290. Mike Feldstein: The 5 Hidden Air Pollutants in Your Home and How To Fix It!

21:05Gary Brecka:Yeah. God's air purifier, sun, wind, rain. It's probably why I feel so good in Colorado, man. I talk about it all the time. You do. Like, I have this little, about a three and a half or four mile loop outside of our place in the mountains. And it's just through the woods. Nothing makes me feel better than putting on a rucksack and going for this hike in the mountains. My red light bed, nothing. All the fancy equipment that I have here in Miami, nothing makes me feel better than, And, you know, in Chinese medicine, they call it forest bathing. And they actually used to prescribe, I think they still do, you know, forest bathing.

21:43Gary Brecka:And, you know, so going out and just getting in the fresh air. Also, the negative ions are super high. And I actually have tested the carbon dioxide on Vancouver Island in the rainforest, and it was 360. Oh, my gosh. So, like, the outdoor ambient CO2, it's like, can you get it lower if you're in the middle of the rainforest? Yeah, it's lower. Wow. So, you got clean air, you got the negative ions, you got the sun. and mold, like if we go outside right now and we test, there's mold everywhere outside, but it's not a problem outside. Mold doesn't grow outside. The problem is it's like the little sandwich, there's only mold only grows on the bread when you put it in the Tupperware.

22:18Gary Brecka:Right. When you have the sun shining on it and with good airflow, mold is not a problem. Right. So when people's indoor environments are sealed tight and they have no sun exposure, what happens to people when they don't have sun? Yeah. And I think what happens is the mold is pretty pissed off. It was doing fine outside. And then you trapped it indoors and it's just trying to survive. So it's replicating, it's multiplying, it's sending out its mycotoxins to try to, you know, grow and your body ends up becoming the host. So because of the way we built and we trap ourselves inside and going back to mold testing, almost every type of mold test is either designed for a false positive or a false negative, which most people don't realize.

22:57So, you know, you go to the functional medicine doc, they say, take a urine test. You're like, ah, I've got the mold. Right. Unless you're like detoxing a lot, everybody's got levels of heavy metals and mold.

23:06Gary Brecka:That's true. So it's the perfect storm. And you go to the functional medicine doc, you know, they took a two day course on mold, which by the way, mold remediation course is also a two day course. So your trusted mold technician, it's a two day course often. Wow. Two day course. So it's not like they went to school or anything for this. It's a hazardous cleanup, but to become a mold remediation tech is two days. Wow. And you learn nothing there. It's all like ancient stuff. you learn as much as a doctor learns about nutrition um so you you have people that are certified they know nothing they come in and like the restoration guys love the false positives and the insurance company loves the false negatives but and the the naturopaths don't realize but they're usually like ermies for example you're all if you're ermie is like historical so you're looking at the dust often in the hvac system uh or like taking a dust sample so it's almost always false positive it doesn't mean that's what's in the air today it means it rained last week and there was mold at some point so it's collected in your dust right and then that test is designed to be very alarmist so this is where it's really nuanced because when you have a mold rush it's like all the crypto guys when there's a big opportunity a lot of experts come in really fast and then you have so the best thing is to do you know you want to test there's three or four different mold tests you want to do but ultimately everyone i know who's done mold consulting for a while, you know, in a home in your first two minutes, if it's moldy or not, the test only confirms what you already know.

24:33It's helpful for the homeowner to get the baseline and the before and the after. And like you said, you know, you can't heal in the place that made you sick.

24:40Gary Brecka:Yeah. That's so true. And that's, that's, that's the number one rule of, of mold detox is to get out of the environment. People are doing supplements, but they're still sleeping and they're doing this huge detox protocol in the moldy bedroom. I'm like, guys, what are we doing here yeah yeah you're retoxing detoxing retoxing detoxing and and you know so if you're in that environment that's that's that's the number one thing is to get get yourself out of that environment it's the whole reason why i don't want to turn this into a commercial for my mattresses but it's why i launched the ultimate snooze because i realized we're spending a third of our life on our mattress and you know when i did one of these detox challenges i saw so many uh urine samples that had these like silicon glues and and flame retardants and these these accelerants including my wife's urine in my urine, which really freaked me out.

25:25Gary Brecka:That's another passive biohack if you think about it. Yeah, how did jet fuel get in my urine? I was like, that's weird. I mean, what's got jet fuel in it that I'm drinking or breathing? But the mold remediation is important. But I've heard you also talk about how your air filtration system is only gonna get you so far because number one, it's not constantly recirculating the air. You mean like HVAC-wise? HVAC-wise, so it's not constant on. And then secondly, it's recirculating the same air. And some of these filters are not specific to getting down to mold spores and smaller particulate matter.

