Ryan Blasser: [00:00:06] A lot of times the homes that we live in are not healthy for us and they're actually hurting us. And homes should be the opposite. The home should be our sanctuary. I'm Ryan Blasser, and this is the Life Stylist Podcast.

Luke Storey: [00:00:20] All right, Life Stylists, we've got another banger of a New Year's show for you today. Last week, on our first show of 2023, we, of course, explored the inner landscape through meditation, mindfulness, and breathwork with Manoj Dias. And my intention there was to set our mindset in the right direction for the new year. And we're continuing the New Year's theme this week, but will instead be focusing on our outer environment, specifically the health of our home. 

This is episode 452, Home Sick: how testing and mitigating mold, water and EMF can save your home and your health with Ryan Blasser. And you guys trust me when I say you're going to want the show notes, links, and transcripts for this one. And you can find them at lukestorey.com/testmyhome. 

Our guest, Ryan Blasser, is an electrical engineer, certified building biologist, environmental consultant, and electromagnetic radiation specialist, and sits on the board of directors for the Building Biology Institute. This guy's got over 20 years of experience as an electrical engineer and worked for the Department of Energy and as an air quality specialist for the Department of Environmental Quality. 

So Ryan's experience has deeply informed his understanding of how environments play a vital role in our health and our well-being. Combining his extensive technical and environmental background, he founded the most cool company I think I've ever found called Test My Home. Testmyhome.com conducts indoor environmental assessments to determine the health of the building and how the environment is affecting its occupants.

His team takes scientific measurements with the latest in advanced technology and uses calibrated meters to detect toxic exposures in the built environment. And that, you guys, is exactly what he and his team did for this interview. They went through every nook and cranny of our home. Then we discuss not only what they found, but also his entire protocol in detail. 

So on this one, Ryan explains the new and incredibly important field of building biology and why you need it to be sure your home is truly safe. We talk about the numerous hidden dangers present in modern homes and what we can do to mitigate these without sacrificing our comfortable lifestyles. So listen up. If you're one of the listeners with questions about water, mold, EMF, and interior lighting, this one is going to offer immense value. 

And the icing on the cake is that you can also hire Ryan's team to do the same damn thing in your home. To do so, visit lukestorey.com/hometesting for a special offer on Ryan's extensive building Biology resources. As I've learned over the years, trying to figure this stuff out on your own can be extremely confusing and frustrating. 

So if you want help again, visit lukestorey.com/hometesting and they'll get you dialed in. And take note of this, I've also included a bonus for this episode as well. Click on the show notes to watch an additional video interview with Ryan where we went over the actual test results from my home, as well as the solutions you'll need to make your home the perfect environment for health. Again, you'll find that bonus video in the show notes. 

Now, we covered a lot here and I was tempted to just gloss it over, but I think it'll serve all of us if I just bullet out some of the things we get into here because it's so damn interesting and I think useful to everyone. 

First, we cover air testing, so mold detection, remediation, do's and don'ts; toxic cleaning products; the importance of using your oven's exhaust fan; HVAC systems and controlling humidity; adding UV lights to air-con coils; natural pest control; dangerous personal care products, and scented candles, and of course, the best filtration you can find.

Next, we explore water testing; the various ways to filter whole house versus point-of-use systems, reverse osmosis versus distillation, and hard water solutions. Then we get into the lighting testing, blue light mitigation, and the best bulbs available, the dangers of light flicker and the worst and best bulbs, overhead lighting versus sconces, and the downside of dimmer switches. 

Then last but definitely not least, we cover one of my favorite topics EMF testing and mitigation. We cover the difference between 5G networks in the air versus on your phone and why the setting on your phone doesn't matter-- a little spoiler alert there-- metal detectors versus millimeter wave machines at the airport; the mixed bag of smart meters; alarm system EMF; why wireless baby monitors are a really bad idea; mitigating wireless audio and smart TVs; how devices like printers can emit EMF even when turned off, I discovered that it's crazy, but I fixed it. And you'll learn how.

The EMF level of electric guitars; low versus high EMF saunas; the risks of wireless mouse and keyboard setups; putting phone on airplane mode versus turned off, and take note on this topic specifically, as I've been posting about this for a while, and I learned from Ryan that I had some of this wrong. So we're going to correct that in this episode. 

We also define dirty electricity and how to fix it; solar panel is a common source of EMF; finding magnetic fields from things like pool equipment and fluorescent lighting fixtures; and Ryan's opinion on the various quantum physics EMF products on the market.

So as you can tell, this one's extremely thorough. I'm actually shocked that we were able to pack all of this into one episode, but we did. But like I said, it's the new year, so there's no better time to begin making our homes and our offices, for that matter, as healthy as possible. So here we go. Enjoy the show, and please share it with a few friends. All right, Ryan Blasser, here we are, man. Let's do this.

Ryan Blasser: [00:05:50] Yes.

Luke Storey: [00:05:51] So you and I spent the day yesterday, along with your cohort, testing every possible contaminant in the known universe in our house here, which is a really fascinating experience. So some of the things I'd like to do today is to unpack a little of that and educate people on all the things that we can look for to make our home environment or work environment, for that matter, more biocompatible and healthy. 

So I'm super stoked to have this conversation because it's going to answer so many questions that I get from listeners on an ongoing basis. And many of those answers, I don't know until I talk to someone like you. So I'm pumped to do this. 

Before we get started, I'd never ask, did you yesterday because we just got so busy, what did you do with your career before you started your company Test My Home and started doing the stuff that you're doing now? What's your background?

Ryan Blasser: [00:06:47] So I've always been fascinated with the environment and how the environment interacts with our body and how our body reacts to certain things in our environment. Starting at an early age, I grew up in Idaho and we used to have these parties out in the wilderness and the campfire. And I always noticed that around the campfire, people look better than you do under the blue light and the green light. It was just that glow, that warm glow that seems to make everybody look good.

And so that was fascinating to me how the environment can affect us on a good way. And so I went to college, got a degree in electrical engineering, and we started a company in Phenix designing nightclubs, building nightclubs, the environmental part of it. So we would take a vanilla box, which is basically just sheetrock walls, and we'd turn it into a nightclub or a church or a high-end restaurant. And we would dial in specific lighting, specific acoustics, lighting, sounds, anything to entertain the mind, to entertain the body, to stimulate, to make people feel good. 

And so we had all the colors dialed in. We had this alpha wave generator that we would install, that we'd run the music through. It would actually produce alpha waves in the brain. There's a whole study behind this with psycho-acoustic analysis.

Luke Storey: [00:07:56] Oh, cool. That's funny. It reminds me of the conversation I had prior to you arriving today.

Ryan Blasser: [00:08:01] Yeah. So in doing that eight, 10 years, I started to get sick and realize that there's certain environments that I just don't feel as good in and certain environments I do feel. And one of them that I felt really good in was the recording studios, where it was really EMF proof, EMF free because we would have to make sure there was no interference on the line, no interference going through the air. Otherwise, we'd have these hums and tics and buzzes on the sound and on the video. So by nature, we were making these EMF-free environments and I found that I felt really good in these environments.

Luke Storey: [00:08:29] That's so interesting because when we tested my Fender Telecaster electric guitar yesterday and found it was producing all this electric field, when you touch the strings, essentially you're getting blasted. And I'm like, "Great. That explains why Keith Richards looks like he does." God bless him. 

But I've always thought about, oh, those poor musicians-- even before we test my guitar, I've always thought they're sitting in front of the recording console. They have all these amplifiers, magnetic fields, and electronics plugged in everywhere. They're touching them. There's wires crossed. It's funny you say that, because I've always thought recording studios must be the worst EMF environments there are.

Ryan Blasser: [00:09:05] And that's the interesting thing about pro audio is that it comes in a shielded cable. So it has three wires versus just your regular home audio stuff, which is two wires. So that third cable acts as a shield. So if you take apart a pro audio cable, you'll see this tin foil around it that's shielded and grounded. So if you do it properly, everything in the environment is going to be completely shielded.

Luke Storey: [00:09:24] That's amazing. I feel so much better for my musician friends now. I'm thinking of one in particular, my friend, Doyle. I'm going to tell him about this conversation because he's always asking me about this stuff.

Ryan Blasser: [00:09:34] Yeah. So I dove into the other side, the dark side of the environment. We got really good at stimulating the positive side, but then the dark side, the mold, the chemicals, the EMF exposure, and poor lighting. What are these things doing to our body? Are they affecting our body? And the more I looked into it, I realized that yes, they are affecting our body, in fact, a lot. 

And so I actually took a month off and I went up into the wilderness up in Idaho. So I'm from Idaho, and there's this place between Sun Valley and Stanley. We hiked 13 miles up there, and I stayed for about a month with a buddy of mine. And I'll tell you what, by the end of that month, I felt better than I'd ever felt in my life. And the salmon responded. And we took a bag of rice up with us with some salt, and we were just catching fish and eating it. And the bears were there. It was the most crazy experiment. 

But I realized that a lot of times all we really need is nature. Our bodies love nature, the natural sunlight every single day, the freshwater coming out of the ground, the natural fish, obviously all organic up there. None of this technology around us. And my body loved that. And so it got me thinking, how can we implement this on a day-to-day basis? How can I go back into the matrix, as you call it, the real life, and still get this feeling as I feel in nature?

Luke Storey: [00:10:44] Feel it in real life.

Ryan Blasser: [00:10:44] Right. Exactly.

Luke Storey: [00:10:45] The facsimile of life.

Ryan Blasser: [00:10:47] Yeah. Bring that ancestral lifestyle back into the home. So I just took different jobs in different areas. And one of the first jobs I took was for the Department of Environmental Quality. I wanted to learn all about air quality and how that affects it. Interestingly enough, so they have this call every morning that there's maybe 20 or 30 people from across the state. There's someone from the government office, a meteorologist, and the air quality specialist, and they determine how many units you can pollute each day. 

So this happens every single morning all across the country, depending on how much pollution is already in the air, and what way the air is moving. And so my job was to call up different polluters and say, all right, you're allowed to do 15,000 pollution units today based on the air and what's already in the air quality. There are certain levels that the government wanted everybody to maintain. 

Well, after doing this for a while, I noticed every time I'd get really stormy and cloudy that some of these polluters were polluting much more than they were supposed to. So I brought this up to my boss, and said, "Hey, let's go write these guys a ticket."  I came here to protect the environment and do all this cool stuff. And he's like, "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it." I've seen it happen a couple of times.

Eventually, I took some pictures of it, filmed it, stuff coming out of their smokestack when they weren't supposed to. And I sent it to the main office in Boise. Well, the next day I got called into the office and got fired.

Luke Storey: [00:12:03] Really?

Ryan Blasser: [00:12:03] On the spot. And they're like, "You need to not be meddling with stuff. You're looking in places you shouldn't be looking." That scared the crap out of Holy cow. This is the agency that's supposed to be protecting us, and here I am getting fired for trying to do my job. So that even just drove me even more. "Okay, what else is there?"

So I took a job working for the Department of Energy out of the nuclear facility, which required a high-level security clearance, and we did nuclear waste cleanup that had a lot of toxic chemicals. I learned all about toxic chemicals and nuclear. And then after that, I started working. I had a buddy that did mold remediation. He's like, "Can you come help me work for a little bit." Started working there. I wasn't taking mold very seriously. If I saw it, I put on a mask. But for the most part, go in, we're tearing walls out. I started to get really sick at the same time, I bought this cooler from an auction at a restaurant, or it was a walk-in cooler. Brought it to the house. I thought it'd be a cool little hangout shop out behind my house. 

Well, come to find out, the thing was infested with black mold. I didn't know about it, but I got so sick. I was going to the hospital. They thought I had stomach cancer, a whole range of issues that they couldn't really dial in. And finally, I went to a functional medicine doctor and they tested me for mold. It was off the charts with mold toxicity.

Luke Storey: [00:13:16] Wow. So I tried to make a man cave out of a--

Ryan Blasser: [00:13:19] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:13:19] Walk in the freezer?

Ryan Blasser: [00:13:20] Oh, yeah. It was really cool. It was sweet, but every time it rained, water was dripping through the cracks.

Luke Storey: [00:13:25] Sure. So sounds like inside the ball, yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [00:13:27] Yeah. The inside of the walls was black mold. And it was a 30-year-old walk-in cooler. Of course, there was moldy. It smelled funny, but I had a cool man cave for 500 bucks. But got super sick. And so at that point--

Luke Storey: [00:13:40] It might have been EMF shielded, at least because the metal also-

Ryan Blasser: [00:13:42] It was. It was the EMF shielding.

Luke Storey: [00:13:44] That's cool.

Ryan Blasser: [00:13:45] And I was actually this whole time doing EMF experiments because I already knew 15 years ago that EMF was affecting me. So about that time, my wife was pregnant, my son, and we wanted to have someone come to our house to check everything over to make sure there was nothing wrong with our home. And there really wasn't anybody that came do the full checkup. And that's when the light bulb clay. 

This is the time I said, let's start a business. Let's go into people's homes and do the full range of testing for everything, anything in the environment that could cause illness, stress, sickness. Let's go in and dial it in for people and create these perfect environments because a lot of times the homes that we live in are not healthy for us and they're actually hurting us. And homes should be the opposite. The home should be our sanctuary.

Luke Storey: [00:14:27] Totally. Man, you're speaking my language, brother. I look at a 30,000-foot view of the human species and the pathology that we've devolved into. And you said how great you felt just going out and sequestering yourself in the woods for a month. I personally believe that everything psychologically and physically, spiritually, that's wrong with this is because of exactly what you're talking about, that we're living in this chemical-laden, EMFs, cut off. We're isolating ourselves from what we are.

It's not like, "Oh, when I look out that window, oh, there's nature out there. I'm looking at myself. I am that." And I'm cutting myself off from what I actually am if I'm living in an enclosed space without the intentionality that we're going to talk about today. And this has always driven me nuts, or at least once I became aware of it because everyone's running around like chickens with their heads cut off, arguing about what diet you should be on and should you eat potatoes or chickens. 

It's like, dude, we live in these poison little self-imposed prisons that we call houses and office buildings and storefronts and shit. And it's like, "God, that's the problem." Yet even if I acknowledge that I am that nature out there, it's not practical and frankly even legal in most places on the planet, unfortunately, because of this superimposed matrix system called civilization that we put on the earth. Even if I wanted to go out there and live, I really couldn't.

A. I don't have the skills to do so. And who's going to allow me to do so? How do I get out of Social Security number and taxes and just be a wild human? You can't really do it. They won't let you even if you knew how. So then my question is, how do we make our homes as close to that out there as we can, which it seems like is what you're really good at doing?

Ryan Blasser: [00:16:25] Yeah. And in the last five years, it's blown me away how many people are sick and not just sick, like, "Oh, I'm sick. There's something wrong with me." But their brain isn't thinking as clearly. They don't have the energy they used to. Their testosterone levels are low, their hormones are off. There's so many issues that we can stem back to the environment, including aging, which I do believe that aging is somewhat optional. 

I think that we have control over that, and we can control that to a certain extent. But it all seems to go back to the environment. It's like if you want to clean the fish, you need to clean the fish bowl. You've got to start with a clean fish bowl. That's really important.

Luke Storey: [00:16:57] So this is macro terrain theory? We're talking about the actual terrain that we as an organism exist within. And whether or not we're going to thrive or decline is dependent on the actual nature of that environment.

Ryan Blasser: [00:17:12] Yeah. And we've built these little boxes now that we all live in, and they're all mostly synthetic. A lot of our lives are synthetic, the chemicals are synthetic. A lot of the food, the GMO is synthetic, the paints, building materials, the plastics, it's all synthetic, lighting. It's no longer the natural sunlight. 

We're living underneath these strobe lights or the CFL bulbs or the blue light. Everything that used to be natural to us has been replaced with some synthetic, and our bodies do not like it. And that's why we're seeing a lot of issues we're seeing today.

Luke Storey: [00:17:40] I like how you put that synthetic. We live in a fake ass world and we're paying the price for it. All right. So that sets up a good foundation. If it's not practical to get back to nature in a permanent sense, where we spend all of our time out there obsessively, then how can we create that inside? 

And that is where someone that I would refer to, I think this is what you are building biologist. Where you're looking at the living organism of a structure, essentially. Could you define a building biologist from your perspective?

Ryan Blasser: [00:18:12] Yeah, a building biologist is just the study of how our bodies interact with the built environment. So you look at our skin, and then we have our second skin, which is our clothing that we put on and protect us, and our third skin is our home. And that all interact with each other and it's all meant to protect us from the outside environment. But like I said, unfortunately, a lot of times it's synthetic and it's not protecting us. In fact, it's doing us a lot of harm.

Luke Storey: [00:18:34] Like we were talking about drywall yesterday and I think it was Morris that said that the drywall industry has a stranglehold on legislation and imports and tariffs and whatever. So you really can't build your house out of anything other than drywall here. 

And it's the most suboptimal material to put on the inside of your house for a number of different reasons. Mold, not the least of which, it's just like, oh, we do so many things backward. So a building biologist is helping us to recreate or modify our environment so that it's more biologically compatible.

Ryan Blasser: [00:19:07] Yes. So that's what we do, is we create healthy living environments for people. We bring that nature back into the built environment to almost where it's once again.

Luke Storey: [00:19:17] Got it. All right. Okay, cool. So in the interest of being organized, hopefully in covering all the things I want to cover, which frankly is probably more of a 12-hour podcast than what we have time for, we're going to go until we can't go anymore. But I thought we'd break it up into the things that you did here and that you do. Air testing, water testing, lighting, and EMF. 

Those are the overarching themes of what we're looking for. So because I haven't done a show on air quality, I don't think. We talked about it, but not really too much of a deep dive. Let's start with that. And I think the elephant in the room of sorts is this ubiquitous problem of mold contamination. 

So maybe you could, in the interest of time, give us a truncated overview of where how you see mold as a problem right now. Why is it something we want to be concerned with? And then, of course, what can we do about it?

Ryan Blasser: [00:20:14] Yeah, when mold is almost its own categories, it's such a big deal totally--

Luke Storey: [00:20:18] And I have done one show. We'll put in the show notes you guys, I'm sorry to interrupt. I did one show with Michael Rubino, The Mold Medic, which you can find in today's show notes at lukestorey.com/testmyhome. That's the show notes for this episode. We'll link to that one so people know there is a two-hour mold conversation. But anyway, carry on.

