[00:00:01] Luke: What I want to know is how do you smoke Cuban cigars occasionally?

[00:00:07] Jack: I was wondering if we were going to talk about our past addictions or if we're going straight into wellness.

[00:00:13] Luke: I like to keep it real.

[00:00:14] Jack: Yeah, no, exactly. It's actually awesome. Yeah, that's an interesting balance of things. Like I was telling you earlier, it's not abusive. I'll have two per week, not every week. It's not a daily regular thing, but it's something that I enjoy doing with some friends and some guys that-- so whether it be a few hockey buddies that-- I guess it's that reaction.

[00:00:42] The first time I brought them out on one of our hockey tailgates and I passed around some cigars, there was an enthusiasm and everyone congregated and we had a good time with after our hockey game. And I've got a really close friend of mine in Montreal, and he'll go out in the winter and have a cigar while I'm in Florida having my cigar and we'll have a FaceTime catching up and all that.

[00:01:06] Luke: Can you buy Cubans in Canada? Should I go to a cigar store?

[00:01:09] Jack: Yes, yes, yes. And that's where I get them.

[00:01:12] Luke: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:13] Jack: I'm sure I can get them somewhere locally in Florida, but I guess I'm not hooked up with the local supply there.

[00:01:20] Luke: I used to have a couple of stores in LA where you give them the little secret handshake thing and they let you in the back room to the humidor. But I'm always jealous of people who can enjoy cigars and control it. And some people that don't have addictive tendencies be like, oh, it's just a matter of willpower.

[00:01:41] It's really not for me. If I had one cigar today, I guarantee you I'd be online ordering from the Canary Islands or something, like I used to do. When I get those cigars, I smoke them all day. I just can't stop. I'll have one going all day. It's problematic.

[00:02:00] Jack: That adds up. The wives of me and my buddy who buy the Cubans together, whenever they see us coming back with some boxes, they say, so how many handbags is that for us?

[00:02:10] Luke: Right.

[00:02:11] Jack: The Cubans add up.

[00:02:13] Luke: They're not cheap. I used to run up my credit cards like crazy. I'd be like, "Where'd I spend all this money?" And it's like, oh, look at the statement. It's like Hong Kong Havana cigars. Because you can buy Cubans online. The quality is suspect at times. All right, last thing I'm going to ask you--

[00:02:29] Jack: But I encourage balance, like I was telling you. You have the cigar in a cold plunge.

[00:02:34] Luke: Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. I think tobacco, if it's organic tobacco, Cuban tobacco is inherently because they just don't use pesticides, from my understanding. Someone told me it's because they just can't afford it. It's like, hey, whatever the reason. But I think nicotine is good for you in moderation, as is tobacco, if it's not sprayed with a bunch of chemicals.

[00:03:00] Jack: You bring up something that reminded me, I have a cousin of mine in Montreal that was smoking regularly cigars, but couldn't afford. He was not buying Cubans and all that. So when he offered me a cigar and I decided to have one. Where is this from? Well, the large makers of domestic production of cigars were from cigarette makers and it was like tar oozing out of this thing. And like, I'm sorry, I can't smoke this. I go, "But you shouldn't be smoking this either." Here I am smoking a cigar telling you shouldn't smoke that cigar, but they're not all equal. Some of them are really bad for you.

[00:03:42] Luke: Oh, man. I used to have debates with the guys at the cigar shop because I was such a Cuban purist. And I just felt they were just better. And they'd, "Oh, no, try this one, try that one." Dominican, whatever. This is the best. And I just felt like Cubans were always better.

[00:04:02] And I was trying to determine, is this just in my mind? Why wouldn't great tobacco grow in any similar climate, subtropical climate or whatever? But I held on to that. I'm like, "I don't smoke anything but Cubans." And then one day I was with a friend of mine and I had run out of cigars. He goes, "Man, a shipment came in. I got some come out."

[00:04:22] So I drove out to Santa Monica, all excited to smoke a cigar. There's no label on it. We start smoking. Sometimes they don't have a label, right? And he said, "How is it, man?" And I said, "Oh, this is great. I'm so glad you got some Cubans. I don't want to smoke those other shitty cigars from the store."

[00:04:38] And about halfway through, he goes, "You still like it?" I go, "Oh, man, it's amazing." He goes, "That's a Nicaraguan." And he goes, that's the power of your mind." Because it tasted just like a Cuban because I thought it was. And at that time, I was like, "Okay, maybe someone else is doing it right."

[00:04:54] Jack: I'm no expert, but I have noticed that the Cubans, the actual wrapper, I don't know if it's retained a little bit more of the moisture, it seems a little oilier. It seems like the non-Cubans are drier. So I'm wondering if they're fast tracking the processing on non-Cubans. It's a small little modest difference, but there is something there. Yeah. So maybe it's in my mind as well.

[00:05:20] Luke: Well, I'm going to live vicariously through you and you keep enjoying them a couple times a week. For people like me that lack self-control, I just have to go, it's zero or everything for me. So this is your second time here on the Life Stylist. Welcome back. The last one we did in Florida in a little ass hotel room, so I feel like I'm much more professional in our setting here today. So I'm excited to have a more relaxed kind of open space convo with you.

[00:05:47] Jack: I love the space. Like I told you, as soon as I walked in here, it just felt awesome. So I'd way rather do this here than in a hotel room. This is beautiful.

[00:05:55] Luke: Me too. And for those that want to hear the last episode, that would have been number 443. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And everything you hear about today, you can find it at lukestorey.com/sleepwell.

[00:06:09] So this topic of sleep and specifically healthy mattresses is something I've been into for a very long time. And I feel like it was 20 years ago that I found your company, Essentia. Would you have had a store in Santa Monica 20 years ago or was it 15? When do you think that started?

[00:06:31] Jack: That would be, I guess, 15 or 16 years ago was in Santa Monica. Sorry.

[00:06:35] Luke: It would have been around that time. God, probably in 2000, I got my first organic latex mattress. And it was like sleeping on wood. It was super firm, very uncomfortable. But by that time, I'd learned about off gassing and formaldehyde and all of these shady things that we're going to get into.

[00:06:59] And I used to go into the Essentia store and lay on the mattresses. And they were like, I don't know, three, four, or five grand. It was just totally out of my realm of possibilities budget wise. And it was one of those things on the vision board, someday I'll have an Essentia.

[00:07:16] And now, thankfully, public awareness has grown, but I still get questions from people all the time about these other greenwashing-- and I know you're really classic guy. Last time, you didn't shit on any other brands. I really respect that. You're just like, "Hey, I stand by our products. If you like someone else, great." But I get questions all the time from people now. Hey, I'm about to buy X, Y, or Z brand. What do you think? And I go, "I'm open minded." I go on their website and it's fake. It's has springs, or it's not really organic latex.

[00:07:48] So there's a lot of misrepresentation of what a healthy mattress is. And when I look at the prices on these things, they're not even less expensive than what I believe is the best, which is what you guys are doing. So that's just the framework. So anyone listening, you don't have to ask me. What I think the best mattresses is yours. I'm not just saying it because you're here.

[00:08:11] We have one in that room. We have one in our master bedroom. After going through so many different kinds of supposedly healthy mattresses and sleeping systems over the years, nothing has compared. So that's why I'm excited to talk to you.

[00:08:25] Jack: I think it's just because there's one thing, whether you're just buying an organic mattress. When I say the word just is because what's commonly out there as an organic mattress, and I'm talking about the good ones, where it's not really greenwashing. So greenwashing for me is, there's a lot of them out there that like to use spa like terms for names of their mattresses.

[00:08:50] But really the only thing that's organic will be the cotton shell. But then everything inside is polyester and polyurethane. Those are the, I would say, the non-legitimate brands, more in the very big box stores. But let's not go there. I'm talking about the general authentic organic brands out there, what they are, the entry level to what you'd be buying in an innerspring.

[00:09:18] So if you'd be going to a regular mattress store, what's your entry level, it'll be a spring with a little bit of polyurethane and a polyester quilt and a polyester wrap. That's your basic mattress that probably 70% of the population is sleeping on, if not more. When you go to organic, you're getting exactly that, but organic, which means you're going to have the springs except instead of the polyurethane on top, you're going to put in latex.

[00:09:51] Instead of the polyester batting, you're going to put in wool. And then you're going to wrap that in organic cotton. So what you've accomplished there is eliminated the off gassing of the chemicals that are there. But you didn't buy a good mattress. You didn't buy something that's performing. And I think that's what got me into this, was recovering from illness, not personal, but for family members.

