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 [00:00:00]: Ben Greenfield. And on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Mike Feldstein [00:00:03]: A lot of people, as soon as they put Jaspr in their bedroom, snoring immediately stopped. Like forever. They just stopped snoring. And like my favorite stories where husband and wife haven't shared a room in five, six years because the husband's at snoring and they're sleep divorced, they pop Jaspr in the house. No more snoring, they're sharing a bed together again.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:24]: So is there a link that you know of between snoring and sleep apnea?

Ben Greenfield [00:00:30]: 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:51]: Well, I got a repeat podcast guest on today, the great Mike Feldstein. You guys probably one of the most comprehensive podcasts ever done. Air quality was with Mike. We went deep into like HEPA air filtration and what works and what doesn't. And Mike's been up to a lot since our last podcast, so I wanted to have him back. All the show notes, including my last podcast with Mike. In case you want to dive into the nitty gritty technology of HEPA air filtration, I'll link to in the show [email protected]/airquality. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/airquality.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:32]: I was in Austin last week and I show up to my hotel room. This is the second time this has happened when I visited Austin. And of course, hotel rooms are notoriously annoying when it comes to, you know, me leaving my pristine environment in Idaho and flying somewhere and walking in the hotel room. And either it smells moldy and nasty and damp and dank, or it smells clean but clean like the Christmas tree shaped air freshener in an Uber. Clean like, oh gosh, how many chemicals were used in here? So I always have one of those two problems, whether it's an Airbnb or hotel room. So I check into my hotel room and I've got a air filtration system, a standalone HEPA air filter right there in the room, running on turbo, Smells fresh, smells clean. It was one of your units, the Jaspr. So thank you yet again for saving my ass and giving me clean air when I travel.

Mike Feldstein [00:02:35]: My pleasure, man. I've been thinking about doing this more formally. Has like a clean air, you know, we'll be like your clean air sponsor. So imagine anytime you're going to a hotel anywhere in the country, you or your assistant just flips us an email and anywhere you go, anytime, there'll just be a Jaspr in your hotel room when you travel.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:53]: Oh well, I've thought beyond that. I mean it's a great idea but you know, for the fringe, 0.000 carry the trillionth 1% 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 WIFI, about wanting to have maybe a PEMF mat or grounding mat to sleep on, maybe a little bit of like a countertop reverse osmosis system or you know, a bunch of glass bottled water. I mean some type of travel environmental setup where someone could literally go to a website, click, say here's my hotel, I'm checking in, I want to walk in there and have air, light, water and electricity all optimized. Click, go. I mean it would be a little bit of a fringe business but I feel like there could be at least what, like a thousand true fans who would use it.

Mike Feldstein [00:03:47]: So what I'm doing, that's, I thought about that and I'm like this is, this is a big lift for me. But what I am doing now. So Jaspr is going to be in a lot of hotels in the next several months. There's a lot of hotels we've been making relationships with and they're all looking to start building out wellness suites and I'm kind of consulting and advising them on this. So it's a lot of the hotels that you know, really nice hotels. So we're working to have exactly what you said. So Jaspr's in every room. Water filtration, no ambient lighting, high quality, non toxic linens and bedding.

Mike Feldstein [00:04:20]: Yeah, some red lights and stuff. So we're, they're, they're going to be building out these wellness suites and then we'll have a directory online. So you'll like. In all the cities that you're used to going to, there'll be a hotel with a, a bunch of wellness suites and they're trying to prove it out. And some hotels are actually going to. There's a proper hotel being built in Lake Tahoe right now and they're intending to make the entire hotel like this, including everything in the minibar is going to be non seed oils and gluten free and high quality snacks. So this is happening.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:49]: Yeah, I love the idea and 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. You just described. And you know, at the same time I think, well, gosh, there's still so many hotels that aren't going to add a new suite and aren't even going to care about doing that. But it'd be nice if somebody who's traveling could just say, hey, whatever, I'm staying at Motel 8. I know the room's going to be crappy, but I still, when I show up, want whatever, you know, four big boxes when I walk in with everything that I need to optimize my environment.

Mike Feldstein [00:05:30]: If anybody else out there wants to do this business idea, call me and we will be your clean air partner to test it out.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:37]: Leave a comment. Air quality, I'm too busy to set it up myself, but we got that muscle. If somebody wants to start that business, I will totally support it, send traffic and be a user. Hey, is it true by the way, that you like went through a period of time where you didn't even have a phone or didn't have a smartphone or something like that?

Mike Feldstein [00:05:59]: It's very true actually. When you and I met like around like I joined MMT around 2017. So between 2017 and 2023 years I had no phone. And yeah, it's. I had once my first daughter was born, rose in 2020. That's when I picked the phone up and tried this phone thing again. I think this is going to be the year where I go no phone again. I did a little test last October for a month and it went great.

Mike Feldstein [00:06:27]: So yeah, the big questions people would ask me is like, what about your relationship and what about your work stuff? But the benefits outweighed the negatives so substantially that I'm going to go back to no phone again.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:39]: Yeah, what about FOMO on TikTok when you say no phone, do you like no phone?

Mike Feldstein [00:06:44]: Because they have this dude, I didn't own a cell phone, period. I tried the whole like non smart thing. That didn't work for me because when I go for a walk, let's say you're just going for a hike in the woods and an idea comes up. Often when an idea comes up, the a person to share that idea with is the next thought and then you quickly want to call them and get excited and share the idea and delegate and brainstorm or whatever it is. But I found that not having the ability to dump it, record it, converse with it allowed me to really, I'd come back on that walk with a very, very clear thought, clear plan. Or maybe it wasn't as important 20 minutes later. So, yeah, no, no, no. Ability to communicate with other people when I leave my home or office is what I like.

Mike Feldstein [00:07:27]: And that way, if we're going to meet at 1 o'clock at this place, like, I'll be there.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:31]: Yeah, it is a little bit of a pattern interrupt. I mean, there's obviously a little bit of convenience that you trade off for that. But how I would, you know, my wife is kind of like that, like, rarely uses her phone, barely has any social media apps. You know, if you do glance at her phone, it's the one with like a thousand unread messages and like 87 unlistened to voicemails. I envy that. But at the same time, like, I like being able to run my business, you know, in, in between whole 9 and 10 of the Frisbee golf course or whatever and just like check in, get a few things done or be able to, you know, crank out 20 emails in the back of an Uber, you know, I, I do find it to be convenient when it comes to maintaining momentum in business.

Mike Feldstein [00:08:17]: It's very convenient. I did find though that the team got really empowered because I couldn't bottleneck a lot of things. So also I tend to work around a lot of other humans. So it's like, even if my wife Rachel couldn't call me, like, if she called other people, there's people around me nearby with, with the devices. And I got really good at like my, my head GPS was calibrating again and my ability to navigate the streets. My memory just like. So when I did it in 2017, I did it because I remember sitting with my, my grandparents and I'm like checking sports scores and texting people. I'm like, my grandparents are probably on their last five years on the planet, which was true.