Ryan Blasser: [00:20:37] Yeah. And he's really smart too. There's a lot of guys out there that have really dialed in on just mold. It is such a big issue. It's one of the true pandemics of our age. Drywall has a lot to do with it.

Luke Storey: [00:20:47] That's an actual pandemic.

Ryan Blasser: [00:20:50] I like that. Yep.

Luke Storey: [00:20:51] Without the L, it's at the front.

Ryan Blasser: [00:20:55] The drywall is like cheesecake for mold. It loves that stuff. It's paper. It's ground-down food. It a smorgasbord. And we have that in these wall cavities all it takes a little moisture in there, some mold and a mold spore, and it's going to start growing. We need food, water, and a mold spore for mold. And mold spores are all over in the environment. 

But when it becomes a problem is when that mold spore lands on the food source and then gets some moisture or some water, then it starts to grow. As it's growing, it's releasing Mycotoxins and the Mycotoxins is this defense mechanism. That's how it's claiming it's here.

Luke Storey: [00:21:26] Oh, I thought the mycotoxins was their excrement.

Ryan Blasser: [00:21:29] So the excrement is the mold VOC, the MVC. So when you walk into a house and you smell that musty smell. that's MVOC.

Luke Storey: [00:21:36] Oh, really?

Ryan Blasser: [00:21:37] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:21:37] That's mold poop.

Ryan Blasser: [00:21:37] That's mold farts.

Luke Storey: [00:21:39] Mold farts. Oh, my God, that's disgusting. I know that smell, too. Sometimes you book a hotel, you walk in the room, you're like, something's off. And it took me years to figure out. Oh, it's mold. That's the mold smell. Get out. Run.

Ryan Blasser: [00:21:53] Yep. That means you have a live active source somewhere.

Luke Storey: [00:21:56] Okay.

[00:21:56] If you take the water away, the mold is going to go dormant, it's still going to be there. You're still going to have the mold, the mycelium, the mycotoxins, but it's no longer going to be eating. It's dormant, like a sleeping bear waiting for water. Now mycotoxins, it puts off the mycotoxins to protect its area. There's thousands of different species of mold, all kinds of fighting for their own food, and their own territory so that specific species is immune to its own mycotoxins. 

But all the others, they will kill it off. Now we get caught in the crossfires of that because it can be very toxic for us. In fact, the government has used black mold stacking batches. They've taken the mycotoxins and broken it down and created the nerve gas. So the nerve gases and the biological warfare is actually created from, at least some of them are created from the black mold mycotoxins because it's so harmful, it can actually kill people, pets, small children. It's very, very dangerous. 

And that's one of the biggest ones that's really making people sick. Of course, there's a whole handful but the second part to the mold is the mold spores that are getting released when it's active. And that's to go to another area and set up shop over there and start growing. So it can release millions, if not billions of these mold spores that's traveling through the air. 

So when we go into a home that's moldy, it's not the actual mold that's grown under your sink that's making you sick unless you get down on your hands and knees and lick it. And no one's doing that. What's happening it's these bio-toxins that are coming off of the mold that are traveling through the air. They settle in the couch, they settle on the pillow, and we sit down and lay on bed, and then we breathe this stuff in. And that's where we become affected. 

So day in and day out, it's this big, huge stressor on our immune system. Our body sees that as poison. Our liver has to detoxify that and it can eventually start to build up in the body. Now there's 25% of the population that's actually allergic to mold, just like there's people that are allergic to gluten or peanuts that it affects on a much, much different level. Those people become really, really sick. But pretty much anybody that's going to be exposed to Mycotoxins is going to have some health effects from it.

Luke Storey: [00:23:55] Got it. It's interesting, too, the way the mold illness works, it seems to often have a relationship with things like Lyme disease. You hear these co-diagnosed situations where people have some autoimmune or Lyme and mold seem to dance with those other partners quite frequently. It's becoming so common. I think that's why I want to shout from the rooftops like, "Hey, we need to become aware of this." Because it can be so detrimental to health. 

And one of those things like EMF, as we're going to discuss shortly because it's invisible, you could be sick for years or even literally die from exposure and have no idea that's what it was. It's like lurking behind your wall from some old lake that you didn't know about behind your drywall. It's so annoying.

Ryan Blasser: [00:24:44] I was telling you about Brittany Murphy.

Luke Storey: [00:24:46] Right. Tell us about that documentary. That was a good one.

Ryan Blasser: [00:24:48] Yeah, we watched that documentary. She passed away in her home, and she was really, really sick. And they thought maybe her husband had done something to her or drug overdose or whatever. On the autopsy, it was pneumonia and some lung infection. Well, six months later, as they're investigating and trying to figure out what actually happened, her husband dies of the same exact thing. And so they move out. Somebody ends up buying the home. They go in to do some renovation to fix it up. It turns out the whole thing was infested with black mold. 

So they were in there getting poisoned, and a lot of its brain fog, fatigue, chronic sickness, illness. There's a whole range of things because what it does is attacks your body and your immune system. So now your body is like, "We've got to take care of the mold, We've got to get this out of the system." Everything else is building up in the body. Like all the soldiers are going for the mold, now everything else can start to pick up in the body.

Luke Storey: [00:25:39] Oh, right. That explains some of these co-infections and things like that.

Ryan Blasser: [00:25:43] Yeah. Yeah, because we all have a little bit of the EBV virus. We all have these bacteria and viruses that our body's keeping in check. But once something foreign comes in, now the body has to shift to get rid of that. Now, these guys can sneak in the back door and start building up forces, and it's when too many things are happening at once, that when people start getting chronically ill, and sick. But the idea is, let's catch that before your body gets to that point.

Luke Storey: [00:26:03] Excellent. Love it. Okay. There's so much I want to cover. I got to be mindful not to get too granular here with you because I could go off on any of these for hours. 

Let's talk about maybe some of the sources of mold. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, something Michael said that really caught me. Rubino, the mold medic, was that by the time you see physical, visible mold, it's already been there for a while. In 48 hours, you're pretty much guaranteed to have mold growing in a wet, dark place, basically way before you see, "Oh, my God, there's a bunch of molds over there." They break down its visibility, how it proliferates, how quickly it will develop, things like that.

Ryan Blasser: [00:26:43] Yes, some simple things I like to have, my clients, start out with is go to your toilet tanks and look in your toilet tank. If you open up the toilet tank and look underneath and you see mold growing. It's probably a good chance that you have mold somewhere else in your home because what that means is mold spores are floating through the air. You flush the toilet and it pulls in air as the water's going down. What do we have? A nice, dark, wet environment. 

So it's almost like a petri dish in your house. So go through your home when you're done with this podcast, and go check behind all of the toilets in the toilet tank. And if you have mold in there, there's a good chance you probably have a mold source somewhere in your house that's affecting you. Another thing you can do is look underneath all of the sinks. Sinks are really commonplace because we get a slow drip. If you see any water damage or any warping of the wood, that's an indication that we could have mold growth behind the sink. 

And like Michael was saying, a lot of times it's the tip of the iceberg. What you can see visibly and you start inspecting usually turns out to be something much worse. Also around showers is another really commonplace. All it takes is one little hairline crack somewhere and you're taking a shower every single day and water's running back behind there and your feet in a big mold source back there.

Luke Storey: [00:27:44] Oh, interesting. Okay, cool. And from what I understand, if you find mold in your house, the last thing you want to do is start poking around at it. It would depend on the severity of it, I guess. But you wouldn't just rip off some drywall because you thought mold was back there and start tearing it apart and putting it back. There's very specific remediation practices and experts, and technicians that you would have to do that for you.

Ryan Blasser: [00:28:12] Yep. Yeah. If you're going through and you're doing some of these preliminary checks and you start seeing water damage, you see drywall that's bubbling, or maybe you know that you had a leak somewhere, the water heater broke and it flooded through the second level all the way to the basement, and you didn't really do anything about it. We can pretty much bet that we got some mold there. 

But if we go through those steps and you look for anything that doesn't look right, that's when you want to call someone into-- because the worst thing that you want to do is expose and open that up and just release billions of mold spores and mycotoxins out into the environment. So they're going to come in with plastic and they're going to set up a containment and they're going to have negative air pressure. 

They're going to have masks and suits and respirators. It's going to look like there's nuclear waste in there. And you really need to treat it that way because--

Luke Storey: [00:28:54] It's going to look like Wuhan circa.

Ryan Blasser: [00:28:56] Exactly.

Luke Storey: [00:28:57] Early 2020. I shouldn't make jokes like that. But what are you going to do? The world is insane. I'm pretty much obsessed with water. In fact, I've dedicated around a dozen shows to it. Why? Because water is the basis of all life, including ours. 99% of the molecules in our body are made of water. I've been playing around with ways to restore the natural structure or order of my water for years. And to be honest, until now, it's been challenging to determine what works and what doesn't. 

So I was beside myself with excitement when I found this thing called the Analemma Wand. From the moment I got it, I have literally used it on all of our drinking water ever since. And I even use it to structure the water in our pool and ice baths. Check it out. The guys over at Analemma did a study showing it unleashes the body's own natural rejuvenating power, resulting in 1 to 12 years of biological age regeneration within only three months. It's crazy. And drinking Analemma water powerfully benefits the brain by calming your brain waves almost instantly. 

But perhaps the coolest part of all is that it's so easy to use. You simply stir your water with the court's wand for about 30 seconds, and that water retains its structure for years. To find out more, visit analemmawater.com and use the code LUKE5 to get 5% off your purchase. That's A-N-A-L-E-M-M-A, analemmawater.com and the code is LUKE5. And if all of this sounds too good to be true, give listen to Episode 431 where the inventors break down all the research and science on this thing. It's pretty incredible. 

Okay. So a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about that you and your company Test My Home do, people are going to be like, "I want to hire that guy" and there's only one of you and a few other people. So I want to let people know that all hope is not lost if they can't afford your services or you're busy or whatever. But of course, I'd love for people to reach out to you if they can. 

But when we moved in here, I didn't know you, so I had standard mold testing done. I think I got overcharged by probably about 1500 bucks. But they came in and they found where the mold was. And so thus began a remodel. But it's important for people to know there are people that will come test. And as I understand it, based on my experience a couple of years ago, there are some companies that do testing and remediation and there are some companies that just do one or the other. 

What's your perspective on-- There are many companies out there doing both the testing and remediation right, or should people do those independently to get better results?

Ryan Blasser: [00:31:33] Let me ask you this. Would you have your child grade their own report card or grade their own tests?

Luke Storey: [00:31:38] Probably not.

Ryan Blasser: [00:31:39] Even if you trust them there, if you're taking a mold test to verify if you did a good job, how is that? You got to have second, you've got to have accountability. You got to keep it separate.

Luke Storey: [00:31:53] This could be a fox guarding the henhouse situation.

Ryan Blasser: [00:31:55] Yes, 100%.

Luke Storey: [00:31:57] Or the people that do the testing, if they're not Integris, they come in to do the testing and tell you have mold when you don't so they can charge you for mediation.

Ryan Blasser: [00:32:04] Well, unfortunately, that's more the worst-case scenario. We would like to think that everyone's honest, but unfortunately, they're not. And so they could come in and make the problem seem much, much worse than it really is. Come in and tear your house apart, charge it 20 grand and then a couple of tests. Oh, you're good. We fixed it. On our way to the next one.

But more so, I think that it's really important to have someone that's just specialized in testing, do the testing, and have someone that's just specialized in remediation, do the remediation. And there are plenty of companies out there like that.

Luke Storey: [00:32:33] Awesome. Okay, perfect. Okay. Well, thinking about the air quality, I guess, as it pertains to mold, let's talk a bit about HVAC systems. People's AC and the heating and the potential for mold growth there. Even after we did all the remediation here and remodeled our HVAC, I found there was a bit of a water leak and the cooling unit condenser thingy and did a chemical flush because some mold had grown in there.

And then instructed us to install these ultraviolet bulbs inside the coils of the AC unit, which we did. And based on your guys's testing yesterday, it didn't seem like there was mold so far. How do we deal with humidity, fresh air, recirculating air, cooling the air, heating the air, temperature differentials between inside outside, all that as it pertains to mold and air quality?

Ryan Blasser: [00:33:22] Yeah, that's a deep question because depending on where you live in the world or in the country, that's a completely different way to address that and look at that. And there's also some building science behind it. But basically warm, moist air wants to attract cold. So you think you got your cold glass in the middle of summer and you put it outside on the picnic table and it's going to collect water and run down. 

Same thing if you have a cold AC unit and we're pulling warm, moist air into that unit, it's going to hit the coils, and we're going to have condensation. And so a typical AC unit is going to collect that water and it's going to drain outside. Okay. Now, if that gets plugged or that's not working properly or we get an excessive amount of water, we can start to grow mold on the coils themselves. 

But more so if we're in a colder climate and let's say we have our ducting in the crawlspace or we have it up in the attic where it's not insulated, now we're running this warm, moist air through a cold surface and the ducting and it's going to condensate and we're going to get mold growth there. So just think about where the air is flowing and the hot, moist air going into the cold areas in the condensation.

Luke Storey: [00:34:25] Okay. And do you think these UV lights that you put up in the coils are useful? And do they really prevent growth in that area?

Ryan Blasser: [00:34:33] They do. And people use them two different ways. On the coil, they're really effective. And the reason is, is you need a couple of seconds well time for that UV light to penetrate into the cell wall and break it down. Now, some of these systems have put a UV light in a stream in the ducting as the air is flying by, that's not enough dwell time to be effective. But on the coil, I think that's really good preventative maintenance to keep those coils nice and mold-free.

Luke Storey: [00:34:55] And then what about humidity control, depending again, of course, where you live? All climates are unique. There's a lot of humidity here that I'm not quite used to yet versus Los Angeles, which is essentially a desert. 

But you were mentioning something yesterday, too, about this system that circulates fresh air in the house and stuff that was compelling. I don't know if that related to the humidity, but I know some people use dehumidifiers, some people need humidifiers. So how do we work with the humidity and the quality of air in terms of indoor and outdoor air?

Ryan Blasser: [00:35:27] Humidity is a little tough. One of the worst jobs I've seen was in Sun Valley Pinedo, was really cold. It was a client that they had a vacation with. They were from Hawaii and they liked the humidity really high and they would come back half the year. Well, they left their humidity on fairly high 60, 65. When they came back, the whole home looked like moldy cheese.

Luke Storey: [00:35:46] Are you serious?

Ryan Blasser: [00:35:46] Because they didn't have it heated, the insulation wasn't enough, so the walls were super cold and now we're pumping in all this moist, humid air. It's condensation on the walls and windows, and those cases can be really bad. They didn't want the dry air, but you got to think about the airflow again. It's that condensation that really causes a lot of issues with mold.

Luke Storey: [00:36:06] And what was that unit you were telling me that draws in fresh air? And so you're not just recirculating the same--

Ryan Blasser: [00:36:13] Yes.

Luke Storey: [00:36:13] Oxygen-depleted air inside your home, I think was the point with that.

Ryan Blasser: [00:36:16] Well, that's another one of the issues I run into a lot with homes. Is that they don't have fresh air. The only time a lot of these homes are getting fresh air is when you're opening up the doors and windows going in and outside of your home. You're good, you open up the windows and you get more fresh air. But for some people, especially if you're in a cold climate or a hot climate, it's really sealed up. 

And so we're building up CO2, we're building up moisture, we're building up VOCs and off-gassing. And so we need a system to flush out the air to bring fresh air. And so it's called an ERV. Are you going to do an HRV depending on your climate, but it brings fresh air in from the outside, filters it, and then it pumps it into your house, typically in the bedrooms, the living room, the office, the nursery, and then it's going to pull stale air out of the laundry room, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and it's going to mix as it goes out? Not the air itself, but the heat. Is going to go through a heat exchanger.
So it's bringing the cold air in, it's fresh, it's filtered, and the warm air is leaving and it's warm in that air up. So when it comes in, it's not pumping cold air. And if you're in the middle of wintertime. So it filters it, fresh air in, still air out, and it's happening in the background all the time. It's called an ERV, and it's one of the best investments you can get for your house.

Luke Storey: [00:37:25] What are we talking for an average-sized house?

Ryan Blasser: [00:37:28] Five grand or so.

Luke Storey: [00:37:29] Okay.

Ryan Blasser: [00:37:30] But one of the best five grand you can-- 

Luke Storey: [00:37:32] Cool.

Ryan Blasser: [00:37:32] Homes I test that have those, have amazing air quality.

Luke Storey: [00:37:35] Really?

Ryan Blasser: [00:37:35] Oh, yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:37:36] Yeah, I got to do that. That's the thing, man. People always warn me about owning a house, like, "Oh, it's a money pit. And I always felt like paying rent was the money pit because you just never get it back. Now, I understand, though, because anything cool you hear about, it's about five grand. I never spent five grand on anything renting for 50 years. Do you know what I mean?
You mentioned VOCs. Now, I know back in the day when I used to go buy paint at the paint store, I would get no VOC paint. And it was a specialty. When I recently bought a bunch of paint to paint this house, shout out to Lime Painting of Austin, by the way. Great company. One of the few contractors I worked with that was worth a shit. No offense to the others, but for real, it's the truth. 

Lime Painting. When I went and bought the paint here, I was like, "Oh, it's got to be no VOC." And the guy's like, "Sir, all of our paint is no VOC now." Do you find that things like paint and furniture that are made with chemicals and stuff are a problem with indoor air quality?

Ryan Blasser: [00:38:31] Yes, absolutely. Especially, the wall is the biggest surface we have in our house. So that's really important to make sure that it's non-toxic. And kudos to them for only carrying--

Luke Storey: [00:38:40] It was Benjamin Moore. Just give him some love, too.

Ryan Blasser: [00:38:42] Yeah, but there is actually a lot of still really toxic stuff that people put on their walls. Especially when going to Mexico and some of these other places where they're not thinking about this stuff. People will call me up sometimes, say, "We just moved into this brand new home and we all feel like crap. Get headaches in here, a little brain fog" and I'll go in the VOC the off-gassing, which VOC is volatile organic chemicals. 