[00:10:15] And so that doesn't move the needle. Just organic is really good, really important, but it doesn't move the needle far enough on recovery and wellness and thriving and all those things come from everything else we obsess over, posture support, pressure redistribution, EMFs, thermal regulation. So I would say the difference, what you probably appreciate and didn't know is that we're performance organic rather than just being an organic mattress.

[00:10:45] Luke: Yeah, that makes sense. To me, thankfully, there's more public awareness, but there are certain foundational practices or ideas around health that I think many people miss. One of them is proper elimination. When I got into this stuff, colon cleansing was like all the rage, and it made sense to me.

[00:11:11] It's like, you might be taking all these detox supplements and taking saunas and stuff, but if you're not moving that stuff out of you, not good. People don't talk about that much. It's super foundational. Sleep, most people know sleep's good for you. But considering we spend so much of our life, however many hours you have on the planet, how many you spend in a bed on a mattress, that should be right up there with water, digestion, your lighting environment.

[00:11:41] This is top tier, top five elements of your whole regimen. So there's people out there that are sleeping on these sleep tracking, EMF mattresses and stuff. I'm just like, dude, it's not that complicated. But anyway, we're going to break it down.

[00:11:59] This is like people in the health scene. But you think about your average person, as you said, they're sleeping on-- and you sleep in whatever you can afford, 1,000- dollar mattress for me back in the day, a latex mattress was a lot of money. So I get it. But most people that are unaware of this in the general public are sleeping on these metal coils that are literally EMF antennas and essentially just wrapped in a barrel of crude oil. That's basically what it comes down to. It's not good. And then it's soaked with chemicals.

[00:12:31] Jack: One thing in the house that off gases the most in a home is the mattress. The highest concentration and density of chemicals--

[00:12:39] Luke: Is it, really?

[00:12:40] Jack: Is coming from the mattress. It is, yeah. So there's nothing else in the home, not coming out of the wood and the furniture. It's not even coming out of the laminate plastic furniture. The density and concentration that you get of petrochemicals in a mattress way exceeds the couch, way exceeds anything else you have on there. So it really is the number one thing--

[00:13:00] Luke: Why is that? Just because it's thick and porous?

[00:13:03] Jack: It basically has to have a minimum density for it to be able to even-- even a poor one needs to last a couple of years. And if they're going to go with a low density foams that are used for benches or anything that doesn't have to give that support, they would all be hammocking. So that higher concentration, higher weight, higher density means more chemicals.

[00:13:27] Luke: And what kind of chemicals go in a traditional mattress?

[00:13:32] Jack: Basically, it's polyurethane. Polyurethane is the chemical foam that's used. And what's most popular these days is obviously the memory foams. And memory foams are higher density than the regular base foams. So again, it has more off gassing there as well. When I started this I was trying to figure out how to give some physical wellness without the reactions that you'd get.

[00:14:03] So when somebody has health struggles, they typically become sensitized to their environment. So someone who's really ill will have reactions from polyurethane off gassing. Whereas me and you may not notice that because we're healthy and our body's fighting it. But you learn more from someone who's vulnerable, where they're breaking out into hives or they're having respiratory issues.

[00:14:31] Well, that's affecting us all. We're just battling it a little better. That's when I was trying to figure out how do I make latex perform as a memory foam does, physically, for the body, but without basically ingesting all these chemicals through your pores, through your lungs. And that was when I realized how toxic the regular mattresses were.

[00:14:55] Luke: What's the deal with the fire retardants? I've seen things over the years with not just mattresses, but furniture in general, where they have these prop 65 warning. What are the regulations? As a manufacturer, for example, how do you get out of it being mandated that you spray your mattresses with formaldehyde and fire retardants and stuff like that? Because it seems like some people are just like, "Oh, we have to do it. The manufacturing regulations force us to." So, oh, well.

[00:15:26] Jack: So there is basically one way where you can bypass not adding the chemicals in it, but it's a synthetic process. So that's one of the issues. So for example, in the lower priced, more general consumer product mattresses, they'll be chemical additives. They'll put chemical additives in the fabric backing of the fabric, sometimes on the fiber batting, and that's the chemical that's added so that it becomes a fire retardant.

[00:15:57] The only way to do it where it's not off gassing is to get a Kevlar knit, which is a knit which encases the mattress inside. So while not being a natural organic product, we've tested that and there's no off gassing that comes from it. It's completely inert. So that's the only bypass with the law.

[00:16:16] Luke: Is it bulletproof?

[00:16:18] Jack: No. Again, it doesn't have to be that dense. It just has--

[00:16:23] Luke: I feel like a Kevlar vest.

[00:16:25] Jack: Pass an open flame test.

[00:16:27] Luke: Okay. Got it. Got it. So then they can have those chemicals inside, but the idea is that they're not breaking through.

[00:16:35] Jack: That's not for maintaining chemicals inside. That's for stop the flame.

[00:16:41] Luke: Oh, okay, okay, okay.

[00:16:42] Jack: From accessing the chemicals inside or anything.

[00:16:43] Luke: Got it. So that's what they're using as a flame retardant essentially as a barrier.

[00:16:47] Jack: Exactly. Yeah. So the barrier is actually the better one, but it's the most expensive option. The chemical spray is the cheap option, which is what you mainly find on mattresses.

[00:16:57] Luke: I'm imagining that the former option of the Kevlar wrapping would make for very hot sleeping.

[00:17:05] Jack: No, because it's--

[00:17:09] Luke: It sounds like it wouldn't breathe very well.

[00:17:10] Jack: It's a knit, so it's open pores completely. Yeah. So it's amazing how that is. It's not airlocked. So it is something that's-- and it's strange where you should be able to make a choice. We're living in times where that's always in question. What can you decide for yourself, and what should be regulated? And FR barriers is one of those things. If you have a doctor's note saying you have chemical sensitivities, you can bypass having any type of FR or Kevlar barrier.

[00:17:46] Most companies don't offer that option just because if it's sprayed into their production line, they're not offering that. But if it's a barrier, you can opt not to have the barrier on there with the proper doctor's note. Hopefully, things change as we-- there is a movement towards wellness and change and people making their own choices where you don't need a doctor's note to opt out of having a chemical--

[00:18:12] Luke: It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. I've been looking at RFK and the MAHA movement and stuff, and everyone wants to go after the Fruit Loops and all this stuff. And I agree, it would be good to not feed the population poison. But I have thought about it from the other side.

[00:18:31] It's like that's the kind of government overreach that I often complain about and find fault with. If I own Kellogg's and I want to put a bunch of shit in my cereal because it makes more money and attracts little kids because it's colorful and now some regulatory agency is imposing a rule on me that says I can't do that, I wouldn't like that.

[00:18:54] Not that I would ever do that because I'm not evil, but it's interesting. There's a fine line. It's like you don't want to be regulated, but then there's a lot of bad actors out there that are making crappy toxic mattresses and food. Well, who's going to stop them?

[00:19:07] Jack: I figured it all out with the Uber driver on my way here.

[00:19:10] Luke: You did?

[00:19:10] Jack: This was exactly the conversation that we were having. And I came to the conclusion that we need some regulation and how the regulation works, if it kills you quickly, it's illegal. If it kills you slowly, it's legal. That's basically it. Chronic exposure to chemicals that'll kill you in 20 years, completely legal. If it becomes a short-term addiction, short-term life threat, like certain drugs, that's illegal.

[00:19:40] Luke: That's pretty good parameters. I like that. Talk to me about latex. Tell us what natural latex is. I find this fascinating. When we were adjusting the mattress today before the recording, the word just came to me. It's tree blood. That's how I thought of it. I don't know if that's true, but that's how my imagination works sometimes. But tell us about latex-producing trees and all that. It's just interesting to me that we're sleeping on something that comes out of a tree.

[00:20:09] Jack: Exactly. And it's going back to how the original foam was made. When you think about it, it's sap from a tree, which is harvested and then is frothed up and then baked into making a solid permanent form. We call it latex, and basically the sap from a tree is the most resilient foam that you can ever make.

[00:20:36] It's long lasting. It doesn't off gas any chemicals. The negative side of regular latex was-- and when I was working on this 23 years ago, the main issues were, and you probably remember this from your original bed, it's like sleeping on almost like a tire. Maybe a tire is an exaggeration, but it's almost like sleeping on a tire.

[00:21:00] Luke: It was brutal. It was brutal. Well, the funny thing is, just to interject for a second, that original 1,000-dollar organic latex mattress that was super hard, it was so uncomfortable. I ended up having to buy a polyurethane memory foam topper, which defeated the whole purpose of not off gassing, but that's how I had to make it comfortable. So yeah.

