Meet Ryan Blaser
Ryan Blaser is the accomplished Founder and CEO of Test My Home, an environmental company dedicated to improving people’s health and wellbeing. As a functional medicine doctor for your home, Ryan uses his expertise in building biology and healthy home consulting to identify and address toxic sources that could be impacting your health. Ryan’s extensive educational background in electrical engineering, environmental toxicology, and electromagnetic radiation, combined with years of experience in industries such as mold remediation, construction, and nuclear waste cleanup, has given him a deep understanding of the relationship between humans and their built environment.
After a personal wellness journey, Ryan founded Test My Home to help others achieve optimal health. He personally experienced the detrimental effects of mold exposure and lead inhalation, which caused unusual and serious health symptoms like fatigue, weight loss, and brain fog. After unsuccessful attempts with conventional doctors, Ryan took the initiative to investigate his home environment and found the source of his health issues.
He cured himself and is now sharing his knowledge and experience with the world. What makes Ryan stand out is his genuine care for people and his commitment to finding real solutions. Whether you are seeking answers or simply peace of mind, Test My Home is the perfect solution. Ryan’s expertise will change your life
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Podcast transcript:
Excited to introduce you to Ryan blazer. I met Ryan through a network of building biologists while I was doing a series. Um, it’s coming out soon called homesick home, all about the stuff in your house that makes you sick. And all roads led to Ryan. All these folks, not only knew Ryan, but trained with him.
And he was kind of the grand Poobah of this network of building biologists. And he was. The go-to person, um, during our filming. He was committed to another film project, which lapsed. And so now, um, I get to film him. , but he’s the guy He is sought after, by everybody. He is, uh, famously known for the F the, the guy who shows up to celebrities, houses, and diagnosis and fixes them. , he knows his stuff.
So pay attention. You’re going to learn a lot from Ryan blazer.
Pedram Shojai: Ryan, it is good to see you. Welcome to the Vitality Summit. Thank you.
Pedram Shojai: I am a big fan of the work that you’re doing. Um, you are also a part of another series called Homesick Home that we’ve been working on for a while and you’re going to be helping a lot of people get out of this toxic home mess. Um, and I’m excited for our audience to get to know you and meet you.
Pedram Shojai: here. So we’d love to start just a little bit of background about you and building biology and how you got into all this so that then we could start talking about. the matter at hand.
Ryan Blaser: You bet. Yeah. And again, thanks for having me. This is great. So, you know, I got into this whole thing. I’d say in my twenties, I’ve always been fascinated with how the environment around us affects the body both for positive and for negative.
Ryan Blaser: And in my twenties, I had a company we were designing and building out nightclubs and high end, uh, recording studios, restaurants, things. And we got, you know, we got really good Really stimulating the mind using lights, sound, video, acoustics, even the layout, smells, really dialing in everything about the environment that will help stimulate it and, uh, provide people with a good experience.
Ryan Blaser: I happened to, uh, move into a moldy home late, late twenties, and it happened to have a lot of mold in it that in turn made me really sick. And of course. At the time, I didn’t really know much about mold and how dangerous the environment could be, uh, with the three or four different doctors. Finally, there was a doctor that did some testing on me and said, Hey, you’re chuck full of mold.
Ryan Blaser: You need to check out your environment. And sure enough, it had a ton of black mold in it. So I was able to move out of that. I got my health back. It was shoot probably a year or two journey. It was pretty bad. Uh, but then I said, you know what? there’s a lot of other people that are in this same situation that are sick.
Ryan Blaser: Uh, you know, and if I hadn’t have gone to that third, fourth doctor, um, I might’ve, you know, still be struggling trying to figure out what’s going on or even worse. So I took what I learned, uh, in my training and my knowledge, you know, I went back to school, uh, as a building biologist, got my certifications and really dove into kind of the negative aspects of the environment.
Ryan Blaser: You know, what, what can cause us harm, uh, and be detrimental to our health. And so we started this company, Test My Home, as a, as filling in a gap, uh, for people’s environment because there’s really not anybody out there looking out for people in the home in their environment. You know, we have the, these, some of these government agencies that do their best at at best to try to help us in the, in the environment outside when you think of trees and water and forests.
Ryan Blaser: But when it comes to our home environment, there’s really nobody out there looking out for us. And so that’s why we created this company to go into people’s homes that are sick or, um, just need to have a better environment that want to optimize their health, that want to live longer, want to be more healthy and help them really dial in their environment.
Pedram Shojai: Love that. And, you know, unfortunately, People who had these symptoms 10 years ago, five years ago, probably even today, um, the doctors are either not trained or lazy or not looking for it. And they, you know, put them on a antidepressant. They’ll say, look, you’re crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you. And they go back to the same moldy house.
Pedram Shojai: They go back to the same toxic home. Um, and they get worse until things, you know, people I’ve, I’ve met patients that were suicidal. I’ve, I’ve had a lot of very distraught people. Stumble into my clinics and this was not part of my training. Right. I learned feng shui. I learned like the, you know, the positive juju side of it.
Pedram Shojai: Right. But no one ever said that you could have a sick home when we were learning this stuff. And so I think it’s a big part of it. Um, and it’s a big part of what we need to understand when we’re talking about vitality is you can’t put yourself in a place where your body doesn’t feel safe. Sleep there every night.
Pedram Shojai: And take green smoothies, assuming you’re going to feel better. You know, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re stacking the liabilities faster than the assets here. So you have a framework, um, that I’d love to follow here. Water, air, mold, chemicals, and EMF. And when you go in to diagnose a home, as I would diagnose a patient, you start looking at these things.
Pedram Shojai: So I’d love for you to go through this framework so that our listeners can understand how to think about Where to even diagnose a toxic home.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah. You know, uh, the things that we bring into our body, clean food, clean water, clean air, I think are the three fundamental tripods to ultimately having a healthy lifestyle.
Ryan Blaser: And if we’re not doing those, uh, that’s where we’re going to see some of these problems, a lot of problems that we’re seeing. And so let’s talk about clean water. I mean, we’re made up a majority of water. It’s, it’s really critical to put clean water in our body water that does not have contaminants in it.