So that's a chemical that volatile gases in the air easily that we can breathe in. So those are through the roof. It's off-gassing from brand-new furniture, new carpet. That new carpet smell that you're smelling is typically formaldehyde glues, binders, things that our bodies really don't appreciate. So all this stuff's building up into this brand new home that's super airtight without any ventilation. Of course, they're not feeling good. 

So then we have to go through the process. Sometimes we have to repaint the home if they haven't used something that's natural.

Luke Storey: [00:39:31] And when you guys do your testing for the air quality, you're picking all that stuff up too, I guess. Are you guys we're testing for VOCs?

Ryan Blasser: [00:39:37] Yeah. And your VOC tests are great.

Luke Storey: [00:39:39] Yeah. Do you know why? Because I buy used rugs.

Ryan Blasser: [00:39:42] There's lots to it.

Luke Storey: [00:39:42] They're all recycled, Turkish rugs and things like that. I don't think there's anything. Oh, you asked about the carpet that we put new carpeting in the main. I don't think you can call the master bedroom anymore or you're racist, but whatever you call the big bedroom where you sleep, that closet, we did put carpeting and I was like, thinking that, no, I actually requested just wool, whatever it's called Berber carpet or something. 

It's all wall, no chemicals hopefully. So I'm glad to hear that. But you know what's funny, and I don't know if you've experienced this, as you start to eliminate things like VOCs from your home with cleaning products and crappy furniture that's made with chemicals and such, have you found that you become more chemically sensitive over the years? Because that's been my experience. The more I've weeded all that stuff out of my life now when I'm exposed, it's like really offensive.

Ryan Blasser: [00:40:29] I've talked about this with people like, are we sensitizing our bodies by living in such a clean environment? Because my home is clean. And then when I go into a hotel or Airbnb, when I'm out on the road, I am a lot more sense to it and I am more aware of it. My body doesn't react, but I think there is a certain level where we want some Hermes and that's we want to expose our body and break down the cells. And it's almost like working out at the gym. 

When we go to the gym, we're going to work out a muscle group and then we let it rest for a little while. And that builds it up. Same thing with small amounts of poison, a little bit of time, and then we take a break from it. Then we can build up somewhat of a little bit of a tolerance. Sometimes it takes generations to do. Sometimes we can do it sooner. 

So I think it's good. We don't want to live in a complete bubble all the time because then we are going to desensitize our bodies and we're going to evolve in the wrong way. But we also don't want to be exposed to it all the time. And that's the key, is that you need to give your body a break from it. You've got to have that resting period. And that's the problem with the EMF, and we're not there yet, but we're always exposed all the time even when we go on a hike, we got our cell phone with us or Bluetooth headphones. 

We've never given ourselves a break. And it's the same thing with the home. 90% of our lives are spent indoors now and we're not getting outside and getting away from these chemicals. And that's where we're getting the chronic exposure and the illness and the disease and the sickness because we're not getting a break from it. But that is a good point you've bring up. We need a little bit of this exposure to be able to evolve.

Luke Storey: [00:41:54] Got it. Okay. So I need to go. Well, sometimes what I do is I just go eat some M&Ms. Sometimes I just do super unhealthy shit. Maybe for that reason, subconsciously I know. I'm getting too pure here. I got to get some resilience built in. But yeah, I have really noticed over the years I'm super sensitive to chemicals. There's one shampoo or something Alyson uses and it maybe it's not totally organic or it has some fragrance to it and I could really smell it super strong where your average person probably wouldn't even notice, or it would just be a pleasant, flowery smell to them.

Ryan Blasser: [00:42:27] Yeah. And another thing to that too, is that we start to learn what it feels like to feel good again. Back when I was at my sickest, I was actually 360 pounds.

Luke Storey: [00:42:37] What! Damn, bro.

Ryan Blasser: [00:42:37] I was very overweight. I was on four different prescriptions, like heartburn, ADHD, anxiety, one other one. But it was crazy. I was sick. I was not healthy. I didn't feel good. I felt like crap. And it's completely different now. 

And so now that I know what it feels like to feel good now when I get in an environment that's not healthy, I can feel it. So whether I'm more sensitive or not, I think it's a combination of both. I think being able to recognize this is not a healthy environment. My body is sending me slow signals.

Luke Storey: [00:43:06] You set a new baseline. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [00:43:08] Yeah, you set a new baseline for your body.

Luke Storey: [00:43:10] That makes perfect sense. All right. We thrived right on through 2022, perhaps the weirdest year to date. And after the end of the year, work obligations, and holiday family fun, it's easy to start the new year stressed, worn out, and lacking motivation, which is definitely not the way we want to start the new year. 

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What do you guys find when you're looking at chemicals in the air and VOCs and stuff in terms of people's cleaning products and personal care products, shampoos, hair sprays, all this stuff? Do you find that that's as problematic as health nuts think it is? Is it really that important that you don't use Lysol on your coffee table or something?

Ryan Blasser: [00:45:13] Absolutely it is. I had a colleague of mine that a lady called her up and she swore up and down that she had mold, go through the house, and figure it out. He couldn't find any mold anywhere and left. Reports came back clean and she said, "Please come back. I'm getting sick or I'm getting sick. Come back."

So he came back looking through, finally went into the downstairs basement, into the storage room, and saw this whole case of Lysol, a couple of cases, a whole bunch. And I asked her, what's this for? What are you doing with all the Lysol? She says, "Well, I go through the house twice a day and spray a couple of cans of Lysol to kill the mold off." 

And she had been doing this for the last six months because she had got on some websites somewhere, some podcast, something that scared the crap about mold. So she went out and bought a bunch of Lysol and started dousing her house, basically fogging her own home while she was in it and poisoning her and her husband this whole time.

Luke Storey: [00:46:00] Oh my God.

Ryan Blasser: [00:46:00] She got rid of the Lysol, aired at her house and her symptoms started to get better. But these are poisons. Absolutely, these are toxins for the body. And so it's really important to look at what chemicals we put on our body, what chemicals we put in our home, what do we put it on our clothes. Fragrances are really bad now. A lot of the clients that I work with are pretty aware, more of the biohacker health-minded type of people. I don't see a lot of the toxic chemicals, but I still go into some of these homes that they're new to this and I see the Glade plugins everywhere.

Luke Storey: [00:46:31] Oh, my God. The Glade plugin pro.

Ryan Blasser: [00:46:35] So I actually had--

Luke Storey: [00:46:36] Oh, gnarly.

Ryan Blasser: [00:46:37] I don't know if you saw on our planet our house prep instructions. It said if you have any of that stuff, please put it in a plastic bag just because I got sick of going into these homes and just headaches.

Luke Storey: [00:46:46] Oh my God. That's one thing that's always been so darkly ironic to me is those plugins that just smell absolutely disgusting. And also, like I'm doing quotes here on the video air fresheners when you get in an Uber, I used to have a joke with a buddy of mine like getting we used to go to New York and you get in a cab was before Uber's be in a cab and they'd have the black ice. The black ice air freshener was the words we text each other. Bro, black ice just landed the wrong cab. 

But that poor guy is sitting there for 12 hours a day breathing that thing in. But again, it's becoming desensitized to it. He's probably inadvertently transitioning to the other gender just from the endocrine disruptors and this freaking face all day. Do you know what I mean?

Ryan Blasser: [00:47:34] Yeah, absolutely. More right than you think you are.

Luke Storey: [00:47:36] I was exaggerating, but--

Ryan Blasser: [00:47:38] It's a hormone disruptor. All those phthalates, that's where it starts to hit you. So, people, I think, in America need to feel like they have a certain smell to be clean. I think we were raised, tide, and downy sheets and it smells like spice around Christmas time and we need to have these smells. But we need to learn to get away from that. And actually clean doesn't have a smell. 

The home should be neutral. When you walk into a home, you shouldn't have a smell. If you're smelling something, there's something off. It's either a chemical or it's a mold or it's not clean or there's a gas leak. You shouldn't have any smell in our home. It should be neutral. And that's where we need to train our brains. That neutral, no smell is the clean smell.

Luke Storey: [00:48:19] Okay. I like that. Yeah. It's not a sea breeze. Like those things, you put in the dryer, the dryer sheets. Oh, God. Sometimes I'll be walking down the street and I'll smell a neighbor's dryer from using those things. And I'm not anywhere near the house. It's like permeating the whole neighborhood. That's gnarly.

Ryan Blasser: [00:48:39] The fresh mountain air glade plugins. That's not fresh mountain air that they went up there and bottled. That's a chemical. That's a toxic chemical that's messing with you.

Luke Storey: [00:48:47] Got it. Okay. So obviously, one point would be just to get anything out of your house. Just take one for the team, make a decision, and get all that crap out. But what about air purification and filtration? Even if you know this house, everything's all good. But still, I want to be cleaning the air. So I had my air doctor in the bedroom and the Austin Air in the living room, and you brought me the super badass commercial industrial grade, which I want to learn more about.

Ryan Blasser: [00:49:15] Yeah, the Jasper Air.

Luke Storey: [00:49:16] And thank you, by the way, for that. But what can we do to just maintain clean air even once we've got all this crap out of the house?

Ryan Blasser: [00:49:23] You've really nailed it with, 'Get everything out first.' That's the first line of defense. Let's get back down to a point where we don't have any sources because it's much easier to clean the air if there's not a whole lot in there to clean. And so EWG is a really good website that you can go on and you can actually scan the barcode of a shampoo or cleaning supply. Also, Think Dirty as an app.

Luke Storey: [00:49:44] Oh yeah, I used to use that.

Ryan Blasser: [00:49:46] That is a good one. Yeah. So go through your house. So download those apps. Again, we're going to have a little chore list for--

Luke Storey: [00:49:51] We'll put it in the show notes at lukestorey.com/testmyhome. We'll link to all this stuff.

Ryan Blasser: [00:49:56] Yeah. After the show, go download the app and go through all of your personal care products, all of your cleaning supplies and scan the barcode is going to be a scale from 1 to 10. So 10 is going to be this stuff is probably going to kill you and one being you can feed it to your baby. At least our house, we're like a three and a last maybe you can choose whatever comfort level. You start with a five and a less.

And everything that's five and higher just put it in a bag, bite the bullet and get rid of it. And whatever you need, then go, let's shop and get some healthier stuff, healthier alternatives. But it's amazing how little we really need, especially in the cleaning department. Hypochlorite acid or some ozone cleaner or vinegar and water with a little lemon peel in it. We'll clean 90% of what you need in your house. You really don't need a lot of this stuff.

Luke Storey: [00:50:40] That's funny because I see those folk recipes for cleaning supplies and stuff like you just described, even I'm like, is that really doing anything? But you mentioned the ozone. I showed you, the ozone bottle. I think the company is called God, 03Waterworks we'll link to it in the shows notes. 

Dude, they sent me this spray bottle. That's an ozone generator. Like no more Windex. Like none of that. Whatever you clean counters with, like, you literally just have water. You turn it on, it makes ozone, and then the next they really nailed it with the ozone washing machine thing. I got one of those. No more laundry soap ever. Even if you use natural laundry soap just cause a bunch of money, you're doing single-use plastic. It gets everywhere lint sticks on. It's all nasty.

This ozone. Oh, my God, dude, it's really funny when you turn it on, you see, like, starts up. You see the ozone getting fired in there and your laundry is perfectly clean, smells neutral, and they say it makes your clothes last longer. So I'm like, yes, more innovations like this to your point of just sometimes simplicity is really all you need, despite the fact that at its face it looks like too simple to work.

Ryan Blasser: [00:51:53] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:51:54] What about ovens and stoves?

Ryan Blasser: [00:51:58] Ovens and stoves? As far as the ventilation goes, I'm assuming that's what you're talking about. Because with you, we found that you had the fan on low. You're cooking a turkey during the day. So I set the meter next to it.

Luke Storey: [00:52:11] Which I do all the time. No big deal.

Ryan Blasser: [00:52:12] Cooking a turkey for random lunch?

Luke Storey: [00:52:14] First time literally ever in my life or Alyson's life.

Ryan Blasser: [00:52:18] We noticed that the carbon monoxide levels were starting to rise, so the fan wasn't able to keep up with the output of the gas that was burning. But it's also not just carbon monoxide. So any time we're burning any kind of fossil fuel, petroleum, diesel, gasoline, natural gas, we're going to have off-gassing coming off of it, but we're also going to be burning off contaminants that are in the gas. 

So when they mine this gas out of the ground and they process it and turn it into, say, propane, they're not filtering it. So with the propane comes a whole range of lead, arsenic, heavy metals, VOC, radon and these get released into the air as soon as we burn them. So now we have these toxic chemicals and heavy metals floating through the air. We're breathing them in along with the carbon monoxide and it's a big burden on the body. We're accumulating those in our body.

Luke Storey: [00:53:08] This was so eye-opening for me. I literally had no idea that once you ignite a gas like propane, there's anything other than just inert air there. I had no idea. I know if I'm smelling gas, I'm like, whoa, whoa, get some ventilation. But I figured once it was burned, it's just gone. So that was huge for me. I'm going to keep that damn fan on all the time. That's a really good takeaway for people, I'm sure. And many people cook like me. They thought the fan. I assume the fan was just for the smell of the food, unlike the smoke.

Ryan Blasser: [00:53:40] That's what most people think.

Luke Storey: [00:53:41] Yeah, I had no idea. So that's a really good takeaway for people.

Ryan Blasser: [00:53:45] Yeah. The most important thing if you're cooking with gas, always have that fan on and make sure that it's actually pulling air out too.

Luke Storey: [00:53:51] Make sure you test that with a piece of incense or something that you see it getting sucked up.

Ryan Blasser: [00:53:56] Candle or put a paper towel over it and make sure it's sucking it up.

Luke Storey: [00:53:59] Oh, okay. What do you think about the soot from candles?

Ryan Blasser: [00:54:03] If it's a petroleum-based candle, not good. We want beeswax candles. Yeah, but they will put particulates in the air, but they're not as harmful.

Luke Storey: [00:54:11] Okay, cool. What about incense?

Ryan Blasser: [00:54:14] I've seen people overdo it with incense. It can potentially be a lung irritant, especially if there's fragrance in the incense. We've got to look at where is the smell coming from, where's the fragrance. Is it a chemical or is it an essential oil? And typically it'll say it on the incense.

Luke Storey: [00:54:29] So if you're burning a pure copal resin or something like that, probably less harmful. You're just getting an ash particulate or something?

Ryan Blasser: [00:54:37] Just getting a little particulate coming from it.

Luke Storey: [00:54:39] Okay. Okay.

Ryan Blasser: [00:54:40] Or inorganic matter. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:54:41] Someone who love incense I like, "Don't tell me that kills you too. Can I have any fun?" All right. Well, I think as far as the air stuff goes, what could people do? Mold is one issue. And you have a mold testing company and then a remediation company. We're going to keep those separate to be smart about it. Are there also companies other than you that'll come out and just test the air quality in general apart from the mold?

Ryan Blasser: [00:55:06] Typically you can get water test kits off of our site, there's mold test kits, you can order or mold investigators that will come out. And there's a whole range of people. Air quality. There is air quality companies that will come out specifically just for air. But a lot of times you can get a lot of information off a website called Bristle Meter. 

It's online and it tells you the air quality of what's going on outside your house, fire, smoke, or if you have pollution in your area. It will tell you that because a lot of our indoor air, well, all of our indoor air is made up of outdoor air. That's where it comes from. We pull it from the outdoors and we breathe it in. 

People like, typically think the outside air is a lot worse than the inside. It's actually the opposite. The air inside of our house is worse than outside because we're bringing that air in. And what are we doing? We're adding to it. So we're off-gassing chemicals that skin insect parts, smoke, pollen, dust, a whole range of things get added to the air.

Luke Storey: [00:55:57] Wow, dude.

Ryan Blasser: [00:55:58] That's all we need to filter back out. So talking about some of the solutions side of it, the ERV to get in the fresh air and then a really good filtration system like a Jasper, which is a really good commercial grade.

Luke Storey: [00:56:08] Oh yeah. Tell us about that. I touched on that, but I didn't get the download. You just brought it in and were like, "Here's a gift." I'm like, "Yeah, I love being a podcaster."

Ryan Blasser: [00:56:17] I want you to have the latest and greatest and all the best stuff. And I test a lot of these filters and some of them do a little good, some of them don't. But this one is more of a commercial-grade one. The guy that designed it used to do fire restoration and flood, and he wanted something that he could put in his client's homes that would actually really clean the air. 

He was coming from an air scrubber standpoint, but those things are really noisy and they're really ugly. So he designed one that was much quieter and actually looked really nice so that people could put them in their home. Mostly started out selling to doctors and dentists and more the commercial space. But I came across him and said, these are great for residential, so this is what we need to have in people's homes that's really going to move air and really filter out the air and pull those particles out.

Luke Storey: [00:56:59] I loved it based on the demo, for those listening that are familiar with the molecule, it looks like that, like a cylinder, but it's white and it's considerably bigger than a molecule, but it's hella quiet. And I liked it when you turned it on, it gave us an accurate reading of the air quality in the house, and then it automatically chose the level of intensity or suction based on input and output. I guess based on the particulate found in the air.

Ryan Blasser: [00:57:24] Yeah, because if it's a nice clear day and there's not much particulates in your home, no reason to be blasting that full blast. But let's say you have a bunch of people over your cooking. We want that thing to cook good. Cranking up some good air, we'll do it automatically.

Luke Storey: [00:57:38] Cool. Awesome. And we'll link to that thing in the show notes, too, because I know I'll forget to talk about it later, probably. Okay, cool. And in terms of the other air cleaning methods out there, what do you think about running an ozone generator in the house when you're not home every once in a while and then opening up all the doors and windows for a half an hour before you come back in and actually do your thing in there. 

Do you think that's a viable way to just reset the bacterial load in the air or fleas, dust or whatever that's lingering around? I feel like ozone is such a good disinfectant. Obviously, you don't want to breathe it, but is it useful in a scenario like that?