Mike Feldstein [00:08:57]: They're not here with us now. And I'm doing silly stuff. So the, whether it was, yeah, sports scores or texting or weather or flights, just emails, like nonsense. And then I found myself Google Maps in addresses five minutes away that I was walking to. I'm like, what am I doing? I was putting in there, like, remember to work out and cook dinner. And then I'm like, have a brain. It actually has a lot of these same features and by outsourcing to them, to the phone, the brain features were atrophying.

Mike Feldstein [00:09:27]: So I think a bit like trying it out allows one to see how important that like, little bit of productivity is. Also if you have assistant or assistants who can kind of like be in close proximity that can like, do. I love going for A walk with someone and they're on the phone and they're doing the emails and I'm just talking to them while things get done. That's my ultimate most. That's my happy place.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:51]: Yeah, so, so ditch your phone but hire an executive assistant to just follow you everywhere and. And be your scribe.

Mike Feldstein [00:09:56]: Yeah, exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:00]: Now I of course playing devil's advocate here also kind of like the Sherlock Holmes esque approach of basically not as he told Watson. And for anybody who's read Sherlock Holmes, when Watson tells Sherlock Watson's name, Sherlock says, oh, I'll do my best to forget that immediately. And he says that he does that because he doesn't want his mind just jumbled up with random facts or trying to remember certain things. And I will often use my phone as this external brain get something out of my head onto a phone as soon as possible. But I can tell you back in college I think I got my phone my sophomore year but through high school and college I would just walk everywhere. And I think this is kind of like an old Tim Ferriss idea with one of those little Moleskine journals and I would just have a running list of things to remember. I just find the phone digitally and smaller to be a little bit more convenient.

Mike Feldstein [00:11:00]: I also use sticky notes a lot. So if I have to remember to take something out of my. Let's say it's like 9:00 at night, I'm getting ready for bed and I need to take somewhere, something, I'll put the sticky note on my front door. So I'll put stickies wherever in my life they need to go. So I remember the thing.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:17]: Yeah, yeah. I used to use sticky notes quite a bit too. My mom actually, and sometimes I'm concerned she might get ink poisoning. She uses her hand and a pen and if you meet my mom like her entire hand is always covered with notes like literally like that's what she uses, her skin.

Mike Feldstein [00:11:38]: We need to get her a non toxic pen if that's such a thing.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:41]: No, seriously, I've not tested her for.

Mike Feldstein [00:11:45]: Any type of elk's blood or something.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:48]: Seriously. Well, speaking of toxins, since the last time that you and I talked about air quality, this whole LA wildfire smoke exposure thing blew up. And I'm just curious how you think about that and your recommendations to people in situations like that. I know it's kind of a big question, but it was a hot topic upon kind of intended and I'm sure it will be again. So what are your best practices when it comes to wildfire exposure. And what did you learn during the recent LA epidemic?

Mike Feldstein [00:12:24]: Yeah, so I went. I flew out about three weeks after the fire to just get my boots on the ground. And I'm going back on Wednesday again to do some more testing. This time I'm going to go deeper. I'm actually going to do soil testing, dust testing and air testing, maybe some water testing too, because you really have to do all of them to get a sense. No, this fire was unprecedented. Unprecedented. Unprecedented.

Mike Feldstein [00:12:45]: That's a hard word. For me. This fire is like no other. Because typically when you have the fire experience that most people have is a kitchen fire, it's a dryer vent fire, it's a localized. It's a house fire, so. Or it's a wildfire where millions of acres burn and a little bit of smoke blows through. In this case, over 12,000 homes burnt, over 15,000 cars burnt. So if you think about it like normally with a wildfire, you have like trees burned.

Mike Feldstein [00:13:19]: It's not the most harmful thing, but everything, every single item inside those 12,000 homes also burnt. So every WD40, every can of paint, Lysol, Clorox, Windex, insulation, drywalls, flooring materials, every car, and California, Louisiana specifically, has a lot of Teslas, a lot of electric cars. So now you have like 15,000 or probably three or 4,000 lithium batteries that got cooked. So that's why it's like no other, because we don't have a good data set on what happens when you burn 5,000 batteries that are £2,000 each. So what you would normally test for doesn't even scratch the surface for this fire. And I tested like all kinds of different homes within a few hundred feet all the way up to like five, six miles away. And it was quite interesting. You know, in its best case, this whole thing will pass from an air quality perspective in six months at its worst.

Mike Feldstein [00:14:16]: This is here for years to come. So that's why I'm gonna go take some soil samples. The one thing working for LA is it's very close to the coast. So they have these big coastal winds that work like a big filtration system pushing things out to the ocean. When it's in a valley, like in, in Kelowna up in British Columbia, or Fort McMurray, Alberta, or more inland, they don't have those same coastal winds to kind of clear things out. But LA also doesn't get very much rain, so people there were like, oh, it rained. We're good now. I'm like, not so fast, guys, because like, it rains, but there's still thousands of homes that are piles of ash.

Mike Feldstein [00:14:48]: So I remember testing the air throughout the day and it was really varying hour to hour. Normally it varies a little bit, but it was all over the place because every time that the wind would kick up, all those homes that are piles of toxic ash are now sent up into the air. I saw in Altadena, there was cars that were completely burnt and there was these molten aluminum rivers going down the street. Because these wildfires burn at about 1800-2000 degrees. That's typically the temperature of a burning home. And aluminum melts at about 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. So, like, every single thing was. And if it.

Mike Feldstein [00:15:24]: If you have an aluminum river, imagine how much airborne heavy metals we're talking about here. So I get asked all the time, like, should I leave la? And it's a really, really hard thing for me to answer here because it's like, I don't think it's black and white, but if you're not attached to LA and like, you were kind of already on the fence, this would be enough of a reason for me to push myself over the edge. It would definitely be a time to be. This is a time to be doubling down on your water filtration, doubling down on your air filtration. Really thinking about that, opening your windows a lot less. And now, you know, people stopped. It's like, it's like, it's distant news. When I was in L a month after the fire, if you were just like, driving around, no one's like, you're either not talking about it and it's old news, or your life is in ruins and you're like, staying at a hotel for the next six months.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:13]: Yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:16:14]: Which is just a crazy situation. That city is so large and yeah, I met a lot of people who lost their homes when I was staying at the hotel. And the people who I think really don't get the coverage and don't get the love that they deserve, the people who lost their homes 99% out of the time, they're going to have their homes rebuilt. They're going to get a fat check for all their contents. There's no really arguing what happened. If you were a few hundred feet from a home that got burnt, insurance is like, get back home, you don't get a new home. Your home is this. Your home is messed.