Ryan Blaser: And unfortunately, a lot of the water that’s coming out of our tap these days in the United States is not safe to drink. But also a lot of people don’t think about the showers and the baths that we’re taking because we can absorb those contaminants right through our skin. You take a nice hot, steamy shower, we’re breathing that stuff in, you can get.
Ryan Blaser: They say a 15 minute hot steamy shower is as much as four glasses of water, uh, that you’re absorbing. And so it’s really important that, uh, the water that’s coming into our house, that we filter that, uh, test it, make sure that whatever contaminants that have in it, we have a filtration system set up that’s proper to handle that.
Ryan Blaser: So that’s, and that’s right off the bat. That’s something that everybody should have in their home. If you don’t, if you’re drinking tap water, You’re doing yourself a big disservice. Uh, next is, is, sorry,
Pedram Shojai: go ahead. Yeah, real quick on that. Because one of the things that, um, I became aware of later in the game was that it’s always going to be different.
Pedram Shojai: So you really got to know based on your municipality, based on where you’re at, what’s in the water, because not all filters are created equal. Not all remedies are for everybody.
Ryan Blaser: Right. Yep, that’s absolutely right. Yeah. And that’s why testing is critical right off the bat to see what it is that we’re trying to get out of the water for sure.
Ryan Blaser: Yep. And then so air, what are we breathing in? That’s another life force. You know, if you can’t go more than five minutes without air, you’re going to die. So that’s really critical to be breathing in important stuff. So, uh, we can kind of break that down a little bit further, but yeah, I think that’s Air quality, and that really comes down to air filtration and fresh air.
Ryan Blaser: So inside of the, the built environment these days, we’re making these homes really airtight, and a lot of them just aren’t breathing. We don’t have the fresh air coming in, and we have a toxic soup that’s building up with the off gassing from the building supplies, uh, the personal care products that we’re using, the cleaning supplies, uh, fragrances, uh, you know, the, the, um, bacteria.
Ryan Blaser: Then the mold, all that stuff is building up and we’re breathing that stuff in. So it’s really critical to step one. Let’s try to eliminate the source if we can, but step two, let’s filter out whatever’s left over and then step three, let’s make sure we have a fresh supply of air that’s coming in that we’re expelling the, the exhausting, the bad air breathing in the fresh air.
Ryan Blaser: So. Part of that, a subsection is going to be mold. And that I think is really the true pandemic of our times. Uh, one of many, but it’s one that’s really overlooked. I see a lot of really sick people that don’t have a clue about what’s going on. And we go into their home and do some of these analysis and we find out that their home is chuck full of mold, similar to a situation, what I went through.
Ryan Blaser: And it can be frustrating because mold is something that can be extremely hard and expensive and time consuming to fix the right way. Uh, it’s microscopic and we can’t really see it a lot of times it’s behind the walls, but it’s causing a major impact on our health. So mold is something that we take very seriously and we really dive in and figure out where’s the mold, how bad is it, and what’s the plan to fix that.
Ryan Blaser: Um, then another kind of subsection of air quality is the chemicals that we’re bringing into our house. So, you know, I talked, I talked a little bit about the, the personal care products, the cleaning supplies. um, Pesticides, herbicides, off gassing. These are all chemicals that we can either absorb through the skin, we can breed them in, or they can get on our plates and food and we can ingest these.
Ryan Blaser: So, uh, especially if you have little ones that are crawling around on the floor and they’re putting their hands in their mouth, uh, it’s, it’s great. I was looking at a study about how many different. Toxic chemicals that children of the age of five actually ingest is because they put in their hands and their mouth the toys and everything It’s a crazy amount of leads and phthalates and chemicals and pesticides So we really want to be cautious about what we’re bringing into our home and treat our home kind of like a holistic Entity just like we would treat our body You know, I, I like to look at our home as our second skin, right?
Ryan Blaser: We have our, our first skin that holds in our organs. We have the environment of our cells and our body, but then we have our home, and that’s kind of our second set of skin that protects us from the outside environment. And everything we bring into that little bubble we need to be conscious about. Is it healthy, is it natural?
Ryan Blaser: Is it doing harm or, or good to our body? And so chemicals are a big one that people overlook. Now, so that’s water, that’s air, that’s chemical, that’s mold, uh, EMF, and in with EMF, we can talk about lighting as well, it kind of bundled together, but really when we’re talking about EMF, we’re talking about the technology in our house and the exposures that we’re getting to the technology.
Ryan Blaser: And it’s bad enough sometimes, you know, we’re staring at these screens for eight, ten hours a day. These people working in these office environments in their homes, not getting natural sunlight, uh, exposing their body to electric fields and magnetic fields. And then the radio frequencies that are coming off of our devices, uh, you know, there’s a lot of studies starting to come out that are really showing the dangers that this is is causing to our bodies.
Ryan Blaser: And you know, the debate has never really been if EMFs are harmful. Uh, all of the EMFs have levels that are set by the government that say, hey, if we exceed these levels, we know we’re going to do detrimental harm, uh, cancers, maybe even death at high enough levels. The debate has always been about what level is safe for us and how, how long and, and what, uh, individual person, what can they tolerate?
Ryan Blaser: You know, maybe my 80 year old grandma that has cancer that’s just struggling to stay alive is probably a lot more sensitive. Uh, than a, you know, a 14 year old boy that’s healthy, uh, and eating well. So, we got to look at all these different factors when it comes into saying what EMF is dangerous for an individual person.
Ryan Blaser: And that’s why there’s a lot of debate on this topic. There’s also a lot of money behind it, too. Telecom industry is a trillion dollar industry. You know, communication and, and all these wireless devices is big money. So. you better bet there’s, there’s going to be some studies out there that are funded by these people that are going to cause a lot of confusion.
Ryan Blaser: Okay. So when we look at the full exposure of the house and then the lighting that we have, that’s coming in, we want to try to mimic what the sun is doing. Uh, we lived on this planet ancestrally. We were used to the sun. It’s no, um, surprise or no coincidence that we sleep when the sun goes down and we’re awake when the sun goes up.