Ryan Blasser: [00:58:21] That's a really good question. That, again, is more of a deep question. I'll try to answer it the best I can quickly, without going too deep. Ozone is an oxidizer. What that means is it takes that extra oxygen molecule and it goes into the new molecule the substance is interacting with.
So let's take bacteria, for example. That extra oxygen molecule will denature the cell wall and basically kill off that bacteria. Now the bacteria will still be there, but it's no longer going to be alive. It's no longer going to be active. It does the same thing with viruses. That does same thing with mold. It can interact with chemicals. The problem with ozone and some chemicals is that depending on what chemical it is, it could have an unintended consequence of the reaction that it makes because it doesn't just make things disappear. Poof, like magic. 

There's a physical chemical interaction that happens and sometimes it can change it from a chemical into something that's also harmful as well. The other problem with ozone is that it will break down textiles like electronics. It's hard on some of those objects as well, but it does a really good job of neutralizing and breaking down microbiology.

Luke Storey: [00:59:23] I used to run mine in my office when I wasn't in there, and I noticed over time it would like turn my electronics yellow and stuff. This was like oxidizing them essentially. I was like why is everything cracking and falling apart? And I think it was the ozone.

Ryan Blasser: [00:59:37] It's the ozone. If you leave something out in the sun, the UV rays it's oxidizing it.

Luke Storey: [00:59:41] Okay. Right. But do you think there is some utility value in periodically just flushing out the house with ozone for an hour or two and then emptying all out? Or would you be better off just opening the doors and windows for a while?

Ryan Blasser: [00:59:52] It's important to test and see where you're at because there is good bacteria, just like our gut biome. There's good bacteria in there and we don't want to just take, say, like, let's take antibiotics every once in a while just to clear out our system. It's probably not a good idea because we have good with the bad and it's all working together as an ecosystem. 

So if you're starting to get sick, I think it's good just to do a yearly checkup on your home anyway, just like you would go into the doctor and do a checkup on your body. And in that checkup we're going to look at and we're going to analyze what's the bacterial load, what's the mice's load and what's the mold load. And if we start to see that these things are elevated, then we can come in with more of a treatment protocol.

Now, there is other chemicals. There's also a company we work with called Super Stratum, which has a chlorine dioxide gas that you can spray in there. And it gas fogs everything. It does the same thing as ozone, but it's not harmful to the electronics and the plastics.

Luke Storey: [01:00:46] Oh, that's interesting.

Ryan Blasser: [01:00:47] But that's something where it's got to be really planned and intentional, where we're taking pets, plants, and people out of the environment for 24 hours. We're coming in, we're sealing up vents, were fogging, gassing the heck out of it. And we're basically starting over with a clean slate. So the only time we want to do that really is if there's a problem.

Luke Storey: [01:01:04] Got it. Would that be applicable in a mold infestation scenario or just in other VOCs and things like that?

Ryan Blasser: [01:01:11] It's one step of the bigger process.

Luke Storey: [01:01:13] Okay. I think that's another thing I wanted to actually touch on was-- one idea that I had at one point when I thought I might have had mold up in the HVAC because I thought I'll just put my ozone generator up there and just run it for a day just in the attic. Would that potentially piss off the mold rather than getting rid of it, for example?

Ryan Blasser: [01:01:34] You might piss off the mold at the beginning. Mold is pretty smart. It's amazing how smart mold can be. It knows when it's starting to get under attack and it will release more mycotoxins and mold spores as a last ditch effort. So we always recommend coming in and doing the physical removal first. 

So if we can help evac, if we can wipe down or if it's on drywall and we can cut it out, if you got moldy carpet, always step one is let's remove the source, whether it's mold, whether it's a chemical, whether it's poor air something putting in poor air quality, even if it's EMF. Let's always remove the source first and then let's come in and let's clean up the contaminants.

Luke Storey: [01:02:10] Got it. Okay, cool. I know what I was going to ask you. I've heard it said, and I don't know if this is a conspiracy theory in the health world, but I've heard it said by from some pretty smart people that mold tends to proliferate more rapidly and severely in a high EMF environment because of what you just mentioned, that it has an innate ability to detect outside threats and it will perceive the chaos of those RF fields, for example, in its environment, and start to reproduce faster, better, bigger. Do you think there's any truth to that?

Ryan Blasser: [01:02:43] A lot of that comes from a study that Dr. Klinger did where he did some experiments with different types of mold in a Faraday cage with, I believe it was a Wi-Fi router and one that wasn't. And he was able to detect the mycotoxins output from the one that was in the Wi-Fi cage was 600 times more.

Luke Storey: [01:02:59] 600 times?

Ryan Blasser: [01:03:01] 600 times more.

Luke Storey: [01:03:01] Okay. So there's some legitimacy to this at some level?

Ryan Blasser: [01:03:05] As far as I know, that's the only study that's been done that really quantified that.

Luke Storey: [01:03:09] Okay.

Ryan Blasser: [01:03:10] Part of it. And I've talked with some other it'd be interesting to try to replicate that because there's a lot of debate when there's just one study. And is it legitimate? What were the other things? But I tend to see that people that have higher RF levels in their house also seem to have more toxic homes because of mold and more endotoxins. Like the mold can sense that there's something else going on in the environment that's not natural and it's just automatically putting off its defense mechanism.

Luke Storey: [01:03:38] Oh,wow. God, nature is so savage.

Ryan Blasser: [01:03:43] It's fighting back, man.

Luke Storey: [01:03:43] Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Even such unevolved organism like that can still be so evolved in the ways in which it tries to remain on earth.

Ryan Blasser: [01:03:55] Absolutely.

Luke Storey: [01:03:57] God, I probably done more shows on water than I have EMF. But just in terms of giving people a strategy and some resources and how to deal with their water, I think by now anyone listening to this podcast knows that you're 99% water on a molecular basis. So I think it's really important that we're mindful about the water we drink, cook, feed our pets plants, bathe in all that. So we know it's super important. 

Now, we didn't do anything with the water here because I got a test off your website, sent it in and I got the lab report of that. And as I guess the water where I live in Texas is total garbage. So I drink my spring water and then we have this AquaTru where we filter the water for cooking and drinking sometimes and giving to the pets. So I have like a temporary point of use system here. So we didn't test my water. But if you had come into this house cold, how would you have dealt with the whole water issue?

Ryan Blasser: [01:04:52] Yeah, test all the way around the board. That's something you don't really need. Have me come in to do like you ordered it right off. Our website came to you, you fill up the vial, send it in. That's really the only way. We just got a test because people always called. What filter should I use? What should I do with my. Well, you need a test because there's lots of different filters for lots of different contaminants. 

In some cases, it's not very bad and you don't really need much filtration. I remember one I did where this lady was filtering it. Then she would put it in these glass jars and she would set it out to air out. And she had this whole process that she went through and we end up testing her water. And her water actually was fine. She didn't need to do any of that.

Luke Storey: [01:05:26] Oh, really? Well, that's funny you mention that, because I have been to a few mountain towns in my life that just subsist on natural spring water and it's not treated or touched in any way by humans. And it just comes right in like there's a town. And it might even be the town of Shasta, if not the town next door. You just turn on the tap and it's the most pristine, beautiful spring water ever. 

But you might not know that. And you put in a row system and your water's fine. So testing and and anyone like me can just go on your site and get this test since different people are going to have different needs in terms of their strategy with filtration and purification and all that. If someone then gets certain test results, how are they going to determine which filtration system is appropriate for them?

Ryan Blasser: [01:06:15] That's something we're working on more of a solution based to where you can come to us and we're going to have exactly what you need. But what I recommend now is finding a good water filtration company in your area and you can take the test to them. And I said, good one, one that knows what they're doing. You can show them the test. These are the contaminants we have in designed me a system that's going to deal with these.

Luke Storey: [01:06:15] Oh, really?

Ryan Blasser: [01:06:37] Yep. And that's really the best way to go. There's a couple of companies we talked about. There's some high end stuff that definitely is pretty cool. There's some more mid range stuff. But what people need to realize is that we can absorb just as much of these minerals by taking a 15 to 20 minute hot shower or soaking in the bath, as we do from drinking it throughout the day. Those are skin is pretty porous. That water and those minerals are going to soak into our body through our skin.

Luke Storey: [01:07:02] Are you talking about toxins or minerals?

Ryan Blasser: [01:07:03] Toxins and minerals.

Luke Storey: [01:07:04] Okay. 

Ryan Blasser: [01:07:04] I should say contaminants is a better word. So anything in the water that we don't want in our body can enter through the skin, but it can also enter when we're taking this hot shower and it's getting nice and steamy and we're breathing that stuff in. So people think, Oh, I just got an OR System under my sink. I'm good. We need to think about what you're bathing in as well.

Luke Storey: [01:07:23] Got it. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [01:07:24] Don't forget about that.

Luke Storey: [01:07:26] I've used the shower filters for years. There's a few that I like. People know those that know they're on my website. And we have one here because we don't have a whole house filter yet. And then you have, these little bath balls. If you want to take a bath and you hang it over the spout, it's like two inches of filtered material. Probably better than not doing it. But I've always had a sense that the amount of bathing that we humans tend to do is very problematic in the water for the reasons you just described. 

So I always recommend go whole house, not just point of view. So now that financially this can get really challenging for people and I get it it's the same for me. I want a system right now from 04I, I think is the best company I've found but it's many thousands of dollars. You could buy a used car or their system, God bless them. But I think it's worth it. All the years have been into this, I went to their factory in Santa Barbara. It's very, very impressive, to say the least. 

But not everyone has that. Or even if they did, would they spend it? You mentioned this company you yesterday, radiant life. What's been your experience of their their systems? And how do they work?

Ryan Blasser: [01:08:37] They did a pretty good job of reducing the contaminants. It's like air filters. We're basically moving the water, the air through a filter. The contaminants are getting caught and the good stuff's coming out the other side. That's really what a lot of this stuff is. And it's just different combinations of media. 

Sometimes it's charcoal, sometimes it's paper, sometimes it's twine or some fabric, whatever that is. We're catching these particles and the good stuff is coming through. So it's just all different combinations of them. But Radiant Life makes a really good one. We use Connecticut at our house. It's a really good one as well. There's a lot of different good ones.

Luke Storey: [01:09:08] And do you think that what you described earlier, where someone could find a good local water treatment company, give them their test results and have them build a custom system, do you think that companies like you just mentioned would be willing and able to do that as well rather than just buying something off the shelf that might not match the particulars of your water chemistry?

Ryan Blasser: [01:09:28] Yeah, the best really, just find the specialist in your area that does water filtration like that's their gig, and then you take your test to them and say, "This is what I have in my water, set me up with what you got." And usually, it's maybe four or five different combinations of different filters that they're going to put in for you. And maybe this specific one is for VOC, and the specific one is going to get led and this one's going to get arsenic out of your water. So different filters for different contaminants.

Luke Storey: [01:09:55] Okay, cool. That's a great suggestion. I didn't even know that was a possibility. And it's a question I get a lot. So that's good to know. Maybe that's what I should do because I've been hemming and hawing about like, oh, I can't afford the one I want, and so I don't do anything. Maybe that would be good since I already have your test. Last thing on water. What about water softeners and hard water and all this stuff? Why is that part of the conversation, or is it?

Ryan Blasser: [01:10:21] Two things. One, preference. Some people prefer soft water. It feels better on their skin when they're watching. It feels softer when they're washing, that's why they call it soft water. Other reason is soft water is a lot easier on your pipes. You don't get that corrosive buildup. 

So people have really hard water. They're going to see the calcium ring and the toilet and the calcium ring around the sink and the shower when it starts spraying. Funny, you got calcium buildup. That's from hard water deposits. So it's two parts. It's the preference and also to protect your equipment.

Luke Storey: [01:10:52] Okay, cool. Do you think if you built a system of water filtration in the home and you put your water softener, provided you have hard water like we do very much so here in Texas, you would want, I assume, to strip the minerals out of that water and make the water soft and then run it through your filtration system to preserve the life of the filter medium.

Ryan Blasser: [01:11:12] Correct. Yep. Exactly. So we have water softener and then it goes through the filters and it goes through the rest of our house.

Luke Storey: [01:11:19] Cool. Okay. Let's get into lighting. Now, you guys again, with the water when I asked you yesterday, what's up with my lighting? You're like, "Dude, you already did everything right. I don't need to test it." But for people that are unfamiliar, let's talk about light temperature and then flicker, maybe best to worse in terms of what you find out there and how you deal with it.

Ryan Blasser: [01:11:40] Sure. So going back to ancestral, we have evolved on this planet underneath the sun. And then when the sun goes down, up until a hundred years ago, it was candlelight, it was firelight, it was that warm red sometimes into the orange spectrum and really dim, let's say, in the middle of the day with the sun, its full spectrum light. We're getting the blues, the red, the ultraviolet, everything. But it's not flickering, it's consistent. It's a consistent glow.

Now, where we get into trouble with the home now is a lot of our energy-efficient lighting is flickering, and it does that to save energy. So it's on 20% of the time. Then it's off 80 on 20. And this vibration, our eyes, it looks like it's consistent, but it's really vibrating and it's called flicker rate. And our brain doesn't like that. And in fact, some people that can induce seizures in headaches, some people when they start getting sick, that's one thing they know. It's like, I don't like the bright lights in the room. 

A lot of times it's the flicker rate that's really causing that effect. So we talk about the color. We want to mimic the color of the sun. So it's when it's in the middle of the day, we want the full spectrum lighting. That's fine. That's triggering our body to suppress melatonin and to be awake and be energetic. When the sun starts to go down and we see that red hue and the sunset and then eventually down into a dark and then ancestrally when we had this campfires and lights that we want to try to mimic that. 

So once the sun goes down, you don't want to have these blue lights going. And even an hour before sunset, you want to make sure that those bright lights are off and we're starting to get ready for nighttime. If you have kids, very, very helpful, they'll go to sleep a lot faster.

Luke Storey: [01:13:15] Have you noticed that as a parent?

Ryan Blasser: [01:13:16] Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did that in our house. So we have two different sets of lights. We have what's called utility lights. So if we're doing dishes or cooking, when that's done, that's typically our canned lights. And then we turn those off after dinnertime, and then it's just more of yellow. The orange-like what you have, those more vintage style lights that are really warm.

Luke Storey: [01:13:33] The Edison.

Ryan Blasser: [01:13:34] The Edison bulbs. Yeah. And not just color temperature and not just flickering but also intensity as well. A lot lower glow. We don't want those full. You can have big bright red lights if they're really powerful. That's also messing with their circadian rhythm. So we want the intensity to be less also.

Luke Storey: [01:13:53] Got that. Yeah, that's interesting you say that because I've at various times had my Joovv wall panel thing in the living room or whatever and oh, I'll turn on the Joovv and have red light, but it's so intense, it freaks most people out and I think it does energize you. A little too stimulating. That's a good point. 

The bulbs that I found, by the way, and you I don't know if you're hip to these it's a company called Bon Charge. Used to be called Blue Blocks. And they make these little red LED bulbs that don't flicker. And they're solid red. The best ever. They're super cool for travel and that's what I have in some of the rooms here. 

But it is a bit of work to strategize your day set up, and your night set up, which is essentially what you described. You definitely have to put a little thought into it. What do you recommend and find out in your testing experience in terms of those curly bulbs and fluorescent tubes and LED lighting? What's the nasty stuff people should look into starting to move away from?

Ryan Blasser: [01:14:52] So when it comes to the CFL bulbs and if you're not familiar, they're the ones that look like little ice cream cones, the curlicues, and the fluorescents, the long old-school fluorescent tubes. They both have vapor mercury in them. And that's where we get into the really toxic side of lighting, because if those were to crack or break or fail or I don't know how many kids back in the day playing sword fights with the fluorescent tubes and broke them. 

Well, you just released a bunch of vapor Mercury. If you breathe that in, that's a heavy metal that's really hard to get out of your body and that causes a lot of issues. And so don't even bring that stuff into the house. If it's toxic, if it's going to harm your body, don't even mess with it. Don't even bring it into the house. Stick to more of the incandescent. The halogens are good and there are some LEDs that are actually not too harmful to it that have a consistent glow. They have steady drivers. They don't put off dirty electricity.

And dirty electricity, that's another one that these CFL bulbs and the fluorescents, these big ballasts, also put off dirty electricity onto the line, which is light interference. And what else did we learn about your fluorescents? They were in the garage.

Luke Storey: [01:15:54] They were in the garage under Alyson's office in there. And you were picking up a massive magnetic field from the floor of her office, from the fluorescent lights that were mounted to the ceiling in the garage under her.

Ryan Blasser: [01:16:07] Yeah. So a lot of laundry rooms and garages have fluorescent lights because it's a cheaper fixture. And so if you're on a second level and you have a bedroom or a nursery or a game room, be aware of what's on the floor underneath you. If you have these fluorescent lights on the ballast because they have to step up the voltage to shoot that high frequency, a high voltage through the light, through the vapor mercury to energize that light. The whole setup is just bad.

Luke Storey: [01:16:32] Yeah. I'm with you to get them all out of the house. If you have the wiring there, you could have an electrician put in any fixture. We did say that there are some LED lights that don't flicker. Aside from the ones I mentioned that are the good nighttime red bulbs, they're called Lumi Sleep, I think. How does one find LED lights that are a moderate kind of mid-warm temperature that don't flicker? How do you even search for that or find it? Are there certain brands you like?

Ryan Blasser: [01:17:03] Yeah, Cree brand lighting works really good. They're one of the more original LEDs. They're a little more expensive. Those seem to have no flicker rate and they're a little bit cleaner as far as EMI interference. Philips makes a pretty good brand. Brian Hoyer, he puts out a lighting guide, actually that I share with my clients as well.

Luke Storey: [01:17:23] Man, I don't want to promise this, but he sent that to me. I'm going to set the intention to put the lighting guide in the show notes. This is really cool because he even points out if you're stuck with certain fixtures, he gave solutions like if you have to put a tube light in there, here's the best one, and stuff like that.

Ryan Blasser: [01:17:39] Yeah. So he's took the time and it's really cool. He made it really user-friendly and I share that with my clients as well.

Luke Storey: [01:17:52] Awesome. We all know the phrase, let there be light. Well, I agree. Light can be a potent life-supporting energy. Not to mention it allows us the convenience of turning nighttime into daytime on demand. But unfortunately, light can also suck in terms of the negative effects on our health. 

