Could This ONE Simple Change Fix Your Sleep Forever?, Making Schools Healthy Again, and Why Your Air Filter Probably DOESN’T Work Right With Mike Feldstein.

Ben Greenfield: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of The Boundless Life Podcast, a lot of people, as soon as they put Jaspr in their bedroom, snoring immediately stopped, like forever. They just stopped snoring. My favorite stories were husbands and wives who haven't shared a room in five or six years because the husband's snoring and they're sleep-divorced; they pop a Jaspr in the house, no more snoring, and they're sharing a bed together again. So is there a link that you know of between snoring and sleep apnea?

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Everywhere I go in the US, I have an air filter shipped to my hotel room. It's that important in terms of cognition and health, and combined with the fact that a lot of hotels and Airbnbs are notorious sources of mold and mycotoxins that can ruin your life for years to come, I don't mess around. The air filter that I use is called Jaspr. It's the same one I have scattered around my house; I've got five of them. It is basically the Tesla of air filters, and today we are talking to the founder of Jaspr, Mike Feldstein. All the show notes will be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/jaspr2026. Let's go talk with Mike.

My pleasure, man. I've been thinking about doing this more formally, like a clean air sponsorship of some kind. Imagine, anytime you're going to a hotel anywhere in the country, you or your assistant just flips us an email, and whenever you arrive, there'll already be a Jaspr in your hotel room.

Oh, well, I've thought beyond that. I mean, it's a great idea, but for the fringe 0.000001% of the population who walks into a hotel room or Airbnb and thinks not just about air, but about the light bulbs and the lighting, about the electricity, the Wi-Fi, about wanting to have maybe a PEMF mat or grounding mat to sleep on, maybe a little countertop reverse osmosis system, or a bunch of glass-bottled water, some type of travel environmental setup where someone could literally go to a website, click, and say, "Here's my hotel, I'm checking in, I want to walk in there and have air, light, water, and electricity all optimized." I mean, it would be a bit of a fringe business, but I feel like there could be at least a thousand true fans who would use it.

Mike Feldstein: So I actually thought about that, and I'm like, this is a big lift for me. But what I am doing now, Jaspr is going to be in a lot of hotels in the next several months. We've been building relationships with a lot of hotels, and they're all looking to start building out wellness suites. I'm consulting and advising on this. These are really nice hotels. So we're working to have exactly what you said, Jaspr in every room, water filtration, no ambient lighting, high-quality non-toxic linens and bedding, red lights, and so forth. They're going to be building out these wellness suites, and we'll have a directory online, so in all the cities you're used to going to, there'll be a hotel with a bunch of wellness suites. And they're trying to prove it out. Some hotels are going further, there's a proper hotel being built in Lake Tahoe right now, and they're intending to make the entire hotel like this, including the minibar, everything non-seed-oil, gluten-free, high-quality snacks. So this is happening.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I love the idea. I've also consulted with some different hotel chains and people in the hospitality sector who are building out suites or rooms to accommodate exactly what you just described. At the same time, I think, there are still so many hotels that aren't going to add a new suite or care about doing any of that. But it'd be nice if somebody traveling could say, "Hey, I'm staying at Motel 8. I know the room's going to be crappy, but when I show up I still want four big boxes with everything I need to optimize my environment."

Mike Feldstein: If anybody out there wants to do this business idea, call me, and we will be your clean air partner to test it out.

Ben Greenfield: Leave a comment at BenGreenfieldLife.com. I'm too busy to set it up myself, but we've got to start that business. I will totally support it, send traffic, and be a user.

Hey, is it true, by the way, that you went through a period where you didn't have a smartphone, or any phone?

Mike Feldstein: Very true. When you and I met, I joined MMT around 2017, so between 2017 and 2020, three years, I had no phone. Once my first daughter was born in 2020, that's when I picked the phone back up. I think this is going to be the year I go no-phone again. I did a little test last October for a month and it went great. The big questions people would ask me were, "What about your relationship?" and "What about your work?" But the benefits outweighed the negatives so substantially that I'm going to go back to no phone.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. What about FOMO on TikTok? When you say no phone, you mean, no phone?

Mike Feldstein: No cell phone. Period.

Ben Greenfield: Wow.

Mike Feldstein: I tried the dumb phone thing, that didn't work for me. Because when I go for a walk or a hike in the woods and an idea comes up, the person to share that idea with is often the very next thought. You quickly want to call them, get excited, share the idea, delegate, brainstorm, whatever. But I found that not having the ability to record or dump the idea actually made me come back from that walk with a very clear thought and a clear plan. Or maybe it wasn't as important twenty minutes later. So what I like is, no ability to communicate with other people when I leave my home or office. That way, if we agree to meet at 1 o'clock at this place, I'll be there.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, it is a bit of a pattern interrupt. There's obviously some convenience you trade off for that. My wife is kind of like that, she rarely uses her phone, barely has any social media apps. If you do glance at her phone, she's the one with like 1,000 unread messages and 87 unlistened-to voicemails. I envy that. But at the same time, I like being able to run my business in between holes nine and ten on the disc golf course, or crank out some work in the back of an Uber. I do find it convenient for maintaining momentum in business.

