the different biohacks. But maybe just cleaning up the environment around you could make a really big difference. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Pat. Thanks for having me.

You got it. Tell me your story. I think your 20s are like my 20s.

Yes. So I've always been fascinated with the environment and how it affects the body. And in my 20s, I had a company in Phoenix where we would design and we built the nightclubs, the high end recording studios, broadcast centers, churches. And we would go in and we would create all the things that stimulate the environment, stimulate the body, so the sound, the lights, the video, the acoustics, the layout, the colors, all the things to make an environment conducive for optimal health for the body. Now, after doing that, I found that in certain environments, particularly the recording studios, I would feel better at the end of the day than I would in some of the other environments that were not so clean electrically. And I found that myself. Personally, I'm sensitive to emf, and in recording studios, you would think there's a lot of technology, but actually, you need to have a really clean EMF environment in there or else a lot of those noises will get on the recordings. Experimented around with that, you know, started looking into what other things can be unhealthy to the body, what other things can harm the body. Shortly after that, I moved into a newer home, and it was infested with black mold. I didn't know that at the time. I got super sick. In and out of the hospital. They thought I had stomach cancer. They want to take my gallbladder out. Finally, after about four or five doctors, he did some testing on me. Functional medicine doctor found out I was heavily toxicated with mold. At the same time, I was also restoring an old Scout vehicle, sanding on it, and I was breathing in. I wasn't wearing the proper mask, and I got super sick, moved out of the home, started to recover, got better, and realized, wow, there's a big problem in the world, particularly with mold and these toxins that people are just unaware of. I was not aware of it and so started going into different fields, learning about the different dangers in the environment. Worked at a nuclear facility, toxic waste cleanup, the Department of Environmental Quality, doing the air quality division, and through going through these different career paths, kind of informed myself and learned the dangers of the home. So I created a company about five years ago that goes into the home, does a full analysis of all the toxins and stressors that could possibly come up and affect the body, come up with a plan to fix those, and then start adding some of the good stuff, some of the biohacking stuff, to truly make an ultimately clean and healthy environment, true sanctuary for us to go back into, because the world is pretty toxic out there, and we're never going to get away from all of it. But if we can at least create a sanctuary for our house that we can go home to, to let our bodies heal in recovery, that's kind of the goal of our company.

It's funny how going through all of that just the health stuff makes you so aware of it. You were actually heavier than I was. You were £360. I only hit £300. And you had heartburn and ADHD and all this stuff, anxiety, very similar story. Toxic mold alone could do that. But when you combine it with all the other stuff, it's just a burden that's more than our bodies are meant to bear. And this is just a quick shout out. If you have not seen Moldy Movie, which is a documentary I did on toxic mold. It's free. It takes one hour. About the length of this podcast, go to moldymovie.com and you'll see how big of a difference it is. And just hear from doctors, hear from people who've been affected, because I know if you're listening to the show, if you look to your left, look to your right, one of those three people probably has mold in their home that is affecting them differently than other people in their homes. It's a massive issue. It doesn't matter where you live. The desert, in the swamps, it's everywhere. And it's because of the way we build our homes. Let me ask you this. Of all the things that you've experienced, you had the automotive stuff you were doing on your old Scout. You're breathing solvents, you're breathing heavy metal dust. You had toxic mold. What do you think was the worst exposure?

I think it was definitely the mold that put me over the edge. I remember it would be raining and water would be leaking through and I'd smell that musty smell. I'm like, oh, it's not good. A little moldy. But I didn't at the time realize how serious and dangerous moles can be for the body and how much it can wreck you. But I believe that was probably the number one thing that really put me over the top.

Tell me about your walk in refrigerator Man Cave.

Yeah. So we had went to an auction at this grocery store and they were selling the refrigerator, the walk in cooler. I thought this would be a great addition to put onto the back of my house as like a little man cave. And so we installed that, put it in there, and come to find out, that was also infested with black mold. So it was kind of a combination between the house I was living in, that moldy man cave, so to speak, that was full of black mold from years and years of condensation and buildup in there. Not the smartest idea. Looking back, it seemed good at the time, but that definitely caused a lot of issues.

There's a environmental village up on Vancouver island where I. Where I live. And, and they decided they were going to do reclaimed materials for construction. So they'd go around and they'd gather old carpets and use them as wall insulation and all that. And I noticed every time I went there, I would just get so profoundly sick and like, well, tell me more like, oh yeah, well we got the carpet from a water damaged building. No, what you do is you build environments that make humans thrive. And if you say our goal is to save electricity instead of to make people feel good, you'll get the lead environmental standard which is, you know, the greenest buildings ever. One of the people in that moldy documentary lived in a Leeds building in New York that was absolutely full of toxic mold because they didn't take humidity out of the air because it took electricity. So it turns out low cost electricity and low cost power are fundamental to human health. So we can control our environment. They're also fundamental to human freedom. So what you want is clean materials. Not environmentally, not environmentally easy to get materials. So we don't want to create waste, but it's not worth sacrificing the quality of the environment around you to save electricity. And there's a very big focused push even to destroy food quality in the name of carbon dioxide. Well, if we have toxic mold and uranium particles and atrazine and glyphosate and plastic in your food, carbon dioxide is not important compared to those. It's important. It's a hundred year problem and we're dealing with a short term problem that is actually caused by the same people trying to sell us carbon dioxide. 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, a heat recovery ventilator, fresh air system, your home is not breathing. And that's where we start to see A lot of these problems cause when we have a mold problem now, it's amplified because we're not getting fresh air in 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 downsize just a little bit and we focus more on the health so that it evens out in the long run. Because 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 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, correct?