26:03Gary Brecka:And it has a demonstrative impact, not just on how you sleep, but your cognitive function, you know, overall, you know, whether or not, you know, your level of brain fog, your processing speed, short-term recall. um one of the stats i found fascinating that you quoted and i don't want to misquote it um was putting air filtration into um public schools and seeing the um attendance rates yeah go up by 30 percent and you know i want to be the absentee rates go down by 30 percent yes i guess that's the same okay so yeah it is and if they were optimizing for carbon dioxide it would have been even better so like a few baseline studies when you talk about cognitive performance they've taken air quality whether it's co2 particulate um and they do it in i've seen it with um chess players grandmasters in chess and they see how much is their next move game theory optimal and they the the air quality was directly correlated to the quality of their move move so even with high performance like brain athletes another big one is sat scores so the test score is completely correlated to the air quality.

27:15It makes sense. Wow. Well, think about it. If we think about how you feel. It does, but you just don't, you know,

27:19Gary Brecka:it's like playing as a nose on your face kind of thing where you, you know, when you say it, it makes sense. Air quality is like getting hit in the head by a two by four. When you realize that it's a duh moment. Yeah. So with the school, the study was done in Finland. They put air purifiers, and I don't even think super impressive ones, but decent ones, into 50 % of the classes across a handful of schools. And the absentee rates dropped by 20 to 30%, depending on where. Yeah, yeah, right. They crushed it. Yeah. So yeah, whether it's the SAT scores or the chess players, and the list goes on and on and on.

27:53Another one was like based on the level of PM 2.5 and the inflammation in your body and your airways. A small amount, but when your airways are more inflamed, you get less oxygen. You're not running as efficiently.

28:05Gary Brecka:Yeah. You know, I noticed that sometimes when I travel and I stay in certain hotels, I will get phlegmy and slightly congested. I don't feel terrible. Sleep scores are still good, but I can tell that something in the air quality, and hotels are infamous, like we were talking about earlier, for shutting off the HVAC and the rooms between guests. So yeah, you save a few pennies, but you're tripping over. Your whole hotel for mold and you're knocking them down. Exactly. So now the room, and you can tell those rooms where you walk in and the AC has been off for days and they just turn the AC on and the air actually feels, you can feel the moisture in the air.

28:49Gary Brecka:Sometimes you can even smell the mold in the air. And you turn the AC unit on and then that smell kind of goes away. Or you get used to it. Or maybe it's just because you're getting used to it. So I think it's a bigger problem than most of us realize. and again it's one of those aha moments i always talk about when a fish gets sick we clean the tank mom when humans get sick we never think about the tank that they're in you know we really don't treat the environment and physicians don't ever ask you about the environment that you're in you know is there mold in your home kind of what are you drinking kind of mattress you sleeping on that they don't think about these this constant toxic toxic load and it may not just be the air quality i mean there's your toxic bucket just is getting filled up with you know um and different assailants And then eventually something happens, autoimmune, you get sick, you get repeated viral attacks, you get repeated sore throats, whatever it is.

29:43Gary Brecka:And a lot of these repeated sore throats are directly attributable to mold, especially in children. We found this in our own daughter. We have – so I have three kids and I have one that I share with my wife, Sage, my youngest, Delina. and she when she was 16 15 16 she just started getting all of a sudden out of nowhere just repeated um sore throats like three four strep infections a year and i was very anti wiping it out with antibiotics every time because i knew we're just going to buy a problem for ourselves down the road and what i realized and i would really give this message to parents that are listening um was the vast majority of these kids have mold toxicity it's perfectly it just lays back there in the adenoids it's dormant sometimes sporulates if there's any streptococcal bacteria it pisses that bacteria off and it flames up um especially if when they have a stress like a stressful event yeah it seems like it really triggers it yep like i would be testing people's homes, there's family of five.

30:47One doesn't notice it. One is completely itchy skin and red eyes and trouble breathing. And two of them are mildly impacted. Like really, I feel like mold is really an allergen and people are more allergic to it. And then the amount of stress that you're going through really kicks it up. And like, I think the hotel probably doesn't impact you as much as others because of all the stuff you're doing all the time. Whereas for enough people, if that stress bucket was already almost full a couple nights and that big exposure puts them over the edge

31:16Gary Brecka:yep um so so um back to the jasper filter for a minute um so in in an ideal situation for you know the best air quality is this something that you would put one in the biggest area of your home or would you put them in kids rooms your bedroom and one in the biggest area of your home how much air does one of these things move so by far the most important place to put it is your bedroom yeah and that is a third of your life in there so bedroom for sure get the good bed get good sheets get a good pillow and sleep is funny because sleep is only as good as the weakest link you know if you have the greatest bed ever but it's hot you ain't sleeping if it's loud you're not sleeping like with you when it comes to your i call the bedroom the sleep sanctuary yeah and the average person nowadays has a million dollar home and a thousand dollar bed i know maybe get a third of your life get a 950 000 home and spend 50 000 optimizing all your bedrooms what's the point of a home guys so yeah it should heal you you know your home can really be a place for you to detox and and heal it can go from the place that makes you sick to your healing sanctuary yeah so if you think about it um the first one needs to go in your bedroom for sure yeah if you the number one way you pollute your home though is cooking by far so if someone's cooking frequently frequently, having one in the main room is also a no-brainer.

32:40But bedroom first, because if we can dial in that third of our life, it's going to pay dividends and compound like incredibly. Then you move into the kitchen and living room area. Also depends where you spend your time.