Mike Feldstein: It's very convenient. I did find, though, that my team got really empowered because I couldn't bottleneck things. Also, I tend to work around a lot of other humans, so even if my wife Rachel couldn't reach me, she could call other people who were nearby. And I got really good at calibrating my internal GPS again, my ability to navigate streets, my memory. What prompted the decision in 2017 was sitting with my grandparents, I'm checking sports scores and texting, and I realize they were probably in their last five years on the planet, which turned out to be true, they're no longer with us. And I'm doing silly stuff, checking sports scores, texting, weather, flights, emails, nonsense. I also found myself Google Maps-ing addresses five minutes away that I was walking to. Then I started putting reminders in the phone like "remember to work out" and "cook dinner." I'm like, you actually have a brain with all these same features. By outsourcing to the phone, the brain features were atrophying. Trying it out lets you see how much of that "productivity" you actually needed. And if you have an assistant who can walk with you and handle the emails while you think out loud, that's my happiest place.

Ben Greenfield: So, ditch your phone, but hire an executive assistant to follow you everywhere and be your scribe.

Mike Feldstein: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield: Now, I'm playing devil's advocate here, this is also kind of the Sherlock Holmes approach. For anybody who's read Sherlock Holmes, when Watson tries to share a piece of trivia, Sherlock says he'll do his best to forget it immediately, because he doesn't want his mind cluttered with random facts. I often use my phone as an external brain, get something out of my head and into the phone as soon as possible. But back in high school and early college, before I had a phone, I'd just walk everywhere with a little Moleskine journal and a running list of things to remember. The phone is more convenient, just smaller and digital.

Mike Feldstein: I use sticky notes a lot too. If I have to remember to take something the next morning, I'll put the sticky note on my front door, put stickies wherever in my life they need to go.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I used to use sticky notes quite a bit. My mom, on the other hand, and sometimes I'm concerned she might be getting ink poisoning, uses her hand and a pen. If you meet my mom, her entire hand is always covered with notes. That's literally her system.

Mike Feldstein: We need to get her a non-toxic pen, if that's such a thing.

Ben Greenfield: Seriously. I haven't tested her blood levels or anything.

Mike Feldstein: You should.

Ben Greenfield: Speaking of toxins, since the last time you and I talked about air quality, the whole LA wildfire and smoke exposure thing blew up. I'm curious how you think about that and what your recommendations are to people in situations like that. I know it's a big question, but it was a hot topic, pun kind of intended, and I'm sure it will be again. What are your best practices when it comes to wildfire smoke exposure, and what did you learn during the recent LA fires?

Mike Feldstein: So I flew out about three weeks after the fire, just to get my boots on the ground. I'm going back this Wednesday to do more testing, this time I'm going to go deeper, doing soil testing, dust testing, air testing, and possibly water testing, because you really have to do all of them to get a full picture.

This fire was unprecedented. That's the word. It's like no other, because typically when most people experience fire it's a kitchen fire, a dryer vent fire, or a wildfire where millions of acres burn and a little bit of smoke blows through. In this case, over 12,000 homes burned, over 15,000 cars burned. With a normal wildfire you're burning trees, not the most harmful thing. But every single item inside those 12,000 homes also burned, every can of WD-40, every can of paint, Lysol, Clorox, Windex, insulation, drywall, flooring materials. And California, LA specifically, has a lot of Teslas and electric vehicles, so you had something like 3,000 to 4,000 lithium batteries that got cooked. We don't have a good data set on what happens when you burn thousands of 2,000-pound lithium batteries. What you would normally test for doesn't even scratch the surface for this fire.

I tested homes ranging from a few hundred feet away from the burn zone all the way out to five or six miles. In the best case, the air quality situation will pass in about six months. At worst, this is going to be here for years. That's why I'm going back for soil samples.

One thing working for LA is it's very close to the coast, so they have big coastal winds that act like a natural filtration system, pushing contaminants out to the ocean. When fires happen in a valley, like in Kelowna, British Columbia, or Fort McMurray, Alberta, they don't have those same coastal winds to clear things out. LA also doesn't get much rain, so when it did rain, people said, "Oh, we're good now." I'm like, not so fast, because there are still thousands of homes that are piles of ash. The air quality was varying wildly hour to hour, because every time the wind kicked up, those piles of toxic ash got sent back into the air.

I saw in Altadena cars that were completely burned, with molten aluminum rivers going down the street. These wildfires burn at about 1,800 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Aluminum melts at about 1,200 degrees. So imagine how much airborne heavy metal contamination we're talking about.

People ask me constantly, "Should I leave LA?" It's really hard to answer, because it's not black and white. But if you weren't strongly attached to LA, and were already on the fence, this would be enough reason to push you over the edge. Either way, now is the time to be doubling down on your water filtration, doubling down on your air filtration, and opening your windows a lot less. A month after the fire, if you were just driving around, either no one was talking about it anymore, it had become old news, or your life was in ruins and you were staying in a hotel for the next six months. Just a crazy situation.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. That city is so large. I met a lot of people who lost their homes when I was staying at a hotel out there. The people who I think really don't get the coverage or the love they deserve are the ones who were in close proximity to burned homes but didn't lose their own home. If you were a few hundred feet from a home that burned, insurance is like, "Your home isn't destroyed, you don't get a new home." But here's the thing, I mentioned that aluminum melts at 1,200 degrees. If you were close enough to be in the 1,000-plus degree range, which you would be if you were near burning homes, the steel in your home is likely at 50% structural integrity. Insurance companies are going to try to tell you your home is fine. You really want to fight for your rights here. This process will be a long one, but it's worth it. Get a structural engineer to come out. Your roofing structure, your home could be swaying or shifting, your window seals could be blown. Just because your home looks okay doesn't mean it's okay after taking on that kind of heat load.

