Transcript of Your Home Might Be Destroying Your Health (& how to fix it) - Michael Feldstein - #1173

So I've got a bunch of products here.

Okay.

That a lot of people will have in their homes that I want to get your opinion on. But first, before that, before we get to this, you walk into a hotel room, there's a street hooker, there's a bag of white powder—might be pure, might be cut, you don't know—and a potential mold problem. Which one are you most worried about?

Um, I guess I'm most interested—I'm most worried about the mold, man.

It's what you're most interested in that might be something different.

It's the thing I could least control if I have nowhere else to sleep that night. I could throw the bag away, I could ask the hooker to leave, but the mold is a little bit more difficult.

Yeah. I think this air quality thing is one of the big three areas in health that everybody's going to be interested in over the next few years. Air quality, mold toxicity, light pollution—those are the big three for me. I think water quality was a big deal, and now we're kind of getting to the peak of that. People understand any clean water. How did you get started working in air quality? What's the story?

Also, I totally agree with that, and I feel like some things are trends, but some things, once the awareness raises, they don't go back the other direction. Like, some things come and go. Red lights are kind of popular now-ish. Coal plunges. But like, in 10 years, I'm not so sure.

Agreed.

Water filtration—once you start drinking clean water and then you taste—once you get the water awareness and you can taste the chlorine and the lead and you become water aware, there's no going back to not drinking filtered water. And air is the same way. I say the only thing that is rough for people about breathing clean air is you might become an air snub, and that might make it a little bit more difficult to navigate Airbnbs and hotels and people's homes. So I got into this by being in the disaster restoration business.

Because otherwise you could just have bad air in the local environment. Like, if you'd taken an air quality reading during the fires, you'd have been like, the air inside's horrible. It's like, yeah, so's the air outside. It's just the same.

You know, you're not supposed to do mold testing, like, 48 to 72 hours after a rain, but no company adheres to that because it would—so a lot of people, they get mold testing. The results are in the millions. You look, it rained the day before. It's like, did they do a control sample? If they didn't, of course there's mold spores in the air. Doesn't mean your home is contaminated. It's just what was in the air that day. So we go in there, we check the outdoor air, very contaminated. After a bad wildfire, the air can stay bad for 4, 5, 6 months. Gets in the soil, it's the homes that are burnt, it's in the ash.

Let's say that someone's got their exercise and their sleep dialed in. How much could they be leaving on the table by ignoring air quality in their house?

Well, let's just anchor with this. You can go 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and 3 minutes without air. The first thing you do when you take a—when you're born, you take that first breath. The last thing you do before you die is you take that last breath. Out of the air, water, food are 3 big intakes that are keeping us alive every day. The only one we do when we sleep is breathe. And us humans are really good at getting acclimated to uncomfortable, toxic environments. With water, it's like, we're thirsty, go drink. You're hungry, go get food.

It's interesting. I think a lot of people will be thinking about the trait and the state. So what is it doing to my performance in the moment? And then what is it maybe going to accumulate to cause systemically, maybe there'll be some disease, maybe I'm going to get some biomarkers that are going to start to be bad, my long-term health's going to suffer. What are the big worries when it comes to short-term performance from poor air quality and long-term health impacts from poor air quality?

So short-term performance, we're really going deep down the rabbit hole, but here's a few—three big studies that were like, whoa, for me. And the fun thing about air is it's not really talked about, but it's massively researched. Like, if you type in, like, air quality, blank, whether it's fertility, asthma, cognitive performance, sleep, the, like, Harvard and MIT, the big universities who have done massive studies, it's all there. So they did a lot of studies on umpires in baseball. And, you know, when the ball strike happens and they show you on the screen and they're wrong often, and you're like, can't believe this is still a human thing.

Blows my mind that that sport still doesn't have some AI.

We have self-driving cars, but the umps are still manual.

Yeah, yeah.

So the quality, the accuracy of the umpire's call accuracy is directly correlated to the air quality that day. Two is grandmasters in chess. Game theory optimal means, like, the chess player is playing a perfect next move. The game theory optimal performance was dramatically affected by air quality. And so are SAT scores. So that speaks to the acute performance of your cognitive performance.

Wow.

So, and when we're talking about air, we're talking about fresh air and clean air. So you can have, if you think about being in, like, an elevator with 12 people going up a big building, or you're in an office, or you're at, like, a party and there's 30 people in a home, you're like, I got to get outside. That's, like, the feeling of stuffy. Stuffy means high carbon dioxide. The CO2 is high, your brain's not working good. So that's short-term. Same thing applies to, and, like, if that's what's happening to the umpire, what's happening to the guy throwing the pitch? What's happening to the guy swinging the bat?

Okay, well, just for the people that are listening, we have these sensors in front of us, an Aranet-4, which you kindly gave me. And this is tracking primarily CO2?

Yeah, that's what it's for.

Okay, so at 973, which is on the upper end of what's okay, but that means that if me and you start talking gibberish, we'll be able to look at the different component parts here and find out, oh, 295 parts per billion VOCs. Anyway, we've got lots of sensors and stuff.

By the way, I was really excited that the first time we came to your house to bring some Jaspers by, your whole house was nerded out. You already had another air filter brand. You had air monitors in all the rooms. So, like, seeing that offline, I'm like, yes.

Well, you're talking to someone who's spent the last 2 and a bit years of his life trying to regain his health after basically being infected with poor air quality. Like that, you know, the house that I was in previously, yeah, it'd have been stuff that was in the water and the pipes and all the rest of it. But this is incredibly personal to me, and I've managed to find, like, the grand wizard of air quality who just happens to live in the same city as me. So anyway, short-term performance, people are less accurate, their cognition is impacted. Most of this has been done on people that are doing cognitive tasks, but presumably when we get into physical tasks, emotional regulation, all of this stuff is probably going to be impacted too in the short-term.

We've Jasperized a lot of the city of Austin. So if you go to jiu-jitsu gyms and a lot of the gyms.

Dude, it's in Rogan's green room. Your filter's in Rogan's green room. I walked in the other day and I was like, oh, there it is.

And that one works hard.

I fucking bet, yeah, there's a lot of.

That one works hard.

Substances for it to, yeah, that's the Navy Seal of, that's the tip of the spear of air quality.