32:53Gary Brecka:If someone has a home office and they're spending a third of their life there, then that's another really good place to optimize for. But everybody gathers in the kitchen. And I think, you know, we think that ventilation over the stove is enough, but probably not for that particular matter. And when you're cooking, you're creating a lot of these VOCs too, right? So I've been working out with my son lately, trying to keep up with him and his High Rocks competitive athletes. And I've been starting to use this Perfect Amino pre-workout. I really like it. It's got BH4 and improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash.

33:24Gary Brecka:There's no stimulants. So no caffeine, no Mao Wong, nothing that gives you that kind of amped feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout like you have better blood flow so if you're in the market for a pre-workout check out the perfect amino pre-workout it's my favorite now now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast and well the interesting thing about cooking so more than 50 percent of range hoods do almost nothing so well we'll weave some free tips in here yeah because this is what it's all about yeah yeah let's give them some tips for things that they could do if they didn't if they don't have the wherewithal to invest in a filter and Even if you do.

33:57You want to do it all. Okay. But the free stuff that you could do tonight is a really big deal. So if you cook a lot or if you cook at all at home, number one, let's make sure your range hood's working. And I'll use the word range hood and vent interchangeably. It's the thing above your stove that's supposed to evacuate the air from your house.

34:14Gary Brecka:Right. So number one, take a Kleenex, take a paper towel, turn it on and make sure it's actually sucking it up. Okay. Often you'll see it's blowing it down or it's not pulling it all. If it's not pulling it from your hand and holding it there, it's not working. If it's been a few years since you've cleaned that thing too, you wouldn't imagine the amount of grease that's stuck up in those things. Yeah, clean that thing regularly, like at least once a year. Then if we know that it's pulling air, let's find out where it's venting to. You'd be shocked how often it's just venting into the cabinet right above.

34:43Right above. You open that little cabinet above and the vent's just there.

34:47Gary Brecka:Wide open. So your GC just ran it into there. Yeah, especially apartments. Wow. Often it's venting into your attic. Yeah. So imagine you're steaming and boiling your veggies and you're cooking and you're vaporizing water and then you're just dumping it into your attic. Why do you think you get mold in your attic? Yeah. Especially when the attic doesn't breathe. So ideally that range hood should be pulling air. It should be venting it outside. Okay. So cooking, not only does it create a lot of particulate and stuff, but it also creates PAH, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. When I would test homes after wildfires, PAH, hexavalent chromium are two of the main things that we would test for.

35:26and until those were non-existent, a home wasn't cleared.

35:29Gary Brecka:And those are carcinogens, and those are byproducts of, like, you know, coming in contact with very high heat. That's denaturization from very high heat. So you could have the best pan and the best oils and high-quality butters and a great grass-fed, grass-finished steak, but you're still going to create the PAH. So you need to be venting that out of your home. And if you go into a home and it smells like food everywhere, it dissipates. where do you think it really is going? It goes into your carpets, into your clothes, into your walls, into your bedding. So that pH is getting absorbed into your pillow and then you're sleeping on it.

36:03The good news is this is an easy thing. This is a low-hanging fruit. Get that range hood working. It's also an area that's very worth investing in. Eventually, I would like to make a new, better range hood. It'll be a while. How silly that your range hood still has to be manually turned on and off. Why is there not a sensor? And then when you have these gray vents, if your CO2 is high, let's use all the existing fans in the home to help the home breathe and exhaust. Yeah. Just a no brainer. So cooking, let's get that range hood going. Number two, bathroom fans. Everything I said about the range hood applies the exact same to the bathroom fan.

36:36Take the tissue, hold it up. You might be surprised it's not working. If it's caked in dust, clean it, open it, clean it, check where it vents. So you're taking that shower. And if you look how much water your towel can absorb, it's a lot. It can be a gallon of water. plus the water pooled up in the shower. And then it's going, even if your bathroom fan's running, it's going into the attic, which often is not ventilating. So you really want to make sure those bathroom fans are venting outside. If they're going into the attic, then you want to make sure that the attic is breathing properly. Otherwise, you're taking the cooking particulate, the steam, the showers, you're dumping it in the attic, then you get a whole bunch of mold growing in there, which is the least bad place to have mold.

37:15Right. But it's still backdrafts and it can still create a problem and it can still grow downwards. So we need those bathroom fans working. and people think bathroom fans are for the poop particles. They're for the shower. They're for the moisture. They're for the humidity. So if you have a family of five and there's five showers happening a day, you're talking gallons and gallons of water just dumping into your home every day, potentially unfiltered water. So you want to be getting that stuff out of the home. Obviously, minimal carpets, minimal rugs. If you are using carpets, getting a really good HEPA vacuum, and I don't mean like the Dyson, for example.

37:47The mold vacuum that I used to use for mold and asbestos, It was called the GD930.