For example, most indoor lighting flickers, which can be an issue for our neurological system. Now you can't see this flicker with the naked eye, but if you shoot a short slo-mo video of your light fixtures or bulbs on your phone, you can see how bad the flicker rate is with many light sources. Try it right now and you'll likely be shocked by what you see. 

Plus, modern lighting commonly emits a spike in blue light, which can disrupt sleep quality. And lastly, some bulbs also emit tons of toxic EMF, which is, of course, no Bueno. So that's the bad news. Womp, womp. But the good news is that I found the perfect solution to all of these issues. It's the blue light-blocking lighting collection from Bon Charge. Their bulbs, remove the blue and even green spectrum and provide balanced light for better eye health and sleep. 

And they also happen to be flicker-free and very low EMF. Plus, they now offer full spectrum bulbs with three settings that you can manually change from day to night so you can mimic visible sunlight and regulate your circadian rhythm, all with zero Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. So Bon Charge is just killing the game in blue light blocking, lighting, reading, lights, lamps, and even night lights.

To get your lighting in order, here's what you do. Go to boncharge.com/lifestylist and use the coupon code LIFESTYLIST to save 15%. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E, boncharge.com/lifestylist. What's your perspective on-- let's say you're building a house or remodeling a house. What's your perspective on overhead lighting like those canned lights, and recessed lighting versus lamps, and sconces that are more directionally eye level or horizontal?

Ryan Blasser: [01:19:51] And this goes back to the days when we were designing the nightclubs and the lounges and stuff. And really our eyes don't like direct bulbs, direct light. If you can see the light bulb, it's not good. We want more of the reflection and it looks better. Esthetically, it's more pleasing that way. But as far as from the health standpoint, it really has to do with the flicker rate, the color, the intensity. 

But more architectural-wise, we don't want to see the direct light. So the can light is coming down. We use those more for the utility lighting and then we use more of the sconces and the lamps is more of our mood lighting, so it's more intentional. So cleaning the house, whatever the utility lights are on if we're all hanging around a party or relaxing, getting ready for bed, we have the mood lighting on and it's set that way. It's a lot dimmer. It's more of red and yellows and oranges.

Luke Storey: [01:20:43] Awesome. I love it. Agreed 100%. One guy that I interviewed who's a lighting genius, I'm not overstating that. Dr. Alexander Wunsch, he's, I think, a German guy. He was telling me something about how going back to biology and ancestral living you never want to use overhead lighting because there's only a short fraction of the day in which the light is directly overhead. It's totally unnatural. 

And if you think about where the sun is for the vast majority of any day where you can see the sun, it's out there somewhere. It's not right over your head. It's only over your head right at solar noon or something. So he went into this whole tirade on that point. I was like, "Holy shit, I never thought about that." And that's why the overhead lights, I find them really annoying. I hardly ever turn these on in the house. It was just built that way and am stuck with them.

Ryan Blasser: [01:21:31] Yeah. Yeah. We tend to do more of the lamps and the wall sconces in the evening and then just overhead during the day or whatever if you need extra lighting.

Luke Storey: [01:21:38] Yeah. Okay, cool. I love it. This is really going to bum a lot of people out. Speaking of creating mood lighting, tell us about dimmer switches. 

Ryan Blasser: [01:21:48] I know dimmer switches put off what's called line interference or dirty electricity. And I'm with the inductor and the phase alignment of it, it really causes a lot of line interference, and that line interference goes back through the wiring and can radiate into the room just like an antenna. 

So we did the readings on your dirty electricity and we can see the spikes and we can see the normal curvature of the AC line traveling through the wires. When we get these spikes, they can travel much further out into the room. They can also be a lot more biologically damaging to the body. 

And so we want to try to minimize that dirty electricity as much as possible. And unfortunately, dimmers create a lot of light interference.

Luke Storey: [01:22:29] Has anyone made a dimmer that doesn't do that yet?

Ryan Blasser: [01:22:32] As far as I'm aware of, not really a good one. I think it's better just to have two different sets of lights. Your mood light and your utility light. And then you don't have to worry as much.

Luke Storey: [01:22:32] Right. Okay. We're going to sell a lot of lamps on this show. That's really the answer because you don't want to carve up your walls and put sconces everywhere. I was lucky when we remodeled here, all the bedrooms, even though there are canned lights, I installed an extra switch. So there's a bright white daytime set and a red set for night. So in all the bedrooms, you have to have light switches. 

And that was useful, but it cost me a lot of extra money to have those little can lights put in and the electricity and all that. I'm like, dude, I think the easy fix for people is go get some cool lamps and strategically place them around your spot. So at least at night you can have appropriate calming more natural lighting.

Ryan Blasser: [01:23:20] Yeah. And have fun with it, make it more artistic and set the mood. Set the intention for the room.

Luke Storey: [01:23:25] Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Now on to the one. We'll get this done in probably five minutes. EMF. I saved the big one for last. But luckily to our credit, I have done a lot of content on this topic, so people will know a lot. But you turned me on to some interesting ideas yesterday that I was not familiar with, and I study up a lot on this.

Let's start out by demystifying 5G. And so a couple of parts to that, if you can track me. If not, I think I can repeat it. But the first issue being there's two types of 5G networks out there. So we'll talk about that. Then I was asking you about whether my phone is set to pick up 5G or if I just leave it on LTE because I have that option in the settings. And your answer was interesting and useful. 

And then thirdly. We need to explain to people, I think the difference between the 5G cellular networks and the 2.4 or the 5G on your router, which is a totally different thing. So let's start with, I guess, the different networks of cell towers and cell service.

Ryan Blasser: [01:24:30] Yeah. So the networks, definitely AT&T and Verizon, all own frequency bandwidths. They've owned those from the beginning. There's only so many frequency bandwidths available. The government owns a huge chunk. Cell companies own a huge chunk. A whole different range of people on different frequencies. 

So when 1G came out, they still were the same frequencies as 1G and 2G, and 3G. They just made it more compact as far as the signal goes and able to send more data. It's like we got the freeway and the freeway has the speed limit. We have the older cars, then you got the newer cars, the newer and then go faster and they can haul more people. 

When we get up to 5G, and this is where 5G made it a little bit different than the rest of them that they were starting to run out of frequency bandwidth. So they purchased a group of frequencies from the government up in the 24 gigahertz range around that range. And it's a lot of smaller frequencies. It's a lot higher frequency, which makes it a smaller bandwidth frequency, and it can carry more data on it because it has more frequencies per second. 

But the problem is, is that it doesn't penetrate as easily as the lower bandwidth frequencies. So homes, trees, even heavy, thick leather jackets can block a lot of this higher bandwidth stuff. And in fact, it's the same frequency if you walk into a supermarket and the motion detector shoots down at you, tells you to open up the door, that's in the same similar frequency range as the 5G.

Luke Storey: [01:26:04] Oh, no way.

Ryan Blasser: [01:26:04] Same thing with radar detectors and radar for police. So the Ka-Band, when they're shooting their radar gun at you, that's really similar frequency. And the reason is because it will bounce back. It doesn't penetrate. 

So there's a little misconception and one of the misconceptions is, this is all military weaponry stuff. And yes, it came from the government. And yes, they can weaponize this at high enough levels. Anything at a high enough level can be lethal, very harmful. But they still have to go within the guidelines of the FCC, which they can't go over 10 million microwaves per meter squared because they know past that level that we're essentially cooking from the inside out. It's heating up the body. They can measure thermal effects. And so that's where they set these speed limits, so to speak. 

So all these devices out there have to stay within that limit. Now, where 5G starts to become a little bit more dangerous is because now we can't have one big tower up on the hill that's broadcasting to everybody because it doesn't go through the trees, it doesn't go through the walls very easily. Now we have to have them on every other light post going up and down the street. 

So it's a lot more localized, it's a lot more condensed, and we can't really get out of the signal, so to speak. Now, you asked if I change the on my phone the settings so that I no longer can receive 5G. I'm only communicating with 4G. Does that lower my exposure? The answer is no because we're always getting blasted from this stuff. It's like if we're in the shower, we're getting wet. Whether I open my mouth to take a drink or not, I'm still getting rained on from these signals.

Luke Storey: [01:27:40] Okay, because I posted a story at one point on Instagram, you guys can follow me there @lukestorey, by the way. No, seriously, dude, I made a video of like how to turn off the 5G on your phone and I was so excited to share it and now it's meaningless because I thought, well, does it really matter if my phone's talking to a 5G tower. 

Because like what you said, I'm still in it. But I thought, I don't know, maybe my phone's talking back to the tower in 5G language that's worse than the LTE or something. So easier for everyone and probably better reception frankly, when mine had the 5G turned off, it didn't work as well in some areas.

Ryan Blasser: [01:28:16] Yeah. And so we're always getting exposed to all these frequencies all around. When we go outside, we're in the soup, especially in the city and town. You get more in the rural areas, it's a little bit less. But these frequencies are traveling through the air all the time, from AM, from FM, from satellites, from the police, from airplanes, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cell phones. It's all this big soup that's going through the air.

Luke Storey: [01:28:38] All right. Yes, it is. Sadly, we're going to fix it, though, today. We're going to solve all the problems. Back to the 5G though, and this is another part of it that's a bit nuanced. And I think I was confused about many people still are.

You got the small cell, those little like tubes that you said are every block in a downtown area. And those are these high-frequency gigahertz like super high frequencies but don't penetrate. There's that classification of 5G, which is what I think most people are afraid of because it's closest to the military, energy, weapons, and all that.

But then you have this other 5G rollout that just goes on the existing long-range towers sitting right on top or amongst the other little individual transmitters that are the 3G and the 4G ones. So they just stacked it on. So you'll be in a rural area like this and still be picking up, quote, 5G. But it's just the fifth generation of cellular service. It's not the 5G that's in the downtown areas in that gigahertz short-range, super gnarly cancer machines. Is that right?

Ryan Blasser: [01:29:41] Yeah. No. Correct.

Luke Storey: [01:29:41] It all sucks, but I think people should freak out a little less about the long-range, just normal 5G that's up on the towers with everything else. Am I articulating that?

Ryan Blasser: [01:29:54] 100%. That is very good. Yeah. 

Luke Storey: [01:29:56] Okay. Do you have anything to add to that?

Ryan Blasser: [01:29:57] Yeah, I think people worry about certain frequencies being worse than others. And there's studies out there and there need to be more studies of which frequencies are more harmful to the bodies, in which frequencies are actually good for the bodies because we have a whole range of therapeutic EMF stuff on the other side of the fence here where people, the PMF pads and some of the low-frequency stuff and there's a whole range of devices that can be therapeutic.

Luke Storey: [01:30:26] And then we have bio charger, the amp coil, all this kind of stuff.

Ryan Blasser: [01:30:29] Exactly. And then we have the other side that is a lot more harmful. And then a lot of it has to do with the frequency range and the size and the resonance of our body. So 2.4 gigahertz is what microwaves use to heat food because it resonates perfectly with the water molecule. Hey, it's the most dangerous to the water and it vibrates it violently and that's why it heats up our food.

Luke Storey: [01:30:52] And this is why I don't have Wi-Fi in our house.

Ryan Blasser: [01:30:54] Right. Well, 2.4 gigahertz is in the microwave. It's also Bluetooth. It's also in WiFi. And the reason is that it's open source. So the government 50 years ago said 2.4, 2.5 around this range, it's going to be open source. Nobody owns it. It's a free game. And that's why all the Bluetooth, all these people are used because you don't need a license to use it. You don't need to own those.

Luke Storey: [01:31:15] Interesting.

Ryan Blasser: [01:31:16] But what's crazy, I don't want to get a conspiracy theorist. But--

Luke Storey: [01:31:19] I had also David Eick on the show. We can go as far out as you want to.

Ryan Blasser: [01:31:24] Those frequencies are the most dangerous to the human body because guess what our body is made up mostly of? Water.

Luke Storey: [01:31:30] Bingo.

Ryan Blasser: [01:31:31] Bingo. So that's the scary part is they made that specific band of frequencies open source. It also happens to be the most dangerous biologically to us because we are water and it violently vibrates water molecules.

Luke Storey: [01:31:45] Oh, my God. Dude, can you explain to people why the 5G option on some routers, for Wi-Fi routers is not the same 5G as what we're talking about prior?

Ryan Blasser: [01:31:55] Yes. So on the router, they're actually talking about the frequency. So five gigahertz. So when you have the 5G up and it's five gigahertz and then you have 2.4 gigahertz, that's a frequency. So it's a specific frequency that they're talking about.

Luke Storey: [01:32:10] Okay, perfect. Because I think a lot of people like me were confused about that. Would you say in your opinion that if you have an option and you have to have Wi-Fi on in your house because it's useful and you depend on it, etc, would it be better to use the 5G WiFi signal, the five gigahertz or the 2.4 gigahertz? Like if you had to have it on in your house, which one would you pick?

Ryan Blasser: [01:32:33] If all other conditions were equal, I would choose 5G because it's further away from that 2.4 gigahertz range and it's also less penetrating. So the higher the frequency, the less penetrated. 

I think AM Radio stations traveled through the mountains. You could be way out in the middle of a desert. You're picking up AM radio stations because the frequency wavelength of an AM radio station signal is like a quarter mile. It's huge. 

Now the frequency wavelength of a millimeter bandwidth is actually a millimeter. So they call it millimeter wavelength because it's actually a millimeter size. So that wavelength will determine how much it's going to penetrate and how much is going to go around buildings and walls and through leaves and through our skin.

Luke Storey: [01:33:12] Got it. Okay, cool. Man, that's dope. Thank you for eliminating that. But on the millimeter wave topic, we were talking about airports and TSA yesterday. My arch nemesis worldwide. Well, I guess they're only in the states, but my arch nemesis in terms of travel, dealing with that organization, I've always sensed that those millimeter scanner things that spin around you and you hold your arms up like this, I've always sensed that I don't want millimeter waves firing at me. It feels like a military weapon. I've never trusted them. I don't care what the guy says. I'm not walking through it. 

So I always, whenever possible, go through the metal detector, the old school, like when you're going to court metal detector or a violent band, that you're going to see a concert wherever they make you walk through a metal detector. I was like, "Oh, I'm stoked. I got the metal detector." And then you told me something that would counter the logic of that choice.

Ryan Blasser: [01:34:03] Yes. So the metal detector, old school is a much more powerful frequency that's going actually through the body. So if you have a metal device withinside your body, it's going to pick that up. Whereas the millimeter, since it's a higher frequency is not going to penetrate through the skin very much. It's going to lightly go into the edge of the skin but it's not going to penetrate through the body and that's why it works so well as radar or imagery because it will hit the body, it will go through the close to the skin and that will reflect back out. 

And then it can pick up how much percentage of it kicked back from your clothes or if you have a knife in your pocket. They're both still EMF. They're both still bad, but if you were to choose one or the other, choose the millimeter wave because it doesn't penetrate the body as much.

Luke Storey: [01:34:49] That makes perfect sense. And I'm so pissed that I've spent so much time avoiding them for all of these many years. Since they came out, I've been avoiding them. But to your point, the best option if you have time and you're willing to be accosted, would be the pat down.

Ryan Blasser: [01:35:03] The pat down, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:35:05] Which ends up happening to me a lot anyway, because I always set off, even the old school alarm with my frequent EMF clothes and whatever.

Ryan Blasser: [01:35:11] Oh, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:35:12] Okay. I'm myth-busting some stuff here. It was really fun with you. Let's talk about earthing as a health benefit. And so using the earthing sheets, the earthing pads, when you're sitting in a computer, all of this stuff that where we can again, try to bring in the energies of nature into the home. What are your best and worst practices in terms of earthing when you're in a house?

Ryan Blasser: [01:35:37] Yeah, this is probably one of the biggest misunderstood things with EMF is grounding and earthing and shielding and these are all three different things. And we talked about this at a great length yesterday in your home. And the earthing to me think of that more as therapeutic. That's what we do when we go out and we stand on the grass and we walk on the beach with our bare feet and we're conducting electrons and energy directly to the earth. 

That's how we've evolved on this planet. Again, we're going ancestral. This is why we've evolved connected to the earth, and that's more therapeutic. But that doesn't really have anything to do with shielding or blocking or the electrical fields. That's just us connecting with Earth and grounding. 

Now, there's a second thing called grounding and grounding, think about grounding more like a lightning rod. The big building on the top has a lightning rod that goes back down to ground. And so that if a lightning bolt comes, it will hit that rod and it will go the quickest path back down to ground. 

And so inside of our home, we have ground wires that run all the way through our house, and those are going into ground rods in the ground so that if lightning strikes our house, we are protected and we're not going to get electrocuted. And it will shunt that energy to ground. 

Now we have shielding, that is going to block electrical fields going from one side to the other. So when we talk about professional audio stuff and we have the tinfoil that's around the cables that we talked about earlier, that's acting as a shield. Now that shield needs to be grounded back to the source. It needs to be physically connected back to the source that we're trying to shield it from. 

So as electrons are flying through the air, they hit that shield. That shield is going to act like a ground similar, but it has a different purpose. It's for blocking the electrons or the electric field. So inside of a home or inside of an office or in a sleeping area, we have this misconception that if we can connect ourselves to ground, that's good. 

Well, that's only good if we're not in an electric field, which unfortunately, a lot of times when we're inside of a home, we are in an electric field and now we've just turned ourselves into a lightning rod. Now we're providing a path for these electrons to get back to the ground, back to the source, and we become part of the circuit and we start conducting electricity, which we did some measurements on you where you laid in bed, and we actually measured your body voltage. And maybe you can share a little bit about that experience.

Luke Storey: [01:38:04] Brutal, dude. We did all of the shieldings of this house when we were building it, we went hardcore, and did all the things. So the bedroom is a Faraday cage. And to our credit, we did at least get extremely low radio frequencies in there. But yeah, we had me lay on the bed, hold a skin voltage meter, and that's going to determine how much AC current is hitting my body. 