For anyone who's interested, I created a resource at jasprco/smoke, J-A-S-P-R dot co slash smoke. I was spending hours talking to people one by one, so I put together a free two-hour course. It's choose-your-own-adventure style, with a table of contents, so whether you lost your home, you're trying to assess your home, you're trying to detox your home, deal with insurance, deal with contractors, or your home got water-bombed by a firefighting plane, whatever your situation, jaspr.co/smoke has free resources to navigate all of that.

Ben Greenfield: The aluminum melt-off thing, obviously aluminum alone is an issue, but I'm sure there are many other metals and contaminants. Do you think that affected or is still affecting the water supply?

Mike Feldstein: I do, a lot. Also, if the soil is contaminated, it gets into the groundwater. The standard things cities test for in their water are bacteria, chlorine, and a few other things. That's why everyone was asking about air quality, and I'm like, yeah, but what did you test for? It's like going to your doctor for a blood test and not asking what panels they ran. In this situation we really need to expand the scope of what we're testing for. Typically, when water quality is compromised, they just throw more chlorine at it, that's how they usually deal with this. Personally, I would be drinking bottled water exclusively for at least a year, and I'm going to do soil and water testing to get a clearer picture.

Ben Greenfield: A really good carbon block or reverse osmosis filter is a big help too, though obviously that's an expense.

Mike Feldstein: Yes, this is a good time to be doubling down on your water filtration.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, so let's say your home didn't burn down, you know there was smoke exposure, and, we're not just talking about LA, there are podcast listeners who deal with wildfires in their area that, as you astutely noted, often go beyond just wood burning. I imagine that smoke must at some point settle and get embedded in an indoor environment, beyond furniture, floors, or your HVAC system. If you weren't going to move, how would you go about detoxing your home?

Mike Feldstein: I'll give you the abbreviated version, I went deep on it in the smoke course, but here's the overview.

If you had any ash or soot visibly inside your home at any point, typically you'd see it on the windowsills, then you're in the full insurance claim category. They're going to detox your home, rip out carpets, insulation, repaint, replace every soft material. Most people aren't in that category. But in LA, a lot of people had homes that smelled smoky for a while and now don't. You still need to do a smoke detox.

What does that look like? First, definitely get your ducts cleaned, that's essential. You also want to get your HVAC system serviced and cleaned; most HVAC contractors will do this. They'll be there for a few hours, open it up, and clean it thoroughly. Do the duct cleaning and HVAC service back to back. You also want to get all your carpets, bedding, and couches steam cleaned to pull out those toxins, this is a deep clean, that's what you're doing. And all the clothing in your home. Here's how I approach it, and I've detoxed hundreds of homes after wildfires, so this is Mike the wildfire detox guy talking, not just Mike the Jaspr guy.

Ben Greenfield: For those of you listening, we did do a prior podcast with Mike that we'll link in the show notes. His whole background in mold remediation and wildfire experience is covered there. Definitely pair that one with this one. Go ahead.

Mike Feldstein: Yeah, that first episode was basically air quality 101, air awareness. If you haven't been connecting air quality to your health, or you're focused on water, food, exercise, sunlight, but not air, that first episode is your foundation. If you haven't heard it, pause this one now and go back to it, because this one builds on top of it.

So, to detox a home, bag up all your clothing at one time and take it to the dry cleaner. While your clothes are out of the home being cleaned, that's when you do all your steam cleaning, your HVAC service, and your duct cleaning. Coordinate it all in a one- to two-day span so you're not recontaminating freshly cleaned surfaces. Once all that's done, do a thorough deep clean.

For the deep clean, I personally recommend investing in a HEPA vacuum, and not just any HEPA vacuum. Not a Dyson, which is great for daily use but isn't built for this. The vacuum I recommend is the GD930 by Nilfisk, also sold under the Euro Clean brand. This is the same vacuum I used in mold remediation, asbestos abatement, and wildfire smoke restoration, it's contractor-grade. I've got to,

Ben Greenfield: Wait, real quick. Is this like a $10,000 vacuum?

Mike Feldstein: No, man. It's $599 now.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, it used to be,

Mike Feldstein: It used to be $1,500-plus. Now they're around $500. Very reasonable. This is your monthly or quarterly deep clean vacuum, not your daily driver. If you were to hire someone to come out and do what this vacuum does, you'd pay more than the purchase price in a single visit. It has a serious, real HEPA filter and a HEPA bag. It's heavy duty, high suction, great for carpets, stairs, walls, and furniture. Do a full once-over of your home with this vacuum. It's just a good thing to own, it's built like a tank, you'll have it forever.

Ben Greenfield: What's it called again?

Mike Feldstein: GD930.

Ben Greenfield: GD930. Okay.

Mike Feldstein: Yeah. Lots of different restoration suppliers sell it; Amazon carries it too. It's between $499 and $599. And in restoration work, I only had to change the filters every few months under heavy use, for personal use, you're basically set indefinitely.

Ben Greenfield: I'll link to it in the show notes. Okay, so we've got a good vacuum cleaner, what else?