37:52Gary Brecka:That sounds serious. It's serious. Yeah. It sounds like a front end loader. They're only$500,$600 now. Really? And they're on Amazon. And what is the difference? Is it the suction power? Suction power is incredible, but it's a real mechanical filter with a big HEPA bag. Even in mold restoration, this would last us months. For residential use, you'll probably never have to change the filter ever. Wow. And this should be your, it's not your daily driver. But you can't get these things at like Walmart or Target. Amazon has them now. Amazon. Euro clean, no fisk. What is it called? GD 930. GD 930. So that is like your deep clean vacuum.

38:27Gary Brecka:Okay. And I really recommend that every family, part of your news year's resolution and you're, you know, you're getting ready for the holidays, having a family-wide detox, deep clean party one day. That sounds like something my family would do for sure. Put on good music, take the dishes out, take the, move the dresser, move the bed, have some fit, like rotate it out once a year a deep clean this is a good time to get your ducks cleaned get your carpet steam cleaned and do a deep clean of your house do the range hood do the bathroom fans once a year is fine so big deep clean party why not yeah it's just it's just a low stakes you know because last thing we want to do is create daily weekly or monthly habits dude when you pull that bed out from the wall too there's some nasty business going on back there i mean as clean as my house is too man uh we just recently renovated and put put new new furniture in the house and you know i'm a psycho about you tested my air quality um about the air and the cleaning products we use in here everything but man pulled the bed out from the wall and the behind that headboard was it's like the one place where the cleaning isn't happening yeah it's was pretty pretty bad um so those are big ones obviously you know you want to mitigate the source so using better cleaning products and using better oils and all that good stuff, but really getting the ventilation dialed in.

39:46And then as much as there is outdoor pollution, outdoor air is typically, indoor air is typically five to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air. I've heard that from so many sources. It's very consistent. Yeah. It's very, not here. It's very consistent though. And if you think about it, your indoor air, like people think of their home air has like this insulated thing. When I test 99 % of homes, there's more pollen in your bed than there is outside, even on a high pollen day. Because your home is not, it's not, where do you think the air inside is coming from? It comes from outside. So that pollen is just staying inside and getting trapped.

40:19So if you're cooking, this is a great time to open your windows. So if your range hood isn't working good and your bathroom fan isn't working good, let your home breathe.

40:29Gary Brecka:And you know, the loud range hood vent can be quite annoying, but opening a couple windows, get that cross ventilation going your home needs to breathe just like you do you always feel so much better when that happens too of course i mean one of the nice things about miami we have dinner parties sometimes in the winter and i'm always i open the whole one side of the home and it's just a different environment when you when you do that and let the fresh air in so fresh air range hood bathroom fans once a year family clean party you know keep the shoes outside or have a separate pair of indoor shoes and slippers i got a pair of my if 95 so big on that 95 of shoes tested have fecal matter on them, a.k.a.

41:03poop, we're good here. Okay. So, and then what do you think it is for glyphosate? It's going to be the same. Yeah. You're walking around on, just because you're not using Roundup, you're walking around on public grounds all the time.

41:15Gary Brecka:Yeah. Dog poop. Dog poop and glyphosate is on your shoes. Then you come inside, you're walking on your carpets, you're walking on your floor, then baby's crawling around, and then it's constantly getting aerosolized. So you want to be cleaning your air, but you want to stop things at the source level if you can. Yeah. And like water is an obvious thing. If people realize it only in the last 10 years, did drinking filtered water become like kind of a thing. Table stakes. Everybody grew up, you know, uh, drinking from the hose. Yeah. And then you think back. I did too. We survived. Yeah. Me too.

41:46Gary Brecka:Yeah. Um, they probably still are. God only knows what was in the municipal water in the eighties when I was drinking it out of my, well, we lived on a farm. So at least we had well water. So, and if you drink that hose water, you're like, time to kind of tasted a little plasticky. It did. It tasted terrible. right now just thinking about it yeah you got that memory it's super metallic like i can actually taste copper or like the school or the park uh water fountains yeah occasionally i go around and test water fountains at park oh and like the leads off the charts really off the charts because the pipes yep yeah so like we all realize and once you start drinking filtered water now you learn to trust your senses more and you can taste what top water tastes like so true versus filtered water so the cool thing is what's really exciting here is ignorance is not bliss what happens is i I always tell people there's the worst part.

42:31There's one bad thing about really cleaning your air. You may become an air snob. All of a sudden you go to people's homes and you're like, this is, you know, everybody. That happens to me in hotels, man.

42:41Gary Brecka:I can smell the lack of air quality, even in really good hotels. We'll know that my work has been valuable if by 2030, when you go on Airbnb, there is a scent-free option on the filter. Or when you go on Uber, there's a scent-free option. If we can get that awareness going enough, with those fragrances. Yeah, because you're big on the fragrances. I'm big on the anti-fragrances. Yeah, anti-fragrances, yeah. You're big on fragrance awareness, how should I say. I guess while we're talking about the free tips, no Glade plugins, no Febreze, no air fresheners. Dude, I have a driver in Las Vegas, and I went out for the fights this weekend with the family, and we got into his Suburban, and he actually had this little thing that created scents in the cup holder, and it was smoke yeah so i guess what it was doing was taking the uh the the little gel filter and and vaporizing it and dude i got into the car and you could just feel it it's like you know when somebody just has way too much perfume on and you get on an elevator with them or something it felt like that in there and he was like don't you love it man i you know i bought this thing it's electric it's a car always smells good i'm like shut that thing off open the doors i'm making a a beautiful card that we're going to send to all of our customers.