Yep.

All right, so how do you know if you have mold in your home?

So if you've ever had. 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 molded, 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. 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 and 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, 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 Mac.

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, 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 would 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, 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, especially if you're using gas, you need to be using that 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, very good advice on what to do there. 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 gas stove versus electrical?

With the electric range, you're going to have an EMF filled from, 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 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, 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.

Okay. 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?

Oh, 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 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 is happening 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 a lot of people tell me, I'll go into their home and 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 evenings because LED light is so disruptive. I, I can see the flicker. A lot of people can't see it. I have a very fast, bright brain and it's, 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 breathing it in. If you were using natural beeswax with essential oil, that's not a problem. It's, it's what's in the candles that, that they're, 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. So are you franchising this thing? Are you planning to grow it? Are you going to hire a bunch of people? How do you make it so this is available to everyone?

Yeah. Right now we're in, in five locations. Boise, Salt Lake, Phoenix, Austin and la. And we're really focusing on building our systems, making sure everything is locked tight and that we have a good product for the right price. And then once we have that really dialed in, we're either going to franchise or go nationwide with it. Because you're right, it is something that everybody needs. And I think that if we've learned anything over the last couple years, is that it's all almost. It's up to us to really take care of our health. The people that we thought were supposed to look out for us obviously do not have our best interest in mind, unfortunately. And so it is up to us and companies like ours and you and the education you do to really teach people how to be healthy and how to live in the modern world that we have. Because it's hard to navigate. There's a lot of noise out there, and it's important to really cut through that noise and get down to what's really important.

So, Ryan, clearly they're doing it for your own safety. So if you could just relax and know, compare at the party line, we'd all be a lot better off. All right.

Yes. Do what you're told.

Well said. Okay, let's. 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. It's. 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 a mold problem. 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 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 got to 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 going to be in the environment everywhere. We can't really control that moisture. We can control to a certain extent, except for 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.

It's funny, at a hotel down there, it's going to be drywall, it's going to be wallpaper, all this stuff that's terrible. But a traditional home would just be concrete and it's much less of an issue. You also could put airlocks in. And I don't see this very often, but if you walk into say a common grocery store, there's two doors for a reason, right? So you never have it opened up. And if I lived in a really humid part of the world, I would want to build that into my home too. So my entryway, when I open the outer doors, humidity comes in, it stops there. And then I close the outer door and I open the inner door so that your home is still, still clean. What about airbnbs? It feels like as soon as, you know, as soon as you check out, they seem to turn off the AC. Wouldn't you have 80% humidity in a really warm house after that?

Yep. Airbnb is really a challenge. You know, going into the Airbnb, first thing I like to do is look in the toilet tank and see if we got any kind of mold growth. Also click on the H Vac if we, if we smell musty. I mean, it's tough though. You've already checked in, you paid for it at your place, now you find out there's mold in it. I don't know, what do you do? That's, that's a tough one, you know, but yeah, that's a challenge.

It's, it's a little bit scary if you own Airbnbs right now, the, the usage of Airbnbs is going down and the rates are going down. So a lot of people thought they had a sustainable piece of real estate and maybe they don't. So I think we're going to see a, a decline in real estate prices as people have to unload Airbnbs that aren't producing. And one of the reasons they don't produce is people have figured out if you're at a hotel, they recirculate the air, but they maintain it well. So if the whole building is moldy, you're screwed, but you just know, don't stay there anymore. But I would say at least half of hotels are relatively safe from a mold perspective, even if the air isn't that fresh because it's recirculated. So I tend to avoid Airbnbs unless they're high end or they're well rated because of the mold problem. And you know, it's not nice because you save money on Airbnbs, but the number of them that are moldy, it's a problem. Have you ever thought of like certifying with test my home, certifying Airbnb to say this is one that's tested and clean? I'd pay more for one of those.

Yeah, that's one thing that we're working on that we have in place is a healthy home certification program. And once we get bigger and have more data behind it, we would love to approach Airbnbs and vacation rentals to have that healthy home certification so that you know, as a consumer walking into this home, that it is mold free. We have air filtration, we have water filters, we're using organic sheets, we're using non toxic cleaning supplies and it's gone through rigorous testing yearly to achieve that. And as you know, we have an Airbnb, which we do that to our Airbnb, and it's. It's fairly popular because of that reason, you know, we. We have the no emf, it's hardwired, and all the important things. So I think that should become more standard, but I don't think the general public is there yet.

Yeah, that was a beautiful place to stay up there in Meridian. And that's Meridian, Idaho, where there, by the way, is an Upgrade Labs now, which is super cool. That's open.

So I came up right by my house, too. That's nice. Yeah. Didn't have to invest in all that stuff to put down in my man cave. I can just go about half a mile from my house and I have all the cool stuff.

And by the way, because I should have said that at the. The introduction, but that's how I met Ryan, is I was going up there to the opening, the grand opening of the Meridian Upgrade Labs, and I got to stay in his Airbnb. That was perfect. Environmentally, I was so blown away. How do you know? It's like. Well, I kind of run a company that does this, so that was. That was cool. Of the best Airbnbs I've ever stayed in. And by the way, if you're saying Upgrade Labs, what, you can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and you can open a franchise like they just did in Meridian outside of Boise. And that's something that's.