We texted him the other day, we're like, one is not enough, guys. We're constantly getting photos of that thing in the red all the time.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. All right, so what about long-term? What's happening to long-term health?

So the last thing for short-term, I would just say sleep. So we did, I'll be careful about my word, my usage of the word study. This was a community-led experiment where we gave 150 people Jaspers who didn't filter their air before. They were using either Oura or Whoop. And we did 1 month, so it was 4 weeks. The first week, no air filter, tracking your sleep. Weeks 2 and 3, Jasper on in the bedroom, fan speed 3. Week 4, Jasper's off again.

Those are using some sort of track, like a Whoop or similar, right?

Yeah. So the average person slept 25 minutes more per night, 18% deeper sleep, and they fell asleep 5 minutes faster.

So week 1 and week 4 would have been similar. Weeks 2 and week 3 would have been similar, but the change would have been up and then down. Dude, that's such a fucking cool study. I'm aware. Maybe it's not lab randomized controlled trially thing, but that's fucking awesome. We should do something similar to that. We should come up with a way that we could run a bigger version of that.

I'd like to do it in the spring maybe, when allergies are really bad here.

Oh, that would be cool. Anyway, let's come up with an idea. I think that's fucking sick. We should come up with a way that we can do that.

We will. So, and the cool thing was, so everybody had to give us their data, and they had to be okay to not be anonymous. Because I'm like, no one's going to trust the study if, like, you have to be willing to put your name on it. So it was men, women, all kinds of ages. Doctors, scientists, teachers. Like, we had a wide range of people. So that was the first, like, I like to, that's like, you know, a beta test study. Before we go into a big study, like, let's experiment it ourselves.

Cool.

So it's a big deal for sleep. 30% of people, once again, this is, like, our own data, stop snoring who snore. And of the other 70%, more than half of them dramatically reduced their snoring. One of my, like, man, when we started this, I never imagined in a million years. We get emails from women all the time being like, we were sleep divorced for years. We bought the Jasper because of some allergies. And now my husband can come back into the bedroom again.

Oh my God. You've saved the sex lives of a few hundred thousand Americans. That's funny.

So that's, like, kind of the short-term. Naturally, if your sleep, your sleep is the leading indicator of all kinds of long-term stuff. So, you know, with all the toxins in our body, it's like, our bodies are so resilient. We can handle stuff in an acute setting. Also, like, when we test the, in Austin, anyone who gets a Jasper, we go to their homes. They don't even know we're in Austin. But when they make an order, we either call them or text them, and we hand-deliver the Jasper. We test the air before and after.

Right.

So we test a lot of air.

Yeah.

And the coolest thing, Austin is a significantly, it's a big allergy season. Like, it's a thing that we talk about here, cedar fever.

Yep.

So a lot of people go to zero or massively reduced allergy symptoms. Because we can handle some mold. You can walk down the road when they're, like, paving and breathe, like, asphalt and toxins for a minute. When we test people's bedrooms, often the pollen levels on your pillow or in your bed are higher than outside. Because they come inside and then they stay in your house.

They're just so much to settle.

They stay there. They stay in the porous materials. Anything that can get wet from water can also be, you know, permeated by air. So if we have a sealed surface, like when I'm doing restoration, if we have, like, sealed wood like this, we can restore this all day long. We just wipe it clean. But if it's porous, like drywall, like carpets, like insulation, a lot of furniture.

Soft furnishings.

The bottom is unsealed.

Yeah.

And then that permeates. So anything that can get wet will also permeate by smoke. So you can handle some pollen for an hour or two in the day and not really impact you. The problem is you're breathing it in 24 hours a day. So when you can turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, right now the average home, the indoor air is 5 to 10 times dirtier than the outdoor air.

Wow.

When you flip it, I can tell you in your house, the air is, like, 10 times cleaner than the outdoor. So your home, it's called home. It should be this place, this abode where you come to, like, heal and recover.

What are the biggest concerns when it comes to air quality inside of the home? Obviously, we've got some things in front of us, like CO2, VOCs, mold, allergies. Like, what are the things that you're talking about? We talk about air quality. What are the constituent parts, the macronutrients?

Yeah, good idea. And this will incorporate some tips. Like, through this, there'll be some tips that you can implement immediately. So shoes indoors, very bad. The average shoe tested, 95% of shoes tested have fecal matter on them. Fancy word for poo. If they have poo, they probably have glyphosate as well.

Hang on, sorry, sorry, sorry. 95% of shoes have got poop on them.

Yeah. Because you walk outside, dogs poo outside. You never wash the bottom of your shoe, like, ever.

But how much is this? Like, surely this isn't an amount that could be big enough to cause an impact on someone's health.

But, like, a little poo, a little glyphosate, whatever else you walked on, rubber from tires, like, your shoes accumulate a lot of stuff out there. Then you're walking around your carpets. So then it's permeating into the home. And then every time you walk on it, you should see, like, I'll show you later. We do something called the disturbed carpet sample. We can maybe do one before I leave today. We smack the carpet with the particle counter, and it's, like, millions and millions of particles. So the same thing's happening kind of every time you're walking on it.

Okay, and what is that? That's, like, biological material?

It's a little bit of everything. It's everything from mold spores, dead skin cells, hair, pollution, pollen. So speaking of, like, the home. So we got the shoes.

Cool.

Cooking. Cooking's a big one. So even if you're using organic avocado oil, which I think avocado oil's not in anymore, but if you got good oil or beef tallow, beef tallow's still good. Grass-fed, grass-finished steak, still good. So even if you're cooking with great ingredients on a great pan, the high heat and the proteins create something called PAH, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So when I was testing homes after fires, we're always looking for hexavalenchromium and PAH. So even though those 2 things by themselves are good, the chemical reaction of the heat really contaminates your home.

Right.

So, you know, you smell the bacon on all the cooking, smells great, but even when the smell passes, those reactions are still embedded into your home.

Right.

And most people aren't using their range hoods.

And the fan extractor above the stove.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Opening windows or using your range hood is a good idea. Like, we've only started cooking indoors very recently. We've only created indoors very recently. Imagine going back 1,000 years ago and trying to explain the concept of inside. Like, we built these little Tupperware containers that we live in. The average American spends 95% of their time indoors. Like, we're, like, in these Tupperware boxes now. You know, mold doesn't really grow outside. Dust isn't really outside. These are indoor problems. Outside, we have the sun, the wind, the rain, the trees. That is, like, nature's air purifier that's taking care of the outdoor environment.