Ryan Blaser: For the majority of people, we have that cycle and we get those cues from the color and the intensity of the lighting that we see outside. So it’s really critical to mimic that inside of our own environment so that we make sure we’re getting the best deep sleep possible. So that’s really the categories and how we dive into the home.
Ryan Blaser: Okay,
Pedram Shojai: so high level. We have the framework. I’d like to dive deeper into each. Um, we’ll go backwards. Um, EMF. I’m surrounded by them right now, right? Like computers, computers, computers, screens. You know, this is kind of the cost of doing business to do these summits. And so I have blue lights and red lights and all sorts of stuff.
Pedram Shojai: But I also So, I’m very wary of bringing any of this crap into the bedroom. I’m very, you know, quick to get away from all this stuff when I’m not recording and all that. So how does one in a world that effectively, I mean, we don’t live in Little House in the Prairie anymore. Like we have computers, we have lights, we have stuff.
Pedram Shojai: How does one think about electronic hygiene, uh, airwave hygiene going into the sanctuary of their home.
Ryan Blaser: You know, I’d say the biggest thing is, is hardwire and use wired devices as much as possible. So see, I got the hardwire, it’s connected. My laptop is, is hardwire connected to my router. The microphone is hardwired.
Ryan Blaser: So I’m, I’m shying away from all things wireless. If I can replace it with something wired and, you know, 20 years ago, when internet first came out, everything was wired, um, and you know, homes, I used to do home audio stuff as well back in the day, and everything had a wired connection. Now, a lot of things are wireless and that’s where really where we get into trouble.
Ryan Blaser: So the wireless mouse. Um, you know, the headphones, the computer, if we can hardwire these things, especially in the office, that’s where we get a good amount of our exposures when we’re sitting in the office. Now, if we can’t hardwire, then you mentioned something that’s compartmentalizing our homes. Let’s treat the different.
Ryan Blaser: Areas of our home for what they are, you know, so the bedroom is for sleeping and resting and healing and we don’t bring electronics into the end of the bedroom. We don’t watch movies in the bedroom. We don’t, um, do projects in the bedroom. That’s strictly for what it is. The office is going to be where we do our study and where we make our money and where we run our business from, let the kids come in and do their homework.
Ryan Blaser: The kitchen is going to be for eating and cooking. The living room is going to be for entertaining and hanging out with their families. And so when we. are really intentional about the purpose of each room, then we don’t necessarily have to have Wi Fi on every square inch of our home and our property.
Ryan Blaser: We can compartmentalize and say, you know what, this is the technology room, we’re going to treat it as technology room, but when we go into the bedroom, we don’t, we’re not going to bring that stuff with us. And that allows us to really get away from it and let our bodies heal as much as possible. And then also distance.
Ryan Blaser: Distance is our other friend. So instead of having my cell phone in my pocket or on my lap, I’m going to keep it over on the desk at arm’s reach, or when I’m in the car, I could put it up on the dash, um, and then just turning these devices off when we’re not using them. So there’s a lot of simple things we can do, just changing the way we think about it, uh, and making some small changes because we don’t want to live like, okay, man, that’s not necessary.
Ryan Blaser: We just, like I said, digital hygiene, you know, be smart about how we use this stuff. Yeah, I
Pedram Shojai: recently having, uh, done this project that’s coming after the summit, uh, homesick home, uh, learned a lot. Got freaked out by some of the measures that we saw in someone’s house. Uh, and quickly went and, uh, we bought a unify router that is app based that allows us to set times for when the wifi just turns off at night.
Pedram Shojai: So we literally go into a cave electronically by things shutting off at night. Now you lose certain things that, you know, you might want on for the intelligence of your home. So, you know, there’s a lot of decisions to be made there. But for me, I’m thinking, look, I got a seven year old daughter, you know, 20 feet away from this server room.
Pedram Shojai: No, thanks.
Ryan Blaser: Right. And we got to realize that this stuff comes at a cost, so it is convenient and it is helpful, but it does come at a cost, and so we got to weigh that out, the risk versus benefit.
Pedram Shojai: Now, as a building biologist, um, going in to diagnose a home, you’ve got gadgets. Um, what do you look for when it comes to kind of miswired electricity?
Pedram Shojai: What do you look for in terms of EMFs? What are you looking for for Wi Fi to say, Hey, look, this house is okay. Or look, you, you folks are screwed. We got to fix this.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah. So what I like to do is get a baseline first and let’s turn off all the power and all the devices. And we’re going to measure the different energies inside the house and outside the house, and more specifically, in the places where they spend a lot of time.
Ryan Blaser: So in the chair in their office, on the couch, uh, at the kitchen table, at their bed. And we’re going to get a baseline reading of what’s the outside background levels. Now we go ahead and turn everything on in the house and we’d get a worst case scenario so we can say, okay, the devices from the outside or like cell tower, uh, satellite at this level.
Ryan Blaser: And then we turn on all the devices. Now that’s 10 or even 50, 100 times higher sometimes. And so then we can get a really good idea of what devices in the home are causing the significant increase. And what can we do about them at that point? Can we move them? Should we turn them off at night, like with a timer?
Ryan Blaser: Can we hardwire or can we eliminate? And then we can make intelligent decisions based on what we see, how much actual exposure we’re getting.
Pedram Shojai: Okay. In the early days, when all this stuff came out, I was one of the, like, I, I studied Qigong. I’m an energy medicine guy. And I thought a lot of this stuff was hokey.
Pedram Shojai: You know, all these folks with these quantum chips on their phones and all sorts of magical thinking about what makes EMFs go away. Um, I’ve never seen a compelling study showing me a little chip with some mandala on it actually changing anything. In your experience, testing this stuff on a daily and weekly basis, do any of these things actually work and block?
Pedram Shojai: Or are we kidding ourselves and do we need to stop the exposure, uh, for the most part? We can’t live in a Faraday cage.