And it was much higher than you want it to be. As totally unnatural, like would never be present in nature in a million years on planet Earth, which was disconcerting, especially since we had shielded, I think we found maybe the cause of that or something that was quite nuanced, which was when we made the bedroom a Faraday cage by painting the shielding pane and then grounding the floor with the special mesh stuff I got from Brian Hoyer's company Shielded Healings, where I got all the stuff and he came and did the original testing and stuff. 

So shout out credit to Brian and his great team. But then I did a bunch of construction after they came and all the shit got undone and so I had a friend of mine reground the bedroom system to a copper plate buried in the yard rather than grounding it to the electrical outlet ground because that's the way that he thought would be best to do it based on his understanding.

So we thought that we might have allowed for a little electric field to get over into the bed space, even though the room is totally shielded because that grounding is not grounded to itself. Was that--

Ryan Blasser: [01:39:30] Correct. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:39:32] The assessment that you had of it?

Ryan Blasser: [01:39:33] Yes. And grounding and earthing and shielding is very complicated. And it took me 25 years as an electromagnetic engineer to really fully understand. I'm still learning more about it. But yeah, in your situation and you even had a grounding mat under the bed that was grounded.

Luke Storey: [01:39:49] Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [01:39:50] But in your situation, we were trying to block the electric field that was coming from the electrical system, so we needed to have the shield, which was the wall that we had painted. We were treating it as a shield and we needed that to be grounded back to the electrical system ground.
So that was the potential difference. That was the difference of potential. Where we made a wrong turn is grounding it to earth instead of back to the electrical system.

Luke Storey: [01:40:16] Got it. Okay. And so in terms of, I know this is like splitting hairs here for it takes a certain type of person to want to go this deep and nuanced here. But our analysis after checking that was that we should have done the Faraday grounding of the whole room into the outlet ground, the ground of the building's electrical system. 

But with the earthing sheet, it would be ideal to actually run that wire out the side of the house right now, which is where I have the room grounded to essentially. That it would make sense to get the electrons from the earth into the bed, provided I'm not being exposed to an electric field, an AC current of 60 hertz coming out of the wall.

Ryan Blasser: [01:40:59] Yeah, we are getting deeper here.

Luke Storey: [01:41:03] We're getting deeper in the weeds. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [01:41:04] Yeah, for people try to ground earth and I think it's important to understand the difference. And so that grounding mat, if it connected to Earth instead of the wall, it needed to touch your skin. And that was another piece we were missing too, is you had some linens and bedding and I think a mattress topper in between that your Ooler, your Chilli system.

Luke Storey: [01:41:25] Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [01:41:25] If it was physically touching your body, we need to have that physical connection. Even if there's a millimeter plug in between, it's not going to work. You have to have the physical connection for that DC flow back to Earth. So it's two different things. So we're shielding the room and we're grounding that shield back to the electrical system because that's what we're shielding from. 

And then we're connecting your body physically to earth-separate. And we're making sure that the electrons from the electrical system are not getting to your body to find a path back to Earth. And we're doing that with the shield.

Luke Storey: [01:41:56] Yep, yep. Perfect. That makes perfect-- 

Ryan Blasser: [01:41:58] Hope that makes sense.

Luke Storey: [01:41:59] That makes total sense to me. And probably 5% of those listening because it gets so nutty. But this is why I always tell people, hire someone like Ryan, testmyhome.com. And this is what I do. I can't figure this stuff out. And I think so many well-intentioned people are out there using these earthing products, but they're right next to an electric field. They don't know it. They're thinking they're doing the right thing. Like I did that for years until I learned otherwise.

People are getting different EMF, mitigation tools, and things. And it's like I always say, man, save your time, energy, and money. Save up like you're saving up for a vacation somewhere or whatever you save for. Hire a professional to come in and test. Because even when you do, which I did when we were building this house, you still miss things along the way and you come back and retest. We're like, "We got to make one little tweak here and a little twist, really get it perfect."

But I would never be able to figure any of that out without someone like you coming in the home and telling me what's up. It's indispensable. And I know it's not accessible for all people, but I think you do it on a scale of what's feasible for you and your family, where you are in your life. And there's low-hanging fruit, like putting your router on a timer. If you can't afford to Ethernet the whole house or whatever.

Ryan Blasser: [01:43:15] Yeah, maybe we can just keep it simple for people to what not to do.

Luke Storey: [01:43:18] Okay, cool.

Ryan Blasser: [01:43:19] Get your earthing outside. Go outside to earth. I know it's hard if you're in the middle of winter or something but get your earthing outside.

Luke Storey: [01:43:26] Or if it's the middle of winter. Then you get your cold thermogenesis in.

Ryan Blasser: [01:43:30] There you go. Go lay in the snow, get your everything. But really, that's honestly the best way to do it. Go take a walk on the beach barefoot. Go out on your grass, go lay on the grass and read a book or something. To get properly earthing inside your home is very difficult. You have to go to pretty great lengths, as we found out. You have to shield your home. You have to shield the room. Sometimes you have to kill the circuits, which will ultimately wind up doing with your house to really get that down to zero level again.

Luke Storey: [01:43:54] EMF killswitch is what we're putting in there. And I'll put it in the show notes. But again, useless to someone that doesn't know how to test and figure out how to install it, and all that. It gets complex.

Ryan Blasser: [01:44:06] Yeah. So if you're earthing inside your home, more than likely you're causing more damage than good.

Luke Storey: [01:44:11] Perfect. Simple answer.

Ryan Blasser: [01:44:12] Because you're becoming part of the circuit now. Now they have those grounding mats, like for the office space, for example, where you put your feet on them and grounding. Don't use those as earthing. Use those as a shield. Take that grounding mat that's grounded to the outlet and cover all of the wires on the floor. 

And as the electrical field comes off all those wires, they're going to hit that grounding mat and they're going to ground back to Earth, but don't touch it with your foot. Because now you're part of that circuit.

Luke Storey: [01:44:41] That is great advice because I was thinking about under my desk where there's all those wires. I don't really keep my feet that far under there, but that's where the dog sleeps. I realized after he left, I was like, "Oh, poor Cookie." She's been getting fried. 

So that's great. So under your workspace, you could buy one of the larger grounding mats or even a small grounding sheet and basically just burrito up all of your cables and plug that into the ground plug, and your golden. It's all recirculating itself down there, basically.

Ryan Blasser: [01:45:10] Yeah. If you've bought one and you're like, "What the heck, that sucks. I just got ripped off." No, you can repurpose that and use it for its intended purpose.

Luke Storey: [01:45:15] Oh cool. There we go because a lot of people are saying, shit, I just bought a bunch of earthing pads and whatever.

Ryan Blasser: [01:45:21] Oh, a lot. I can't tell you the homes I go into and they have all these cool earthing grounding this and they're using them wrong and they're actually making it worse. And what sucks about that is now their whole deal with EMF is already hard enough for a lot of people to grasp. Unless you're really sensitive, then it's pretty obvious to you, but they're not really seeing effects from it.

And so then they think, Oh well, it must not be the EMF because I just did this grounding in my house and now I'm not really feeling any different. In fact, I feel a little worse. The problem is that they did it wrong.

Luke Storey: [01:45:47] Right. I think a lot of that is borne out of-- I don't know that they were intentionally deceptive, but just erroneous videos people would make, which I fell for and started buying all the earthing products is where you're in an electric field next to a lamp or something. 

Sit on a bed and then you have a skin voltage meter that's picking up that electric field from the lamp that you're next to, then you put your finger on a grounding mat and it drops to zero and you're like, sick, No more EMF for me. But it's not really what's happening. What's in fact happening it's just using you as the conduit. And now all that electricity just going through you.

Ryan Blasser: [01:46:27] It's all in the measurement because when you got the meter out and you're measuring, it's measuring a difference of potential. So this is three-volt and this is one volt. And I measure from here to here, it's going to have that two-volt difference. And so that's what I'm going to measure. 

Typically when you're measuring the voltage with the meter, you'll have one end ground and then one is hot. And we're measuring for differences of potential. So if you're measuring you and the ground is referencing ground with the meter and your grounding mat is plugged into ground and now you touch ground and we measure you the ground, it's basically touching the meter's probes together as electrically, it's the same connection.

Luke Storey: [01:47:02] So that's getting the zero and the false hope that you're protected from the electric field.

Ryan Blasser: [01:47:07] Yeah. And don't feel bad because that's some deep engineering stuff right there to get through all that and understand.

Luke Storey: [01:47:13] I'm, dude, there's a huge learning curve and that's why I like interviewing guys like you so I can get hopefully complex information distilled down for the people listening so they can just make practical choices and know when they're doing more harm than good. What's your take on smart meters?

Ryan Blasser: [01:47:32] Smart meters, it's a lot about proximity. If you have a smart meter on the opposite side of your bed where you're sleeping, that could be a big deal. The thing with smart meters is that mostly a shooting away from the house because radiofrequency will reflect off of metal. And a lot of times the smart meter is in a metal enclosure behind it and it's shooting the majority of time away from the house. 

When we do measurements, a lot of times we get more reading coming from the neighbor firing at your house. So if you live in a tighter-knit community where the homes are close, it's your neighbor's smart meter firing at you that's going to give more exposure than your own smart meter. 

Now, a lot of exposure dials down to three different things. It's the strength of the signal that's coming off of the source. It's the duration. How long are you in the source? And its distance. How far away are we from it? So when it comes to the smart meter, they'll send a ping out every 45 seconds to a couple of minutes sometimes. And actually, if you're further away from the main power company, if you're at the very end your ping is maybe only happened every couple of hours. If your smart meter is close to the substation, it's acting as a path and it could be pinging quite a bit more. 

I actually did an assessment on a home where the guy was an engineer for the SRP Power Company in Phenix, and he designed and built those things and he sat down and explained the whole thing to me, is fascinating how it works, but it he was very EMF aware himself, and so he kind of knew the dangers, but it was quite interesting to hear the other side of it, the technology. 

But the ping that happens is only a millisecond and maybe only a minute or so. So we talk about duration. That's not very much duration that add up over the day. And then proximity, it's across the house. It's not as much of a concern.

Luke Storey: [01:49:16] Okay. Are all smart meters created equal in terms of how much radiation they put out and how often? I feel like I've tested a few, some of them were like, break your meter and it seems pretty consistent. And then some of them I can't even like. They don't even barely hit the RF meter. Like nothing's even happening. I'm like, are there some fake smart meters that aren't that bad?

Ryan Blasser: [01:49:40] It's your proximity in the grid. Where are you in relationship to the main central?

Luke Storey: [01:49:45] So what you just explained essentially is going to determine?

Ryan Blasser: [01:49:48] Yeah, it's like they're playing telephone with each other. This one's talking to this one. Talking to this one, and it's broadcasting down. That's because like I said, if you're far out in the boonies, it's not transmitted very much. If you're really close to the central hub, you're sending all that information through.

Luke Storey: [01:50:02] Okay, Got it. Yeah. We ended up switching ours out when we moved in here, and I think it was like 50 bucks a month fee we had to pay, so I think it went down to 35. Now it's still like you dicks. Well, that's what it cost because we have to send a person out. 

And I'm like, just on principle alone, even if having one wasn't that bad, I don't want to be part of that system because of the privacy issues too. It's not just the EMF, it's the data collection and the spying potential, right where your Alexa refrigerator is like talking to the CIA for you.

This stuff. When they came and did our new sewer system because we got rid of septic they put a smart meter on the water system and I was like, I don't want that. And they're like, "Well, too bad then you don't get water." I was like, okay. So I ran out there and tested it and it's not putting off any EMF. 

But what it does do is it tells them what time of day you use water and they charge you exponentially more for certain times based on drought patterns and water scarcity and things of this nature. So I'm like, "It's none of your business when I'm using the water. I buy from you, I bought it from you. I'm going to use it when I want." And they're like, "No, you're not."

Ryan Blasser: [01:51:10] Oh yeah, it's amazing how much data they can collect. Every device you have in your home has its own specific signature, like a fingerprint. So when that turns on. So what we measure as dirty electricity, we showed you on the oscilloscope when we analyzed your power, they can tell what devices are on what devices are off based on the signatures.

So an inductive motor has a different phase alignment than, let's say, the lights or the fan that you turn on or your pool pump. These all have different electrical signatures. And so as those turn on and off, it can sense and it can tell you.

Luke Storey: [01:51:40] So if you have a smart meter, they can tell when you're using your electric bidet.

Ryan Blasser: [01:51:44] Yeah, they can tell the difference between a lighting load or a motor load or air conditioning.

Luke Storey: [01:51:50] That's creepy, dude. Call me paranoid.

Ryan Blasser: [01:51:52] Well, data collection is big business. They not only make money off of the power that we pay them for, but they're making money off of the data that they're collecting. Because data information is big business.

Luke Storey: [01:52:04] Okay. Noted. I'm going to take a moment here to share an incredible resource with you. It's called Quantum Upgrade. Every unit of matter contains quantum energy, and so do our cells. Every person has a quantum energy field and constantly interacts with other quantum energy fields. Quantum energy is so important that the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was specifically about quantum entanglement. 

Let me explain here how Quantum Upgrade uses this energy to powerfully enhance our well-being. Through many years of research, Quantum Upgrade has developed one of the world's most potent sources of usable quantum energy. When you sign up for their service, Quantum Upgrade associates your home, your phone, your business, your pet, or even your car with this energy source. And you all know by now what an EMF mitigation fanatic I am. That's because EMF frequencies are incoherent and dramatically stress the human body. 

Well, Quantum Upgrade counters this problem by harmonizing the EMF to make them no longer toxic to your body. This is why I love the service on my car. My car fatigue has dramatically improved. It very obviously works. But apart from the EMF benefits, Quantum Upgrade also enhances your vitality in many other ways, which are shown in the studies on their website. So if you want an affordable way to deal with EMF and experience the vitality you deserve, check out quantumupgrade.io and get a 15-day free trial using the code LUKE15. Again, that's quantumupgrades.io. 

We found something interesting here that I think would be useful for people. And that was my alarm system, the ADT alarm. When they installed it, I was like, "Does this thing talk to the mothership all the time?" "Oh, no, sir. Every once in a while it sends a ping." And I was like. All right, that sounds dubious. Sure enough. What did you find?

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:03] It was a pretty powerful source. It was putting out 2.5 million micros. Constantly all the time, no matter what.

Luke Storey: [01:54:11] No off button?

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:12] No off button.

Luke Storey: [01:54:13] And even when we did a system shutdown, it just turns itself back on.

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:16] Turns itself back on.

Luke Storey: [01:54:17] Then I unplugged it in the little AV closet, turned itself back on with the backup battery.

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:23] Yeah. 

Luke Storey: [01:54:23] Then what did you do to fix it?

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:25] We had to take it apart, pull the back off, and we had to disconnect the battery from it.

Luke Storey: [01:54:29] Yeah. So don't tell any criminals out there. It's currently unplugged. But the cool thing there, at least when we leave the house, it's pretty easy to just flip the power back on and make it work again. So anyone listening to that wants to break in, good luck with that. You're not going to make it very far. 

But these are the things people have in their homes. It's like everyone wants everything smart and easy, convenient. They want to live in the Jetsons. And it's like, dude, you're turning your home into a microwave oven.

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:54] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:54:55] It's ridiculous. What about baby monitors?

Ryan Blasser: [01:54:58] Oh, this is a tough one. This is hard because a lot of people have baby monitors. And the problem with baby monitors is they typically put them really close to the baby, sometimes even mount them right on the crib. When babies are growing and developing, their cells are dividing rapidly. It's probably one of the most critical times to have them in a clean environment, electrically, chemical wise and lighting. 

But what happens is new baby comes in the picture, they go and they repaint the whole room, they get new furniture, they get all these cool electronics. And a lot of times the nursery can be one of the most toxic rooms in the house. And so it's sad. And I point this out, I've had mothers break down and cry and feel bad, like, oh my gosh, I'm really hurting my kid. Is permanent and all this stuff isn't permanent.

Let's fix it, though. So we're not exposing the little baby to these things. It's unnecessary. There's other ways to accomplish the same thing. We can get baby monitors that are hardwired that you can run a cable in and it maybe doesn't look the best or maybe just turn it off when they're not in there. 

A lot of these things are broadcast nonstop all the time. No reason to have it on all the time if you don't need to be monitoring the baby in there.

Luke Storey: [01:56:10] They do have wired ones, though.

Ryan Blasser: [01:56:11] They do have wired ones. They're becoming harder and harder to get because everybody wants to go wireless, but they are still out there. You got to look for them.

Luke Storey: [01:56:19] So everyone listening, share this podcast with every mom or potential mom you know so that some entrepreneur out there is going to make a badass, very functional, and beautiful baby monitor that plugs into your Ethernet.

Ryan Blasser: [01:56:30] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:56:31] What about this jump conduction issue on Ethernet cables? I thought in this house, I'm totally stoked. It was built in 2004. There's Ethernet ports in every room. No Wi-Fi, we're stoked and then you're like, wrong. What did you find on the Ethernet cables?

Ryan Blasser: [01:56:45] Electric field. So electrical energy electric field likes to jump. Remember we showed you, you just hold on to it and I measured your other hand. And so through your body, you're conducting electricity through the cables. It has a ground wire in it. That ground wire can get energized. And so unless you're shielded, you're shielding the cable and you're grounding that cable that goes back to the grounding versus earthing, we're grounding or shielding and it needs to be shielded back at the source where it's coming from. 

If you don't do that, we're emitting an electric field through the wires. So even though your room was completely shielded, and grounded, now you had these five cables coming up under the bed, which is great because that's what you want to do. That's what I have at my house as well. But it needs to be shielded and needs to be grounded.

Luke Storey: [01:57:25] Do people sell shielded Ethernet cables?

Ryan Blasser: [01:57:28] Yes.

Luke Storey: [01:57:29] Okay, good to know. And so if someone shopping for Ethernet cable because they figured out, oh, I could just plug an Ethernet cable into my router and then use an adapter on my phone, plug my laptop in, could someone easily find a shielded Ethernet cable?

Ryan Blasser: [01:57:42] Yes. Yeah, you can Google Amazon shielded Ethernet cable. It's the little adapter, though. You plug it in and then that little coupler unit has a ground wire that goes in and plugs into the ground.

Luke Storey: [01:57:53] Oh, okay.