Cool.

We build these tight homes. We leave nature outside. So the problem is, the best example is if you think about a river or a stream flowing water, that's typically pretty clean water. But as soon as it stagnates, that pond gets the algae, gets the bacteria. Life wants to move. Water wants to move. Air wants to move. So we got cooking. We got the shoes. Then we have all the chemicals that we're using, the hairspray, the fabris, the glade plugins, all the candles, the incense, some of the stuff here. The other one is the building materials themselves.

Why am I not always suffocating inside of my house? I know it's not completely hermetically sealed, but surely the circulation, especially in a place like the UK where there's not a massive amount of AC happening, I would have just assumed that there's a, like, no airflow. Where's it coming? Where does air come from?

Well, let's think about a water bottle or a Tupperware container. We don't have to poke very many holes into it for it to fill up with water, especially when it lives in the water. Because also, how cool is this? They say the breathable, like, us humans, we need a very particular blend of air to survive. Like, a very specific composition. If we hike 10,000 feet or more, we can't really survive there very well. If we go underwater, we can't survive. They say if the earth is an apple, the breathable area is the skin on the apple.

Okay. Okay, that's interesting. So what about CO2? We talked about, like, some of the things that kind of particulates inside of the home, but this is you recycling the air yourself inside of it.

I think CO2, like, the way we have sports tickers, I'm walking around the airport or, like, the mall or down the street, I see sports scores everywhere. Like, the CO2 should be that present. Because.

I found this out this morning from the guys. There's people taking these Aranets through the airport and waving them around and being like, oh, I thought that I needed to be worried when I was outside. It turns out the airport's killing me.

The airplane too.

Wow.

So carbon dioxide, you know, us humans, we breathe in oxygen. We breathe out CO2. Trees and plants, they do the opposite. The outdoor carbon dioxide is about 460 to about 500. So indoors, like, 600 to 800, decent. Once you get above 1,000, it's okay still, but that's when the brain fog starts to kick in a little bit. At 2,000, now we're really going to start feeling it. And at 3,000, you're like, I'm exhausted. I can't think.

Just the ambient CO2 ppm has gone up by, like, 10, 20%.

Mm-hmm.

Wow.

And there's a huge difference between a 400, feels like, and 600 and 800. So imagine.

We noticed that, sorry for interrupting, we noticed that inside of the studio because we've got these things everywhere. And this, in order to make it sound good for everyone at home, you can see on the ceiling, well, no one else can see on the ceiling, but you can. There's all of these sound deadening panels. This is as hermetically sealed as we can, double cavity insulated from the outside. We go to Rogan's studio. He's on a floating floor. Like, you would get in Rick Rubin's music studio or whatever, the whole floor is double-walled off the ground so that you have, like, deadening so that you're not actually hitting the foundation.

So my commitment to you, and I'm very close. I'm probably about 2 or 3 weeks from a perfect solution. I've been speaking to everybody because we're building a little podcast studio in town. It's going to be called Clean Air Studios. You might have it before us. So what we're going to be able to do is put a little air exchanger all the way on the other side. Because what happens is, if we put the ventilation in here, that would ruin everything.

Yep.

It's going to go the opposite side out there and then pull the air slowly and quietly. So it will not impact your sound at all. And it's going to just be a slow, gentle exhalation. So that's our commitment.

So either that or I put a fucking rainforest in here and just have a shed ton of foliage and plants.

And then the humidity and the mold would take us out.

Oh, my God.

Well, look, okay, so this is something that I think probably a lot of people are maybe feeling. And I know that I did. Like, oh, is this another thing? Is this more burden for me to consider with my life? I am trying to avoid ultra-processed foods and seed oils and blue 40 and red 5 and colors. And, oh, my God, I got to go to the gym and do my VO2 max training and my HIIT and I've got to get strength in and I need to make sure that my vitamin B12's right. And now you're telling me that I've got this other arduous bit of homework on top.

Dude, that's why I have dedicated my life to this mission. Because I don't have or like to exercise willpower ever. I believe that your environment tells you how to feel. So if we hang out on the dock or in the mountains, good luck being stressed there. You know, go to a spa, you hear the flowing water and the gentle music and the nice light and the wood and the stone, you feel great. Go to a place that's, like, bright and loud and black and pink walls, a dentist office, like, you're going to be stressed.

No. And, like, is water one of those things? I don't want to be ignorant to water and still drink the hose water and still drink tap water. It was, like, a little bit of awareness. And I got a water filter at home and I change the filter twice a year. And when I go out, I buy a bottle of water. And if it's $7 for the glass one, I'll take that one. If I reverse osmosis, I'll add some electrolytes back to it. Like, easy. The majoring in the minors is perfect because people want to sell people stuff. So they make all these things.

Yep.

And, like, 0 to 1 is always the biggest step. Also, by the way, you can make an incredible air filter for $60 to $120 with Home Depot parts. Type in DIY air filter. Corsey Rosenthal box is, like, the most popular design. But it takes a few hours. The downside is it's kind of ugly and loud and it doesn't have a sensor in it. But I'd way rather people do that than buy a little plastic box from the store that doesn't work. So these 3 things.

I want to get onto some ways people can do this for free around the home. But I found this stat.

Sure.

99% of the world's population lives in places where air pollution exceeds WHO guideline limits. Like, how much do different cities compare in air quality? Like, everyone knows that Los Angeles has got smog, but how much of that smog actually sort of finds its way into homes and lungs? What about, I hear that Miami and Florida is really bad. Obviously, Austin's pretty. I don't know about the rest of the world. What are the more dangerous places in your experience?

So, you know, I used to, I travel now. One of my major considerations when I travel is air quality. Like, Mexico City looks like a beautiful place with big vibrant culture, but I'm not going to go there more than a day or two. And I'm going to be scrubbing my air when I sleep. Bangkok, Delhi, Beijing. Like, there's a lot of cities with bad air. Now in America, it's very regional, but everywhere has its problem. Like, you can kind of run, but you can't hide. So, yeah, Florida, you're dealing with a lot of mold.

Right.