Ryan Blaser: You know, this is kind of a touchy subject in the health and wellness space, because you got a lot of high level people that promote these products. And I think there’s a lot of misinformation and a lot of miscommunication about some of this stuff.
Ryan Blaser: When they come out and say, this sticker is going to block EMF. That’s not true. That’s a lie because we have meters, we have equipment, we can measure what the device puts out before and after you put these little stickers on it. Um, so when they come out and say this is for reducing EMF, that’s not true.
Ryan Blaser: Now. I do believe in some of this fringe science and some of the woo woo stuff, like sacred geometry and quantum physics and quantum effects and the power of the mind and thinking, you know, and also placebo effect. All these things are very real. So if you believe something enough and it’s got a cool symbol and you believe it’s, it may be doing some benefit to your body, but is it reducing EMF?
Ryan Blaser: No. And so we have to be scientific. We have to be truthful about some of these things and tell it how it is. I appreciate that.
Pedram Shojai: I appreciate that because, you know, one of the issues, one of the reasons I decided to do this summit is there’s a lot of people fear mongering and a lot of people hawking single vector solutions saying, Oh, don’t worry about it.
Pedram Shojai: You know, drink tequila. I got Advil heavy MFs. The sticker blocks it. And so, you know, it’s just the world’s a little more complicated than that. And so we have to think about all the stuff. All these computers are hardwired for a reason. Um, that’s not arbitrary. It’s because I know better. Right. And that’s what I want people to do is just learn and know better.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah. And then some of these devices may have therapeutic effects. It’s kind of like saying, go sit in the sauna. That’s going to help reduce the effects of EMF. That’s a little different than saying, go sit in the sauna. It’s going to reduce your EMF. Yeah. There may be beneficial things that come from some of this.
Ryan Blaser: Maybe not like the stickers and things like that. It’s just very basic, but there are some stuff out there and I don’t want to put those things down, but they’re not. reduce an EMF. We got to call it what
Pedram Shojai: it is. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, if you’re grounding or doing PE, uh, you know, you’re doing, uh, the magnetic therapies to clean up the energies that are distorted, having been exposed to EMFs, that’s completely different conversation.
Pedram Shojai: And I got no, no qualms with that, but a sticker blocking EMFs, I’ve never seen any data to say that it’s doing it.
Ryan Blaser: Right. Yep. Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. Okay. All right. So let’s
Pedram Shojai: move to chemicals. Um, this is a big one, obviously, uh, from all the, all the crap that comes into the house from Target and Walmart and on the, you know, the shelves and the plastic.
Pedram Shojai: Um, one of the things that really broke my heart was learning that the kids pajamas we bought. We’re made of, you know, plastic slash petroleum products because they were stretchy and yummy. And because of that, they had flame retardant chemicals on them. And it’s just like, what have we done? So what are the bigs in the, in the realm of chemicals?
Pedram Shojai: What do we have to really look out for? What should we never buy again? Right. And how should we start thinking about chemicals in the house?
Ryan Blaser: You know, anything that’s going to be flame retardant or non stick, the, the stain guards, it’s going to have the PFOAs, the forever chemicals. Those are really big ones to stay away from.
Ryan Blaser: And also anything fragrance or perfume based, because we’re going to have the, the phthalates in there and there’s some indica disrupting chemicals. So those are big ones to stay away from. If you can do that, those two are really big categories to stay away from. That’s a lot of, that’s a lot of things out there.
Ryan Blaser: A lot of things. If you look in the ingredients, perfume, or fragrance, or nonstick, or flame retardant, or scotch guard, stain guarding. All these things are using really toxic chemicals that can get in our body and cause a lot of problems.
Pedram Shojai: Uh, odors is always a big one. The, the plug in glade things, the scented candles, um, I’ve heard mixed reviews about essential oils, right?
Pedram Shojai: Oh, it’s a plan. It must be safe for you. But I’ve also heard that they really also can have VOCs. They can also have impurities like what, when you start testing air quality, do you see some of these? Natural remedies crapping out
Ryan Blaser: as well. Yeah, you can definitely overdo it. And a quick story on that. I had a lady call me up and say that everyone in her family is suffering asthma and breathing issues and stuffy nose.
Ryan Blaser: And she thought for sure there was mold, hired me to come to her house. First thing I do when I walk in, I see she had a diffuser at every single room with this rack of display worth with the essential oils. And so she was a dealer of one of the major brands and she had an oil for the morning and oil for the afternoon and oil for evening.
Ryan Blaser: And when I pull out my particulate counters, it was in the millions particulate per square liter per liter of air, which it should be like down in the hundreds. And she was. Literally choking out her family with these essential oils. So yeah, you can absolutely overdo it. And when I pointed this out to her, I think she felt really bad about what she’d been doing to her family for the last couple of years, thinking that it was mold and the asthma and all these symptoms when simply she was just way overdoing it with the essential oils.
Ryan Blaser: And these things have a time and a place and you can use them therapeutically, but we just, we need fresh air. That’s what our bodies want. They want good fresh air, and that’s really what it needs. Yeah, sniffer
Pedram Shojai: Kool Aid. That’s, um, it’s a challenge. You know, it comes to our plant. It’s healthy. It’s good, right?
Pedram Shojai: One of the things I learned, um, a couple of years back, I’ll actually make it a bonus in this, uh, summit. So we did an episode with someone who was explaining how all new homes, um, are designed to have negative pressure and that the lungs of the home are effectively the HVAC. So leaving the air running is how the house was designed to breathe.
Pedram Shojai: Whereas, you know, my, me and my hippie sensitivities are like, open a window, give me fresh air. But the design of the home also requires circulation. So when you go into a house, I mean, obviously you’re looking at the air filters and Merv ratings and all that. But how often do you see houses where you’re like, man, you guys got to run your air?
Pedram Shojai: Because of this design.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, I see that a lot. That’s one of the biggest problems I see with homes is that they’re not breathing. And if it’s a commercial space, it’s required to have so much CFM per hour, per person, air exchange, uh, fresh air coming in and that’s by code. Unfortunately, residential homes don’t have that built into the code.