43:55Gary Brecka:Yeah. With their jaspers and we'll send it out to as many people as we can, where it'll be a beautiful card in English and Spanish with a little QR code that you give to the Uber driver that explains to them what that Christmas tree of death is doing to them. Yeah. Because like people, we need help. And I have a lot of videos where I actually would talk to the Uber driver of why they have it there. Yeah. They think it's increasing the ambience. Yeah. And you know what's interesting? You can't trick human biology when it comes to temperature where our thermal sensors are we're so you can't trick the body cold feels cold hot feels hot but you really can manipulate smell and you can really manipulate taste so but companies have taken a lot of advantage manipulating our food and manipulating our air in a really big way that's a whole separate podcast i could definitely go down that road with you but um yeah that's part of but part of my whole maha presence is you know trying to fixed food quality especially in the public school system and i mean the public school system serving 30 million meals twice a day you know so 60 million meals a day to our most vulnerable which are children in their most vulnerable stages their pre-pubescent years and and you know it's no wonder 42 percent of kids have one chronic disease so i'm curious actually what you think about something because what i've what my reachers had showed and what i believe to be true is when you think about i learned don't eat unless i'm salivating and i've noticed this to be deeply impactful so even if i'm like out in public i my prayer for food is take putting it close and smelling it very slowly and i smell each thing on the plate and i feel my mouth instantly fill with saliva it's amazing yeah no the body is like that's like the pavlov's dog you know experiment but the body is amazing at starting creating cravings around what it needs.

45:42Gary Brecka:And I think what's happened with highly processed foods is it's perverted that sense, right? I mean, if you're nutritionally deprived, you will actually crave the very things that make that situation worse. So, you know, like GLP-1 is a hormone we secrete in our gut. And I mean, there's a trillion dollar industry crept up around GLP-1s. but we secrete GLP-1 in response to nutrient density. So when you chemically circumvent the GLP-1 response, the body doesn't realize that it's the amount of calories it's taking in, it's reading the nutrients. That's why you can eat four boxes of Oreos, but you can't eat four avocados.

46:21Gary Brecka:Always got room for dessert. Yeah, I always have room for dessert, right? Because four avocados is too nutrient dense. You can eat a whole box of Oreos because they're chemically designed to circumvent that response. And, you know, again, when we get back to like biohacking, you know, I just tell people, look, there's no secret to dogmatic dieting. The secret to living a long, healthy life from a food perspective is just the absence of processed foods. But, you know, again, these things like air quality, water quality, light quality, even though these are expenses, you know, if you're on that journey of wellness, longevity, anti-aging, whatever you want to call it, I mean, making your home this sanctuary of healing, sleep, relaxation, this should be where you go to detox, not sort of retox.

47:15And I think so many of our homes are making us sick and not the least of which is, you know, mold and indoor air quality.

47:23Gary Brecka:And five years ago, I would bet more than half of all primary care physicians would have just told you that mold is a made-up, you know, it's hocus-pocus. We all have mold. Mold's everywhere. You don't need to worry about mold. I can patently tell you that that is false, you know, from having our clinic treat tens of thousands of patients and remediate mold. By the way, I have a free mold detox on my website at theultimatehuman.com. It's completely free. So if you find that you have mold in your urine or you do a test and you find mold, There's an eight-week detox in there for mold and another one for heavy metals.

47:58Gary Brecka:Because I'm such a believer that as the, you know, we slowly sort of micropoison ourselves to death. And air is one of those things. So back to the filtration. Sure. What kinds of things is this taking out of the air? And what direct impact does that have on our physiology? And I'll say when we talk about, when I say PM 2.5, what that means is particulate matter, 2.5 microns in size. 2.5 microns. And why is that an issue? I don't have any estimate of what that is. Is that dust? It's a lot of things. Or smaller than dust? It could be dust and smoke. 0.3 to 10 microns is what I was testing for before.

48:37Okay. PM 2.5 in particular. And a lot of things have ranges of particle sizes. But the reason PM 2.5 is the one that you see reported and talked about the most is because it's small enough to get into your lungs and bloodstream and too big to get out. so when things are 0.03 0.1 microns and tiny tiny tiny they come in and you breathe them back out they don't get stuck that PM 2.5 it comes in and it stays in which is why that's like the number that we always see reported on and it's big in air quality indexes and then VOCs is this catch all term for volatile organic compounds you know there's naturally occurring VOCs but when we're talking about it in an indoor environment we're talking about what the fragrance is creating and the off gas is basically airborne chemicals.