Mike Feldstein [00:16:47]: So for anyone out there who was in really close proximity to the fire. So remember I said aluminum melts at 1200 degrees. Well, once you're around if you're at a thousand degrees plus which you would be if you were in close proximity to homes that were burning. The steel in your home is likely at 50% integrity. So insurance companies are going to try to tell you to move, move home and everything's okay. And you really want to fight for your rights here. And this process will be a long one, but it's worth it because you want to get a structural engineer to come out. Likely your roofing structure, your home could be swaying, it could be shifting, your window seals could be blown.

Mike Feldstein [00:17:24]: Just because your home looks okay, it doesn't mean it's okay when it took on that kind of heat load. So I actually, for anyone who's interested, I created Jaspr.co/smoke. J A S P PR.co/smoke. I was spending hours one by one talking to everybody. So I, I shot like a two hour course. It's free. It's choose your own adventure style so you don't have to listen to the whole things. It's. We have a table of contents.

Mike Feldstein [00:17:51]: So whether you lost your home, you're trying to assess your home, you're trying to detox your own home, deal with insurance, deal with contractors, your home got water bombed by a plane, any of that Jaspr co smoke. I have a bunch of free resources on how to navigate all that.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:08]: That's incredible. I didn't know you put that together. The aluminum melt off thing, how much of that do you think? Just aluminum alone is obviously an issue, but I'm sure there's many, many other metals and contaminants. Do you think that affected the water supply or affects the water supply much?

Mike Feldstein [00:18:28]: I do, I do a lot. Also. The, the, if the soil is contaminated, then it gets into the groundwater and the standard things that, that cities are testing for in their water, it's like bacteria and chlorine and a few other things. But that's why everyone's like, how's the air quality? I'm like, yeah, it's like going to your doctor and be like they did a blood test. You're like, what did you test for though? Like, so in this situation we really need to expand the scope of what we're testing for. So I personally think that it would be surprising because what do they do when the water quality is contaminated? They just throw more chlorine in it. Like that's how they typically deal with this stuff. So yeah, I would, I would be drinking bottled water exclusively for at least a year.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:10]: And I'm going to do soil and.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:12]: Water or getting like really good carbon block or reverse osmosis, which is obviously an expense.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:17]: Yeah. This is a good time to be doubling down on your water filtration.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:21]: Okay, so I'm assuming that let's say your home didn't burn down and there's smoke and we're not just talking about la, obviously. There are podcast listeners who I know have to deal with wildfires in their area that, as you astutely noted, often go beyond just wood burning, go beyond just organic matter. I imagine that smoke must at some point settle down, you know, after it's infiltrated into an indoor environment and be on things like your furniture, your floor, Maybe inside your HVAC system, etc. What do you do? If you, if you weren't going to move, how would you go about just like cleaning up your environment? Yeah. How do you do. How do you detox the home?

Mike Feldstein [00:20:10]: So I'll save the long answer. I went deep on it in the. In the kind of smoke course I put together, but I'll give you the abbreviated version now. So if you had any ash or soot at any point visibly inside your home, typically you would see it in the window sills. If you had that, then you're in the category of you should be having an insurance claim. This is a full insurance claim. You need, like, they're going to detox your home, they're going to rip out carpets, insulation, paint your house, replace every soft material. Most people aren't in that category, but they were in la.

Mike Feldstein [00:20:43]: It did smell smoky. Their home smelled smoky. Now it doesn't. You still need to do a smoke detox. So what does that look like? So definitely getting your ducts cleaned is a great idea. You definitely want to get that done. You also want to get your HVAC system serviced and cleaned. So pretty much any HVAC contractor will do this.

Mike Feldstein [00:21:01]: They'll come, they'll be there for three hours, they'll open it up, they'll clean it. Doing this back to back is also a really good idea. You want to get all your carpets, bedding and couches steam cleaned. Just pull out all those toxins, do a heavy. You're doing a deep clean. That's what's happening here. All of the clothing in your home, typically, this is the way I would. I like to approach it.

Mike Feldstein [00:21:23]: And I also, I detoxed hundreds of homes after wildfires. So this is not Mike the Jaspr guy talking right now. This is Mike the wildfire detox guy.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:32]: Talking, who used to be restoration in our former podcast. Just for those of you listening. And definitely pair the other podcast with Mike with one because we got into his whole background in mold remediation and wildfire experience. But go ahead.

Mike Feldstein [00:21:45]: Yeah, that, that first pod was basically like Air Quality 101 Air Awareness. If you haven't been connecting air quality to your health, you're thinking about water, you're thinking about food and exercise and some sun and you're trying to do all that. That last episode was just really air quality 101. So if you didn't hear that one, pause this one now and go back to this, the first episode, because this one's going to build on top of that. So, yeah, to detox a home, you'd want to get all of your clothing. You'd bag up all your clothing at the same time and you would take it to a dry cleaner, get it all cleaned. While that closes out of your home is when you want to do all your steam cleaning, your HVAC and your duct cleaning. So you can coordinate that all in like a one or two day span.

Mike Feldstein [00:22:27]: This way you're not re contaminating stuff. So your clothes is out of out of the home being cleaned. HVACuum duct, good to go. Get all your steam cleaning done. That covers the big stuff. And then you want to do a deep clean. I would personally recommend investing in a HEPA vacuum and not a Dyson HEPA vacuum. Those are great for your daily driver.

Mike Feldstein [00:22:47]: But there's a vacuum that's called the GD930. GD930 by NilFisk or EuroClean. This is the same vacuum I would use on mold remediation, asbestos, wildfire smoke. This is like a restoration contractor grade vacuum. These used to be.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:04]: I gotta ask you, by the way, I gotta interrupt real quick. Is this like a $10,000 vacuum?

Mike Feldstein [00:23:08]: What would cost her 599 now? Oh, this used to be. It used to be like 1500 plus. Now they're like $500. They're very reasonable. So this is the vacuum that I would recommend. This is like your monthly or your quarterly. This is not your daily driver. This is the deep clean vacuum.

Mike Feldstein [00:23:25]: And if you were to hire someone to come out and clean it, you'd pay way more than that one time. It has a serious hepa, real HEPA filter and a HEPA bag. It's heavy duty and it has way more suction power. It's great for carpets, it's good for stairs, it's good for walls, it's good for furniture. So I would do a once over in your Home with the deep clean. And this is just a good thing to own. You'll have it forever. It's built like a tank.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:52]: And what, what's it called again?

Mike Feldstein [00:23:53]: It's, it's the GD 930.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:57]: GD 930.

Mike Feldstein [00:23:58]: Yeah. And like any, a lot of different, like restoration and online guys sell it. I think Amazon even has it. It's between 4.99 and 5.99. And I think it's really worth it. You'll have it forever. And even in restoration land, I only had to change the filters every few months. Like, if you have it for personal use, you'll never have to change the filter.

Mike Feldstein [00:24:15]: You're good forever.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:16]: Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll link to it in the show notes too. Okay, so we got a good vacuum cleaner.