[00:21:21] Jack: So if you look at the construction of a mattress, that's why even today, a conventional organic mattress is going to basically be the coil, the spring system, which is not good for you. And then you'll have a few inches of this rubber, organic latex rubber, because it's not so contouring.

[00:21:43] It's not so soft. So the springs help to break down some of that firm feel and then on top of that, they'll put wool or cotton or something again to soften up the top of it. So the foam itself is not really functional as you need it to be for a mattress. And that was the head scratcher for me.

[00:22:03] And that's where I was constantly trying to figure out how to reformulate this, how to make it different. We're the only ones who use essential oils in the fabrication of our latex foam, just because I had realized that we can change the behavior of this foam just by some of these additional organic ingredients that I can add into it and basically changed how it reacted, allowed more pressure redistribution, create this consistency that I used to call like a pizza dough where it basically would give you the posture support that latex foam never had.

[00:22:44] And that's what I patented and that's where, like we saw those heavy mattresses that we were moving around together, we're able to make a full latex core, but that feels contouring, supportive, dense, but still be fully non toxic, not having any of this negative off gassing.

[00:23:07] And then over the last few years, we've taken it to other levels of thermoregulation on how it allows your body heat to naturally escape, pushing your limits of REM sleep and deep sleep. So we've obsessed over every little detail.

[00:23:22] Luke: It's obvious. It's difficult to describe something like that. It's just like you got to spend a night on one to understand. But as you know, we used to have another bed here that I really was attached to making work, and it was fine, but my wife just hated it.

[00:23:42] And when we got to our first Essentia, she's like, "This needs to be the main bed. No more." So she called it, and she is obsessed with your freaking mattresses. Now I'm locked in for life. She'll never allow another type of mattress because, really, I don't know, whatever you guys did.

[00:24:02] Because it's like, it doesn't-- what did you call it? Hammocking? It's soft, but your whole body doesn't sink into it. It doesn't become concave. It's like only sinks in where the pressure points are, which is where you want to have least resistance-- your elbows, your hips, your shoulders, etc. So however you figure that out, it freaking worked.

[00:24:23] Jack: I receive messages from people who are in the wellness world, physical wellness and know what you need to have as far as support for a mattress. And I'll get messages from them and it'll be a little bit in shock saying, "I don't understand what you've done." Authentic messages.

[00:24:44] I don't know how you've done this. The bed feels soft when I touch it. When I lay down on it horizontally, all of a sudden it's giving me support. Where did that come from? How did something that to my hand touch felt soft now all of a sudden is supporting and nurturing my lower back and shoulders.

[00:25:03] So it is interesting where people become lifetime ambassadors and evangelists of Essentia. And I think that's why we're here today, 20 years later, where people who know, know, and people who know, tell their friends that know, because obviously it's a big marketing machine out there and we're just going along our paths. You won't see us on a TV commercial, but people who know pretty much are--

[00:25:29] Luke: There's no turning back. Like Cuban cigars.

[00:25:32] Jack: Yeah.

[00:25:34] Luke: For those of us that appreciate those. Let's talk about heat issues because going back to that original latex mattress that was like sleeping on stone, then I added the memory foam thing, and then I would have massive problems with overheating, like night sweats. I find synthetic memory foam cooks me like I'm in a frying pan. Why is that? And how do you fix that? Or how have you fixed that? Because I don't experience that with-- whatever secret sauce you did, I don't get hot like that.

[00:26:05] Jack: So memory foam is basically a foam version of plastics. So it's as if you'd be sleeping in Saran wrap. And even if you fill that Saran wrap with a whole bunch of holes, like people trying to have ventilated pierce some holes into their memory foam, put some holes into Saran wrap, wrap yourself under it, you're still sweating.

[00:26:26] It's not going to do anything for you. So there's two things. One is because they're plastics and they're non breathable and they're not allowing your body heat to escape. But also, they require your body heat to mold to yourself. They're all heat activated foams.

[00:26:43] So without your body heat, they won't function properly. Overheating in bed is not just a comfort issue because of you'll be sweating. You're hot. You're actually staying awake because what ends up happening is you're speeding up your central nervous system and it keeps you in the awaken stages.

[00:27:04] We're all tied into this circadian rhythm, and if you're going to be as hot as it is at high noon, your body will be thinking it's daytime and time to be awake. Our bodies are designed in a way that as we're cooling off, and basically sundown, sunset, and overnight, our central nervous system is slowing down and it keeps you in that stage.

[00:27:31] And we did a whole lot of testing. We did a lot of double-blind studies with-- we mainly work with athletes over the last 10 years, which has been fantastic because they're really in touch with their bodies. But with the wearables and all that, we were able to really identify so much when it comes to thermoregulation, is that just sleeping cold or sleeping hot, that's actually not what it's about.

[00:27:54] It's about following that natural flow of the circadian rhythm. So we realize that it's allowing your body heat to escape, and the more rapidly we allow that to happen through the course of the target sleep-- whether you're sleeping five hours, six hours, eight hours-- if you're constantly dropping in temperature, that doesn't have to be immediately cold. If you're actually dropping in temperature, your body is identifying that as time to sleep.

[00:28:23] It continues to operate slowly and it basically keeps you in deep sleep longer, keeps you in REM sleep longer. So you're constantly repairing your body and mind a lot faster. And that was the connection I wanted to make, is how do we heal faster? How do we wake up without anxiety, without stress, with that focus and clarity to thrive? And it all happens through REM sleep and deep sleep.

[00:28:50] The whole thing of eight hours sleep is really a myth. It's all about how much REM sleep and deep sleep. So if you're going to sleep five hours on Essentia, but we got three hours of deep REM sleep and deep sleep, it's equivalent to you being in bed for eight hours with the same three hours of REM sleep and deep sleep. And that thermal regulation is a key part of that. There's others. The non-toxic part is important.

[00:29:14] The thermal regulation. That's one and two. Those are the two most important things to keep you in deep sleep longer. But then there's EMF we talk about. There's pain management. There's a lot of things that come into it, but those are probably my number one and number two.

[00:29:30] Luke: The temperature regulation is really interesting because I think it was many years that my sleep suffered from overheating and I didn't even know that's what it was, until I fixed it. Before I had an Essentia, I had the Chilipad, and the Chilipad came out and I was like, "What the hell?"

[00:29:49] All of a sudden I'm sleeping great. And I wouldn't wake up throughout the night like I used to. And then over time, I realized if I would travel and I didn't have that, I would sleep like shit. And then I started to identify that it was the overheating that was actually, if not totally waking me up, like you said, just being in that light sleep, not in REM, not in deep sleep.

[00:30:09] And then I started thinking about, well. So I always think about how we got here through the evolution of time. And before humans invented beds, we'd be sleeping close to the ground, on the ground, maybe on some animal skins or whatever it was. But anyone that goes camping and does outdoor stuff, you know if you're sleeping with very little padding between you and the ground, the ground sucks the heat out of your body.

[00:30:33] People get hypothermia and stuff from that. So I started to piece that together and go, "Oh, this is why your body likes it." Because for thousands of years, humans lay on the ground, the ground gets colder after the sun goes down and it signals, like you said, it's time to go to sleep.

[00:30:48] Jack: And just think about non climate-controlled environments. We're in climate-controlled environments, so we're keeping a constant temperature 24/7. But at the same time, those are not the natural conditions. So what are the natural conditions? What we've realized is within these climate control areas is just allowing your body heat to escape as it should at night.

[00:31:12] Because your body naturally wants to do that, needs to do that, so that it gets into the stages of recovery for cellular recovery of all kinds of the body. So it knows what to do. Our bodies know what to do. I remember one doctor was talking. Our least intelligent part of our bodies are our minds.

[00:31:36] Because it's the only thing that has doubt and questions itself. If you scratch yourself, your body knows to send the blood over to heal itself and all that, but everything that we control with our mind is filled with doubt.

[00:31:50] Luke: That's true. That's true. I think that's why physical healing is much more automatic than emotional healing. If you have emotional wounds, they don't just disappear over time. You have to use your mind to consciously find a way to address them.

[00:32:06] Jack: And can you imagine that sleep is so important to emotional wellbeing as well, just because sleeping well will give you that clarity, that focus, that calmness to be able to make those right decisions. And I'm sure we've all experienced it. When you have lack of sleep, you have poor judgment, doubt, stress, all those things. It's incredible because sometimes when we repeat this, it sounds crazy to be saying that sleep is so important. It's obvious, but it really touches every single part of our wellness.

[00:32:45] Luke: 100%. For me, it didn't start to hit until I got a bit older. In my teens, 20s, even 30s, yeah, I go out partying all night. People tell me you shouldn't do that. You should sleep. I say, "You're crazy. I'll sleep when I die." And maybe like after 40, I started to realize like, huh. Wow, I'm really irritable today.