Ryan Blasser: [01:57:53] So you got to have that one piece that grounds it and you do it at the source.

Luke Storey: [01:57:57] Got it. So you would plug the Ethernet cable into the Ethernet port, and then there's another little wire that would go to a nearby outlet into the ground of the outlet.

Ryan Blasser: [01:58:05] Yes.

Luke Storey: [01:58:05] Okay. Got it. Cool.

Ryan Blasser: [01:58:06] And they have grounded Ethernet switches so you can ground the Ethernet switch and then the ground cable. You need a whole system. Grounding is really the most tricky thing when it comes to this stuff.

Luke Storey: [01:58:18] I'm sorry for those listening. It's difficult, but then you hire someone like you to come in and help us fix it, I guess. What about Oh, man! Again, I'm sorry to be the messenger here, guys. I'll play devil's advocate. How awesome are wireless speakers like Sonos and smart TVs that aren't connected or hardwired to anything?

Ryan Blasser: [01:58:38] Sonos has done the way that you do it is probably the best way to do it. But, unfortunately, a lot of people will just use Sonos, they don't hardwire. That's probably one of the worst. So when I go in to test the EMF in the home, Sonos is just blasting throughout the whole thing. Speakers, it's like a little mini cell tower in every room. 

Now you can hardwire, but you have to go into the settings and turn the wireless off. If you don't do that, it's still going to be transmitting. So I see a lot of people make the mistake. "Well, I'm just going to hardwire it all," which is great. But they don't go into the settings and they don't turn off the wireless function. So now it's still broadcasting.

Luke Storey: [01:59:13] This just described my life before I went around with my meter and I was like, "What? Why is it the Sonos speaker putting off RF?" It's hard-wired with the Ethernet and even my AV guys are like, oh yeah, there's nothing. You just plug in the Ethernet, it turns it off and I had to dig in and geek out in the Sonos app on my computer basically, I was able to disable them all, but man, if I didn't know that as you said, I'd be living in a sea of what's essentially a bunch of WiFi routers. 

Oh, I know what I want to ask you in lighting. What's your take on these Philips Hue bulbs and these like bulbs that magically change colors based on the time of the day?

Ryan Blasser: [01:59:49] Well, if they're Bluetooth enabled and you're connecting through Bluetooth or even Wi-Fi, then we got the bad effect of the Wi-Fi and the radio frequency. They do make a smart one and I want to get it for my home. It's super cool. It runs off of Cat six cable. So you run Cat six cable instead of electrical wiring. So it's low voltage so it doesn't have an electric field. 

And then it's called circadian rhythm lighting. So it'll actually change colors and dimness throughout the day. So it'll track exactly the same color and intensity as the sun, as you just leave it and let it sit and it will change. Hue will change color. The sun goes down, it turns red, it goes dim.

Luke Storey: [02:00:25] Wow. Wow. That's so cool.

Ryan Blasser: [02:00:25] I'm going to find more when I get back home. There's a guy I'm going to meet with and he's actually where I live. I need to get more information. I know it exists, I just didn't know where or who to get it from.

Luke Storey: [02:00:40] Keep us posted. And if we get that info on time, we'll put it in the show notes.

Ryan Blasser: [02:00:43] So cool.

Luke Storey: [02:00:44] And is this something you would really only be able to do in the process of building or remodeling a house or could you retrofit your house with that?

Ryan Blasser: [02:00:51] So the trick is getting the cables where they need to go. So there's going to be some retrofit, there's going to be some cutting involved, and you don't have to do it on every single light in here. And it doesn't need to be in your storage room or your laundry room, but like your main area, the bedrooms take the time to wire up a system like that in your house. 

This is more next-level stuff, biohacking stuff that I think should be standard in most homes in the future. I think a lot of this health stuff should be standard and it's not. But out of the big scheme of things, it's probably not the first thing I would do is call up someone to come do that. Things like ERV and air filtration and water filtration and the Hardwire Home, are all like no-brainers. Let's do these. But the circadian rhythm light, this is some really cool next-level stuff.

Luke Storey: [02:01:31] It's definitely cooler than getting those ones, as you said, that are each a little Wi-Fi transmitter. I had those when the Philips Hughs ones came. It was a trick question because I already had my answer, but I had them in my nightstand lights and then across from the bed I had a dresser with two lamps on it and I had those on. I was like, Oh, it's so cool when it gets dark and turns red. 

And then I asked a friend of it, I think it was actually Dave Asprey. I know it was him when we were doing some coaching back in the day and he's like, "Yeah, that's cool for the melatonin, but guess what? Now you have four Wi-Fi routers?" Quad wrangling you in your bed, whatever The word for four things around you is. I was like, never mind. Took those out. I returned them.

Ryan Blasser: [02:02:07] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:02:08] What about these mysterious things, these pesky things that aren't supposed to be smart appliances and electronics? But they are. Tell everyone about my printer.

Ryan Blasser: [02:02:17] Yeah. So your printer was actually off. No lights, no indication. And it was sending this beacon signal out about every 3 seconds. This burst like a machine gun sound, sending it through your house, send it through your office. And unfortunately, right where you sit at your desk multiple hours a day, not even using it and you're getting exposure from it. 

There's a lot of these sleeper-type devices that want to stay connected. They want that connectivity. So when the router is active, it's sensing who's what other devices are in the area and it keeps that IP address open for them, or it can assign it to specific IP addresses so that if you go to turn your printer on or you go to turn your TV on, it already has a connection established. So it's a lot faster. Unfortunately, when it's not on and you're not using it, it's still broadcasting through the house.

Luke Storey: [02:03:03] That's just insane that when it's turned off, it's that way.

Ryan Blasser: [02:03:07] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:03:07] Yeah. I guess the answer there is a, whenever you buy stuff, just test it or buy things that don't even have the option to be wirelessly enabled. Like that one has the Wi-Fi thing, but I'm like, who cares? Because I'm just going to hardwire it and I never use it. 

Lo and behold, I've had that thing for a couple of years right next to my desk as you said just hammering me in the face. What do you find in people's homes when you test some of their health technologies, like saunas, for example?

Ryan Blasser: [02:03:35] Yeah, there's some good saunas out there. Sauna Space is one of the best ones as far as low or no EMF. They've done a lot of work to minimize that. Yours is clear light?

Luke Storey: [02:03:47] Clear light. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [02:03:48] That tasted pretty good. Of course, it wasn't zero. We still have energy in there. We still have a little bit of a magnetic field from the filaments, but there are some that can be a lot worse. 

I always tell people when it comes to those therapeutic type devices, use them, get the benefit from it, and don't stress out about the EMF. If you can get one that's low EMF, great. But to sit in there for 15, 20 minutes and detox and get toxins out is the benefit of that is probably much better than the little bit of EMF you're getting.

Luke Storey: [02:04:16] Cost to benefit ratio.

Ryan Blasser: [02:04:17] Cost to benefit ratio. Absolutely.

Luke Storey: [02:04:18] I agree. Have you ever tested one of these backyard barrels on us that have the electric stove in them by chance?

Ryan Blasser: [02:04:24] I haven't, but I've tested a lot of electrical heaters themselves and the electrical filament just inherently is really strong magnetic fields.

Luke Storey: [02:04:31] Magnetic. Okay.

Ryan Blasser: [02:04:32] Yep. It's the magnets. When the current is going through a conductive material it throws off this magnetic field.

Luke Storey: [02:04:38] Got it. All right. Because I want to get one of those barrels on us, and I guess I'm going to have to accept that the benefit of sweating is probably more than the detriment of a magnetic field for a while.

Ryan Blasser: [02:04:47] Yeah. Just sit on the opposite side.

Luke Storey: [02:04:48] Okay, then what do you have to say about it, most of us at least work on computers. What's your take on the wireless mouse and computer? I know you recommend that I get rid of my trackpad.

Ryan Blasser: [02:05:01] Anything you can go wired, let's go wired. Especially, remember we talked about proximity and duration. So if you're eight hours a day with your hand on a mouse, you better have that thing wired because you're getting a lot of exposure. 

And if you don't need to be sitting across the room and it's right there where your computer is, why not have it wired? It's not really an inconvenience. Some of the stuff we're trading inconvenience for health, and if we're not really getting that much benefit from it, why give us the negative side effects from the help?

Luke Storey: [02:05:28] And you said, which I didn't know that Bluetooth is that 2.4, which is the worst on the water molecule and we're mostly water.

Ryan Blasser: [02:05:34] Right.

Luke Storey: [02:05:35] Your hand is made of mostly water. That's sitting on that Bluetooth trackpad. Oh, God. Okay, tell us what we discovered about the why. Well, you already knew and you turned me on to the phone on airplane mode versus not versus turned off and all that. This was again, mind-blowing emoji.

Ryan Blasser: [02:05:55] Yeah. And I get this almost every time with my clients and we're going through different sources. The background cell phone is the number one source of EMF exposure by far, bar none around us because of strength, its high strength. It has to talk all the way back to the cell tower. Duration, it's on us almost all the time. Most people have it right by their bed at night. They have it in their pocket all day long.
And then the proximity. Close to us, duration, strength. So we have all three things all at once. Now, I tell people, put this on airplane mode. A lot of people are like, yeah, it's nighttime, it's put on airplane mode. But when we put it on airplane mode, Apple in particular will still keep Bluetooth on. It will make it so that you can't connect to Bluetooth, but Bluetooth is still transmitting. 

So you actually have to go into the settings and go to the Bluetooth section and physically slide Bluetooth over for it to be fully off. Now, also, if you go ahead and just turn your phone all the way off, it will still be transmitting, which I'm not sure exactly why. Conspiracy theory is out on that one all you want, but it still transmits when it's off.

Luke Storey: [02:07:00] Yeah, because I've always wondered if your phone is turned off and you lose it somewhere, Find My Phone still works. And so when I tested my iPhone powered off and it's still made RF, it still was producing EMF. I was like, "Oh, I see. They're just turning the screen off, but the phone's still on doing stuff."

So what it's doing, we don't know, could be nefarious, could be just an oversight, or they want to make it convenient to find your phone, be able to track it. But for years I was sleeping with my phone in airplane mode near me, listening to podcasts and stuff at night. And it was on fake airplane mode until yesterday you showed me how to do it for real. 

So I think what I'll do actually, Ryan is I'll make a video of how to do that setting on your phone because it's easier to show than tell. And I'll post it on my Instagram. So the people that are listening to this can go to lukestorey.com.testmyhome and we'll put a link to that post in the show notes if all goes well, because that's a really good hack. It's super important.

Ryan Blasser: [02:07:57] Yeah, and all this stuff we're talking about and talking about on my Instagram as well. I have tons of videos on all this stuff.

Luke Storey: [02:08:03] Oh, cool. Do you have that one on there?

Ryan Blasser: [02:08:05] I think I do. You got to look for it. I have so much stuff and it's probably not organized as it should be, but all the stuff we're talking about, I have videos and it's all free content to get on there and learn.

Luke Storey: [02:08:13] Rad. What's your Instagram handle?

Ryan Blasser: [02:08:16] @testmyhome.

Luke Storey: [02:08:16] @testmyhome. How the hell did you get that URL? Did that cost you a lot of money? Testmyhome.com?

Ryan Blasser: [02:08:22] It cost a little money. Yeah. 

Luke Storey: [02:08:23] Because I depend on how long you've had URLs. I remember I had to buy one for another business and it was like five grand. That was a lot of years ago, man. And I had to beat the guy up to get it from. He's just parked on it, waiting until someone wanted to give him free money.

What about solar panels? I don't have any, but I know this is a big question for a lot of people that are concerned with the EMF, what are the issues and solutions around solar?

Ryan Blasser: [02:08:47] Yeah, it's not the actual solar panels themselves. It's the inverter box that converts it from 12-volt to 120-volt AC. That converter box has a big transformer and some capacitors and some switch modes, a power supply, and transformers. And so what happens in that conversion process is there's a lot of line interference and that line interference can get sent down the line as dirty electricity. 

But also there's a big magnetic field that comes from that inductor that's pulsating. And so you want to be mindful of where that inverter is in your house. If it's right on the outside of a bedroom or a nursery or your office, you might want to consider either moving that or moving the bed or the desk because we don't want to be in that field. 

And I think we're going to talk about the magnetic field and what we think that your house because we got to think a lot of times we're looking at what's in the room, what's around us, but what's on the other side of the wall, what's on the floor below is because these energetic fields will go right through the wall, right through the floor and right through our body and affect us on its way through.

Luke Storey: [02:09:46] Yeah, yeah. With the magnetic field from the solar, you were saying that's not coming right off of the panels, but it's from this converter thing?

Ryan Blasser: [02:09:55] Yeah, but the converter box. Now, some of these newer panels have what's called micro inverters and they're built into the panel. And so it's not as bad with the magnetic energy because it's spread out throughout the panels. But we're still going to get that line interference, that dirty electrical spikes in the electric field. And you can buy filters that you can install that will help mitigate that.

Luke Storey: [02:10:16] So you put it in line after the power coming from the solar. Okay. Are there any solar brands that produce the actual tech or companies that install that are EMF aware? Is that something that exists at all where there's like two or three companies that already do it right you don't have to worry about it?

Ryan Blasser: [02:10:34] I don't really have any specific that I could recommend that I know are clean. I just know that some are better than others. Some inverters, they'll state that they clean power or low line interference. So you can look for those keywords.

Luke Storey: [02:10:46] Thank you. That's a good keyword. Okay. Yeah, because I think, a lot of people already have solar and are like, "Oh shit, now I got to hire someone like you to come in and try to fix it." But if you're building a home or you want to add solar, I think it's something really important to pay attention to is ask some questions, do a bit of research so that you don't spend a bunch of money on a solar system that's going to compromise your health.

Ryan Blasser: [02:11:05] Yeah. And just budget it and put a filter on it. SATA makes a good filter.

Luke Storey: [02:11:10] That's the one I have on my site. The whole house thinks it's called the Power Perfect box.

Ryan Blasser: [02:11:13] Yeah. So go to your site and you just get one of those.

Luke Storey: [02:11:16] Okay, cool. Yeah, we got to install that freaking thing here still. Okay, so I think we're about to close. I do want to cover one last topic that, again, could be potentially complex and is also nuanced, and that is in terms of EMF mitigation, I see it as you having two categories. You have hard physics, physical material physics, and then you have quantum physics. 

And I wanted to get your perspective on the difference between those two because I think that there's benefits to addressing EMF from both perspectives, which is what I do. I just do it all just in case something doesn't work. What's your take on blocking, shielding, physics, physics versus these harmonizing devices and quantum energy things and all this stuff?

Ryan Blasser: [02:12:02] This is a really good topic. This is a good one. I like this.

Luke Storey: [02:12:05] I think there's a lot of confusion about it.

Ryan Blasser: [02:12:07] There is. And I get this all the time. I can't tell you that this is probably the number one question I get does this so-and-so harmonize work? Does this work, does this work? And the question is, does it work to do what? What are you trying to accomplish? Because we can lump all of these environmental toxins and stressors in the same group, and our goal is to eliminate them.

If we can eliminate the source, then it's much easier to try to mitigate the after-effects. If we can take the chemicals out of the water, it's much easier than taking that water and have healthy water. And if we want to add stuff to it, structure or whatever, same thing with the air. Let's get the particles out of the air. Let's get the chemicals out of our house. Let's get the mold out of our house. 

Once we have let's get the EMF sources, let's turn them off, and let's reduce them, that's hardwired. That's always the first step. And so our company and what we focus on primarily step one, is we remove all the known toxins. Let's remove everything we can. Now, whatever's left over, now let's talk about how can we work with what we have left over and what can we make better. And so when it comes to EMF, I'm always saying let's reduce, let's turn off, let's distance, let's try to hardwire.

But that's impossible in a lot of scenarios because we don't want to live like Amish people. Not that that's bad. That's probably good. I think we probably would be better off if we did. But a lot of people work from home, teenagers in the house. And so we're going to have some level of technology. And so how can we mitigate the effects of that? How can we mitigate the damage that happens from that? 

And I think that's where harmonizers, get a bad rap because on the physical side, the mechanical physics, mechanical physics we're talking about bowling balls and light and speed and movement we can measure and I have a meter. If you take any of these harmonizing devices or ceiling devices and you put it next to a meter and you put it next to WiFi, router, you're not going to see any difference. You're not going to see any drop in that. 

At a quantum level, there's a whole different world. So quantum level, we got we got this world that we see around us and then we got the world of our cells and those cells are they have their own rules and their own laws and they're interacting differently. And then inside the cells, we have the molecules, inside the molecules, we have the atoms. And the atoms have their own rules, and their own laws, and their own universe and their own thing.

And below that, you get all the way down to the basement level, and it's just pure energy. It's just pure quantum and zero field. And that is where intention and consciousness and ideas and concepts, and everything that we can think of can happen in that world. That's the waves of potential. 

And it's only until we bring those levels back up into what we perceive on our level of consciousness with our bodies that it forms into reality. So at that lowest level, we can control that, we can manipulate that, we can change that, and we can do that with thoughts. We can do that with different energies. We can do that with ideas and concepts. 

And so there's these devices that can affect that lowest level. I believe that we as humans are probably one of the most important things on this planet that can affect that level. I think our thought, our consciousness, our ideas have the biggest impact on the zero energy field, and we bring that into reality every day with the decisions that we make. 

I know you have like the Lila Quantum, and you can probably tell me a lot more about what that actually does, but that manipulates in the quantum field. And so I know enough about quantum physics to know I don't know a whole lot about it. I know that the wacky, strange world we're talking about is really, really small bits of time and really, really small bits of information and a whole lot of energy. But it's what affects all of us. It's the basement. It's what affects all living, being and all of our solar system and everything. 

So when you can tap into that and you can help control that and you can help manipulate that, I think there's a lot of things that we really can't measure and we really can't quantify. So there really is no meters. There are no equipment that we can use to measure some of that stuff. And I think that's where a lot of people really have this argument and this confusion. I think people sometimes take advantage of marketing with people and the fear and they dip into the physical world saying that it can change and it can reduce and do these things which, anybody with a meter can tell you that it doesn't. 