Like, everyone's. The homes are built so bad. Also, they use flexible ducting here in Texas. I'd never heard of flexible ducting. You don't have rigid metal, solid sheet metal, mechanical.

Easy to clean.

You can clean it. If you try to clean the flexible duct, the rotor rips it open and now you can't even duct clean it anymore. Arizona, a lot of people moved to the desert being like, haha, I'm getting away from mold. I see some of the most mold toxicity in Arizona.

Why?

Two reasons. Number 1, all that desert sand used to be underwater. So there's ancient mold in that desert sand. Then you get the huboobs that blow through.

The what?

It's called a huboob. It's a dust storm.

Okay, I think Sydney Sweeney had some of that.

But also, because the relative humidity is only, like, 20% outside, it's so dry that you have no exposure to it all. So you get a little bit of a leak and then you have this huge flare-up. So some of the most, like, the functional medicine doctors that we work with that specialize in mold, Arizona is actually a hotbed. Not because it's in the outdoor air, but because you have this cool, moist box inside a dry area and you have a home that still leaks.

What about the Besta? Where have you been that's typically? Because I think about the UK and you're right on the building material thing. The UK, at the very least, our homes are built out of brick as opposed to wood and then cavity insulation with organic material that while it's being built, it gets rained on. And then it gets heated. And then it gets rained on. And then it gets heated. And you've basically baked in wet organic material into the skeleton of your house. And that's now next to all of this, like, fibrous insulation.

The best air I've ever breathed was Costa Rican rainforest, very good.

Okay.

Vancouver Island, very good. Also, I had my carbon dioxide detector out there and it was, like, 10% less than the rest of the world in the rainforest. That's why when you walk by trees, even, like, here on Ladybird Lake, like, soon as you go under with the trees, you, like, feel that cool freshness. Because, like, they're breathing on you. So it's like a localized air filtration system.

Do you ever see those studies done that people who grew, like, pumpkins, like, prize-winning pumpkins and watermelons and different plants and stuff like that, they said that singing to the plants caused them to grow more effectively. And then people realized if they did a study, it was just that people were breathing on the plants so much that they were getting additional CO2. It was so good. You could have just been like, but instead, you're singing them some beautiful operatic.

So the next test has to be breathwork versus song.

That's it. Yeah, yeah, that's the RCT.

Okay, so I want to show you some products that people probably typically have in their home.

They do have them.

So we've got incense sticks. How do you feel about those?

I like them outside.

Okay.

Yeah, you can't really combust stuff in your home and expect that not to pollute your home. So I like the vibes. I like the smell. I would not light them in my home. If I was going to, I would be scrubbing my air, opening my windows, but no bueno.

Okay. What about, like, bug killer and stuff like this?

No, no.

Okay, no.

No.

No.

Also, if you are going to use these stuff, yeah, we'll get to the other stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bug killer, no.

Okay.

Just read this stuff.

So hair spray, Trazomate hair spray, like, extra hold, stuff like that. Because people want to look good. They're going to have to use these products somewhere. You don't want bugs in your house, right? Like, how am I going to get rid of the bugs? How am I going to get my hair to look nice?

So these are, like, and also, we still want to enjoy life. We all have to make our decisions.

And again, not get so autistically obsessed with each individual small thing that we don't ever feel like we can move without killing something.

I feel like the sickest people I typically know are often the most health aware. They're perpetual healers. So they, like, heal something. It's kind of like a gift to humanity, honestly. They, like, figure out one problem and then they obsess over the next one. And the neuroticness, that stress keeps them constantly sick.

Yep.

They're always like, what is the thing to optimize? They focus on it and they kind of manifest it for themselves. What was an unexpected benefit consequence with Jasper? Because it has sensors on it, when people use their hair spray, it kicks up.

Yeah.

So it knows.

Every morning, mine goes mad at me when I spray my deodorant. It goes fucking crazy.

So depending on the products you use, if you're using better products, it will react less. So.

Oh, that's funny.

Yeah, so it becomes like a lot of, like, the low tox, non-tox influencers, they use their Jasper, has their little, like, which product is the most toxic.

Oh, that's funny. Okay, what about stuff like this?

But if you're going to use the hair spray and stuff, I would recommend if you can, do it outside. If you can't, open a window. And then if not, go in a bathroom and leave the bathroom fan on.

Okay, so this is like a bathroom air freshener.

I'm glad you pulled this one up.

Okay.

This is a fragrance.

Okay.

So everybody's got these Glade plugins for breeze. It's not about the brand. Fragrances.

Yep.

Get this. The fragrance market in America. So by fragrances, I mean the air pollution industry, the indoor air polluting. Fragrances, it's about a $7 billion market in America. Air filtration is about a $3.5 billion industry.

Wow.

So the indoor air polluting industry is double the air filtration industry.

You're outnumbered.

We're going to flip it. Nothing worse than getting into an Uber with the Christmas tree of death.

This is what I was thinking about. So that's from one of the guys that works here. That's from his car.

Ugh.

That's from his car. That lives on the vents. That's on the vents in his car.

No, who?

Kyle, big guy that was outside.

We're going to talk to Kyle after this.

Okay, you're not a fan of those either?

They're the worst. So also, fragrances. Like, I believe Dr. Sachin Patel taught me this and it's honestly changed my life. He's like, don't eat unless you're salivating.

Okay, what's that got to do with fragrances?

I'll tell you. Good question. So when you salivate, that tells your gut and your, like, that tells your digestive enzymes, hey, this is what's incoming. So get ready for these foods. That's why when you smell something delicious, you start salivating, your gut's like, yes, this is what's incoming. And then it's creating custom enzymes to break down the food. It helps with your digestion, your absorption, your nutrients, all of it. The way all of these smells work, if you have the hockey bag or the gym bag and you spray it with Febreze, it didn't clean the stuff. All it did was block your olfactory system, which is your smelling system, so you could no longer smell the stuff.

Surely the amount of whatever human blow-off from a smell is so much less, right? Like, I spritz some perfume or deodorant at the start of the day and it's 3 hours later. How much is left on my body? How much is that putting out into the world?

Well, in my home, as soon as someone opens the front door, I immediately know if someone's wearing perfume or cologne. Instantly.

You're kind of tuned to that. What do you think, what do you say to the people that say that's a kind of fragility, that your level of sensitivity now to good and bad means that you're less robust, not more healthy?