[00:33:06] I got brain fog. I can't think. What changed? And I trace it back to my sleep. And now, anyone that knows me knows I'm freaking obsessive about my, not the quantity necessarily, as you said, but the quality of sleep.

[00:33:19] Jack: It's an interesting thing when I look at, reverting back to some athletes, very few athletes that I work with are really young, but I do work with them. And the ones that come to us that are 18, 19, 20, they're actually superstars because they're thinking about all these little details almost at a preventative nature and always wanting to thrive.

[00:33:44] And I almost see the difference of the top five superstars in any sport will be thinking of this at a very young age. The top 25 a little bit later. In the whole hockey world, the fourth liners, they start to think about in their 30s when their career looks like it may be coming to an end. But it's just an interesting thing, but I think me and you are both late bloomers when it comes to that. We've too much cigar smoking early on.

[00:34:16] Luke: What about things like dust mites and mold and the creepy crawlies and things like that? I haven't looked into it too deeply, but I've heard things about how some materials are more prone to mold and also this dust mite issue where if you're using a wool-based comforter that has a lot of the lanolin oil in it, it'll stop dust mites and stuff like that from reproducing. And I haven't looked too deeply into it, but maybe talk to me about bugs and mold.

[00:34:54] Jack: Generally speaking, because that's a huge issue as well, the main thing when it comes to the dust mites is really allergens more than the idea of sleeping with bugs, which really shouldn't be a big deal other than the fact that their feces and corpses, because they're constantly dying off and staying in the batting of the bed, those trigger allergic reactions. Whether you're sensing it or not, you're giving your body one more thing to fight off, which is a reaction to protecting itself from it.

[00:35:31] People that have overreactions will have respiratory issues and hives. But the 75% of us that don't are still battling something, which means you're keeping your central nervous system a little more active. When it comes to dust mites, you don't want to have any batting on the bed, where the batting is that fiber portion that they have on top.

[00:35:51] So conventional beds are polyester. Organic beds will have wool or cotton batting. Now, the wool batting has an advantage over others because of the lanolin. But the lanolin doesn't last forever. It does dry out. And one of the big struggles with what you should be doing, back in the day, previous generations, going way back, would have wool padding on top. What they would do is they would remove it. They would wash it. They would wash it seasonally.

[00:36:26] Beds are not made that way anymore. If you're buying a bed that has wool surface on it, it's there forever for the life of the mattress. It's not detachable. It's not washable. You can't be taking care of it that way. So ultimately you want to eliminate the all fiber from the surface of the bed.

[00:36:45] And that's because ultimately that fiber, whether it's immediate, like a regular polyester or cotton, or a little bit later down the line, which is resistant a little bit in the early days with wool, ultimately, they become nesting grounds for dust mites. If you don't have that, latex is perfect because they can burrow through it. It's not an ideal nesting grounds, and they just stay away from that. So it's not attracting it.

[00:37:16] Luke: Wow.

[00:37:17] Jack: As a company, we're not just organic and we're not just selling to people in the know and walk our walk and all that. We actually also work institutionally. So everything we do has to be evidence-based backed. We do some work with the military. We do some work with institutional. We do things with professional sports teams, which we need to pass through the vetting process. So we had all this tested out years ago with Johns Hopkins, and they really did the whole analysis of our latex and why this was ultimately the best choice to avoid any dust mites and any allergens, including if a latex is not properly processed.

[00:38:00] You'll still get the latex in the proteins, and that can trigger other allergies as well. But we make sure that proteins have been eliminated in the processing. So there's important stages that you need to go through when you're making a product that you want to have zero stimulants to obstruct sleep.

[00:38:16] Luke: What about mold?

[00:38:18] Jack: Mold is more recent issue that I addressed-- over the last year and a half, actually.

[00:38:24] Luke: Is that because you moved to Florida?

[00:38:27] Jack: Should be.

[00:38:27] Luke: I never heard of mold until I moved to Texas. It's like every other person's like, "Oh, we're mold sick. We've got to move out of our house." I'm like, "What the hell?" I'm sure it exists other places, but it seems Texas and Florida are very prone to it because of--

[00:38:41] Jack: This was a very different experience for me. First of all, latex already is less attractive for mold growth than polyurethane. But I guess it's been about a year and a half now that I was part of a committee that was invited to be part of a committee just to understand some of the issues that the military has in different sites around the world, different environments, where sleeping environments for soldiers may not be healthy for them.

[00:39:14] And one of the things that came out was potentially mold. And so as I was sitting on this panel and listening to the issues, I realized, well, what can we do about it in an organic environment? So I got to work on that and I had realized we use essential oils in our foam. And if I just shifted over to higher acidity, essential oils, more in the citric family of essential oils, that higher acidity was even more effective than our regular latex formula to resisting mold.

[00:39:55] So now mold is not something that grows from the inside out. It's something from the outside that attaches on in. So there's nothing you can really do that eliminates it completely if it's there, but if you can stop it from multiplying through that acidity, that it's not growing and it's not completely taking over the space or the product, that's something that I was able to realize.

[00:40:22] How long has it been now? I feel it's been eight months now that every single piece of latex that we formulate-- we've shifted everything to a high acidity essential oil. And so everything has become more resistant to mold, which is huge, like you said, in Florida, but we've also been selling this for military use as well, which has been phenomenal.

[00:40:49] Luke: Wow. Cool, cool. Let's talk about EMF. So I mentioned these metal coils, which every time I travel and stay in a hotel, it's on a 10th floor or something, I just think, man, I'm right across from the cell tower. And you're probably old enough to remember this, those younger people won't, but back in the day as a kid, before you had a cable TV, you'd have antennas on top.

[00:41:16] And then, if you couldn't get a signal, you'd go to the kitchen, you'd get some aluminum foil, and you'd basically extend the length, or basically the surface area of your antenna and then you could get your extra channels to come in.

[00:41:30] Jack: I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm just kidding.

[00:41:32] Luke: I get the concept that metal attracts radio waves. And then when I started looking into the mattress stuff and also just EMF awareness, because I'm just an EMF freaking fanatic, as you know, I started thinking about the mattress. And having all these coils, it's not just that there's metal in there, but they're corkscrews.

[00:41:54] They're perfectly shaped to be conductive and to pick up RF in the environment. I don't know about electric fields coming out of your wall or not, but what have you learned, if anything, about that particular aspect of having a bunch of metal under you? Is my paranoia validated in any way?

[00:42:13] Jack: The thing is yes and no. The reason I'll say is that what these coils can do is almost create a coning effect, a spiraling effect. But not so much because that's going downwards not as much as the frequencies are coming upwards. So if it was coming upwards, then you'd get that coning going through your body as well.

[00:42:36] So you can have a little bit of that, but the reality is today's EMF issues have a lot more to do with wireless technologies, 4G, 5G, and everyone's streaming. And if it's not you, it's your neighbor. There's towers everywhere. And that information comes in in a very erratic way.

[00:42:58] It comes from all sides. So there's not a direct link from the cell tower to your phone. It comes in every single direction, because wherever you move your phone, it gets a signal. So that signal has to be everywhere. So that being the case, what we've been able to identify is what it does to your body.

[00:43:20] And we were able to see that on your blood cell behavior, when you're exposed to this erratic behavior of signals, your cells seem to clutter together. Almost looks like they're little caterpillars of cells rather than properly dispersed cells. So the theory there is that by creating these caterpillars of cells, you're preventing your oxygen from flowing as freely as it normally should.

[00:43:51] And if you're obstructing that, you're obstructing the repair and healing that the body needs to do of itself. So how we've countered that, because over the years, we looked at so many technologies, like grounding sheets, and grounding technologies, again, it's outdated because it still allows this erratic behavior to go through you and it doesn't stop that blood cell behavior from happening.

[00:44:17] So ultimately, we realize that our bodies need an organic flow. That organic non-chaotic flow. But we also realized that cell phone signals and all these streaming signals, they can exist in our organic flow. They don't need to be erratic. So what we've done is added quartz and informed quartz to our latex. That informed quartz becomes a dominant low-level wave.

[00:44:48] And when the cell signals come in, instead of coming in in an erratic way, they follow the organic flow. Our body's flow is not strong enough to overcome that erratic behavior, but the quartz in high enough concentration is. So what we've seen is that with our quartz in our latex foam, it does not have any effect on the blood flow. In fact, it's even more dispersed than it normally is. So it gives perfect flow for oxygen and all that. Yeah.

[00:45:22] Luke: Crazy.

[00:45:22] Jack: Yeah. So that's pretty wild actually.