49:19Right. Is the, this is the simple way of thinking about it. So when we test air in a home, average bedroom, when I go and test it, you know, there's a million particles floating around between 0.3 and 10 microns inside. What's that? You're talking smoke, pollen, rubber from the tires of the cars. Um, yeah, you got mold spores, you got allergens, you got all the general pollutions. You know, you may not be using, um, lint dryer vents, but your neighbor is. So everybody's polluting this air that we share. Your home is pulling it in and then that's in your bedroom. So typically in the average bedroom, when you start cleaning the air in about half an hour, we can get it about 95 to 99 % cleaner.

49:58Really, really, really quickly. It's just like water filters work. Air filters work. In half an hour? Half an hour. Wow. When we did a test at the Ritz here, we got it 10 times cleaner in 20 minutes. In the room you were staying in?

50:09Gary Brecka:You just walked right in there with a Jasper and set it right in your room? I travel with it everywhere I go. That's awesome. Everywhere I go, I dragged that thing with me. If you know me, you know I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career. Different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair, and it declines faster than most people realize.

50:38Gary Brecka:When I found Symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body. And this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So it's like, it's kind of like what you're talking about before, where it's like, it's your body. And I, for myself, I rebranded sleep to healing time because sleep felt like a dormant word i didn't want to like go to sleep it felt like i was turning off and i love being on and vibrant and awake yeah but like when i'm sick i'm like i'm going to do my healing time now and in eight hours i'm going to find out if i'm feeling better the next day or not like feels like all the healing happens in that state so when i talk when i view it instead of sleep in a bedroom i'm like it's my healing room yeah and i want to optimize my healing facility my my sleep sanctuary so if i get that dialed in so when the air is now in it's not filled with pollen and it's not filled with mold and it's not filled with with dust mites and it's not just the dust when there's dust there's dust mites which most people are fairly allergic to then your body can heal itself so true man so that's a big one nothing more powerful than our god-given immune system but it's so distracted just get out of its way yeah and babies this is a really crazy one too huge yeah so you know you got you got your baby comes home born in a hospital um which already usually is typically horrible air yeah um and then you bring your baby home and you just painted and you got a new crib and a new little mattress and little toys filled with mold and then you put your baby in there 18 hours a day and you shut the doors and you shut the window and you close the blinds right baby's sick all the time yeah and the worst is you get these little diaper pails yeah they're supposed to be airtight but you go into a diaper genie or whatever it's called yeah That's one of the big brands.

52:33Gary Brecka:Yeah. And it stinks like poop in there. Yeah. Newsflash, trust your nose. If it smells like poop, it is poop. Yeah. And if it's poop, it's incredibly high levels of bacteria. Yeah. So I'd love to say Jasper is the solution for this. It helps. But the right, like, if there's like one message that I'm a huge proponent of, it's getting those diaper pails out of baby's room. And there's actually a pretty small one. It's like a$70 Amazon one. It's very small and it works like a trash chute. Yeah. And it's small enough that you're dumping it out every single day. Yeah. Because the diaper genie and others, they have a weak capacity.

53:04So you're holding five, six day old diapers in a bedroom. And you go in there like, oh. So remember, this is 2020. I was living in Kelowna, British Columbia. And I'm going into my first daughter's room. And it stinks like poop. And I'm like, Rach, I don't know about this. My spidey senses say this is not okay. Yeah. But she was really, you know, holding it down. First baby. I said, can we please not put the diapers in the pail? Like, let's commit to taking them outside right away. And she's like, ah, you know, there's a lot of stuff. Like, this is really convenient. I said, fine. Rite of passage, mom.

53:37Mom and dad, rite of passage. For tonight, let's put the diaper pail in our bedroom and see what it feels like to sleep with a poop can in our room. P.S., I'm going to sleep in the other room tonight.

53:48Gary Brecka:Yeah. And she's like, ew, no, I'm not doing that. You're like, oh, I got you. I don't have to say anything else. Yeah. Because then it clicked for her. She's like, wait a second. If I wouldn't sleep in it, but our baby who can't talk is, this is a big problem. Yeah. So, you know, you're talking about the mattress before. Like, so tips for inspecting, expecting parents is, you know, you want to make the pretty nursery. I get it. If you're going to paint, do it as, do it six months before, do it four months before open those windows as much as you can. Let that room off case as much as possible.

54:21Please don't put those little anklets, those EMF anklets on your baby either. We don't need that. If you are going to have a camera and a monitor, if you can put it eight feet away, that's seems to be the sweet spot emf wise yeah um agree with that the the cribs i i everybody loves new furniture but if you can get a secondhand dresser and and a crib so the off-gassing has already been complete before you put that into your nursery that would be great and if not get the baby stuff four or five get it as early as you can put it outside put it in the garage open the windows let that stuff off gas because yeah adults fun facts this probably should have been the first thing I said.

54:59Adults are breathing on average 15 ,000 to 17 ,000 times a day. Toddlers are 50 to 60 ,000 times. Infants can be 60 ,000.