Ryan Blaser: So, if you’re just in an average track home type development where they were just whipping these things out cookie cutter style, more than likely you don’t have a fresh air ventilation system. So, even in that situation, running the HVAC system is a closed loop system. It’s not necessarily bringing fresh air in.
Ryan Blaser: And exhausting and still air out. And the reason that majority of the homes are negative air built is because of our exhaust system. So if I’m doing a load of laundry and the, and the dryer’s going, it’s sucking air out of the dryer and vent it to the outside, that’s creating negative air pressure. If I got my exhaust fan in the bathroom running because I just took a shower, went to the bathroom, that’s pulling air out and create negative air pressure.
Ryan Blaser: Now the question is, where is the air? coming from to make that up, called makeup air. If we don’t have a fresh air makeup system, which a lot of homes don’t, then it has to pull it through the walls, it creates negative air, or those ventilation systems don’t work very good, and that’s usually the case that we see.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. You just assume things work until you realize where all the breakdowns are. And it’s not like the contractor’s trained to think about this stuff, right? Um, he’s just trying to get done, move on to the next gig, feed his family. And so guys like you have to come in and do a lot of cleanup, right?
Pedram Shojai: And you know, hopefully, look, if you’re listening to this and you’re building a home or you’re remodeling a home, it’s a great time to call Ryan or a building biologist to figure out how to do it right. If you’re already in one, you got to diagnose it. Then, you know, it’s hard. It’s like someone could come in.
Pedram Shojai: I can say you have the sniffles. I could say you got cancer, right? I won’t know until I, until I figure out what’s wrong with them. Right?
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, and our home is a closed loop system, and so you need to ask the question, How is fresh air getting into my house? Is there a fresh air ventilation system? There’s something called an ERV.
Ryan Blaser: It’s an energy recovery ventilator. It’s designed to pull fresh air in and exhaust stale air out 24 hours a day. If not, if you don’t have one of these systems, then you’re left opening up the doors and windows. Okay, but what if you live in a, in a climate that is very humid outside? Now we’re bringing humid air in, or it’s really cold or really hot.
Ryan Blaser: Uh, we’re going to have a higher energy cost. So it’s very critical to ask these questions and think about how is my home getting fresh air in? Because if you’ve got five or six people in your family. It’s sealed up. And even if it’s a new house, there’s a lot of things building up in the home. They’re just recycling each other’s air.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Some, uh, of the other issues obviously is you, so I’ve heard statistics where it says indoor air is anywhere from five to a hundred times more toxic than outdoor air. So if that’s the case, you open your windows, let the outdoor air come in. But what if you’re a quarter mile from a freeway? What if there’s an oil refinery down the road?
Pedram Shojai: Like, how do you assess, you know, is that just open the windows, get fresh air, but have air filters? Like, these, these end up becoming a little more complicated questions, right?
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, and that’s where we can have some of the tools at our fingertips to analyze the air quality outside. There’s a website, airnow.
Ryan Blaser: gov, that you can go to and put in your zip code and see what the air quality is outside. You know, we have fire season. It was pretty bad this year on the East Coast. It’s something they normally don’t see. It’s normally, you know, I live in Idaho. We can bet three to four months of the year that we got smoky air outside.
Ryan Blaser: And so in that situation, we want to filter that air that’s coming in. Uh, but yeah, thinking about where, where do you live? What’s upstream? What’s upwind of you? Is it a factory? Is it, um, uh, you know, a farmland where they’re spraying pesticides and herbicides? What are we working with outside? But the reason that the air inside is more polluted than outside is because it’s the air inside starts with outside air.
Ryan Blaser: We bring in the air from outside, it comes in, and then we add to it in majority of case. Now there’s some, uh, people and some systems set up that really filter the air and clean the air, but the majority, I would say 95 percent of homes are starting with outside air and then they add to it. And that’s why it’s always more polluted because we’re adding to it.
Pedram Shojai: Okay, I know we, we jumped from chemical to air because it’s hard to separate these two. Um, and air such a big deal. One of the other issues, um, it’s been trending, um, is, you know, the, the gas stoves leaking. Um, one of the other issues is I’ve realized people don’t use their hoods enough. So how much of the air quality issues that you’re diagnosing are actually happening just in the kitchen with poor ventilation and just, you know, the guys frying bacon into the room and oops, right?
Pedram Shojai: How much of that is, is part is
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, there’s a couple aspects of that one is we tend to get gas leaks, especially from a stove. That’s more than 6, 7, 10 years old. There’s the seal that goes on the valve that can start to leak. And we slowly start to release these petroleum products into the air now.
Ryan Blaser: People think, oh, it’s just gas. Well, what’s in that gas? Because just like water comes out of the ground, it can have a whole range of different contaminants in it. We can have lead, we can have arsenic, we can have radon, a whole bunch of things that are just getting released into the air. So we have the gas that’s leaking is one.
Ryan Blaser: But two, once we start burning this gas, we have the potential for carbon monoxide if it’s an incomplete burn. And then we’re releasing the petroleum products, the petroleum byproducts into the air if we’re not using our hood and our range. And then the third important thing, if we’re not exhausting some of this food particles out, if we’re cooking bacon or grease, what happens is we get this biofilm that’s built up in the kitchen.
Ryan Blaser: Now that biofilm can be a perfect food source for, for mold and bacteria. So I can go into a kitchen and I can tell if they’ve used their exhausts or not. And you can tell. Go up above on the walls and you could wipe on the walls and it’s going to feel greasy. It’s got this little greasy film on it and right there you’re feeding bacteria and mold.
Ryan Blaser: So that’s three really important reasons, uh, that you really got exhausted and make sure that those systems are working properly in the kitchen.
Pedram Shojai: But once you do, your house is so much better off. And so, you know, again, I want to be careful not to scare people because these solutions are also easy for the most part is, you know, ventilate the air, you know, turn on your hood.
Pedram Shojai: Um, if your hood’s broken, you fix your hood. Right. So let’s turn to mold. Mold obviously, you know, clipped you in the knees. I know a lot of people who came to health having had really been punished by mold. My concern with mold, and I would love your opinion on this as the expert, um, is. I’ve heard conflicting tales that, you know, a positive is always a positive, but a negative doesn’t mean negative and you have to test.