[00:45:24] Luke: So are you just pulverizing quartz into a powder and mixing it into the--

[00:45:29] Jack: Crushing into a really, really fine powder, almost like a flour. That's how thin it is.

[00:45:33] Luke: It's so interesting because many people are fans oof crystals. My wife, I would say, she's not as obsessed as some people are, but there's a few around the house, and I've always thought they were pretty, but I've never had conclusive evidence that they have any magical powers. But I find them interesting because they're beautiful and that they grow.

[00:45:56] That's pretty weird. Rocks don't grow. There's something to them. And I keep a big quartz crystal in front of my computer monitor. I don't know. Looks pretty. I like it. But this might be the first conclusive evidence that I've heard that it's actually doing something.

[00:46:12] Jack:   It's actually doing something. And it specifically has to be crushed in such a fine powder to have a really high density and to hold basically a scalar signal that is overpowering and not creating any negative or any harm, but becoming that organic wave that we need to exist in.

[00:46:34] Luke: That's so, so interesting. So there's a coherence in the field that is being created.

[00:46:40] Jack: Right, exactly.

[00:46:41] Luke: Wow. And what testing have you guys done to validate this?

[00:46:45] Jack: Blood testing. Yeah. It's basically dark microscopy testing of blood cells, and we've had basically different genders, men, women of different ages, and we've tested it over and over again to see if the results were consistent, and the results have been consistent all the way through. Blood cell behavior from just general to during downloads and streaming of phone calls and movies and all that.

[00:47:19] Luke: So you increased the EMF in the environment?

[00:47:22] Jack: And then basically, with the presence of our mattress and see how the blood cells behave there. And in every single case, it was the same over and over.

[00:47:33] Luke: That's so cool. Years ago, I think it was around 2009 or so, I was at one of these health trade shows, and I used to love going to those things. I've hung out with you guys at your booth, so I just go meet all these inventors and stuff like that. And I went to one booth of this company called Magnetico. There's this guy-- he's since passed-- a really brilliant guy named Dr. Dean Bonlie.

[00:47:58] And he invented these unipolar mattress pads. They weigh a freaking ton, but basically, they go one direction. So rather than a magnet that has two poles, it has one pole. And so the idea is that you sleep on that and you're mimicking the magnetism of the ground that has diminished over time for whatever reason.

[00:48:21] So he's got these mattress pads, and you can get one that's 10 gals, or you can stack them 20 gals and so on. I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. That makes sense, grounding." I'm always thinking about how did things used to be, and how can we recreate that to be optimal?

[00:48:37] So I look at them. They're a couple of grand. And again, back at that time, I was like, "Oh, it must be nice." But maybe I could lay on it. And so what they were doing is they were doing the live blood cell analysis, and they'd have you lay on it. It was on a massage table.

[00:48:52] They dry your blood; you lay on it for 10 minutes; they dry your blood again and look at it under the microscope, and I'll be damned, I put one on my credit card right on the spot. I've been sleeping on it ever since because it was like seeing is believing. There could be placebo there, I guess, but I didn't know.

[00:49:09] There was no expectation of what the result would be. They just took some blood and they're like, "It's cool. You'll see afterwards." So I didn't know what I was supposed to see, but here's sample A. Here's sample B. And I was like, "Dude, I laid on that thing for 10 minutes. I didn't feel anything.

[00:49:23] Jack: Well, ours were blind tests. So the subjects had no clue, so they had no expectations. So they couldn't be in their minds and couldn't alter their blood cell behavior, which maybe is possible, but I don't think so. But they had no knowledge of it, so they couldn't do it.

[00:49:38] Luke: That's so interesting.

[00:49:40] Jack: This is one of those segments, though, that it's interesting because I guess it's been already, I'd say six, seven years since we've introduced this EMF protection. Initially was for the athletes because a lot of the athletes early on I'd tell them, don't sleep with your cell phones. Don't be streaming in the bedroom. Try to keep the bedroom into this healthy sanctuary.

[00:50:03] And I realized, That's the one thing they didn't want to do. Reason being, one player told me, he goes, "I've been away from home since I've been 15 years old, prep schools, and then going to college." He's been away from his childhood friends and family from the beginning. The only thing keeping them connected are those phones. So I get it. So that's what it was driving me to figure out what the solution can be for these athletes. And then when I launched this, the athletes all got on board with this.

[00:50:36] But for the general consumer, this is a little weird. It's a topic. But I've noticed that that's been changing as well. People are a lot more open to understanding that EMFs are definitely making an impact on us. And so it's been gratifying to see that we've been a little more accepted in the mainstream side ever real.

[00:50:58] Luke: I'm hoping it's only going to grow an awareness. I'm glad people are talking about Fruit Loops and stuff, but I'm like, "Dude, how many people have their phone on under their pillow or next to their pillow or have a Wi-Fi router in the room or in their baby's nursery and they have no idea?

[00:51:17] That's why I'm always talking about it. I know people that listen to this show are probably much more savvy on that. But you go to the grocery store, you'll see a guy with his cell phone in his breast pocket, like your t shirt right there, walking around with his phone on top of his heart.

[00:51:32] I'm just like, "Whoa, I got to keep talking about this. People still don't know." It's really, really important. So the blood cell analysis thing is interesting because I didn't realize that your mattress was doing that. But I actually just got a new Magnetico that's under my Essentia now.

[00:51:50] So my blood must be really moving because I have both of now. But I want to go back to the grounding. This has been a topic of debate on the podcast and elsewhere in this realm. It's grounding's always made sense to me again because we've evolved to always having our skin in contact with something conductive on the earth.

[00:52:13] With the exception of any animals that fly, every other living being is grounded 24/7 the entire time they're on earth. Think about it, anything aquatic, all fish, reptiles, amphibians, all mammals. Everything is always grounded. So it seems like God designed us to be connected to the earth. A few years ago, our dumb asses made rubber sold shoes and we sleep in a house and we're disconnected from the ground.

[00:52:39] So grounding has always made sense to me, and I've been doing it for ages. But the thing I realized is I used to see these videos of people with grounding mats at their computer or sitting on their bed and they'd have a skin voltage meter to test the AC current running through the body.

[00:52:56] And so say you're sitting in front of your computer and you're not grounded and you test your skin voltage. It's off the charts. You got all this electric field running through your body. And then you touch the grounding pad, it goes back to zero. And I'm like, "I'm sold. I'm going to be grounded everywhere."

[00:53:10] And I started doing that at my computer, ground in my bed. And as I started interviewing experts on EMF and physicists and people smarter than me, they said, "Well, the reason that the voltage meter goes down to zero is because your body is now the conduit. So you're sucking the AC current, the 60 Hertz out of the wall, the drywall behind your bed or from your computer. It's hitting you using you as the ground because you're touching the--

[00:53:36] Jack: You're channeling it.

[00:53:36] Luke: Yeah. And I'm like, "That's probably not good." So I don't know which is worse. The currents getting hitting your body and stuck in there is better or just allowing it to go through. I haven't had a conclusive answer on that, but my current understanding of grounding and what I practice is I only ground when I'm in an area that's shielded from electric currents. So like our bedrooms are Faraday.

[00:54:04] I sleep with a grounding sheet on there because there's no electric current. I hit a kill switch every night. The room's dead. My office, everything's shielded off, the computer wires and stuff. So I have a little grounding mat there. I'm still a little apprehensive about grounding when you're next to an electric field. Do you have any insights on that?

[00:54:24] Jack: Well, I guess first of all, when it comes to grounding, there's not really strong conclusive evidence of whether it's good or bad. So that's one of those problems where there's not blood work, there's nothing that we can approach on a real evidence-based side of it and say conclusively this is right or wrong or not.

[00:54:44] On the other hand, when you look at our bodies need power. It's always that untold part of our bodies, that energy, that spark, what keeps our heart going, what keeps everything going.

[00:55:00] Luke: We need electrons.

[00:55:01] Jack: Exactly. Yes.

[00:55:04] Luke: Which you get from grounding.

[00:55:05] Jack: So to me, what I feel for grounding is it feels good when you're meditating, when you're practicing. So to me, if you're going to do some breath work, instead of just doing it on the couch, take off those shoes, go on the grass and be connected, be connected to nature, be connected. I think it's got to do something.

[00:55:30] I don't have conclusive evidence that it's good. I know when it comes to Wi-Fi signals, it's not doing much there, but being connected to natural earth, it feels good. So there's got to be something that we haven't figured out that's doing something right as far as grounding ourselves.

[00:55:51] Luke: Yeah. The only real evidence I've seen is thermography where they take a heat scan photo of your body and you'll see all this inflammation and then you go ground for 10 minutes and then it's not red anymore. Now you're all blue. There's a lot of that out there, which is pretty compelling.