55:05Gary Brecka:50 to 60 ,000. 1 ,000 breaths a day. Wow. Infants can be 80 to 100 ,000 breaths per day. Wow. The average person drinks half a gallon. This is probably a good water drinker, half a gallon of water per day, but you breathe 3 ,000 gallons of air per day. They say about 70 % of all your detox happens in your lungs. So if you're taking in this amount of air relative to this much water. So you're breathing, you know, you have two pounds of food coming in a day, half a gallon of water and 3000 gallons of air. It's by far the thing that we take in the most. It's also the breathing is the only thing that we do passively and actively.

55:39So when you're sleeping, you're not eating, you're not drinking. The only thing keeping you alive all night long is air quality, is the air that you're breathing. It's the first thing you do when you're born. It's the last thing you do before you die. And I think that's why we're sleeping on air, no pun intended, is because it's so core to our existence that if we were so distracted by air, you know, we're really good at adapting to things. So I think that's why air is just like this, this duh moment because of how much air we take in. And if you look at the Google search volume, air quality is like meh, flat.

56:10Type in breathwork and it's like hockey stick growth. So the fact that we're, we don't talk, I mean, we should, but we're talking about what we eat more than how we chew and we're talking about water quality more than how we drink but breath work is talked about way more breathing is clearly understood and growing but what are we even breathing yeah it's

56:29Gary Brecka:just it's just hiding in place why i try to do it outside every day i mean and it is such a game changer you know it's it's more of the free advice things that i talk about that really help move the needle those habitual things like just getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning within first 30 60 minutes of the day delaying your coffee intake maybe 60 minutes after you wake up I love that one. You know, getting a little sunlight onto your skin, you know, doing a few rounds of breath work, which was really hard for me learning to sit in silence. You know, I always, growing up until just very recently, had a real issue with silence.

57:02Gary Brecka:I mean, it's when my brain would just start to ricochet and think about everything. But quieting my mind was a really hard thing. Tuning into my breath allowed me to quiet my mind. And it's sort of that transition from waking into the day and it's free and it's portable and you can do it anywhere. I do it on commercial flights. I mean, when I do those 15-hour flights. Breath is your connection to everything. Everything. And if the air field is polluted and distorted, your connection to the everything, there's too much noise in the air. And people are like, we're talking through the air. EMF moves through the air.

57:33We're not just talking about particulates and VOCs, but air is the vehicle in which we couldn't be talking underwater right now. This is like the medium of life. So keeping that channel super clear and super dialed in. And there's two fun studies. you know, because like mold is everywhere that I forgot to mention to tell you. So all of our studies, I like, because I was a restoration guy. I wasn't a scientist or an engineer. I was a mold man, you know. So I was testing the air before, cleaning it, testing it after. It was like very simple layman kind of thing. I was just looking at before and afters.

58:07And so all of the labs tests that we do are real world stuff. most studies that you look at when you look at water filters air filters cleaning products it's these in these controlled environments so all our mold studies you know we remove 97.1 of the mold spores in a 500 square foot room with eight foot ceilings in one hour in two hours it's 99.9 uh and 98.1 in three hours it's 100 because we're scrubbing we're scrubbing the air in the room so all of our studies and when you go to our website we put all of our lab datas right there what is this jasper.com jasper.co jasper.co okay yeah now that they know you have a big company they're going to hold it for you and um so all everything should be real world examples we did a study a sleep study about a year and a half ago where we shipped 150 people jaspers they were using aura and whoop and a few other sleep tracking devices a lot of whoop and um what happened was they um these were people who were not filtering their air so we said we'll give you guys a Jasper in exchange for 30 days of sleep data, four weeks.

59:12So the first week, keep your Jasper off. Weeks two and three, Jasper on in your bedroom, fan speed three, dark mode. Week four, turn your Jasper off. The average person got 25 minutes more sleep per night, 18 % more deep sleep, and they fell asleep five minutes faster. And this was dramatically pulled up by the people who were sleeping. The people who were sleeping four hours a night were sleeping like six. You know, people who were really dialed in and optimized still got solid benefit, but people who were really struggling, anyone who had mold or pollen or allergies or VOCs, or they were cooking a lot.

59:46And then the white noise also helped a lot of people quiet their minds as well. So this is just like, when I got to see that 30, this is still, and by the way, all of this is a community study. That was an anecdotal study that we did with the general public. A lot of them were influencers and doctors, but this was not an official sleep study. This was our own community led sleep study off of basically aura and whoop tracking data and stuff like that and um to me that kind of study is very relatable yeah um and when i realized that also about 30 percent of people who were snoring stopped snoring and we historically look at snoring has you know weight and structural issues but for a lot of people especially people they have cpap machines to force air down your throat it should be like the law like table stakes that if you need a cpap you

1:00:34Gary Brecka:have to clean the air yeah because you got this moldy pollen full there that you're just driving deep down your airways come on guys yeah another duh moment so um hepa i'm kind of on a we're going to change our language soon because you know we're calling our hepa filter hepa is bullshit it is why that was totally bullshit why is it just particulate size or what's so you know you often hear that it filters down to you know 99.97 or at 0.03 microns what they don't tell you that's the mpps which is the most penetratable particle size so we actually are more effective at smaller particle sizes that's they say down 2.03 it's not true if you look at the lab data at 0.02 and 0.01 we're more effective than 0.03 that's like the pm 2.5 that's the sneaky size that that gets through and when that's the most damaging that's the most damaging um but also So HEPA, so you go to these third-party labs.