I love this. So I want to be highly sensitive, but also resilient. So it doesn't ruin my day. Like, you know, sometimes people are like, I used to, if I turn, like, it's dark, someone would turn on a light and I'm like, ah, no.

Yeah.

Huberman says you just ruined my next 4 days. Like, you screwed my week. Ah. And I would get, like, angry and like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There was an issue and then my reaction was really big. So now I'm like, let's turn the light off. Like, I'm resilient. Okay, Andrew. I understand that that's significant. I'm quite resilient. So it doesn't ruin my day. I want to be sensitive. I want to be empathetic. I want to feel my environment, but then also not be, you know, hit by a tidal wave.

Yeah, so you mentioned Febreze, and this is an interesting one. Like, fabric extra strength fights odors and fresheners. I think a lot of people, I certainly thought this for a long time. I'm like, all right, so if I've got something that's on my couch, that's on this rug, if I spray that, that is like, I don't know, getting in there and deconstructing the particles or something. Somehow, is there anything that does that or is it just straight up wash your shit if you need to wash your shit?

Yeah, wash your shit. Put it outside. The sun is the greatest UV light of all time. That's the best disinfectant ever.

Okay, so the dog comes in, the dog smells, the dog's on the rug or the couch or something like that. You would say, take the covers off and then.

Fresh air and sun.

And put them outside.

Yeah.

Way better than Febreze or something else. What the fuck else would we use?

Also, sunscreen, by the way. Think about this. If you're, like, on the beach or by the pool and you see someone using that, say, spray sunscreen. Number one, it messes up the plants and the water and everything. But if next time you notice it, someone could be 50 feet, 100 feet in any direction, watch when they spray, you'll smell it. So if you can smell it 100 feet in any direction.

Outdoors.

Outdoors.

Yeah.

Another way to think about that, let's say you take a red bathtub, take red, sorry, a bathtub, put 3 drops of red food coloring in, just like a few drops. Within seconds, the entire bath is equally distributed with the red. It doesn't stay localized. Air is basically water. It moves the same. So it just kind of contaminates the whole area.

What do we think about candles? Because I know that a lot of people like the idea of candles, candle light. This is a Glade limited edition warm apple and spices flavor. It's a fucking edition, I guess. How do you feel about candles generally? Can we have safe candles?

This is one of those, like, decision things. Personally, I do use candles. I love candles. I think they do some, you know, candle or no candle. I think no candle is the most optimal move you can make.

Okay.

But I mean, on the light side, candle's like the best light you could have.

Yeah, it looks beautiful. It's very relaxing. Good for the nervous system.

If you can find a really, really, very sexy.

Yep.

Candles and cuddles is the new Netflix and chills.

Very good.

So if you can have a beeswax candle, a really good one with a good wick, like a wooden wick or a hemp wick. So I've done tests before. There was something on our Instagram where we tested some candles and we blow it up beside the Jasper. So a beeswax candle is like a natural ionization. So I like beeswax candles.

Are there any companies that you recommend?

I'm still in the process. I've got, like, 25 different ones.

Okay.

When I have one that I can vouch for, I'll tell you.

Cool, cool.

But that's how I feel.

All right, let's go.

But extinguish the candle outside.

Okay.

The black smoke at the end. If you have, like, a little snuff, that's decent too. But I usually go outside and blow my candle out outside.

Okay.

Or, I mean, I'm pretty, I'm quite Jasperized. So if it's like your water's coming in, let's say you got city water, well water, basically you're pumping contaminated water into your house any way you cut it. So you have to filter it. Air is the same. Air is a little bit sneakier. With water, we can filter it in a jug. We can filter it. Like, there's one water pipe coming into our home. So we filter it at the point, the shower, the whole home, we got it. Air is coming in through all these different areas. It's a lot sneakier, which is why the way we have to air filter is a little bit different than the way we have to think about water filtration.

Who is particularly susceptible to air issues? I'm thinking older people, kids, immunocompromised. Like, is there an avatar of a person who's particularly vulnerable to air quality?

Well, if the average adult is breathing 15 to 20,000 times a day, toddlers are like 40 to 60,000 and infants can be like 60 to 100,000 times. Think about the modern birth of a baby. I would say the baby, babies and elderly.

Right.

So they get birthed in this, like, hospital with these bright lights and rushed around and beep, beep, beep, beep. And then they get rushed home and they're in their nice nursery, Instagram ready, fresh paint on the walls, lots of VOCs, bunch of toys, off gassing. This is really important. There's these diaper pails that people put into their nurseries. So you change baby's diaper, you pop it in this little airtight container.

Okay.

If you ever go into a baby's nursery, it smells like shit, significantly. Newsflash, if it smells like shit, it is shit. And if it's shit, it's bacteria. A lot of bacteria. So mom is trying to do everything for her healthy little baby. Meanwhile, the baby is being intoxicated by shit particles, shardicles all night long.

So you could literally just put that outside.

When my daughter Aria was newly born, I remember it was our first child. We were living in British Columbia at the time. Rachel, my wife, she was, we had this diaper pail. I'm not going to say the brand. They'd probably hate it, but they're all the same. And I'm like, yo, every time I go in there, I'm like, ugh. I'm like, Rach, I really think we got to put this thing outside. Like, the shitty diaper should go directly outside. And, you know, it was the first kid. Like, you know how many things I'm dealing with? And it was, you know, so it's convenient.

Optimizing the diaper pail is low down on the list of things to do. I need to try and keep this thing alive.

So I'm like, cool. Let's run an experiment tonight. I noticed if I try to make change, it's difficult. If I call it an experiment, she's really willing. So I said, tonight, let's run an experiment. Let's put the diaper pail into our bedroom. I'm going to sleep on the couch in the living room. She's like, ooh, no. We're not, I'm like, exactly. So once she realized we would never in a million years put the diaper pail in our bedroom, but our baby who's breathing 100,000 times a night with a developing immune system is breathing all this poop. So, hey, mom and dad, please take the diapers outside.

Yeah, and it's a free intervention.

Free.

Okay, talk to me about what ways people can improve the air quality in their home cost-free.