[00:56:11] And I'm barefoot in the yard all time. I avoid wearing shoes whenever possible. And that always feels intuitively, logically, like a good idea. Especially when you're in the sun and you're getting that radiation, you have to complete the current. I always feel weird when--

[00:56:28] Jack: Something calming about it, right?

[00:56:29] Luke: Yeah, I did it before you got here. I was sitting out in my side yard buck naked. I sitting in the sun with my feet on the wet ground. I was like, "Okay, I'm ready to podcast now. But there's something that feels weird to me about being in the sun wearing rubber shoes and not being grounded. To me-- again, I could be totally wrong. It feels like the circuit of that solar radiation is not being completed. It feels like stuck in my body. When I'm grounded, I feel the energy from the sun--

[00:56:58] Jack: Is flowing through.

[00:56:59] Luke: It's creating a circuit. Yeah. I don't know how you explain that scientifically, again. It's just a gut feeling thing. And just like, wow, this is what animals do. So anyway, I'm always thinking of just maximize. You make an awesome mattress, but I'm like, "Well, now I could add the magnet and then the grounding.

[00:57:16] Jack: Exactly. Why not?

[00:57:17] Luke: Chilipad. It's like I want to do 50 things because--

[00:57:20] Jack: Overdoing wellness is not a problem.

[00:57:23] Luke: If you're wired like me, I just want to try everything. And it's like, if these three things are good and we've proven that they're good and they feel right, then I'm going to stack all three things. I don't think everyone has to do that to be happy and healthy. But I just choose to do so for whatever reason.

[00:57:41] Luke: I always want to go to your factory. I want to see the big vats of latex and the essential oil injection needle or whatever it works. How did you start to work out the actual manufacturing?

[00:58:00] Jack: It started pretty basic. The very first one was almost like a kitchen. We actually had what would be a mixer that you would have in the kitchen. So we used to blend in a mixer, and if you figure, we were pouring about 150 pounds of liquid that we would froth up, and then by hand, we were dropping these into molds and then curing them.

[00:58:25] So the very infancy when I started Essentia, this was very primitive, but we were getting it done just to try to develop this one product that didn't exist right now at that time. But then we'd made our first major investment, was redesigning a machine that was normally done for plastics and all that and reengineering the whole thing to work with organic products that wasn't burning the organic products through the processing.

[00:58:59] So adding in cooling elements inside this so we can do a high velocity mix and injection into our molds, which we were doing those by hand from the injection heads to eventually a robot arm that was able to properly disperse the latex in a mold to go to baking and curing. And still how it's made today.

[00:59:26] Some of the exciting news that we have going on is we're working on our first American factory. Right now, everything's manufactured at my original factory just outside of Montreal. And now we're working on building a Boca factory in Florida.

[00:59:41] Luke: Oh, really?

[00:59:42] Jack: Yeah, so that's long--

[00:59:44] Luke: So you'll be next to your home.

[00:59:45] Jack: Yeah, long time in the works for there. Ever since I relocated 10 years ago, I've always wanted to launch a factory here. And I think we're at the point where our growth is supporting it. And we have a lot of interesting things going on. And this one will be taking that automation to the next level for quality control and from weights to ILD to everything about it, to RFID tagging, to know that every single component is right for the full tracking.

[01:00:23] Everything we do is also a tract from farm to bed to make sure where we sourced every ingredient from, make sure that everything was fair trade and everything is organic through the hands of custody from all suppliers. So it's pretty incredible process. We've come a long way from doing our best to figure it out to now auditing every supply in our supply chain to make sure that it's done all the way through.

[01:00:54] Luke: Where did the trees grow that produce the best latex?

[01:01:00] Jack: The latex is the latex. We choose to buy typically from Sri Lanka, is one of the favorites we have. The main difference that I find from different harvest is not so much in the quality of the latex, but it's natural. This is an organic product.

[01:01:21] There's some latex crops from certain countries that I find have a more pungent odor to it. And it's still natural, it's still organic, but it has too much of a latex odor to it. So a lot of the selections I have, and sometimes we blend from different countries as well, the sap, is ultimately trying to keep this as odor neutral as possible.

[01:01:47] And we do so also with our essential oils. Our essential oils are not put in for aromatherapy in the beds. If we did our job right, you can't tell what that aroma is.

[01:02:01] Luke: I've never smelt it.

[01:02:01] Jack: Exactly.

[01:02:02] Luke: Your mattresses don't smell like anything.

[01:02:05] Jack: And that's the point. They're not supposed to.

[01:02:08] Luke: Latex smell is a little funky. I'm not super sensitive to smells, but I have noticed it in the past, for sure.

[01:02:13] Jack: Yeah. So we want to try to make sure we're buying the organic batches that don't have that. And it's like anything else. If you're buying honey from one farm or another farm, depending on the soil, depending on neighboring crops, it can have a different flavor altogether. It's the same thing with latex. If you're not choosing what I choose to be, an odor neutral one, you want to make sure that the crops haven't picked up something in the soil that is giving that funk.

[01:02:45] Luke: If every mattress manufacturer in the world switched to natural latex, would there be enough latex trees to support that? How fast did they grow? Are they renewable? Are we talking like an oak tree that takes 100 years to grow before you can make a board out of it?

[01:03:04] Jack: No, no. It's nothing close to an oak tree. The question is, it depends how fast that transition has to happen. As of now, that would be a problem for everyone to transition to latex. But if we're talking about a transition that will happen over the next 15 years, then easily we can-- because the lifespan of the trees are long, they're constantly producing, so you don't need to plant new trees.

[01:03:32] You need to just plant those original trees and be able to harvest them. And like anything that's farming, every tree needs its break. So it has a season where it's not being tapped and not being harvested, give it a chance to restrengthen and rebuild again. There's a management involved.

[01:03:49] Luke: So it's like maple syrup. So we're not having to go and chop down a forest of latex trees. You just have to incrementally and seasonally extract and give them time to recover.

[01:03:59] Jack: Exactly. Yeah.

[01:03:59] Luke: Oh, that's interesting. Because I was picturing you'd have to chop them all down to get the latex out.

[01:04:04] Jack: No, no.

[01:04:04] Luke: Okay, cool. Cool. So is my idea of tree blood somewhat accurate? It's like a white goo that comes out.

[01:04:15] Jack: I wouldn't think that the maple syrup industry would want to call it maple blood, because that's the same thing. And it's harvested almost the same thing. The maple syrup is tapped in, whereas the tree is really between the bark and the solid part. And you see that in different plants. So here, what we're doing is we're cutting the bark and it'll start to, I guess, bleed. You're right. So it's not coming from the core of the tree. It's coming from the skin of the tree.

[01:04:47] Luke: Okay. Interesting.

[01:04:48] Jack: Just within the skin of the tree.

[01:04:51] Luke: Got it. So as I said earlier, when I first found you guys, it was way out of my price range as a broke musician or whatever I was at the time. But in recent years, as I said, all these other companies have propped up, and I get messages from people all the time, like, I know you like Essentia, but how's this other one and this brand and that brand. And I just said, "Hey, you get what you can afford, and any healthy mattress, even if it's a greenwashing is going to be a step up above your silly mattress depot down the street or whatever." You know what I mean?

[01:05:22] This is totally toxic. But last time we spoke, I addressed this problem with you. I'm like, "Dude, you're the Rolls Royce, and what do the people in between do?" And you were talking about launching more of entry level that were affordable. How many tiers do you guys have right now?

[01:05:41] Jack: I've actually taken a lot of pride in that, where even in our most premium product, when we look at our athletes, for them, it equals contract signing. So for them, price is not a consequence. We're still a very inexpensive mattress for them because they'll spend 10,000 with us, whereas they're being constantly solicited for a 25,000, 35,000-dollar mattress.

[01:06:10] But that being the far out of it, my focus is always to make it attainable. I want wellness to be attainable for everyone. So we have products right now that basically are under $2,000. So we are in the mix and we're proud to be there because I want to make it attainable. Especially with us working with military over the last year, our volume has, it has increased substantially.

[01:06:37] New factories, fully automated to be able to produce many of these. So we really are competitive. But we're also competitive because you're buying from the source. No other mattress you're really buying from the source who produces the latex and makes a finish mattress and you'll buy it from our website.

[01:06:58] It's direct to consumer. If our product had to go through the many hands than a normal mattress, we'd probably be triple the price that they are. So a mattress that you can get for, let's say 1,600 from us would probably be close to $4,000. If you look at how many hands this goes-- so if a regular mattress manufacturer right now, an organic one even, is buying the latex from a latex producer, is buying the cover, they're assembling it together, and most of them are then selling it to a reseller.