Mike Feldstein [00:24:20]: So yeah. So, you know, we got the steam cleaning, we got the clothes cleaning, we got the ducts, we got the HVAC. We're HEPA vacuuming everything. And then I would just do like a good deep clean. So if you have the time to do it yourself or, and, or you're on a budget, then this is the part you can do yourself or you can just hire a cleaning company to come in and do a deep clean. This is similar to what you would do after a renovation. And there's dust everywhere. In this case, you can't see the dust.

Mike Feldstein [00:24:43]: It's too small to be visible to your eye. But this is like, you know, three cleaning cleaners for like a day. If not, though, this is, it's a good time to wash all your dishes, go behind the cabinets, pull out the bedding, like, spend a day or two and do a really good deep clean of your home. And this is what everyone should be doing. And the HEPA vacuum is essential, people. Now, if we go to New York City right now and a couple summers ago, it turned into the apocalypse there, the wildfire smoke from Canada blew through. Even now, if somebody was not filtering their air in New York, which was thousands of miles away from the fire, their bedding, their couches, their carpets still has hexavailing chromium. PAH.

Mike Feldstein [00:25:24]: And a lot of wildfire smoke contaminants. Because if it gets into your, your porous materials, it doesn't get out unless you detox it. It's going to stay there forever or for a very, very long time. So it's like the smoke came in your home and then a week later it didn't smell anymore. It's not because it left it's because it got embedded in the fibers of your home. And that's why doing a very active deep clean is essential.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:49]: Unless you're like my grandma who had all of her furniture covered in plastic.

Mike Feldstein [00:25:54]: Real. If it was, if it was airtight, you're good. And a lot of people even had three, four Jasprs in LA. But if you lost power, they weren't working. And a lot of people lost power. But there was a girl named Ashley. So when I went to la, I did a bunch of testing, including going to Jaspr customers and just checking in on them and seeing what everything was doing. And this was a really cool situation.

Mike Feldstein [00:26:17]: I mean, bittersweet. None of this was happy stuff. But I want to make sure Jaspr's doing its job. There was a girl named Ashley and a guy named Javier. Same apartment building, one floor apart. She had a Jaspr. He did not have air filtration. The particles in her apartment were about 200,000.

Mike Feldstein [00:26:34]: His was 1.4 million. Hers had no odors. His place still stunk. So his place was like borderline not livable. And her place was quite pristine. She did not lose power. She lived in Santa Monica, a couple miles from the fire. And she just had one Jaspr in her living room on smart mode.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:52]: Just, just a single Jaspr.

Mike Feldstein [00:26:53]: It was probably about an 800-900-square-foot apartment. Yeah. But one Jaspr on Smart mode, you know, because it detected the smoke and it was running on full speed the entire time. There was a couple in New York, Brooklyn. Their apartment building had a fire and everybody escaped but their dogs and the whole building filled with smoke and the building did not lose power. They came back a few hours later with the fire department and the dog was like in the cl. In a small bedroom right beside the Jaspr. The Jaspr's cranking and the dog survived.

Mike Feldstein [00:27:23]: We did a zoom call with them recently. We're gonna, we're gonna publish, publish that call soon. But yeah, it was, you know, originally my background being in wildfire, smoke and mold. I made Jaspr not as an air purifier, it's truly an air scrubber. An air scrubber is what we would use for mold and fire. And that's what I was trying to create with Jaspr and air scrubber. So this was the first huge fire of its kind where I was able to say, because my hypothesis was like, you can't have these big ugly industrial air scrubbers are too loud, they're too ugly, they're very expensive, they're very cumbersome. But if people in areas that are susceptible to wildfire smoke just have Jasprs in their day to day life.

Mike Feldstein [00:27:59]: When a horrible air quality smoke event comes through, how does it hold up? So I was very pleased to see how it performed and now she doesn't need to do a deep clean at all. She's good to go. So she's now saved thousands of dollars on a deep clean and a big headache by proactively filtering her air. So this was a blessing to see.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:17]: Yeah. Mike, what's the difference between a filter and a scrubber?

Mike Feldstein [00:28:22]: It's a great question. It's a little vague but it's basically the. So they can both be hepa, they can both be fans, but a scrubber is more industrial in its nature, you know, so in this it's typically made from metal, it has much more commercial grade parts. It's like what's the difference between like a residential sauna heater and a commercial grade sauna? The resi, the commercial one can work 10 hours a day, it can heat big. It's like designed to take a beating. It's just commercial grade in its intent. Higher quality motors, it operates quieter. It's designed to be used for mold remediation.

Mike Feldstein [00:29:00]: An air purifier, it's really designed for a little bit of dust, a small space like a little humidifier in the corner. An air scrubber is designed to scrub the air and clean it on a higher level. So it's like an F350 versus an F150. Like it's just a lot more of a workhorse. It's a more heavy duty machine. So the vision was to make the world's first air scrubber designed for your home. So aesthetic and quiet, but heavy duty in its nature.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:29]: Okay, so standalone air filtration like Jaspr aside, let's say someone were doing like a new home build and they lived in a polluted environment or an area where there was wildfire smoke and they had the option for their HVAC system to have not just air purification, but the way I understand it from a little bit of research that I've done, you can also add air scrubbing as a feature to like a home build. For an HVAC system you could go beyond just air purification and add air scrubbing and that would be a more thorough solution.

Mike Feldstein [00:30:04]: So it's good in theory. Jaspr originally we tried to. That was the product we tried to come out with and we pulled. We didn't launch it to the public because it was not as effective as we wanted it to be. And the reason that is is you want a home to be energy efficient too, so that means your furnace and air conditioner you want running maybe 10 to 30% of the time, especially in like a temperate climate. So when that HVAC system's not running, the filtration is doing nothing.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:31]: Yeah, mine is set, by the way. I have the setting, sorry to interrupt, in my home, I do have an HVAC system. I've got like 5 Jasprs spread all over the house because I'm just a nut about air quality. But then for my H vac system built into the home, there's a setting and I have it run for 15 minutes every hour. So I guess I'm running. So I'm like 25% of the time mine's running.

Mike Feldstein [00:30:56]: So you probably have an ERV or something. ERV or HRV. Yeah, which is great. I recommend that for everybody. That's ensuring your home's breathing. So Jaspr cleans the air. That system's going to help with airflow and fresh air coming in. I mean, if it's a bad allergy day or a wildfire smoke day, good to batten down the hatch and turn that feature off.

Mike Feldstein [00:31:18]: But. So yes, it can be engineered in to run that way. If you're building a custom home, there's definitely custom solutions and a bunch of things to consider. Like, just make sure you're dealing with an HVAC contractor who's like, really well versed in air quality. But no matter what, you still always want portable in the bedrooms and in the place that you need the most. And they really.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:38]: The kitchen. The kitchen like we described last time. I won't beat that horse to death because we did in the last podcast. But every time I cook, my Jaspr is in the kitchen in smart mode. And again, it's crazy when the little screen shows the PM 2.5 that builds up from like, literally like frying a fish on the stovetop for the next hour.