Cost-free. So let's start with the poopy diapers outside. Shoes off. Use your range hood. Range hood beating the exhaust fan above your stove. A huge one is use the bathroom fan is not for poop smell. The bathroom fan is for humidity. So I would recommend buying a switch. Like, you know, dimmer switches are awesome. One of the greatest inventions ever. So also, you can get a bathroom fan that has a timer on it. Like, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 2 hours.

Why isn't the AC system already fixing this problem? Like, when I think about, hey, I need to get more air into the house.

Yeah.

AC systems pulling air in from the outside. Surely that's the same as opening a window and it's cool. Like, I've heard of HEPA, HEPA filters, dehumidifier, all this stuff. Like, is this not fixed with people's normal airflows if they live in a house that's got AC?

One day, not yet. So I'm just going to call, it's called your HVAC system, heating, ventilation, air conditioning. That's the, think about your furnace and your AC. That's the lungs of your home is the way I think about it. When most homes are built, most people live in a builder-grade subdivision home or like an apartment. When these homes are built, these are built by bankers on spreadsheets. They're not sitting around and saying, how do we build the healthiest home? They're saying, how fast, how cheap, how many square feet, let's make them pretty, let's sell them quick.

Right.

I thought that would be the perfect solution. Pop it in the furnace, out of sight, out of mind, whole home would be good. It was loud and it was quite ineffective because what happens is it chokes out the airflow. So the system is only designed to move the air through it and heat and cool. So a lot of people during COVID, they're like, get the Merv 16s. They got these super intense filters, shove them in their HVAC system, and then their motors blew because you're choking out the system. So when you think about air filtration, you want efficiency and efficacy, which means efficiency is like how many particles are we stopping.

Yeah.

We're so aware of thermal comfort.

Yeah, you walk into a room that's 30 degrees or like even 25 degrees and you're like, oh, this feels a little bit hot in here. I'm not really too comfortable. You walk into one that's got 2,000 parts per million of CO2 and some VOCs in it and you're like, no, I don't know. I think I'm all right. And that will build up over time. So that makes total sense.

What's really exciting, man, the human body is the best sensor of all. After I had tested hundreds of homes from mold, I got a sense. So I could walk into a home and sense the mold right away. The same way, like, I like this party trick. You take five people, go outside, do it in the morning whenever no one's checked the weather yet, and you get everybody to write on a napkin what temperature they think it is outside. Yo, often everyone is, you could have five or six people, they're typically within one or two degrees of each other.

Pretty accurate.

Pretty accurate. Our temperature sensors in our skin are dialed in because we look at the temperature every day. And we've limited our understanding of weather and environment to hot, cold, cloudy, sunny, rain or no rain. But like, that's just a part of it. I want to create a weather app and we're probably going to do it soon where it's like, it's cloudy and it's cool, but the cleanest air in four months. Awesome day to go outside. Like, the weatherman is so negative. So when you start paying attention to the humidity, if you look at your relative humidity every day, your body instantly knows and it will affect you just as, in a good way, you'll become aware.

Fuck an Aranet, I just need you. I'm just going to carry you around all the time.

Well, once you've Araneted for a while, you might be calibrated.

Yeah.

If you were viewing a house or an apartment, what would you check before signing? Like what problems would make you walk away? What would consider you fixing it straight away? Like a lot of people are going to be thinking, going into a new apartment, going into a new house, oh my God, like this feels like I need to be something that I really care about before I get in there. How can they effectively and efficiently work out whether or not this house is going to be good for them from an air quality perspective?

So in 2014, I got certified as a home inspector because I was interested and I was, by the way, it was like an online course I did in three or four days. By the way, getting certified in flood, fire, and mold, it's a two-day course. So you think the mold professional is coming to your house? They didn't go to mold university for a year. They did a two-day course for like $500 and a little room with an easy test. That was to get certified in all this remediation stuff. So the certifications mean absolutely nothing.

Right.

Typically, if you look at a home inspection note, there's exclusions in there. It says, we're not looking for anything environmental, no mold, and typically no roof stuff. So you're paying $400 to $1,000, maybe $2,000 to get a thorough home inspection, and they're only looking for something that's going to hit your wallet in the next couple of years. How old's the roof? Is there a crack here? Does the GFCI plug work or not work? But like, your home could be infested with mold and they don't even mention that part. They're not even trained to look for that. So red flag number one, if you go into move into a home, if there's any plugins and scents and fragrances, you have to demand a re-inspection.

Yeah.

So.

And how expensive is it going to be to try and fix your health if you go in somewhere that ends up hurting you?

The most?

Two years. I mean, for me, incredibly expensive, incredibly effortful. Are old homes worse when it comes to air quality? New, old?

They can be. When I was doing a lot of air quality testing, about a third of the work we were doing was, you know, have you ever, like sick building syndrome was the idea of the home making people sick. It was more thought of in commercial buildings where absentee rates would be high and performance would be down. And they realized, Harvard did a study by Dr. Joseph Allen that showed that the cost of optimizing your employees' health and environments massively outweighs having absent sick team. I think a home is the exact same.

Yeah. Yeah, it's the most efficient way that you could do that. Okay, what are some things or what are the best assessments for home air quality? Let's say that maybe someone really cares about this or they're working on their health at the moment and they think, okay, I've got some money to be able to spend on this. What's the gold standard? I've heard about Erme tests. We've had a bunch of those done. What's good? What's not good? What should people go for?

I wish I had a good simple answer here. It's a little bit nuanced because on one hand, mold is the real deal. Like it can make you really sick. It can really impact you. But the mold industry, there's two words that they use. And this was actually 10 years ago. They called it the mold rush. And that was nothing compared to now. And mold is gold. Think about it. If you're like a contractor and you're demolish, if you're a demolition contractor, gutting a bathroom before a remediation, before like you get a new fancy bathroom, it's about $1,000. If there's black mold on that bathroom, it's $10,000.

Because it's more comprehensive.

It's more scary. The only difference is about four hours in preparation time. You put in a scrubber, you use some antimicrobial. The labor is like three more hours of labor and like $50 more in materials. But.

One feels like it's been a nuclear spill and the other feels like somebody's choosing to put new tiles in.

Yes. So a lot of contractors got into the mold game. Then as mold awareness goes, what happens? The functional medicine doctors are inundated with people coming in for mold stuff. So then they, a lot of companies pop up doing urine testing and blood testing and a lot of them.