[01:07:33] Luke: Oh, so it's like a white label kind of thing.

[01:07:35] Jack: Yeah, exactly. So most of the brands out there, even the big brands you see online, they actually don't make the product. They're buying it from a white label producer who's buying the components from component manufacturers. So it goes through many hands before it gets to the consumer.

[01:07:50] Luke: There's a lot of middlemen in there.

[01:07:52] Jack: And that's where the coil comes in. It's so inexpensive to get a coil and it becomes that filler in a mattress. So if you have a mattress that has coils in it, it shouldn't be over $2,000. That's all misspent on whether it be marketing or whatever it is. All of our mattresses, whether we go to entry-level to our top athletic performance mattresses, they're all full latex all the way through. So it's a full latex score. And the thing is, we don't make a bad mattress.

[01:08:27] So my entry-level mattress is an award winning, best performing foam mattress recognized for years as that just because I don't make a bad mattress just to say, man, I made a lower price point. I'm just, how do I move the needle on performance? And that's what I'm interested in.

[01:08:44] At the very least, every single one of my mattresses need to be certified organic, need to be durable and long lasting, need to be hypoallergenic, so you're not going to get dust mites. You're not going to get protein allergen in them. That's a baseline for Essentia. And then after that, we increase the capacity of the pressure redistribution. We increase the spinal support. So we're adding on to it. But our starting point is the top end point for most brands. [Inaudible] get a lot of points for that.

[01:09:19] Luke: Thank you for doing that. I'm glad because it sucks when I talk about really great things on the show and someone listening is like, "Yeah, that's good for you, but I can't afford that." Because I get it. Like I've said multiple times here, man, I'm 50-- what am I? 54. I just turned 54. And it's like most of my life, I couldn't afford any of the things that I enjoy now in terms of wellness and things like that.

[01:09:49] But also, I wasn't buying Porsches when I did have money. I'd buy the 1,000-dollar mattress, which may be in the year 2000 was still a lot of money. And it was a lot of money for me, but that just happens to be where I like to invest my resources because I just want to feel as good as possible for as long as possible while I'm here.

[01:10:07] Jack: It goes back to my Uber drive here. And it's a shame where we say that wellness is a luxury and it shouldn't be. But I think more people's mindset are accepting that there is some value to add on to make an investment because that investment in your wellness trickles into everything, your overall happiness, your effectiveness, your ability to work well and have great relationships. If you can't be well, you can't thrive in any of those environments.

[01:10:42] Luke: Oh, totally. Yeah. If I'm ever sick, I'm a complete asshole. I'm generally a pretty chill guy, but if I don't feel well, man, you're going to know.

[01:10:52] Jack: That's a man thing though.

[01:10:53] Luke: You're going to know.

[01:10:54] Jack: Yeah. We don't perform as well when we're under the weather.

[01:10:57] Luke: I get cranky, man. I get cranky. All right. I want to let people know that are fired up by this conversation, we've got-- always look at my notes. Yeah, we got a discount for everyone listening. lukestorey.com/essentia, and the code LUKE gets you 100 bucks off.

[01:11:16] There's more. I want to talk to you about more. Tell me about any of the other research and product development you've done. I know you mentioned a couple of things you've done with testing people's before and after blood with the quartz infused latex and all that. Any other interesting kind of studies you've done with the athletes or anything you want to talk about?

[01:11:37] Jack: I think most exciting one has been my athlete one that was two years ago. We did a double-blind study with 75 pro athletes, and here we really wanted to tap in on what's the real impact we're having on REM sleep and deep sleep. So it was a 10-week study. So we were all in. They were all in participating.

[01:11:59] They all thought they were on Essentia mattresses, which is the beauty of it. I always loved that because, one, they know they're being tested, so they were in their best behavior. And you can tell, but that only lasts a week. Eventually, everyone goes back to their old habits. So you can see the first week how things were going well, and then things fell apart after week 1.

[01:12:20] But they do it whether they were on the Essentia or the other product, their habits adjusted to their norm. So after 10 weeks, they were all wearing wearables, and we were able to track their sleep. And the Essentia Sleeper had minimum of 20% and up to 60% improvement in REM sleep and deep sleep.

[01:12:47] So those are huge, huge numbers. I wasn't even anticipating that kind of number because you know what, for an athlete, if I can tell him that I can improve it by 1%, or 5%, or 10%, sold. When I was able to say 20 to 60%-- and that explained where I have some guys that we got them from five hours of sleep to five and a half hours of sleep. We weren't hitting those six to eight hours, and that could be frustrating when you want to be dependent on getting a good sleep.

[01:13:21] But then we've shifted towards this thing of doesn't really make a difference. Are you getting your REM? Are you getting your deep sleep? And if you're getting those, it's irrelevant if you get it over five hours, the proper amount, or five and a half, or six, or seven, or eight.

[01:13:36] So that's what we realized. That's a myth. Eight hours of sleep is a myth. It's the deep and REM sleep that makes a difference. And by increasing that by 20 to 60%, that's a game changer because now you actually don't need eight hours of sleep anymore because you're achieving it in six. And if you're there for eight, it's all good.

[01:13:54] You're just chill and relax, but ultimately, we've got your body really recovering at a pace that's never been done before. And that's what's really key. That's what sleep is about.

[01:14:09] Luke: That's epic. It's taken me a while to get over that brainwashing about the eight hours because I've tracked my sleep forever.

[01:14:16] Jack: Yeah.

[01:14:16] Luke: But I got this thing I was telling you about earlier called the Soltec. It's a magnetic conditioner. You put it at the foot of your bed. It's got a wristband wearable that syncs to it. And basically it responds in real time to your sleep. And this magnetic field, a healthy magnetic field, to be clear, not bad magnetic field from an EMF. Basically, the conditioner speaks to what it's getting from your wearable. And the research on this thing is bananas.

[01:14:48] So I was like, "Okay, cool. I'm going to try it." And also, I grilled them on the EMF and it turns out, I think, if you add up the total pings of the Bluetooth during the night, it equals one second total. I was like, "All right, I'm good for that." But anyway, moral of the story is I started using that and I'm tracking my deep sleep and I'm like, "Holy crap, my deep sleep is really going up." and it didn't really affect my REM, but definitely deep sleep. Maybe, I don't know, I almost doubled it. I'm getting three hours where I used to get an hour and a half or something.

[01:15:15] Jack: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:16] Luke: But I started freaking out because I'm only sleeping six and a half, seven hours. I could never get eight or nine hours sleep like I thought I needed. And then I started noticing, I feel refreshed though. I'm like, "I have hell of energy when I wake up and all through the day." But it's taken me time to undo that belief that it's the number of hours. And to your point, I can confirm from experience, it really is about the sleep architecture more so than the duration.

[01:15:45] Jack: Also, I would say, I don't know if you're looking at your results daily and all that, but you really shouldn't. You really need to look at it more as where you're trending over 10 days and not night over night, because there's a lot of things from something as basic as the sensor not picking up everything accurately to whatever you've eaten in a day, the stress or anxieties of the day. But you want to know how you're trending over a period of time.

[01:16:12] And if it's something of concern or if things are healthier, you're getting your REM and you're deep, those are important. And everyone's different just because these wearables, not every person is as well tuned with them because maybe the signal is too deep beyond the flesh of one person's physical makeup.

[01:16:36] So these wearables may not always be perfectly aligned with measuring what you have, but if you're feeling great and you're only getting your six, six and a half hours, you're getting it done, which is fantastic. So even if it's telling you it's at an hour and a half, it's likely at two. You're getting more though.

[01:16:54] Luke: I agree with looking at the longer term trends though, because there is a nocebo thing I've noticed. When I first got my first Oura ring years ago, it's like, I would look at it every morning and I go, "Ah, five and a half hours. Then I got 30 minutes of REM." And I think I would make myself tired because I would hold the belief that I got a bad night's sleep.

[01:17:14] And I thought, ah, I think I'm like tricking myself into feeling shittier than I need to. So then I'd only check it once a week or something like that. But what I like to see is when you look at the year. That Soltec thing, I've been using, I think about a year, and you see my deep sleep is just like hockey stick, man.

[01:17:29] It's amazing. So I go, "Okay, cool. I'm sold." I don't need to look at it every single day and psych myself out. Because there are going to be nights where it's a full moon or something. You get a bad night. And he might've done everything right. It's just the energetics of the planet are stimulating you.

[01:17:43] Jack: And then it gets in your head. I had a strength and conditioning coach that would insist those players not to be reading it because an athlete would read that he had a bad night's sleep, then be concerned that he wouldn't play well and ultimately wouldn't play well.