Mike Feldstein [00:31:58]: So, like, if the HVAC system was doing the full job, let's say, then Jaspr shouldn't turn red at all. But the fact that it is means it's a good thing to have.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:06]: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So when it comes to the air quality thing, one thing that we didn't talk about is both, well, there's two things actually, I want to touch on here. One is there's a series of studies that have come out, I believe the company is, or the name of the study is CoG FX and it links air quality to cognition. I also want to touch on sleep. But what do we know at this point about like cognition, mental productivity and air quality?

Mike Feldstein [00:32:42]: A lot, and we're gonna know a lot more. I'm going to start doing a bunch. Me and Jim Kwik are going deep down the rabbit hole here to, to do a lot more on this front. The, the best study I know of and there's a lot but they took a bunch of grandmaster chess players and they looked at the game theory optimal like quality of their move and the quality of their chess moves was very correlated to the air quality. So as the air quality got worse their performance in chess went down. And these are like you know mathletes, these are like brain athletes, high performing folk. So there's a lot of air quality studies that tie air quality to absenteeism. There's a lot of new studies that tie air pollution to dementia and Alzheimer's because naturally like if you're, if you if the only fuel we have to fuel our minds and that never stops and fuel our sleeps is air quality.

Mike Feldstein [00:33:34]: So if we aren't fueling our body with, with the cleanest source then naturally our output suffers. So there's two ways of approaching studies. I like, there's, I like real world studies. So 99% of studies you see out of like filter products they're mostly nonsense. They're testing the filter in an isolated chamber, it's not even in the machine. I like to do studies where it's like if we're doing a mold study well then the room should be filled with mold spores. You should turn on the Jaspr and measure it and see how much mold gets removed. Just like real world stuff.

Mike Feldstein [00:34:06]: So on our website now we have our newest study. People can check it out at Jaspr codes on our on on the Jaspr page they filled a room with mold spores. It was a 500 square foot room with eight foot ceilings which is important to note. And after one hour there was 97.1% reduction of mold and within three hours there was no airborne mold detected whatsoever. On the sleep front we did a study also since last time we spoke where we gave 150 Jasprs to people who have been using Oura rings to track their sleep for years but they weren't filtering their air and we did a one month study so we did the first week no Jaspr just like assess the baseline. Weeks two and three Jaspr was on in the bedroom on fan speed two and then the final week they turned the Jaspr back off. It's actually hilarious. I have a lot of emails from people being like, "It's been two days, can I turn it back on, please?" I'm like, no, you can't.

Mike Feldstein [00:35:03]: Because it's like being like, drink clean water for a week and then I need you to drink tap water. Like they're like, no, I don't want to do this anymore.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:11]: Right. It's almost like one of those studies where they, they start the treatment. The treatment's so efficacious that the people who aren't receiving the treatment go downhill so fast they almost have to call off the study due to the unethical nature of the studies.

Mike Feldstein [00:35:24]: Yeah. So the, the data was awesome and thank God for AI. It would have been really hard to compile, but we were able to take 150 people's Oura data, throw it in AI to get, get the output. The average person slept 25 minutes more per night with 18% more deep sleep. Now I will caveat that this was driven by the worst performing sleepers. So I bet you for you we probably squeeze you an extra like three, four minutes a night. Maybe like you're going to be on the margins because you're already, you're sleep optimized intensely. Whereas someone who's only sleeping five and a half hours a night and they're restless and they're up all night, a lot of people, as soon as they put Jaspr in their bedroom, snoring immediately stopped.

Mike Feldstein [00:36:11]: Like forever. They just stopped snoring. And like my favorite stories where husband and wife haven't shared a room in five, six years because the husband's at snoring and they're sleep divorced, they pop Jaspr in the house. No more snoring, they're sharing a bed together again. Another guy was like 100 times a day and they had one Jaspr in their home and he hasn't done it since. But when he travels.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:35]: Wait, I want to, I want to double click on this real quick because sleep apnea, usually that will be attributed to overweight or obesity impairing the airway in some fashion. Some type of biomechanical abnormality in the cervical spine or the jaw that might be restricting the airway. But the air quality piece is interesting. So is there a link that you know of between snoring and sleep apnea and air pollution or air quality? Or is this something that you guys just found out on your own?

Mike Feldstein [00:37:08]: Honestly, this is something we've just stumbled on but now we're probably getting, even if people just go to our website, we're getting at least a review or two almost weekly about people who aren't snoring anymore.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:19]: Yeah, this is super interesting, you know, because, I mean, surely you know about the mouth tape and how many people anecdotally reported drop in sleep apnea and snoring from something as simple as humidifying and cleaning the air through the nose, getting more nitric oxide production, et cetera, during sleep. So what you did is almost like, created a piece of tech that might simulate something similar to nasal breathing during sleep.

Mike Feldstein [00:37:43]: And both is the best. So a lot of people, they tape their mouth and they filter their air. And if you think, like, I know some folks, how crazy is this CPAP machines? And the amount of. I know some, like, fit bodybuilder type dudes in their early 40s who are now using CPAP machines. And how crazy that someone literally needs a machine to breathe at night to, you know, project air down their throat and it doesn't have an air filter. The guys who sell CPAP machines don't sell air filters. It's like, maybe if that person's having a lot of trouble with their airways, maybe clean air would be a good place to start. Or even if they're also using a CPAP machine, the filter is like the size of a quarter.

Mike Feldstein [00:38:23]: It's like, designed for, like, big particulate, but to me, it would be table stakes. We need a breathing apparatus to sleep. Let's have the cleanest air possible to support that process.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:34]: Okay, got it. I want to ask you a product competitor question, and this is fresh on my mind. I hadn't even thought about asking you this question because, you know, usually for a few weeks leading into a podcast, I'm thinking about the questions I want to ask people and, you know, jotting it down, not on my hand, on my phone, but I was at a home three days ago, and I was recording a podcast at this person's house. And they were big into health and in the health industry, and they had a whole bunch of Air Doctors around. Now, I don't want to create a podcast in which we're talking bad about other people, but I want to provide a fair comparison because I know that's another very popular air filter. I actually have an Air Doctor. I think I have two of them. It was what I used quite a bit of before you and I talked about Jaspr, and I started to use that a little bit more.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:27]: What do you think about the Air Doctor? Because that's a big one in the health industry.