Pedram Shojai: I mean, I’ve had guys say you have to test up to like 22 times in different samples to really know if you don’t have mold. So how do you go about thinking about that? Cool. mold testing to be sure it’s not aspergillus or it’s not something in the mold family that is causing the problems.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah. Mold testing is probably one of the most complicated things we do.
Ryan Blaser: And it’s one of the things I continue to learn and grow on as well. And you know, you hear people say, well, air samples can be false negative a lot of times, and that’s very true. And then you can say, Ermies can be false positive a lot of times or scare people and that can be true as well. And I think it really comes down to, for me at least when I go into a home, one of the biggest pieces of information I can get that helps me determine the mold is the history of the home.
Ryan Blaser: If that person’s lived in the home for the last 20 years and has a really good history of every single leak, every single water incident, every single cup of water that was spilled on the floor. I know then where to look because mold needs water to grow. So if we can follow the water, we have a much better chance of finding the mold.
Ryan Blaser: And then second to that is gonna be a very, very detailed, uh, visual inspection. And I mean, we’re looking in every nook and cranny of the house with the flashlight, and we’re looking for even minute little imperfections that could clue us off that there’s something going on behind the wall or behind that cabinet or behind the toilet.
Ryan Blaser: Uh, that could be just the tip of the iceberg. We really. in, in my opinion, use the sampling just to kind of confirm, uh, or what we already kind of know, uh, kind of like scientific methods. So for example, let’s say a client says, yeah, we had a water leak on the second level from a toilet. It dripped down and dripped through this skylight right here in the kitchen.
Ryan Blaser: It puddled up, we caught it, you know, we fixed the leak. We’re good. I said, okay, did we open up the ceiling? No, we didn’t open up the scene. Okay. Now I’m looking, I see, I see some bubbling or some water damage up there. I might drill a little hole and I’m going to take a sample from that area, uh, called a cavity sample, and we’re going to send that to the lab to determine is there mold growing up there or not.
Ryan Blaser: Now if I were to just take an air sample in that room willy nilly, without any kind of idea, it probably is going to come back negative. We got to get into that cavity to where the mold’s actually growing to determine. But if they never told me about that leak and I never seen that little bubble there, I would have never known to look there.
Ryan Blaser: So we have to use all the tools that are. Uh, disposal. The surface samples, the air samples, the dust analysis. We could do VOC mold analysis, the IRMI testing, along with the visual, along with the history of the home, and also the, the, um, how are the patients or how are the, the clients in the home? Is everybody sick?
Ryan Blaser: Do they feel better when they leave and go on vacation? As soon as they come home, they start getting a stuffy nose. These are all clues that we have a problem. So you gotta look at everything from a big picture and put all the pieces together. I love
Pedram Shojai: that. It’s kind of like functional medicine. You need a good history, right?
Pedram Shojai: Before you start testing. Um, okay. The flip side of it, you found mold remediation. Um, scary cause it could be really expensive. Scary because they got to get it right. How do you look at that? How do you recommend? Contractors or folks that, you know, specialize in this to come solve the problem and make sure that this house is taken
Ryan Blaser: care of.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, this is another one that’s not always cut and dry and very difficult because there’s a couple things we’ve got to take into account. One of them is what kind of mold is it? Because not all molds are created equal. Two, how bad is the mold problem? How long has this been going on? Uh, three, how sick is the the client or how sensitive are they?
Ryan Blaser: Some people are not sensitive to mold at all, but they just happen to get sick because the mold is really bad. Whereas other people, it takes a small amount of mold, they’re actually allergic to it and it sets them off pretty bad. So we need to know who we’re dealing with as. as a patient. And then, uh, the last one is really important was how much money do we have to work with?
Ryan Blaser: Is insurance going to pay for this? Uh, do we have the money to go in and do a full remodel and clean it out of the home? Because this stuff can be expensive. And so we have to look at all of that together. And then. You know, using our expertise and our experience, come up with a plan that’s really going to be, uh, custom made for that individual because it’s not always the same answer every time.
Ryan Blaser: How
Pedram Shojai: often in these types of scenarios, I mean, look, if you’re a renter, you just get out, but you know, if you bought this house, that sucks. And so how often have you seen people have to leave their homes and do much more kind of drastic relocations because they can’t afford to fix the scope of the problem that they’ve, that you’ve uncovered?
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, you know, I mean, that’s the last thing I like. Want to want to tell somebody to sit them down and say, Hey, your home is killing you and you have to leave and you got to uproot your family and move. That’s that’s a big deal. That’s a lot of stress. But there are situations where we have to recommend that.
Ryan Blaser: And it does happen. Um, you know, maybe one out of 20 homes. That we have mold problem and not one out of 20 that we test, but one out of 20 that we have a mold problem. It comes down to really the honestly the best solution is for them to cut their losses and just move into a healthy home, especially if they can afford to do so and their health is really declining and the mold species that we have are very dangerous.
Ryan Blaser: When those three kind of align together. Yeah, let’s just get you in a, in a safe, healthy home and get your health back in order because ultimately your health is the most important thing. Of course, money is an important part of this if we can do it, but if you’re not healthy and you’re, your family’s sick, your kids are getting sick, your pets are getting sick, let’s, we need to reverse that right away.
Pedram Shojai: You had mentioned the money a couple times and it’s obviously material to say, you know, to say the least. It’s, it’s a very big part of this. People are stressed about money all the time and this is a big one. Um, How often is the homeowner’s insurance or the, how often is the homeowner’s insurance or the renter’s insurance or whoever is supposed to be on the hook Coming in and paying for the right remedies Like how often do you see this get resolved through the insurances that are supposed to be there for this?
Ryan Blaser: You know, I’d say I wish it was more of us, more like 25 percent of the time when somebody else confront the bill, either, you know, I’m actually going to do an inspection tomorrow, it’s a, it’s a newer home and they already have a leak through the window and it caused a bunch of mold growth. They got kind of sick.