The mold co. Ariana from the mold co. Go to the mold co. That's the company in America that you need to use.

She's the best I've seen by far.

Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone is thinking, I want to do the testing for my body, that is the mold co. They do testing and the therapeutics and they'll help you go through your detox protocol. She's following the shoemaker protocol. She's got the scientists that were the initial like padawans of the main guy that came up with the main most evidence-based mold detox protocol on the planet. She's awesome. So friend of the show.

Yeah. I like her too. So some industries, for whatever reason, they get this conflict of interest label on them where it's like the home inspector shouldn't be the contractor or the mold inspector shouldn't be the remediation guy.

Perverse incentives.

But you go to the accountant, you go to the lawyer, do you have a problem? Yes. You go to the mechanic. So with, but the eye doctor doesn't sell you the glasses. For whatever reason, but it ultimately comes down to trust. I actually, the best mold inspectors are the remediation guys. Because they actually remove the stuff. Like you go to a surgeon to check you out. There's not this whole other industry that's like, let's see if you need surgery. I don't do surgeries, but I'll just check.

Is there anything that you can say around how to work out if a home inspector is of quality or not? Because I understand these are a bunch of warnings, mold rush, gold rush thing.

Yeah.

This is why the industry might be a little bit perverse in its incentives, but is there anything that we can say about like how to assess the people that are doing the assessment?

And the good thing here, this is not a big ag, big pharma, evil cabal situation. This is a road to hell paved with good intention situation. I don't think there's really bad actors in this space. The functional medicine docs just trying to get you a good test. And then they're like, get your home tested. Then you have someone come and wave their wand who did their two-day mold course, thinking they're doing their job great. It rained yesterday. You got the mold. Let's start gutting everything. So it can be alarmist. And then some of the tests, like some of the tests were designed. So Erme, for example, it's a good test, but it's designed to be kind of alarmist and it's checking your dust.

BPAs.

You got some of it. So like, ah, I got the mold. And sometimes you feel relief. You're like, I finally found the thing. But this is not an absence, presence, black or white binary thing. It's like, that's where mold co is actually great. It's like, what species? How much? Let's test again. It's pretty cost effective too. So I think it's, the industry is working its stuff out. I think if you are buying a home, I think actually calling a couple remediation contractors to take a look could be good. Hopefully, you know, it's all like, how do you know which contractor is good?

Probably, at least for me, what I did was I put a, and I'm lucky because I got people to follow me or whatever. I asked some friends, I put a story up on Instagram, but where I found them was I asked a bunch of friends and I was like, hey, does anyone know good mold remediation? Asked, asked, asked. And Toolman, there was this company in Austin came up a bunch of times, had a conversation with them. He was very highly booked and managed to find time. I was like, hooray, that was good. All right, talking about Jasper, you, I guess, took what you found when doing the salvaging of homes and then tried to make that more commercially available.

Yeah. So we call Jasper an air scrubber, not an air purifier. The reason that is, it's kind of like saying a Yukon Denali versus a Honda Civic. They're both cars. They're both vehicles. They have four wheels. They have windows and doors and airbags. But like one's designed to commute a couple around the city and put a bag in it. The other one will take your kids, take your stuff, be safer, look good while doing it. You know, golf carts and pickup trucks. One can pull your boat, one doesn't. So the scrubber is like the industrial grade air purifier.

Would you have designed something that was significantly uglier if you hadn't had your wife's input, do you think?

I would have just used the scrubber.

Right. Yeah.

It wasn't, yeah. And people, I would keep the scrubber in the basement and people would come home and be like, whoa, it feels different in here. But like, she's like, but it's loud and but it's ugly. We need to get this thing out of here. So it's the combination of, I like aesthetics. I also think, speaking of design trends or health trends, I think design is actually a health trend. I think when things look good, you feel good. Aesthetic matters. And so making something that is beautiful, that's inconspicuous, that's smart, that's quiet, no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, no EMF. I didn't do any focus groups. It was for the mold man.

Wow.

And I originally created them just for wildfire smoke. So I figured, hey, it'll be summer, there'll be smoke, we can go there, help. And then COVID happened. So what ended up happening is they mandated in Ontario that every dentist needed an air filter in every room to open their doors for business again.

Wow.

So it was a requirement in Ontario, but based on the airflow would determine the time between patients. So if you had a little air purifier, you were an hour between patients. If you had a Jasper, you were eight minutes. So it became, the dentist would pay it off in one day. So then our first thousand customers, our first thousand, we were called Jasper Medical when we launched because we launched to the dental industry during COVID. Didn't see that happening. I had 50 sitting in my garage. I'm like, I just wanted them for like my grandparents and my family. I'm like, I saw the impact for me.

Next guy can come in.

Yep.

I've been cycled through a variety of machines. I've got Jasper's all over the house. Thank you for helping me to keep my house clean. But I'd gone through the bedroom machine. That was kind of interesting, but really, really loud and pretty ugly. I'd been through, what's the Aqua True?

Air Doctor?

Air Doctor. I'd been through those. That was like, you know, okay, it seems a little interesting, but it feels like more of a one-stop shop to go to Jasper.

We did an air test at your home on video of those other filters.

I wasn't there.

You weren't there, but it's on video. The air coming, because we have hundreds of these on video, we tested the air coming out of the other machine. It was the exact same as the ambient air.

It wasn't cleaning anything.

It wasn't cleaning anything.

Brilliant. Okay. I had a lot of very expensive hair dryers floating around. Where should people, let's say that someone's like, all right, I think this is important. It feels to me like I've got maybe some sinus stuff, maybe some allergy stuff, maybe some mold stuff, and I want to, I'm going to believe that air quality is important. Where do you prioritize putting air purifiers first or air scrubbers first? Like what's the first place that you put a Jasper?

Well, our logo is kind of, the A is a tree that kind of looks like a mountain because the long-term vision for these products should not exist. If we build homes good and we don't pollute so much, we won't need these things anymore. The real air filtration is the trees. I like it because I want clean air in my bedroom for sure. To me, clean air, clean water, clean food, good lighting, I'm good. I don't do the other stuff. I take a sauna occasionally. To me, it's a no brainer. If anyone goes and hears the first 20 or so podcasts I did, I didn't mention Jasper one time.