Mike Feldstein: So we've got steam cleaning, clothes cleaning, ducts, HVAC, and HEPA vacuuming everything. After that, just do a thorough deep clean. If you have the time and budget, you can do this yourself, or hire a cleaning crew to come in and do a post-renovation-style deep clean. The smoke particles are too small to see with the naked eye, but they're everywhere. Think of it like a renovation where there's dust on every surface. This might mean three cleaners for a full day. Either way, wash all the dishes, go behind the cabinets, pull out the bedding. Spend a day or two doing a really thorough deep clean of your home.

And the HEPA vacuum is essential. People in New York City, a couple of summers ago the wildfire smoke from Canada blew through. Even now, if somebody wasn't filtering their air in New York, which is thousands of miles from those fires, their bedding, couches, and carpets still contain hexavalent chromium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and other wildfire smoke contaminants, because once it gets into your porous materials, it doesn't leave unless you actively detox it. It'll stay there for a very, very long time. The smoke came in, and a week later it didn't smell anymore, not because it left, but because it got embedded in the fibers of your home.

Ben Greenfield: Unless you're like my grandma, who had all her furniture covered in plastic.

Mike Feldstein: If it was airtight, yeah, you're good. In LA, a lot of people had three or four Jaspr units, but if they lost power, the units weren't running. And a lot of people lost power.

There was a great example. When I was in LA doing testing, I visited Jaspr customers to check in and see how the units performed. There was a woman named Ashley and a man named Javier in the same apartment building, one floor apart. She had a Jaspr; he had no air filtration. The particle count in her apartment was about 200,000 particles. His was 1.4 million. Her apartment had no odors; his still smelled. His place was borderline unlivable; hers was quite pristine. She had not lost power. She lived in Santa Monica, a couple miles from the fire, and she had just one Jaspr in her living room on smart mode.

Ben Greenfield: Just a single Jaspr?

Mike Feldstein: Probably about an 800 to 900 square foot apartment. One Jaspr on smart mode, it detected the smoke, kicked into full speed, and ran continuously. There was also a couple in Brooklyn whose apartment building had a fire. Everyone evacuated, including the couple, but they had to leave their dog behind. The building didn't lose power. They came back a few hours later with the fire department, and the dog had survived, huddled right beside the Jaspr in a small bedroom, which was cranking the whole time. We did a Zoom call with them recently; we're going to publish that soon.

Originally, my background being in wildfire smoke and mold, I built Jaspr not as a traditional air purifier, it's truly an air scrubber. An air scrubber is what we used for mold and fire restoration. The hypothesis was, you can't have these big, ugly industrial air scrubbers in residential homes, they're too loud, too unsightly, too expensive, too cumbersome. But if people in wildfire-prone areas just have Jaspr units in their day-to-day lives, when a major smoke event comes through, how does it hold up? I was very pleased to see how it performed in LA. And Ashley didn't need to do a deep clean at all, she's good. She saved thousands of dollars and a massive headache by proactively filtering her air.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, Mike, what's the difference between a filter and a scrubber?

Mike Feldstein: Great question. Both can use HEPA, both use fans, but a scrubber is more industrial in its nature. It's typically made from metal, with commercial-grade parts. Think of it like the difference between a residential sauna heater and a commercial-grade sauna heater. The commercial one is designed to run ten hours a day, heat large spaces, take a beating. A standard air purifier is designed for a small room, maybe a little dust, like a humidifier in the corner. An air scrubber is designed to aggressively clean the air at a higher level. Like an F-350 versus an F-150, it's just a much bigger workhorse. The vision with Jaspr was to make the world's first air scrubber designed for the home, aesthetically pleasing and quiet, but heavy-duty in its nature.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. So beyond standalone air filtration, let's say someone were doing a new home build and they lived in a polluted environment or a wildfire-prone area, and they had the option to add not just air purification but air scrubbing as a feature to their HVAC system. Could you actually engineer that into a home build for a more thorough whole-home solution?

Mike Feldstein: Good in theory. And actually, that was the product we originally tried to bring to market with Jaspr. We pulled it, we didn't launch it to the public because it wasn't as effective as we wanted. The reason is that you also want a home to be energy efficient, which means your furnace and air conditioner might only run 10 to 30% of the time, especially in a temperate climate. When the HVAC system isn't running, any integrated filtration is doing nothing.

Ben Greenfield: Mine, by the way, I have a setting on my HVAC where I have it run the fan for 15 minutes every hour, so it's running about 25% of the time. I've got five Jaspr units spread throughout the house because I'm a nut about air quality.

Mike Feldstein: You probably have an ERV or HRV, energy recovery ventilator or heat recovery ventilator. That's great. I recommend that for everybody. That ensures your home is breathing, bringing in fresh air. Of course, on a bad allergy day or a wildfire smoke day, you'd want to shut that feature off and batten down the hatches.

If you're building a custom home, yes, there are custom HVAC solutions, just make sure you're working with an HVAC contractor who is really well-versed in air quality. But no matter what, you still always want portable units in the bedrooms and wherever you spend the most time. And in the kitchen, especially.

Ben Greenfield: We covered the kitchen at length in the last podcast, so I won't beat that horse, but every time I cook, my Jaspr is in the kitchen on smart mode. It's wild watching the PM2.5 reading climb from something as simple as frying fish on the stovetop.

Mike Feldstein: Right. If the HVAC system were doing the full job, Jaspr shouldn't be turning red at all. The fact that it is shows exactly why having portable units matters.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Two things I want to touch on that we didn't cover before. One is the COGfx Study, a series of studies that link air quality to cognition. I also want to touch on sleep. But first, what do we know about the relationship between air quality and mental performance?