Ryan Blaser: They’ve moved out of the house. But I know it’s going to go to legal, uh, I got to go document the whole thing and then they got to show, hey, the builder messed up on the window, they’re going to have to pay for that. But in other situations where we have a failure of the home or failure of the plumbing, which caused the water damage or water event, then it’s pretty easy to tie it back to, uh, the insurance and have them pay for it.
Pedram Shojai: Got it. Yeah. I mean, these are, these are stressful things, right? These are stressful things. Okay, let’s go from spilled water to piped water. Okay. Um, the quality of water, um, is a big deal. Um, I have a story where we put in a whole house water filter, um, where I was living. We had chloramide in the water and one of the side effects, uh, aside from, you know, making the showers healthier and all that was my garden in the backyard just started.
Pedram Shojai: booming, right? Because we were taking all of these soil bacteria killing agents out. And it was a very profound difference for me. Um, there’s all kinds of recommendations. People say RO filters, people have garage filters. So how do you, how do you even start thinking about this? Is it just test the water and then, you know, Um, and then budget, like, where does that come in?
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, test the water right off the bat. Let’s figure out what we’re working with. The tests aren’t too much. You can get a basic one for 150 or a more expensive one for 300, 400, 500. And that’s going to tell us what’s in the water. What do we need to filter out? What do we need to deal with? But I always, if, if budget’s a concern, first thing right off the bat, let’s get an RO system because that’s going to pull out a majority of the water and do all of your cooking and your drinking water out of your RO.
Ryan Blaser: Now, unfortunately, RO doesn’t really. work good for whole home systems because it wastes a lot of water, but it also, uh, you would need a pretty big system to get the pressure enough to Anybody that’s ever had an RO, they know it’s just a really small stream that comes out enough to fill up a cup, but you’re not going to take a shower with that.
Ryan Blaser: You’re not going to water your lawn with RO. Uh, for that, you need more of a whole home filtration system, some sort of carbon filtration. Uh, but also if you have Hard water, uh, hard minerals in there. You need a water softener to pull those out as stage one before you send it through. So there’s a lot of variety of different filters and they meet the needs of the contaminants we’re trying to get out.
Pedram Shojai: So a lot of people say, okay, well, I have a municipal water report that my city sends me once a year. Isn’t that enough? Um, and you know, I, I, you’re smirking, but yeah, I’d love to hear your
Ryan Blaser: answer to that. Yeah, I, I deal with this a lot because they’re only testing for a handful of chemicals. Uh, they’re not testing for a lot of the really dangerous stuff, like the pharmaceuticals, the PFOAs, the pesticides, the herbicides, the things that really matter that are getting into our water supply.
Ryan Blaser: They’re not testing it. It may be for lead, nitrates, um, a handful of these basic chemicals, but there’s, there’s thousands and thousands of contaminants that can get into the water. And so we need to, We need to test appropriately for, and it depends on the area. You know, if you’re downtown LA, we’re testing for a lot of different things in the water than if you’re in Montana, up in the mountains, up in the mountains, you may be testing for the lead, the arsenic, the minerals, the heavy metals that can come out of the ground, whereas.
Ryan Blaser: Out in L. A., we might be testing for the pharmaceuticals and the treatment products, the byproducts that are coming in the water. And maybe back east, you know, uh, New York, maybe we’re testing for the PFOAs and, and these toxic chemicals from, um, the industrial age. So it just depends on what part of town, as to what part of, of the, the water we’re going to analyze and what we’re going to look for.
I hope you’re enjoying this interview as much as I did. I love the work that he’s doing. Ryan has already helped a number of people. I know who had problems with their homes. I found the problem, correct? The problem or brought people to correct the problem. And lo and behold vitality comes back. Their health issues are resolved.
So, uh, Ryan knows his stuff. You need to look in your home for these things. Uh, part of the summit upgrade package includes a guide. Uh, that’ll get you started. And I honestly think that this has been one of the hidden areas inside this vitality equation is, oh, what have I already led into my house?
So let’s pay attention to it. If you haven’t upgraded, please do so back to the interview.
Pedram Shojai: You mentioned the pharmaceuticals, um, which is kind of a scary thought that you’re drinking your, your neighbor’s Viagra or whatever it is, um, that’s coming through their urine, going through the, allegedly it’s going through some sort of treatment plant, recycling through the water system, but is the, is the understanding now that these pharmaceuticals, the chemicals are too small?
Pedram Shojai: Um, and they sneak through whatever filtration is there at the municipal level.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah, you know, I had a client that designed and built water municipality systems. It was really cool. I got to sit down and talk to him. I said, why aren’t we just filtering this stuff out? He’s like, do you understand how expensive it would be to provide everybody pure water out of their tap?
Ryan Blaser: Like, there’s no way that’s even possible. He says, our goal is to make sure people don’t get sick right away, like acutely toxic sick from the bacterias and stuff. So, it’s more about the disinfectants that are in there It’s not about making the water healthy. It’s and making it so you don’t die basically right off the bat, which is kind of a slow death is okay.
Ryan Blaser: Yeah. The fast death they want to avoid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Pedram Shojai: you could
Ryan Blaser: point a finger. Yeah. You know what I mean? It comes down to the money and it makes sense if you’re in LA and you’re trying to provide water for 10, 20 million people, yeah, you can’t expect to have pure filtered water coming out of that tap, it’s just not possible.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah. So. We’ll get some links to the tests that you recommend for anyone who’s listening. Um, I think that this is incredibly important to get a good understanding around what they’re working with. And look, if it’s not a problem, hallelujah, sleep, sleep easier. But if it is a problem, you should probably know about it because, you know, one of the recurring themes in this summit is, you know, everyone’s talking about all these things that you can do to bring about.
Pedram Shojai: Good health to think vitalistically to build the resilience of the system and present company here, right? So we have these kids, grandmas by these, you know, they go to target and they get these cutesy like, you know, pajamas. Never once did I think that these things are laden with petrochemicals and fire retardants that, that are neurotoxic to my little children that are replicating cells.
