When a workday goes badly, we blame the coffee or the sleep. Almost nobody blames the room. But the air quality, temperature, and noise around you have a measurable effect on how well you think and make decisions.

Alex and Moah recorded this episode with a CO2 monitor in the booth and watched the number climb while they started having trouble finding words.

Harvard's Joseph Allen put office workers in a controlled office and dialed the air quality up and down. Cognitive scores were 101% higher with enhanced ventilation, and dropped 50% at 1,400 ppm of CO2, a level plenty of bedrooms and conference rooms hit routinely. A modest rise in fine particle pollution made expert chess players 26% more likely to blunder. Students in dorms without AC performed 13% slower during a heat wave.

Air, temperature, and pollution have an ideal ran ...