Mike Feldstein: A lot, and we're going to know a lot more. Jim Kwik and I are going deep down that rabbit hole together. The best single study I know of, and there are a lot, took a bunch of grandmaster chess players and measured the quality of their moves relative to air quality. As air quality worsened, the quality of their moves went down. These are brain athletes, high-performing people. There are also a lot of studies tying air pollution to dementia and Alzheimer's. If the only fuel powering our mind and our sleep is the air we breathe, and we aren't fueling with the cleanest source, our output naturally suffers.

I want to be honest about air quality studies in general, 99% of the filter product studies are conducted in isolated chambers, not in real rooms with machines. I prefer real-world studies. For our mold study, we filled a 500 square foot room with 8-foot ceilings with mold spores, turned on a Jaspr, and measured. After one hour there was a 97.1% reduction. Within three hours, no airborne mold was detected whatsoever. Anyone can see that study on our website at jaspr.co.

On the sleep front, since the last time we spoke, we did a study where we gave 150 Jaspr units to people who had been using Oura Rings to track their sleep for years, but who weren't filtering their air. We did a one-month study, week one, no Jaspr, just assess the baseline; weeks two and three, Jaspr on in the bedroom on fan speed two; week four, Jaspr off again. It was honestly a little funny. I started getting emails from people after two days saying, "Can I please turn it back on?" I said no, because it was like asking someone to drink tap water for a week after they'd been drinking clean water. They were like, "I don't want to do this anymore."

Ben Greenfield: It's almost like one of those studies where the treatment is so effective that the control group deteriorates so fast the researchers have to call it off on ethical grounds.

Mike Feldstein: Exactly. And thank God for AI, because compiling 150 people's Oura Ring data would have been a nightmare otherwise. The results, on average, people slept 25 minutes more per night, with 18% more deep sleep. I'll caveat that this was driven heavily by the worst-performing sleepers, people already sleeping five and a half restless hours a night saw the biggest gains. For someone like you, Ben, who's already sleep-optimized, you'd probably squeeze out maybe three or four extra minutes. But a lot of people, as soon as they put Jaspr in their bedroom, snoring immediately stopped, just completely, permanently. My favorite stories are the husband and wife who haven't shared a room in five or six years because of the husband's snoring, sleep-divorced, they pop a Jaspr in the house and they're sharing a bed again. Another guy was snoring a hundred times a night, had one Jaspr in his home, and hasn't done it since. But when he travels,

Ben Greenfield: I want to double-click on this for a second. Sleep apnea is usually attributed to being overweight, or some biomechanical abnormality in the cervical spine or jaw restricting the airway. The air quality piece is interesting. Is there a known link between snoring, sleep apnea, and air pollution or air quality, or is this something you just discovered on your own?

Mike Feldstein: Honestly, this is something we've mostly stumbled into. But now we're getting at least a review or two almost every week from people reporting they've stopped snoring.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, this is super interesting, because surely you know about mouth taping, and how many people have anecdotally reported a reduction in sleep apnea and snoring from something as simple as humidifying and cleaning the air through the nose, promoting more nitric oxide production during sleep. What you've essentially created is a piece of technology that may simulate something similar to what nasal breathing does during sleep.

Mike Feldstein: And both together is even better. A lot of people tape their mouth and filter their air.

And here's something that drives me crazy, CPAP machines. I know some fit, bodybuilder types in their early forties who are now on CPAPs, machines that literally force air down their throat so they can breathe at night, and those machines don't have real air filters. The guys who sell CPAP machines don't sell air filters. If that person is having serious airway trouble, maybe clean air would be a good place to start. And even if they're still using a CPAP, the filter in most of those machines is basically the size of a quarter, designed for large particulates. It would be table stakes, if you need a breathing apparatus to sleep, let's at least have the cleanest possible air going into it.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Got it. I want to ask you a competitor question, this is fresh on my mind. I was at someone's home three days ago recording a podcast, and they had Air Doctor units all around. I don't want to trash other companies, but I do want to give a fair comparison, because Air Doctor is another very popular unit in the health space. I actually have Air Doctors, I think two of them, that I used quite a bit before you and I talked about Jaspr. What do you think about Air Doctor?

Mike Feldstein: Good question. First, it's important to note that Air Doctor is a brand, not a single product, they have five to seven different air purifiers now. Their newer models have Wi-Fi on them. Right off the bat, we don't do Wi-Fi, we don't do Bluetooth, we don't do apps.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, and by the way, you have a dark mode on Jaspr, which I appreciate. So many devices show up to my house with bright LED indicator lights, and I literally buy sheets of red-light filter paper from Amazon to cover screens on everything I use at night. I love that Jaspr has a mode where you just press the light button and it turns off. Wi-Fi-enabled devices are another issue entirely.

Mike Feldstein: That's one thing. Air Doctor is a fine product overall, better than the $99 stuff you find on Amazon or Walmart, for sure. Their 5500 model is actually quite good at cleaning the air, performance is very similar to Jaspr. That's their roughly $1,000 model. The smaller ones, like a lot of air purifiers in the $99–$299 range, they just don't move enough air. It's like trying to pull a boat with a sedan, not enough power to get the job done.