Pedram Shojai: So it’s like the enemy had crawled over the city wall, and here I am looking outward when he’s already on this side of the wall, right? And so the Peace of mind that comes. I want you, cause you’ve worked with a lot of people. You’ve had complicated cases. You’ve, you’ve, you know, you’re, you get flown around a lot for this stuff.
Pedram Shojai: The peace of mind that comes once you understand your home is safe. Let’s talk about that. And then also what you start to see in the changes in these people’s lives and their vitality. Once they’ve made these changes, how long does it take before you start seeing the vitality
Ryan Blaser: emerge? Yeah, you know, and I speaking from my own self and my own life, how my journey has been coming from where I was really sick to where I am now, I would say now, mid 40s, I’m probably healthier than I’ve been in my entire life.
Ryan Blaser: And it’s not just the environment I take care of in my fitness and my nutrition and the cold plunges and all the things that we do. You know, I see these people that are really sick, and I go into their homes, and they can barely get off the couch, they can barely get out of bed, and I look on the wall, and I see pictures of them running triathlons and hiking, and they used to be super healthy, and it’s because they weren’t aware of the toxins in their bodies.
Ryan Blaser: that were in their environment or even their food and the things that they were putting in their body and how it really changed their lives. And so going home now and what I implement in my life and my clients is like, look, we don’t want to go through that. You don’t want to get that call one day from the doctor that you have cancer all of a sudden or that you have this chronic illness that’s devastating.
Ryan Blaser: And so it’s so much easier to put this prevention in right off the bat. And keep these chemicals and these toxins out of our body. And unfortunately, we just don’t know about it because a lot of us watching media, watching TV, and we’re not told a lot of this information. And unfortunately, the, the people that are paying for the advertising are people that are promoting a lot of these products.
Ryan Blaser: You know, um, I don’t know, I probably shouldn’t say names, but a lot of these big companies. You know, that are, that have their money is on their mind and they don’t really have the health of the consumer on their mind. They want to make more money. That’s why I think it’s great. What you’re doing is you’re reaching people without that over your head.
Ryan Blaser: Like I don’t need to worry about getting these big sponsors because you’re just out telling the truth out trying to help people. But that’s why, in my belief, why we don’t have this common knowledge out there. Um, I don’t know, maybe I just rabbit holed there a little bit. I got off track.
Pedram Shojai: No, I love that.
Pedram Shojai: And that’s, you know, in, in honor of the summit model. I mean, it’s really sponsored by the people who support this type of information. So, you know, 5 percent of the people who watch this go and buy the summit package, which helps pay for the party. And then you don’t have Pfizer and Nabisco trying to tell you false information and say it’s fine.
Pedram Shojai: Or Verizon for that matter, saying, don’t worry about EMFs. Like you have these massive conglomerates. That have a dog in the race and of course this is safe, but is it right? And you see it in clinics all over the world. People are getting
Ryan Blaser: sick. Yeah, and so maybe I can bring up a little something that we were gonna, and you know, we were, I had another project that I was working on.
Ryan Blaser: There was real similar that we created a pilot show, um, real same concept of what you’re doing with your other project. And we took it and shopped it out to all these major networks. And when we first introduced it to the concept, they were all really excited and they loved it, but they would go back and talk to their people.
Ryan Blaser: And we always. They came back and said, no, it doesn’t fit our market. It doesn’t fit what we’re doing. We had someone on the inside on one of the big networks and we asked, you know, why is this, what’s going on? Why did you guys ultimately say no? And they came back and said, well, one of our biggest sponsors is Procter and Gamble.
Ryan Blaser: And the stuff that you’re talking about on the show is directly conflicting. Um, one of our biggest sponsors. And we’re afraid that we will lose them as a, as a, an advertiser. If we share this on our network. And they said, that’s pretty much what you’re going up against. Um, you’re talking up against major telecom industry.
Ryan Blaser: You’re talking out against, uh, these. Harmful products. You’re talking out against, you know, fast food and being held. These are all of our major sponsors. You see, you’re probably not going to get any network deals with this kind of content, which that’s kind of disheartening. But that actually didn’t surprise me one bit to hear that.
Ryan Blaser: You know,
Pedram Shojai: no, unfortunately, GDP doesn’t measure anything other than money. And so we see these success metrics in the economy. Um, and unfortunately, cancer is good for the economy, right? Sick care. Is a trillion dollar business. That’s also good for you. Hey, you’re creating jobs. Um, but it’s not right livelihood.
Pedram Shojai: And so we’re trying to do the right thing and help people thrive and have vitality here. So I really appreciate the work that you’re doing and man, you’re bold. Um, you’re, you’re like the guy that’s jumping into a moldy room, um, and trying to help people and having had already gotten. kicked in the teeth by mold, that is a, that’s a big move.
Pedram Shojai: So do you, I’m assuming you’re protecting yourself really well going into these houses. Yeah.
Ryan Blaser: Uh, you know, from the inside and out. And luckily I have a lot of good friends, a lot of good doctors, and a lot of good detox protocols. And I do regular mold detox. I do sauna almost every day. I do cold plunge. I exercise and try to sweat.
Ryan Blaser: I eat a really clean diet. I do a lot of that things. On the outside that helped me to be able to tolerate that. So my body is a lot stronger so that I can go into these environments. And then I can come home into a really pure environment. My body can detox, it can rest, it can heal. And it can help prepare me to go out into the real world, so to speak, and face a lot of these toxins.
Ryan Blaser: But I do also wear respirator and suits. I take precautions when I go into some of these places that are pretty bad.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah, please do. We need you. We need you around. We need you doing this. Ryan, what a pleasure. Um, you’re a hero. Keep doing the work that you’re doing and I look forward to seeing you in the next project for the Homestick Home Project, um, and just continue to help people.
Pedram Shojai: Really appreciate
Ryan Blaser: you. Yeah, thanks for having me on and sharing this with everybody. It’s much needed. We got a lot of work to do. We do,
Pedram Shojai: but together we do it. Thank you. Yep.
Ryan Blaser: Thanks.