Yeah.

So I like, so we designed the, and by the way, we only make one thing. It's called the Jasper. No small one, no big one, no water. We are radically obsessed with one thing. And as we, you know, we're on like our fifth filter. So every six months, a new filter comes. Like, whoa, that looks different. Because when you only do one thing, you can just keep making it better and better and better and better and better. So I think given the current state of the off-gassing in the homes and the mold, it's like a really good 80-20 or a 95-5. If you care about aesthetics and service, and then the way we designed the thing is, well, the thing I'm honestly more proud about than how Jasper works, like I'm so proud of the team, man.

So you'd prioritize bedroom.

Prioritize bedroom. If you're getting one, put it in the bedroom. Yes.

Right. Does it have to be near you?

Nope. It can be anywhere in the bedroom. Air don't care. You can put it in the corner. It's round. The reason that we made it a cylinder is because it's 360 degrees. If you have a boxy machine that's taking in the air on one or two sides, if you read the manual, it's like you have to keep it like one or two feet from the wall, which puts it in the middle of the room.

So it slots up against the corner.

Corner, wall.

Okay. So if bedroom's number one, where's number two?

It's where you spend your time.

So typically bedroom is where people start their journey. If someone's like, you know, money's not a big issue, I'm in. They put one per bedroom and they put one in their living room. The bedroom ones, they keep on dark mode. They run it on a high fan speed setting. The one in the living room, they keep it on smart mode and that's it. But if you're starting with one bedroom, anywhere in the room.

What about kitchen? Because you said about the, I guess most people know.

Nowadays the kitchen living room is kind of merged. You don't have to put it beside the stove. Just kind of put it anywhere in that space. Some people put one in the home office. So, you know, we're going to do that sleep study next year. The other two studies that are so important, I think about Jasper like a lab. It's like, let's just put our money where our mouth is and prove stuff. So the other two studies that are so important to me, hopefully we can get this done is number one, we want to work with some big companies and put Jaspers into 50% of the employees' bedrooms, even if it's like a work from home environment.

Okay.

Because we want to measure the performance and the absentee rates. For $2 a day, if we could create a program, man, I moved to America four years ago. I still don't understand all this Blue Cross and this health insurance stuff. Like we're paying thousands, the team's paying thousands. Don't really know how it works. They're still getting medical bills. But like, why not just like put that money into something that actually will change their life that people can see and that they can feel. So a lot of the businesses we do work with, they put them in, they gift one to all the team at home. And like the team feels it. It's good for morale.

Putting one in the fucking office would be a good idea if you've got some shared working space, co-working space.

100%. Jacko's team, Echelon, all 54 employees have one in their bedrooms at home. So I think it's like a no-brainer.

Cool. Where should people go if they want to find out more?

If you want to find out more, so today is someday. So what we're going to do is from today for the next two weeks, we're going to put a site-wide discount to, you know, to me it's all about air awareness, but I know I've only made a lot of my big health purchases, whether it's like an eight sleep or whatever. I wait for Black Friday.

When does the discount?

Discounts get me going, even though like the $50 and the $300, but like I want to get a deal. So I've learned that that really matters for myself. So what we're going to do is today, the day the podcast drops, for the next two weeks, we'll have a $300 site-wide discount on jasper.co. So no discount codes, no nothing like that. J-A-S-P-R dot C-O. By the way, this is going to be our Black Friday discount is kind of the only time we do a sale, except for when there's wildfire smoke, we do them locally, but Black Friday is $300 off. A couple of years ago, we were sold out for three months.

You did take me around the school.

So it's done. The school opened two weeks ago.

Okay.

We got Jaspers in every class. So in Finland, they did a study a couple of years ago. They put air filters in 50% of the classrooms. Absentee rates drop by about 30% in teachers and students. So we're using the school, it's called Kindling Academy here in Austin, has a living lab to show schools. If we put clean air, clean water, natural lighting, non-toxic products, and the kids are outside, next year we're trying to get some organic food. How much will these kids thrive? And public school systems in America are funded based on attendance. So there's these truancy laws. You want to go on a trip for two weeks, you kind of can't.

Do you ship internationally?

Oh, thanks for asking. So right now, as of today, we're only in the US and Canada. But before, and hopefully by, not hopefully, it's happening, by the last week of October or the first week of November, we will also be in the UK and Australia. Yeah, because of you.

Thank you. Well, look, dude, you know, between you and Ariana and Matt Cook over in San Jose and Gabrielle Lyon and her guys, like this is kind of the tailwind of the journey that I've been on over the last two and a half years. And like, you know, I don't want anybody to have to go through the challenge that I did, but I also know that in smaller doses, people are being insulted by their environment, by toxins, by, and to the people that aren't ill or don't know somebody that's been ill, a lot of it can almost sound like talking about ghosts.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, this is like woo, it's sort of like this weird invisible spiritual polygasty thing. Maybe it's an oversensitivity. Maybe it's optimizing majoring in the miners. Like, bro, I know the difference that it had to my health. And there are certain people out there whose physiologies are just more sensitive to what's going on around them. And if that's you or if that's someone that's in your life, you really, really need to look at this stuff carefully. And you can get a good RO desktop, tabletop, like water purifier for like 200 bucks, 250 bucks, and that's it.

And if the mold's impacting you or the allergens, it's not because you're eating it or drinking it. Like the environmental stuff, you're breathing it.

Yeah.

So if you can filter the stuff out, you will feel way better.

This stuff's a, it's a big deal for me, man. And I appreciate all.

Sleep better, breathe better, feel better.

I appreciate all of the effort that you've gone through to try and create something that helps people to be more healthy.

We're just getting started.

It's a big deal for me. Dude, I want to see you take on the fucking AC industry. I know that that's on the, in the future, it's somewhere on the horizon for you as well. I think that that would be a huge solution, but I appreciate you. I fucking love Jasper. I use them all. And hopefully we've educated people. I don't want people to be scared, right? Like look, air quality, yes, it's a big deal that you should think about. There's free ways to do it. There's ways that you can mitigate the problems. And then if you want to.

It's the laziest way to be healthy.

Unreal.

All right. Thanks, man.

Mike Feldstein.

Really appreciate it.

Appreciate you too. Goodbye, my beauties.

Dude, yes.