But then we have this other side that says we have some deeper stuff going on. And this deeper stuff really is what really matters at the lowest level, because in reality, we are just one there. At that lowest level, there's no difference between my hand and the air and the molecule and the particles and your skin. 

It's all one energy field together. It's just our perception that brings this reality and separate that and makes that different.

Luke Storey: [02:17:09] That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think that to totally discount all of the EMF stuff that's in the quantum realm would be doing humanity a disservice because some of it is beneficial. I think the tricky part is it's also easy to defraud people using fear, like, "Oh, EMF's going to give you cancer, buy this holographic sticker for your phone and it'll save you and your family kind of thing. 

It's like there's just so much room for fraudulent marketing and just bullshit, just scammy stuff in there. And that's what's frustrating to me because I, like you, have a rudimentary understanding of the primordial energy that all matter is really born from. And so you know that to be true. You can feel it, you can sense it, you experience it. So it's just a knowing that we have this energy. 

Yet at the same time, it's like I could go down to Kinko's and print up some little stickers and tell you they're going to protect your phone and they're not.

Ryan Blasser: [02:18:06] So. Well, let me add to that a little bit. If your intention was strong enough and you believed it and the person that put on their phone believed it, then it probably will protect them.

Luke Storey: [02:18:18] Good point.

Ryan Blasser: [02:18:18] Because our mind is very powerful and we can influence with what we say. That's the whole power of prayer and the whole thing about what you say, what you can bring into reality, what you can think about, you bring about. I like that a lot because that's so true. And so if you truly believe that that sticker was helping you and I truly believe that that sticker is helping me, it probably helps me.

Luke Storey: [02:18:38]  Well, yeah, I asked--

Ryan Blasser: [02:18:41] And that's the tricky thing about the quantum world. That it comes down to thoughts and beliefs and spoken word and prayer and that all matters. It's important.

Luke Storey: [02:18:49] Yeah, it is. I asked Bruce Lipton a couple of years ago about the cell tower across the street. And if the biology of belief, epigenetics, all this stuff, I said if I am living by that cell tower and I'm also in fear of that exposure and I hold a deep, firm belief that it's hurting me and it's going to make me sick, will it make me sick more? 

And he said, based on his research and his model, yes, for sure. And he went on to say, and I'm going to paraphrase something to the effect that if I had that strong of a belief that it was totally harmless and that my energy field was strong enough to repel it and protect me, that that would also work. And I was like, "I want to believe you, but I'm still shielding my bedroom." 

Only because I don't know how many of us have a strong enough auric field or intention to just harmonize any of that energy coming at us. I believe it's probably possible. My model around this topic is to trust God, but tie up your camel. It's like, yeah, I'm going to. All the FLC and Lela and some of Article and Blue Shield. I have a bunch of shit in the house. It's super cool. It feels great. But I'm also going to shield the bedroom just to be on the safe side. 

So I have the physics covered and the quantum. But I think to your point of simplicity and just first things first start to eliminate the sources as best you can. And I think that's really practical, sane advice for your average person.

Ryan Blasser: [02:20:13] Yeah. And that's where we hand the ball off to the homeowner. When we go into the home, our main focus is let's identify all the toxins, let's identify the known stressors, and let's eliminate them. Let's reduce them. If we can shield from them, we can. Everything beyond that is like have fun with it and try it out and see if it works for you and if it feels good. 

Because if you have a low-level backline that we got down to our background levels and we don't have any of these known toxins anymore. Now your body is going to be a lot more sensitive. So if you bring something into the environment, how does that work? How do you feel? Do you sleep better? Do you have dreams better? What is your mood? Then you can play around with that stuff because who am I to tell you on the quantum level that that's not going to work or it is going to work?

Because just my input into that, my observation of that is going to change it. And so if everyone's going around saying that this water right here is going to poison me and I start believing it enough, I drink that water might not feel good off of that water, even though it could be completely harmless and vice versa. 

There's something out there that could help you and everyone says it's not going to help you. But that's where I stick with the physical. And that's where our company sticks with the physical. And so when people ask me about that stuff, I'd be honest and say, according to our meters, it does not reduce EMF levels.

Luke Storey: [02:21:32] Totally. Yeah. And Brian Hoyer says the same thing. He's like, some of it might be real, but the only thing that's really real to me is what my meter says. And I think that's responsible in your field, to be honest. And what you guys do in the testing, give me the hard science, the physical science, because that gives you the starting point.

Ryan Blasser: [02:21:49] And it's enough that people already think that some of this stuff is the EMF and mold and chemicals, to me, that just blows me away how people would think. How could you think that these environmental factors are not impacting our bodies? We're chemical electrical beings where we were raised and born on this planet and evolved on this planet with the environment around us, with the fresh air and the water and the sunlight. 

When we start changing that, how can that not affect us? And I see that in people's homes. I go into people's homes and I see so many damaging things and we fix it and I watch them get better. And it's amazing. But a lot of these people, they didn't even realize that they have something wrong in the first place. Maybe they just have low-level brain fog or low-level energy or their testosterone is low and they just think that's how it is. That's the norm because they've never got to a point in their life where they feel better.

They've got out of their environment into a sense where they actually like it. And some people talk to like, yeah, I love going to the beach, I love going to the lake. And when I go up camp and I feel wonderful, I'm like, "Well, you need to lean into that more because if you can go there and you're starting to feel great, what is it about that's making it great?" You're leaving maybe a toxic environment and you're putting yourself more in a natural state where bodies like that.

And so we need to look at that more. And that's the whole focus when we go into someone's home we're trying to make you feel better, we're trying to optimize you. So we have three different types of clients. We have our sufferers, we have our warriors and we have our warriors. So like our warriors, just like me and you and the Dave Asprey and the Ben Green for the people that they want to live forever, they're doing all the right things and they just want to optimize their life and they're doing everything they can. 

And then the sufferers, those are the unfortunate ones, those are the ones that they didn't pay attention to this stuff and they ate unhealthily and they surrounded himself with too much electronics and they're using toxic chemicals and they got mold growing and now they're sick and now they're not feeling good. Now they can't be a good spouse or a good parent, and they can't do their work as they can. They can't even think properly. And when you get to that point, life sucks.

It's hard to deal with life when you're sick. I used to be there, so I know what that's like and there's not much future when you are dealing with a chronic illness in a sickness. But then we have the warriors and those are typically the moms with a couple of kids and they're just Mama bear looking out for the family. Do I have mold? Do I have this?

Those three different types of clients. We deal with them in three different ways, three different experiences. And I'll tell you, though, in every single client that we work with, there's something going on in their home that can optimize. You might not be sick, but I guarantee you you're not at your optimal peak. And it's not just because of your environment. You can work on your food as well. You can work on your mental state as well. You can work on your physical fitness. 

There's a lot of areas you can work on, but unfortunately, a lot of people save the environment for less. That's something they don't really even think about. And so that's where we come in and we specialize in the environment and a lot of them will do it for you. That's what you need to get done. But we're here to teach you. I have a lot of podcasts, that have a lot of free information.

I said I have been on a lot of podcasts, so we've talked about this stuff that's all on the website. It's all free. And I'll have people say, "I don't really have much money, I don't know where to start." Start by going through the podcast, going through some of this free information, and start learning. There's a lot of free, easy, simple steps you can do right now. 

Go open up your window, take off your shoes when you come in your house, get rid of these toxic chemicals, and start turning your devices off at night. There's so many little things you can do right now to help improve the environment. And once you start seeing that improvement and you start feeling better, you're like, "Wow, I didn't think I could have more energy, or I didn't know I could be more clear in my head. I didn't know that I could have these better thoughts or better relationships."

Everything in your life is going to start changing and you're going to like that, and then you're going to want more. Then you're going to start to turn from a warrior and into a warrior because you're going to like how it feels and you're going to keep going. And that's what's amazing.

Luke Storey: [02:25:42] I love it, dude. When you guys are doing these tests, I think I forgot to ask you because in our situation seems mostly we're just testing and then you guys are going to leave and probably send me some recommendations, and then I'm going to deal with whatever I need to fix. But do you guys work with people in the capacity where you test someone's bedroom and it has a bunch of EMF and you actually come in and do the shielding and the paint and all the things?

Ryan Blasser: [02:26:09] So that's where we draw the line with that as well. We don't do any of the remediation stuff.

Luke Storey: [02:26:15] It's like we were talking about the mold thing.

Ryan Blasser: [02:26:16] Yeah, because I don't--

Luke Storey: [02:26:18] Or fans in the house.

Ryan Blasser: [02:26:18] I don't want me or my technicians or my building boss coming in the house trying to find problems. I want to be strictly testing. That's what we do. That's our company. That's what we're paid for. And that's it. That's where sometimes people call up different mold inspectors, and it'll be all over the price range, and if you're paying--

Luke Storey: [02:26:38] I paid the price of not knowing that. I thought, "Oh, they're all going to be the same. Yeah, I'll take this guy." And then Brian or Michael Rubino was like, "You paid how much?" I think it was like 2500 bucks or whatever it was. He was like, "That should have been $500." I was like, "Ah, ah."

Ryan Blasser: [02:26:53] And that's what's hard because you want to make sure that they're strictly doing their testing, that's it. Because you can get in a whole sticky situation.

Luke Storey: [02:27:01] Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Blasser: [02:27:02] Now we obviously will recommend you recall who to work with. We will help you along the way and it depends on what level of service package you get from us. Depend on how much handholding, a basic package will come in and do the testing and give you the report. Here you go. 

More of our advanced VIP-type package. I'll be more personally involved. I'll hold your hand through the process and help you make sure to the end. Because ultimately what we want is for you to be more healthy. And if you're like, "Well, I am healthy," well, you can get better. There's more. You can have more energy, you can have more testosterone, and you can have more mental clarity. There's a lot more you can have, plus--

Luke Storey: [02:27:41] Better sleep.

Ryan Blasser: [02:27:41] Better sleep. I could go on and on. These affect everything. But also, what are we preventing? Do you know that right now, one out of two people on this planet right now are going to get cancer? And within the next 20 years, they're saying 90% of the people on this planet I was just talking with a cancer doctor that I do a lot of work with. 90% of the people 20 years from now are going to get cancer on this planet. That's just the way that the number trajectory is going.

Luke Storey: [02:28:07] That's insane.

Ryan Blasser: [02:28:09] And so you think it's expensive to install a water filter or do some shielding or buy healthy products, wait till you get cancer. That is expensive. Not only is expensive, but your life could be on the line. So personally, when I see some of the price tags on some of the things to be healthy, that's nothing compared to me getting the news that I have cancer one day. I have to tell my kids that. So I take that seriously.

Luke Storey: [02:28:35] I'm with you too, man. I don't really live a life of luxury with the exception of all the health stuff. It's like, what do I need a new TV? Like, No, TV's fine. Do you know what I mean? Even cars or whatever, that kind of stuff. I do have a penchant for a vacation every now and again, but I think the most important thing you can invest in is your own health, whatever that looks like honestly, because your entire quality, not just duration, but maybe even more meaningfully, the quality of your life is dependent on that. 

It's like nothing else matters if you don't have your health. And any of us that have ever just had flu. Like when you're sick, life sucks. You're talking about chronic or even terminal illness, which I haven't really experienced in any meaningful way. Then your life really, really sucks.

Ryan Blasser: [02:28:35] Yes.

Luke Storey: [02:29:24] And then how do you even come back from that psychologically? It's just known so many people that have experienced that and largely from lifestyle.

Ryan Blasser: [02:29:33] Yeah, I know you're spiritual and you contemplate and you think and really when it comes down to it, all we need to be is just appreciative that we're alive. The fact that we're alive, that we're healthy, that in itself can bring so much happiness and joy. It's not all the other peripheral things. They're nice. But when it comes down to true happiness, that's all that you need to recognize the love we all have and the connection. Everything else is just gravy.

Luke Storey: [02:29:58] Amen.

Ryan Blasser: [02:29:58] So if you don't have your health and your mind to appreciate that, then you don't have anything.

Luke Storey: [02:30:04] Amen, brother.

Ryan Blasser: [02:30:05] It's got to be first.

Luke Storey: [02:30:06] Last question for you. Around what people can do on their own. So I did the water test of your website, sent it to a lab myself, and got the results. You were mentioning earlier, I think something about in the future you guys having an EMF version of that where people can do some degree of testing of the EMF in their house without having to hire you guys to come out and physically be there.

Ryan Blasser: [02:30:30] Yeah. So one thing that one of the positive things from COVID is that it taught us that we don't necessarily need to be in person with everything. And one good example is telehealth from doctors. We don't necessarily have to be in the doctor's office. We've done it several times where you get online in Zoom and you book a call and you meet with the doctor and sometimes they can even mail you some things and take your blood, sample this and send me the results. 

We're developing something right now where we're almost finished with something similar, like a checkup for the body, but we're doing the checkup for the home to where we can send you the equipment. We can get on a Zoom call with you. We can show you, go through the house, walkthrough, you can take the samples, send them in, and we can get-- the majority of what we can do in person, we can do it over Zoom with this kit. And so that's going to be coming out pretty soon.

Luke Storey: [02:31:16] Is it going to be inclusive of the air and other things, too, or just the EMF?

Ryan Blasser: [02:31:21] No, we're going to do the full kit.

Luke Storey: [02:31:22] Oh, cool.

Ryan Blasser: [02:31:23] I used to do stuff on the cart, but I found that it's not just one thing in the home that's affecting it. It's a combination of things. And so if we're really going to get to the root cause of optimizing your life or your health or making you better, sometimes I deal with cancer patients that are terminal and we're just trying to give them as much life as possible. 

So let's look at everything. Let's look at the whole picture because I don't want to focus on EMF when you're using toxic chemicals or you have lead in your water. So we want to look at everything and let's do the low-hanging fruit, the important stuff, and then let's start bringing everything down.

But if you have something way over here, if you got black mold underneath, you're saying that's the first thing that's got to go or you got letting your water, we've got to get this stuff, and then we'll start bringing everything down together. So the kit that we're putting together is going to be all-inclusive. It's going to have all the things.

Luke Storey: [02:32:10] Awesome, dude. Great move. Great work. Thank you for doing what you do. There's only so many of you. I don't know what your plans of scaling worldwide domination as a company are, but I wish there were a company like yours on every corner. This is so important for people that are interested in this, at least where you can take the guesswork out of it.

Because the guesswork gets expensive in time and energy and just like getting shit wrong because you read something on some blog or listen to it on a podcast, and you've been implementing something that doesn't work or is a waste of time or money. So I like the idea of just a professional inspector. And if some people have the ability to do that themselves, that's really smart too, and I'm assuming much less expensive.

Ryan Blasser: [02:32:55] Well, it's commonplace to inspect the home when you buy it for structural and safety, but there's nothing to do with health. Just like we would go get a checkup every year in our body, the thing is super critical to check up on your home and make sure your home is not. There's the things that are obviously killing you if you've got a carbon monoxide leak or toxic chemicals and mold. 

But there's also a lot of preventative maintenance stuff. This low-level stress that we're in day in and day out, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that is going to be causing the tumors and these low-level chronic inflammation that leads to these bigger chronic illnesses. And so it's important to nip this stuff in the bud before it even starts.

Luke Storey: [02:33:36] Yeah, I'm glad you said to nip it in the bud. One of my weird little OCD pet peeves is when people say nip it in the butt. I think it's a term from flurries. Nip it in the bud, and he's like, you cut the flower off when it's still in the bud phase, and then it opens. 

So anyone listening, please don't say nip it in the butt, or I won't be your friend anymore and I'll judge the shit out of you. Who have been three teachers that have influenced your life or your work that you'd like to share with the audience?

Ryan Blasser: [02:34:05] I'm not a big religious man, but I do believe Jesus led a lot of good examples for us on how to love one another, how to forgive, and how to not judge.

Luke Storey: [02:34:14] So I just broke through. I have sinned, Father.

Ryan Blasser: [02:34:20] Yeah. No, I think he has a lot of good advice to give. My parents definitely teach me how to be a good person. When I was young, taught me how to work. I grew up on a farm and it wasn't always fun to go out and work when my friends are going to play. But I learned how to have a good work ethic because I appreciate that. 

And when I was doing the nightclub industry, I had a mentor, John Gibson, he was like a superstar. All the acoustic stuff, he taught me about psychoacoustic analysis and how it affects the brainwaves and acoustics and vibration and such a deeper understanding of these vibrations and frequencies that we can't see that affect us. And then show me the experiments which just opened my eyes to a whole other world. And there's tons. There's so many I could go on and on. I learn from every.

Luke Storey: [02:35:08] Yeah, me too. Me too. I learned from every person who sits in that seat like you. So thanks for coming in and schooling me today. I appreciate it.

Ryan Blasser: [02:35:16] Yeah, well, thanks for having me, man. This is great.

Luke Storey: [02:35:19] Likewise. Thanks for coming out to the house, too, man. It's been really fun. And everything that I've learned over the past couple of days is valuable to not only myself but anyone I can share. The thing about the grounding or how to say your phone, these are really simple, practical things that so many people, including me, get wrong. So I'm like, loaded with a bunch of new information. Thank you.

Ryan Blasser: [02:35:39] Yeah, perfect.

Luke Storey: [02:35:44] If you're still tuned in at the end of this one, I have a hunch that you are willing to make your home environment a priority in 2023. So as we close, I'll remind you to get in touch with Ryan and his team at lukestorey.com/hometesting. 

They've got a special offer for you there on Ryan's extensive building biology resources. And word on the street is that by the time this episode drops, they will have complete home test kits available as well for those who are unable to hire, Test My Home to come out and do it for you. And trust me when I say this is an incredible resource, so I'm excited to share it with you. Again, you'll find it all at lukestorey.com/hometesting. 

All right. Next week's episode will be our third of the year and again, part of our New Year new series. This one will be Episode 453 with Dr. Dan Pompa. It's called New Year's Revolution: How to Detox the Body Deeply and Safely and why it's critical to do so. So we started off 2023 here with three important episodes to help you reorder your life for the best year possible. 

Make sure to click, subscribe or follow on your podcast app right now so you don't miss any of the upcoming shows. We've got an incredible year of content coming your way and I am more committed than ever to keep the hits coming. So thank you for joining me on another episode of the Life Stylist Podcast.

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