Mike Feldstein [00:39:31]: Yeah. So this is a good question. It's important to note that it's a brand, not a product. So they have, you know, they have, like, five to seven different air purifiers now. So their new ones now have wifi on them. So right off the bat, we don't do wifi, we don't do Bluetooth, we don't do apps.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:48]: Yeah. And by the way, you've got the dark mode, which is good because like there's so many devices that show up to my house. I literally from Amazon have a whole Christmas wrapping shapes, sheet of red light stickers that, or red light paper that I use to cover up all of the bright lit screens on products that I use because nobody thought about the night feature. I do like that you guys have the night mode where I can just push the light button and it turns off. But then the wifi, like you're just describing, that's another issue.

Mike Feldstein [00:40:18]: So that's one. And I mean, you know, they, they're, they're okay. It's a fine product. It's better than the $99 little stuff you get on Amazon and Walmart for sure. Their Air Doctor 5500 is actually really good at cleaning the air. Very, very similar in performance to Jaspr. That's their like thousand dollars model. The smaller ones, you know, they just kind of like a lot of these guys that have air purifiers that are 99, 199, 299, like they just don't really work.

Mike Feldstein [00:40:45]: They don't move enough air. It's like trying to pull your boat or your trailer with a sedan. It's just not big enough to get the job done. Their big guy cleans the air really well. My problem with that one and I, I was testing it in our living room and then my wife's like, when are you going to be done testing this air conditioner? It, it, it's bright white, shiny plastic, loud buttons. And then it has filters on two sides. So what that means is it can't go in against the corner, it can't go against the wall. It has to sort of sit in the middle of the room.

Mike Feldstein [00:41:19]: And if you look at the Air doctor on the filter, it literally says in the filter thing that you have to vacuum it monthly. So because they use a much, much, much lower grade filter, like Jaspr's filter is like four and a half pounds. It's industrial grade. Their filters, like a furnace filter, it's like half a pound or a pound. It's not a very intense filter in there. So that's why you have to vacuum it each month because it gets clogged up. So it's great for social media to be like look how dirty my filter is. After a month I'm like a good filter shouldn't be that clogged up so quickly.

Mike Feldstein [00:41:48]: So the filter is just, if anyone looks at them you'll see a huge, huge difference especially just in the weight and the performance vacuuming it each month. So there's two sides. So theoretically you'd be vacuuming it 24 times a year per Air Doctor. So if you have four of them that's like a hundred filters you're vacuuming a year. Another big thing is they only have a one year warranty. We have a lifetime warranty and I'm just a big, I think brands warranty should match the. So we built Jaspr to last 25 or 30 years. So we put our money where our mouth is.

Mike Feldstein [00:42:19]: If it breaks, we ship you a brand new one. You take the new one out of the box, you put the old one in the box. You get a prepaid shipping label. We send UPS to pick it up from your front door. A lot of companies is like you need to have the box, you got to send them videos. You only have a one year warranty. So if your Air Doctor fails after 366 days, it's so sad, too bad. And sensors will eventually fail and then the smart mode won't work anymore.

Mike Feldstein [00:42:43]: So like you know my background, I was a restoration guy. So I was just trying to make an air scrubber designed for your home. They're really, they've been around for 20 years, you know, infomercial space. They make water filters, they make diffusers, they make lots of air purifiers. So they're a fine company but we just obsess over doing one thing. Making the world's greatest air scrubber for your home and just being, you know, we're like the taco truck for your air. We just do one thing. Awesome.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:09]: Yeah. Okay. All right guys. So, so Air Doctor's decent product, slightly more upkeep required. Some of the models have WIFI and then there's differences in the warranty.

Mike Feldstein [00:43:19]: Although there, if anyone goes to their website they're actually cloning the Jaspr now they're making an aired a Jaspr clone. It's on their website right now. However if you look at that, that and I mean I'm flattered, you know imitation is the best form of flattery. So right now they're doing a pre order. It's basically Jaspr's twin however it's plastic, it's got a little small filter inside and just very cheap parts inside and out. So they use the Same shape and the design. It has no screen. It doesn't show you the air quality in real time, but at least it looks nicer.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:54]: Yeah. Oh, by. By the way, so I do have a product feature recommendation for you. I don't know if you saw my recent podcast with Brian Hoyer. We went through my whole house, yo.

Mike Feldstein [00:44:05]: We talked at the event. Thanks to you.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:07]: Okay, good. Including the Jasprs. And it was not just your product. It was pretty much almost, I think every product in my home test it out really good on the EMF until you get to the cable.

Mike Feldstein [00:44:22]: Yes.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:23]: And apparently it's very difficult to find cables that are shielded so that you're not getting some dirty electricity coming off the cable. And we even tested the Jaspr so it appears that it might be a cool product upgrade to actually make the cable, you know, like what plugs into the wall to be a shielded cable. Did you talk with Brian about that?

Mike Feldstein [00:44:48]: It's already done. So I saw it on your Instagram at that. At, at, at Tim's Health Optimization Summit last week when you were in Austin. I went up to Brian Hoyer. His booth was right by ours. I'm like, dude, we got to talk. He came by the booth. We tested it a bunch.

Mike Feldstein [00:45:04]: We shot some content together. So we're, we're, we're, we're moving to all shielded cables now. Like that's the thing. Because we only do one thing we can, we can ingest and implement feedback rapidly. Yeah. So we're moving to a shield cable. Shielded cable. The good news is the, the EMF was only radiating off of it, you know, a foot or so.

Mike Feldstein [00:45:25]: So if it's like, it's not super.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:27]: Problematic, if it was plugged in next to your bed, it might be an issue, right?

Mike Feldstein [00:45:30]: Yeah. Other side of the room, a few feet away, it's okay. But I'm like, hey, even let, let's, let's do it all. Why not? So we are now upgrading to shield shielded cables and we're sending Brian a couple Jasprs and he's going to do a bigger, a deep dive on it. But yeah, that product change has already been made.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:48]: Yeah. That's awesome. Obviously it's a little bit of an investment on my part, but I'm literally buying shielded cables from Brian to replace every single cable for that plugs into my home because the home itself is built really well. But then after building the home, you know, whatever, we move in the red light bed and the things that are plugged in next to my desk and.

Mike Feldstein [00:46:07]: The lights, you're in there now, right? You're in the new place.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:09]: Yeah, we're in there now. Does it feel awesome and so. Oh, it feels incredible. Yeah. I mean my only problem is like when I travel I'm often craving being home even more because I just feel so good and sleep so good and do so well. I mean I have so much energy.

Mike Feldstein [00:46:26]: Tell me about it.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:27]: Yeah, so yeah, it's incredible.

Mike Feldstein [00:46:30]: We just optimized too and now I don't want to go anywhere.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:34]: Okay, so while we're still being careful throwing people under the bus completely. While you were talking about the Air Doctor, I thought of one other that I actually wanted to ask you about. Molekule.

Mike Feldstein [00:46:44]: Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:44]: This is like the sexy looking space age kind of shaped similar to the Jaspr. I don't hear people talking about it as much nowadays, but it's still a big thing. I saw it at a wellness facility when I was in Austin recently, last week. What do you think about that one? The Molekule with a K. Molekule with a K.