1:01:31And if you dig deep, when you ask these companies and you look at their lab data, what happens is, so Jaspers, you asked about airflow. At the lowest fan speed, we move about 100 to 120 cubic feet per minute. At the highest speed, it's about 400 to 430 CFM.

1:01:46Gary Brecka:Okay. A lot of times you'll see the lab data, people are testing their filters at 4 CFM. So a Kleenex, if you could blow gently enough, could be HEPA. So there's no standard in the regular, Like HEPA is a standard, but they're not mandating that the airflow is at a certain fan speed. So you'll notice when you look at our lab data, we put the CFM on the lab data because we're testing it at the actual fan speed that Jasper is running. If we test it at one CFM, it's going to be off the charts. But it's not a real, it's like testing your zero to 60 on your car. If the car was off the pavement, that's 0.1.

1:02:20Yeah. No, you got to put it on the pavement. That's how we test this thing. so a lot of the marketing claims that you see if you really look in a layer deeper and coming from the restoration standpoint it was like eyes wide open what's going on here so really looking and when people are talking about how many square foot does your air purifier do well on what typically they have these big claims then you look at the five print it's like seven foot ceilings in an isolated chamber on um on full speed most people are running their air filter at the lowest speed all the time right so so you want to have real world data i see real world data yeah like let's let's let's test the pollen in the room let's run the machine and let's test it again yeah um so i really love as a restoration guy before during and after testing in a real environment

1:03:07Gary Brecka:that's the real stuff michael i'm i'm i i think this is just such an important topic for for people to really get their arms around i think it's an important topic for people to also understand that as you know as they're on this wellness journey and longevity journey you know as they get some disposable income you know where are the best places to point it and i think air water and lighting are great places to start in your home because once you make these investments you don't remake the investment or there's minimal investment thereafter and they don't add any time time to your day. And I think that if we just focused on those three things, air, water, and lighting in our homes made it a sanctuary to improve our sleep, to optimize our health, to not retoxify us, you know, we're more resilient when we're outside of the home going through the rest of our daily tasks.

1:04:01Gary Brecka:So I think my audience is going to really love this. Just to comment on that one thing there, you know, the 80-20 being the air, water, lighting, like what's the 80-20 of the 80-20? I think it's drinking water. There's a lot you could do in the shower there's a lot you could do and all your taps and your bathing and all that but drinking water yeah dial in drinking water dial in your sleeping air so you know drinking water and sleeping air and then having a nice lamp in your common area and a nice dimmed diffused lamp in the bedroom if we can just deal with your lighting after sunset yeah you're especially in your bedroom yeah slept you're sleeping air and you're drinking water now we're talking about like really realistic stuff.

1:04:40I just want to mention one more thing too. Well, you talked about the study for the school. Something that we're going to be very much open sourcing is we bought a school in Austin.

1:04:47Gary Brecka:You told me about that. That's wild. I just think it's important for people to know about this. So we're putting in clean air, clean water, good lighting, non-toxic cleaning products, very outdoor based. We'll have big screened in porches. And we want to say, if in Finland, they got the air quality, the absentee rates down by 30%. I believe if we can get the absentee rates down like 50%. That's our target. And I'd love to talk to you later actually about ways that we can measure it and make it scientifically valid. Because if we can, the public schools, the reason that they have all these truancy laws and they force you to be at high attendance and all that is because they get paid based on attendance rates.

1:05:23So if we can prove out that we can get the absentee rates down, it's going to be profitable for the schools to build healthy buildings, clean air, clean water, good lighting, healthier food. If they know that can get the attendance rates up 30 40 50 percent if you can align to the business incentives 50 it's a major move on well 30 was just air yeah so i want to make sure that we're um scientifically accurate you know testing monitoring the sick symptoms the attendance rates schools are already monitoring attendance really well but you know coughs and runny noses and and stuff like that like we want to make this undeniable proof we want to we want to open source it and then you know our school is going to be quite small in Austin, but everything we do, every product we use, the data, we're going to open source it all on the website.

1:06:07So ideally as many schools as possible. And if people are, if your kid goes to a private school, I wish we could help public schools. They're very difficult to work with. If you email us, we give several hundred Jaspers every couple months away to schools to put into your kids' classrooms. Oh, that's great. Because we found once people's kids start getting, stop getting sick, it becomes undeniable. And then we help the school teach about air quality to the parents and everything. So our big initiative is getting clean air into schools. So if this resonates with you, great. If not, open your windows, don't wear your shoes inside, get your range head going, get your bathroom fan going, tell your Uber driver to take out the Christmas tree and unplug Glade plugins wherever you go.

1:06:47We're looking to build a clean air ambassador army. So, you know, thank you so much for listening. And I hope this helps you guys out.

1:06:55Gary Brecka:I'm a huge, huge fan of these kinds of biohacks that don't add another minute to your life. And for the rest of you guys, I hope you enjoyed the podcast until next time. That's just science.