Now, their big unit does clean the air well. My issue with it, I was testing it in our living room, and my wife came in and said, "When are you done testing this air conditioner?" It's a big, bright white, shiny plastic unit with loud, bright buttons. It also has filters on two sides, which means it can't go in a corner or flush against a wall, it has to sit in the middle of the room. And on the filter itself, it literally says you have to vacuum it monthly, because they use a much lower-grade filter, Jaspr's filter weighs about four and a half pounds; theirs is more like a furnace filter at half a pound or a pound. Because the filter is less dense, it clogs up faster. It's great for social media, "Look how dirty my filter is after a month!", but I'd argue a good filter shouldn't be clogging that quickly.

With two filter sides, you'd theoretically be vacuuming it 24 times a year per unit. If you have four of them, that's close to a hundred filter cleanings a year. They also only have a one-year warranty. We have a lifetime warranty. We built Jaspr to last 25 to 30 years. If it breaks, we ship you a brand new one; you put the old one in the same box with a prepaid UPS label on your front door. No shipping hassle, no need to keep the original box. Sensors will eventually fail, which means the smart mode stops working, and after 366 days, with a one-year warranty, that's your problem.

To be fair, they've been around about 20 years, they came from the infomercial space, they also make water filters, diffusers, lots of different products. Fine company. But we just obsess over doing one thing, making the world's greatest air scrubber for the home. We're like the taco truck of air quality, we just do one thing, and we do it really well.

Ben Greenfield: Got it. So Air Doctor, decent product, slightly more upkeep required, some models have Wi-Fi, and there are differences in the warranty.

Mike Feldstein: One more thing, if anyone goes to their website, they're actually cloning Jaspr right now. They have a pre-order for a unit that is basically Jaspr's twin in shape and design. I'm flattered, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However, it's plastic, has a small filter inside, cheap parts throughout, and it has no screen, so it doesn't show you real-time air quality. At least it looks nicer.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, by the way, product feature recommendation. Did you see my recent podcast with Brian Hoyer? We went through my whole home and tested everything for EMF.

Mike Feldstein: Yes, thanks to you.

Ben Greenfield: Good. Including the Jaspr units. The finding was that it wasn't just your product, almost everything in my home tested clean on EMF until you got to the cables. And apparently it's very difficult to find shielded cables so that you're not getting dirty electricity radiating off the power cord. We even tested the Jaspr cable specifically. It seems like a great product upgrade would be to make the power cable shielded. Did you talk with Brian about this?

Mike Feldstein: Already done. I saw your Instagram post about it at Tim Gray's Health Optimisation Summit in Austin last week, and I went straight to Brian Hoyer's booth, it was right next to ours. We tested it together, shot some content together. We're moving to shielded cables now. Because we only do one thing, we can implement feedback rapidly. The good news is the EMF was only radiating off the cable within about a foot or so.

Ben Greenfield: So if it's not right next to your bed, it might be okay?

Mike Feldstein: Yeah, other side of the room, a few feet away, it's fine. But I'm like, let's just do it all, why not? We're upgrading to shielded cables, and we're sending Brian a couple of Jaspr units for a deeper dive evaluation. That product change is already in progress.

Ben Greenfield: Awesome. It's a bit of an investment on my part, but I'm literally buying shielded cables from Brian to replace every single cable that plugs into my home. The home is built really well, but then after moving in, all the red light panels, the things plugged in next to my desk, the lamps,

Mike Feldstein: You're in the new place now, right?

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, we're in there now. It feels incredible. My only problem is when I travel I crave being home even more, because I just feel so good, sleep so well, and perform so well.

Mike Feldstein: You optimized it to the point where now you don't want to leave.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, so, while still being thoughtful about not throwing people completely under the bus, while you were talking about Air Doctor I thought of another one I wanted to ask you about. Molekule, M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E. It's sexy-looking, space-age, shaped somewhat similarly to Jaspr. I don't hear people talking about it as much anymore, but it was a huge thing in wellness circles. I actually saw it at a wellness facility in Austin last week. What do you think about Molekule?

Mike Feldstein: Molekule, so they were the first cool, attractive air purifier. They came out around 2016. Where they started and where they ended up are very different stories, because none of the founding team is there anymore. They raised money about twelve times. They were San Francisco-based, and all their investors were software investors, not hardware, not filtration, not restoration, software guys who looked at it like a software company with subscription revenue. Facebook ads, lose money the first two years, make it back later.

Their whole pitch was, "HEPA technology is 70 years old, it's ancient. No one has innovated. We don't filter, we destroy with PCOTM technology." Meanwhile, they still had a small HEPA filter inside, which was actually doing the filtering. They went really downhill when Wirecutter published a review calling it one of the worst air purifiers they'd ever tested, basically $199 mainstream units were crushing it. The auto mode was just a fixed medium speed with no actual sensor, the "smart mode" was just medium. Ten out of ten on design, zero out of ten on function. They went design-first and functionality second.

They were eventually acquired by a public company. They were losing around $9 million a quarter. Dyson also filed, and actually, Dyson had a class action lawsuit filed against them as well. Molekule faced a class action over the PECO technology claims, and once it was proven the technology didn't work as advertised, everyone who bought one got a small refund. They just don't really clean the air.

Ben Greenfield: What even is PECO technology?