Mike Feldstein [00:47:01]: So they were the first cool, sexy air purifier. I'd say they came out in 2016 and where they started to where they're now is a big difference because none of the founding team is a part of the company anymore. They raised money like 12 times and they were a San Francisco based so all their investors were software investors. Not hardware, not filtration, not restoration software. Guys in San Fran like oh, it's like a software company subscription revenue and they were trying to treat it like that. So bunch of Facebook ads, you know they would like lose money for the first like two years hoping to make it back later. And they made these claims about pico technology.

Mike Feldstein [00:47:43]: Their whole message was HEPA technology has been around for 70 years. It's ancient. No one's innovated. We don't filter, we destroy with pico technology. Meanwhile they still had a little tiny HEPA on board and that's what was actually doing the filtering. They went really downhill when Wire Cutter did a video on them that said worst air purifier we ever tested. And like no way. Like 199.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:07]: Yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:07]: Like million views or something like $199. Air purifiers were crushing it and they. The auto mode was just medium. It had no sensor. The auto mode was just medium. So 10 out of 10 on the design crushed it. Similar to Dyson.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:25]: Oh yeah, looks cool.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:25]: Beautiful. Great design. But I'm like, I feel like they went design first and functionality second. So yeah, now we're in a situation they raise, they, they were acquired recently by a public company and they were losing $9 million a quarter. And then they blamed the failure of the company on, on like the homeless problem outside their office in San Francisco. So I gotta give it to them. They try to innovate, I don't know. But Dyson also filed.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:52]: Dyson got a class action lawsuit started against them. So I actually had bought a molecule to test it out.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:57]: Yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:57]: Even pre Jaspr. So everybody got a little bit of money back because once it proved that Pico technology didn't work and they lost this class action lawsuit, everybody got a little refund. So they, they don't really clean air.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:13]: What even is PICO technology?

Mike Feldstein [00:49:16]: It's like photo catalytic stuff. I can't remember exactly how it works but like the idea of saying that like just because something, it's a good message, you know, HEPA's old, no one's innovated. But like you know what else is old like wood, concrete, water, like just because, just because some things are old that sometimes that's the tried and true. And when I, when I was seeing all their new tech technology, I'm like, if Tesla, NASA space station and surgical operating rooms are all just using hepa, maybe we'll just roll with the fundamentals. So Jaspr doesn't use any fancy technology. We have tried and true. HEPA activated carbon, a big ass fan and a big ass filter. Same thing I used when I was remediating mold.

Mike Feldstein [00:50:01]: So that company's just like, it's confusing. I don't know who's running it anymore. Yeah. But they had their moment.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:10]: Yeah. Okay, so I have like a more like esoteric woo question for you. But like everything that you create allows people to spend more time healthier indoors. But how do you tackle the idea of just like modern indoor confinement in general? You know, because you have a company that would allow people to spend more time indoors and yet you know, we know unless there's wildfires outside that it's a good idea to be outside. How do you tackle that? Like mentally or in your own routine?

Mike Feldstein [00:50:39]: Yeah. So the best air purifier, like our logo anyone's watching on video just looks at the brand. Our logo is a tree in a mountain. Like our logo is a tree. Because the original, the best air purifier, the best air filter, air scrubber of all time is nature. It's the wind, it's the sun, it's the rain and it's trees. Unfortunately, we built our home so tight that we left nature outside so you cannot beat nature. The reason, there's a reason why when there's that huge wildfire smoke cloud and eventually it's gone, it's because the oceans and the trees filtered it.

Mike Feldstein [00:51:13]: So you cannot beat outside. And nor would I try being this. The reason Jaspr exists is not so you can spend more time inside. It's so the time that you do spend inside is a much cleaner environment. And if wildfire smoke is getting more prevalent and homes are tight and there's mold or you're in a tenant situation and you're always going to have some mold and some allergens, you know, the pollen. Pollen outside and mold outside, no problem. Nature takes care of it. But because our homes are built so tight, all that shit comes inside and gets trapped inside.

Mike Feldstein [00:51:45]: So I'm a huge fan of being outside. Open doors, open windows, unless it's too hot or too cold or a high allergy kind of day. And you don't want to trap it inside. So yeah, outside's the best. You can't beat that. Unfortunately, we pollute a lot. And there's, you know, like you said on the pod last time, the. Where do you think the rubber from the tires and the car goes like that shit's in the air that just magically disappears.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:09]: Gone. Just because you're not using balance sheets and chemicals. If your neighbor is and your neighbor's spraying glyphosate, that's coming inside too. So yeah, outside is number one. No doubt about it. The idea is to create like the cool thing about an indoor space. The bad thing is that humans spend like 95% of their time indoors generally, especially in colder climates. The good news is your home is the one environment you can control.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:36]: And the two things that I'm happiest.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:39]: About Jaspr, that until, until. Until we come out with the box that you can get shipped to the hotels.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:44]: Until then, then we're good.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:46]: Yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:46]: And we will, somebody will hit us up. So it, you know when I get reviews that people's sleep is completely changed, that's like as happy as I could except for like playing with my kids and being with my family. Business wise, there's nothing that warms my heart more than someone sleeping better. Because like I think biohack Health hack number one is sleep better. So it's like just do what you have to do to sleep better and everything else will follow that. And the other one is when people suffer from seasonal allergies. And the allergens are real bad in Austin, they're bad in a lot of places. Often people's seasonal allergies are just gone.

Mike Feldstein [00:53:24]: Why? Because humans are like, we can take some stress, we can take some mold, we could take some pollen, some allergens, you know, some asphalt renovation work by the contractors or going by construction that smells toxic, we can handle that. The problem is the 24 hour a day beat down. So there's more pollen and pollution often in your home than outside. So the reason, I think a lot of people have a lot of chronic health issues, not the whole thing. You know, I'm, I'm the air guy, so I'm approaching it from that lens. But you're breathing all this toxic stuff 24 hours a day. So when your body's trying to rest, recover, heal, consolidate memories, work on your gut, work on your muscles, do all its good natural healing process. At night, you're breathing in mold and pollen and toxins and chemicals.

Mike Feldstein [00:54:13]: So your body's still playing defense all night long when you can. In your bedroom. If you look at the air in your bedroom, there's a lot of toxic stuff. And that's your sleep fuel, that's your recovery fuel, that's your healing fuel. When we turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, your body goes deeply parasympathetic. Your sleep improves, your fuel's cleaner now, your body recovers, your stress loads come down. And then because of that, you, you would think, oh no, the contrast is now bigger. So the allergens are going to be a problem outside.