[01:18:00] Luke: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can psych yourself out. Yeah. It's a double-edged sword with all of this tracking stuff and the wearables because the mind is so powerful. Imagine someone rigged your sleep tracker and it said, you got four hours of deep sleep, three hours of REM sleep, and you slept 10 hours total. You'd wake up feeling like a rock star, even if it was lying to you just because you believe so deeply that you should feel energized and well rested.

[01:18:30] Jack: The mind is powerful.

[01:18:31] Luke: Yeah. Just like with the fake Cuban cigar I told you about earlier. I was like, "This tastes delicious." He's like, "Dude, that's a 10-dollar Nicaraguan. I just fooled you." All right, dude. Well, I think we nailed it, man. Thank you for coming back on the show, and thank you for doing something right. I love talking to founders and CEOs and creators that walk the talk and have integrity and make high quality things that really help people. So I appreciate you.

[01:19:01] Jack: Well, thank you for spreading the word. We really appreciate you and getting it out there. Thanks for having me here, though. This place is awesome. I appreciate being here in your home and all that. It's awesome. It's nice to see you here.

[01:19:14] Luke: It's nice. If you got to do work, why not do it at home?

[01:19:17] Jack: Exactly.

[01:19:19] Luke: Before we get out of here, what do you guys have on the horizon? It seems like you're the kind of guy that has a lot of creative ideas and keeps pushing it down the road versus like, ah, we have our three products. We're done. I'm going to sail off into the sunset. What would you like to tackle next? Or what do you have in the works?

[01:19:37] Jack: The issue there is that my team has to keep up with the constant changes, which it's sometimes exhausting for them. I feel bad at times because when I hone in on something that has real impact on wellness, I don't stop, and I keep drilling down into it until it becomes part of our product.

[01:20:03] Right now, I'm proud to say that our latest launch, which was not so long ago, was September 1st of this year, was our latest launch for our active formula foam. It's the best product we've ever made. And I say this with that ego that I can say that my product that I launched in 2006, no one else has even reached that.

[01:20:28] And I'm on my eighth version of this formula, this bed. And I do feel that the product we have now is by far the best we've ever made. I'm really proud of the team, really proud of what we've made. And I think I'm on an R&D break. It won't last long. It never lasts long.

[01:20:52] Luke: Famous last words.

[01:20:52] Jack: I feel like I'm on a break. Maybe it'll last through the holidays. I don't know. But right now I'm just like a proud father, just sitting back, looking at it, saying, wow, we pushed it forward again. And if you ask somebody if we needed to change anything a year ago, the answer would have been, no, we're great. Two years ago, no, we make the best product. Yet we changed it again this year and made it better. So we're excited about that.

[01:21:19] Luke: What do you think it is in your personality that drives you to continue to innovate when it's not really necessary in terms of just running a successful, profitable business?

[01:21:31] Jack: I don't know if it's curiosity. I don't know if it's obsession. I don't know if it's a combination of both, but as soon as I hear that there's an issue or a problem. When I was starting on the talk about mold, I needed to understand it. And when I needed to understand it, and then when I come to certain realizations, then I'm no longer happy with my product.

[01:21:54] If my product doesn't have something that I've learned, it bothers me. So I have to now figure out how to make Essentia that much better, even though others would have said it needed any changing.

[01:22:07] Luke: As you're talking, I'm trying to think of something you haven't thought of. I'm like, "There's got to something."

[01:22:12] Jack: No, don't do this to me.

[01:22:13] Luke: You got the EMF, the mold, the dust mites, the off gassing. There's no metal. It's comfortable as shit, but also supportive. If I think of something, I'll let you know, and your team can blame me if I give you an idea. But yeah, I honestly can't think of any other missing links.

[01:22:30] Jack: If you think of something [Inaudible] months off on R&D, so I obsess for a while.

[01:22:35] Luke: Yeah. I would say figuring out integrating grounding into it, but it sounds like the quartz crystal is having the same effect based on the testing you did with the blood. So it's like, well, that would be redundant. Someone's already doing the magnets.

[01:22:52] Jack: Correct.

[01:22:52] Luke: And that seems like a challenging business model because it probably costs as much to ship them as it does to make them. They're so freaking heavy.

[01:22:59] Jack: We even had to patent the design for our beds. You notice here, we ship and assembled here to be able to get our--

[01:23:07] Luke: Yeah, what's up with that? I was confused when a FedEx showed up here a couple of months ago and I was like, "We only ordered one mattress. What is this other thing?" I thought it was maybe, oh, he threw in a couple of pillows or something. And then the delivery guys put it together and they unwrapped the two boxes and the top pad zips on to the bottom, the thicker part of the mattress.

[01:23:31] Jack: So we do some really-- I couldn't say-- crazy oversized beds. We have some celebrities that buy 145 by 145-inch beds. They're just big monsters. And for the longest time, those needed to be in giant crates, and we'd ship them everywhere in these giant crates. It's thousands of dollars in transport charges, really hard on everyone building it.

[01:23:59] And so I guess it was a year and a half ago, I started trying to rethink this problem of transportation. And at the same time, I had models like the ProCor, which was an oversized overweight mattress. So I just came up with this design of how they can assemble and zipper together and finalize that.

[01:24:24] And now we're able to FedEx 145-inch by 145-inch celebrity mattress that we get going on. And it's easy to install and easy to put together and easy for the guys in the factory to put together. So that's what it's about. That was one more little obsession I had and a little problem to overcome.

[01:24:48] But yeah, not everyone knows that about us, but we make these things in any size at all. We ship them around the world, European sizes, but also oversized. And that's been a thing over the last few years.

[01:24:59] Luke: Seven-foot eight basketball player or something.

[01:25:02] Jack: I'd say, yes, we do NBA players, and they have the oversized beds, but the biggest beds go to celebrities, not to pro athletes, which is crazy. We have some people that--

[01:25:14] Luke: Probably because they have so many people in the bed at once.

[01:25:17] Jack: It's called a family bed.

[01:25:19] Luke: You didn't make any beds for P Diddy, did you?

[01:25:21] Jack: No, not [Inaudible].

[01:25:23] Luke: I just want to get that cleared up. I hope not.

[01:25:26] Jack: He didn't have any freak models there.

[01:25:27] Luke: [Inaudible] above board here. It's funny. I heard the other day, I think it was Donald Trump when he was on Joe Rogan. It was really interesting. He started telling the story about the first time he went into the White House or whatever, and there's Lincoln's bedroom, and Lincoln apparently was really tall. And so he had a custom made mattress. I don't know how tall he was, but he was like, "Yeah, it's a giant ass bed." I was like, "Oh, that's a cool idea." I'm 6'2, so I can fit on a normal king size. But yeah, that's funny.

[01:25:56] Jack: But I've had some shorter customers request the giant bed. Again, I know there's a whole family thing where people are sleeping more and more their children.

[01:26:14] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:26:15] Jack: So there is a family bed concept. More of the standard sizes in oversize that we do are either 96 by 96 or 108 by 108. But then some big-name people have come up with some major-- and again, part of it, I wonder if big homes, big rooms and a standard size mattress maybe looks out of place.

[01:26:36] Luke: How do people find bedding for these giant custom one?

[01:26:42] Jack: Custom bedding for it as well. Yes.

[01:26:44] Luke: Wow. Someone's living large. Now that you say it, I like the idea. A king's plenty big, but if the dog jumps on the bed, we don't have kids yet, but if they did, that would actually make sense. Yeah. I know people that have really big dogs. They're a couple and there are two big dogs sleeping in the bed. I'm like, "Where do you go if this one is in the bed?"

[01:27:07] We used to have a cat too. He'd be up there. It's getting a little cramped with four beings there. So yeah, it actually makes sense. Has anyone requested any-- I'm thinking of these Elvis and Liberace types that would have a heart-shaped bed. Has anyone come in with weird shapes or just different sizes?

[01:27:25] Jack: Well, we do shapes mainly for yachts.

[01:27:28] Luke: Ah, right, right.

[01:27:28] Jack: So that'd be in the shape of the boat and all that. So those are the only real odd shapes we make. Yeah, we don't have many requests for more glitchy type of things or anything, but yeah.

[01:27:42] Luke: I've always liked the idea of a big round bed in the middle of a room. Just a big circle.

[01:27:48] Jack: Yeah, that is pretty cool.

[01:27:49] Luke: I don't know where you put the nightstands and shit though. Oh, Cookie's excited. She knew I was talking about her. All right, man. Let's get out of here. Thanks again for coming.

[01:27:59] Jack: Cool. Thank you.