Mike Feldstein: It's Photo Electrochemical Oxidation, the idea that you can destroy pollutants rather than capture them. It's a compelling message, HEPA is old, no one's innovated. But you know what else is old? Wood, concrete, water. Sometimes the tried and true is tried and true for a reason. When I see Tesla, NASA, the International Space Station, and surgical operating rooms all using HEPA, I'm inclined to stick with the fundamentals. Jaspr doesn't use any fancy technology, just tried and true HEPA and activated carbon, a serious fan, and a serious filter. Same thing I used in mold remediation. Molekule had their moment, but they lost the thread.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, okay. So I have a slightly more esoteric question for you. Everything you create allows people to spend more time healthier indoors. But how do you reconcile that with the broader idea of modern indoor confinement? You're building a company that helps people optimize being inside, and yet we know, unless there are wildfires raging, that being outside is generally a good idea. How do you tackle that philosophically, or in your own routine?

Mike Feldstein: Our logo is a tree in a mountain, anyone watching on video can see it. Because the original, the best air scrubber of all time is nature. It's the wind, the sun, the rain, the trees. Unfortunately, we've built our homes so tight that we've left nature outside. When there's a massive wildfire smoke cloud and it eventually dissipates, it's because the oceans and the trees filtered it. You cannot beat the outdoors, and I wouldn't try.

The reason Jaspr exists is not so you can spend more time inside, it's so the time you do spend inside is in a much cleaner environment. Our homes are built so tight that pollen, mold spores, and pollutants come inside and get trapped. Outside, nature handles them. Inside, they accumulate. So I'm a huge fan of being outside, keeping doors and windows open, unless it's too hot, too cold, or a high-allergy day. Outside is the best. Unfortunately, we pollute a lot. Where do you think the rubber from tires goes?

Ben Greenfield: It just magically disappears?

Mike Feldstein: Gone. And even if you're not using harsh chemicals, if your neighbor is spraying glyphosate, that's coming into your home too.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Mike Feldstein: Outside is number one, no doubt. The good news is your home is the one indoor environment you can actually control. And the two outcomes that make me happiest are, when people's sleep completely transforms, that's as good as it gets for me, business-wise. Sleep better, and everything else follows. The other is when people with serious seasonal allergies find that their allergies just disappear. Here's why I think that happens, we can handle some stress, some mold, some pollen, the body is resilient. The problem is the 24-hour-a-day assault. There's often more pollen and pollution inside your home than outside. I think a lot of chronic health issues stem from breathing toxic air 24 hours a day, so that when your body is trying to rest, recover, consolidate memories, repair tissue, work on your gut, do all its natural healing at night, it's still playing defense.

When you turn your bedroom into a clean-air sanctuary, your body can go deeply parasympathetic. Sleep improves. Recovery improves. Stress load comes down. And then, because your toxin burden is reduced for eight or more hours a day, your body becomes more resilient overall. When you do encounter allergens outside, you handle them better. A lot of people's seasonal allergies just go away, even when they travel, even when they go outside, because now their baseline is cleaner.

Ben Greenfield: Parasympathetic down-regulation, you're a little less hypersensitive to everything, allergens, arguably EMF, you name it. The perfect example, have a toxic day, poor sleep, junk food, a few arguments, a flood of emails, and then try a cold plunge. It's miserable. Twenty seconds and you want to climb out. But on a day where you slept well, ate well, had good emotions and relationships, you can sit in the plunge like it's a warm bath for four or five minutes. The nervous system is just more resilient.

Mike Feldstein: That's kind of a silly but effective litmus test. And to close the loop on that, I believe the goal for indoor environments should be to make them as close to the natural outdoor environment as possible. A lot of homes have no natural light, synthetic carpets, toxic cleaning chemicals, and poor air on top of it all. With Jaspr, going back to our logo being a tree, we want to give you the air that nature intended. We only filter things out; we don't add anything. That philosophy extends to home design more broadly, get as close to the outdoor environment as you can. Of course, we want thermal comfort. But beyond that, get as close to outside as possible.

Ben Greenfield: You're speaking my language. In our home, rather than LED lighting we mixed OLED and incandescent to get as close to the sunlight spectrum as possible. Rather than just filtration, we added a structuring step that returns water back to the state it would be if it were tumbling down an underground spring. And rather than being disconnected from the earth, we lined the flooring of every level of the house with copper conductive material that's grounded, so no matter where you are in the house, as long as you're not wearing rubber-soled shoes, you're grounded. The entire philosophy of building the home was, how can we be as close as possible to being outside when we're inside?

Mike Feldstein: It's funny, "biohacking" means a lot of different things to a lot of people. You might think it's about adding things and departing from nature. But really, everything you're actually doing is trying to return to nature. Do what the sun would do, do what the river would do, do what the mountains would do. We want cities, internet, a comfortable life, technology, but within all that, you're really just trying to bring nature inside. It's kind of a neat way to think about it.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Microplastics are a huge concern right now. I know we're running short on time, but talk to me about that. A lot of people think of microplastics as a water issue, plastic water bottles, transdermal absorption from receipts, but your lungs are actually one of the primary entry points for microplastics. Does Jaspr make a dent in that?

Mike Feldstein: We're actually running a study on it right now. There isn't a standardized microplastic-specific protocol yet, so the lab is using latex beads sized to match microplastic particles. But yes, we will filter those at a very high degree.

There was a BBC-covered study in London where they tested around 40 homes. One hundred percent had microplastics inside, at eight times the concentration found outside, because outside, nature filters them. They also started doing biopsies of people's lungs and found microplastics in almost everyone. We don't yet know exactly how bad this is, but we can reasonably infer it's not good. And consider, 70% of your body's detox capacity runs through your lungs. So while a lot of us are obsessing over glass water bottles and avoiding plastic, which I do, there's a strong case that we're breathing in far more microplastics and toxins than we're ingesting. We may be majoring in the minors. Air is the first thing you do when you're born and the last thing you do before you die. It's a great place to start.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Back to the Uber idea, you hop in an Uber, there's a Christmas tree air freshener, a crinkly little plastic water bottle that the kind driver gives you out of the goodness of their heart, massive EMF output from the vehicle, even more if you're in the back seat of an EV because the batteries are behind you. That's a perfect example of everything we're trying to avoid. So the more you can hack your environment to be a non-Uber experience... that's the goal. Come up with Uber for health-conscious people. You've got Uber XL, Uber X, Uber Comfort, why not Uber Life?

Mike Feldstein: No air fresheners.

Ben Greenfield: Exactly. A car that's naturally clean, low-EMF, maybe one of those little quantum block devices, there's another business idea for you, folks.

Mike Feldstein: One thing I don't want to forget to mention, for anyone out there with kids, keep an eye on this. We're opening a school in Austin in August.

Ben Greenfield: Oh!

Mike Feldstein: And everything we've talked about, we're putting it all in. There's a study from Finland showing that when air purifiers were placed in classrooms, absenteeism dropped 30 to 50% almost immediately. When my daughter started school at age three, she was chronically sick, constant stuffy nose, coughing. I went to the school and found, no windows that open, scented air fresheners plugged in every day. I'd unplug the freshener when I picked her up; every morning it was back in. We put a Jaspr in her classroom and she basically stopped getting sick. Before long, the school put five of them in.

But our kids, they come out of the womb into nurseries with dirty diapers, EMF, freshly painted rooms. Then we send them to school, which has got to be one of the most toxic environments they're in. No water filtration, no opening windows, no ventilation, no air filtration, the cheapest most toxic cleaning products, the worst fluorescent and LED lighting. And this is where we're sending our kids for most of their waking hours.

After seeing that Finland study, I knew Jaspr could do more. We can't tackle this alone, but we can do something. So we're opening this school, and our goal is to make it the healthiest school in America. With the tailwinds of MAHA, it feels like the right moment. Air filtration throughout the entire building. Water filtration. Circadian rhythm lighting that tracks the sun as closely as possible. Large screened-in porches for an indoor-outdoor environment. Zero toxic cleaning products. We're going to benchmark everything, sick rates, runny noses, absenteeism, all of it.

The school is called Kindling Academy. If you're in Austin and want to check it out, go to kindling.academy. If you want to follow the journey, we'll be publishing studies, content, and bringing in outside mentors to teach kids real-life skills. In our second year, we'll have an organic wellness chef using hyperlocal whole foods. This won't be a money-maker, hopefully it'll break even, but we want to prove what it looks like to optimize a school for children's health. We also have a sauna and cold plunge, and when parents drop off and pick up, they're welcome to use them. Drop off your kids, take a sauna, meet some other parents. As adults it can be hard to build community; the parents of your kids' friends are a natural place to start.

Ben Greenfield: Dude, I love it. I can imagine little Bobby and Kevin hashing things out in the sauna after school. Talking things through, making things right. It's going to be great.

A couple of other schools worth looking into, Centner Academy in Miami, I did a podcast with Leila Centner, who sounds like a woman after your own heart, because they're doing a lot of this as well. And then you should connect with Kelly and Juliet Starrett, because they've been a big proponent of the stand-up kids movement, stand-up desks in classrooms. My son had a brief stint at a private school and I bought the entire third-grade classroom stand-up desks. The Starr, Starretts' organization, I think it's StandUpKids.org, has been a real force behind the biomechanics of the classroom. That would be a great addition.

Mike Feldstein: Writing both of those down. Centner Academy, Miami, and the Starretts.

Ben Greenfield: Right. And I think it's the StandUpKids.org, Kelly and Juliet Starrett have really been a big force behind the idea of the biomechanics of the classroom. That would be another cool thing to look into.

Mike Feldstein: I just think, our homes are really important, but we can't forget the kids' schools. Homeschooling is a big lift for most people. We looked at everything, Montessori and similar models. The educational foundation will be Montessori, but with more project-based learning, more inquisitive and collaborative learning. Before this I had a call with Jamie Lee, who's owned multiple schools, they're helping us out with the structure.

Ben Greenfield: Incredible. We'll link to Kindling Academy at KindlingAcademy, it's a dot-academy domain, kindling.academy. Everything we talked about today, from Kindling to my previous podcast with Mike, the Jaspr studies, the Jaspr website, and your Jaspr discount codes, it's all at BenGreenfieldLife.com/jaspr2026. Mike, as always, this has been incredible. Thank you so much.

Mike Feldstein: Thanks, dude.

Ben Greenfield: All right, folks, BenGreenfieldLife.com/jaspr2026 for the links, the codes, the show notes, and your questions and comments. From healthy hotel rooms to new Uber business ideas to healthy kids, we covered it all.

Mike Feldstein: Don't leave the kids out.

Ben Greenfield: And of course, healthy kids. I'm going to send you a copy of Boundless Parenting, Mike. You'll love it.

Mike Feldstein: We'll give it to all the parents at the school.

Ben Greenfield: Getting it in the mail today. All right, folks, thanks so much for listening. And Mike, thank you.

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