Mike Feldstein [00:54:45]: That's not how it goes. A lot of people, seasonal allergies just completely go away, even when they travel, when they go outside, when they come inside. Because now, eight hours a day or more, if they have clean air throughout their whole home, their toxin burden's coming way down. And then they're more resilient people and they're just feeling better all the time. Inflammation goes down.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:05]: Yeah, that makes sense. Sympathetic nervous system downregulation. So you're a little bit less hypersensitive to really a lot of things. Allergies, though there's no research behind this, arguably emf, et cetera. You know, it's kind of like the perfect example of this is put yourself through a toxic day, maybe poor sleep, junk food, a couple of arguments, some email and emotional stress and see how you feel doing if you do this. Your typical cold plunge on a day like that versus a normal day. Like if I'm stressed out and I've had a really awful day, a cold plunge really sucks. Like I'm like 20 seconds and literally want to climb out of that thing because my nervous system is not really resilient.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:48]: Whereas if I have a good night of sleep, decent day of work, good emotions, good relationships, you know, I can go plunge and just sit in there like it's a bath, you know, for four or five minutes. So, you know, that's kind of a silly but. But I think effective litmus test.

Mike Feldstein [00:56:04]: Yeah. And just like to conclude on that, you know, air filtration is awesome, but generally indoors, I think the goal should be and like to make the indoor environment be as close to outside as the has the natural environment. So a lot of homes, you know, there's very little natural light. There's carpets, there's synthetic materials, there's toxic cleaning chemicals. Then the air is bad too. So I believe Jaspr, going back to our logo being a tree, we want to give you the air. That's why we don't add things to your air. We only filter things out.

Mike Feldstein [00:56:36]: I want the air that nature intended me to have. So we just filter stuff. And I think the goal with home design and things and building design should be to get as close to the outdoor environment. Of course we want thermal comfort. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. But outside of that, I want my indoor environment to be as close to outside as it possibly can.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:56]: You're speaking my language, brother. I mean, back to Brian Hoyer, we covered a lot of this in my episode with him. But rather than LED lighting, we mixed OLED and incandescent to get as close to sunlight spectrum as possible. Rather than regular water filtration, which is great, we added an extra step of structuring which returns water back to the state it would be if it were, say, like tumbling down an underground spring rather than something like being disconnected or cushioned from the surface planet. We lined the flooring of every single floor in the house with copper conductive material that's grounded. So no matter where you're at in the house, it's. I mean, unless you're wearing like, rubber shoes indoors, it's like you're grounded or earthed. So, yeah, I mean, that perspective through which we viewed the.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:45]: The construction, the entire home was how can we be as close as possible to being outside when we're inside?

Mike Feldstein [00:57:51]: It's funny because, like, biohacking, you know, that word means a lot of different things to a lot of people, but like, you would think it's like additive in getting away from nature, but. But it's like everything you're actually trying to do is just to return to nature. Like you're trying to do what the sun would do and do what the river would do and the mountains would do. It's like, it's less about editing and just we want to be thermally comfort. We want cities, we want Internet, we want a comfortable life, we want to enjoy technology. So, yeah, it's just actually kind of neat to think that like most of the stuff you're doing is actually about like getting nature has it in your home as much as possible. Pretty cool.

Ben Greenfield [00:58:27]: Yeah, yeah. Microplastics are a huge concern for people. I know we're running short on time, but talk to me about that because I know one of the primary sources of microplastic exposure. You know, a lot of people think water or, you know, whatever, plastic receipts and transdermal absorption or something like that, but your lungs are one of the primary ways in which you inhale microplastics. Does Jaspr make any kind of a dent in that? We haven't talked about that before for.

Mike Feldstein [00:58:54]: So we're doing a study right now. By the way. If you, if, if anyone out there and you, Ben, have ideas for studies, hit us. This is where we love to invest in. So we're doing a study right now. There's not an exact microplastic study in particular, so the lab is going to use latex beads that are at the size of a microplastic particle. But yeah, we will filter that at a high degree. There was a study in the UK, if you just type in microplastic study, BBC London.

Mike Feldstein [00:59:20]: They did a study and they tested like 40 homes and 100% of the homes had microplastics inside, eight times more than outside, because remember, outside it's getting filtered by nature. They started doing biopsies on people's lungs and almost everybody's lungs had microplastics in them. And now they're going to study more. It's like we don't know exactly how bad microplastics are, but we could infer that it's pretty bad. And 70% of the detox in your body happens in your lungs. So it's kind of comical to me that here we are, you know, up trying to like get glass bottles and not drink out of plastic, which I do. But there's a good case to be made that we're breathing in way more microplastics and way more toxins than we're getting from everything else. So, you know, a lot of us are majoring in the minors and like, just not starting from your air, which is the first thing you do when you're born, the last thing you do when you.

Mike Feldstein [01:00:10]: Before you die is a great place to start.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:13]: Yeah, yeah. Bad. Back to the Uber idea. You hop in an Uber, you've got the Christmas tree air freshener, the crinkly little plastic water bottle at the kind Uber driver, out of the goodness of their heart because they don't know hands you. You've got the massive amounts of EMF being kicked off by the vehicle. Even more if you're in the backseat of an electrical vehicle because the batteries are in the back. And like, that's a perfect example of everything that we're trying to avoid. So the more that you can hack your environment to be a non Uber experience, I guess we could say, you know, the anti Uber approach, the better.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:44]: And that's another great idea. Come up. Come up with Uber for healthy people, right? You got Uber xl, Uber X, Uber.

Mike Feldstein [01:00:49]: Company, Uber not toxic.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:50]: Maybe like Uber Health or Uber Life.

Mike Feldstein [01:00:53]: No, no, no. Fresheners.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:54]: Yeah, yeah. This is a. This is a car that's naturally clean with, you know, air scrubbers and low EMF and maybe one of those little, like, quantum block thingies in there. And yeah, there's another business idea, folks.

Mike Feldstein [01:01:05]: One thing I don't. Yeah, who knew this would be a business pod? One other thing I just don't want to forget to mention that we're going to be anyone out there with kids. Keep an eye on this. So we just actually, we're opening a school here in Austin in August, and everything we talked about, we're putting. So there was a study in Finland that showed when they put air purifiers in the classrooms, absenteeism dropped between 30 and 50%, like right away. When I. When my daughter started going to school when she was three, all of a sudden she was chronically sick, stuffed nose and cough. I'm like, what is going on here? I went to the school, of course, there's like, no windows don't open.

Mike Feldstein [01:01:42]: There's scented air fresheners. Every day I'd pick her up and unplug the air freshener, and every morning it'd be back in. And we put the Jaspr in her class and she kind of stopped getting homesick. This was before the school. Then put five of them in. Then I found out about that Finland study. But I'm like, our kids, you know, they come out of the womb, we put them in these nurseries with dirty diapers and EMF and freshly painted rooms and all that. And then we send them off to school and Schools gotta be one of the most toxic environments there is.

Mike Feldstein [01:02:13]: This is where we're putting our kids to spend most of their waking hours. And they have no water filtration, they don't have opening windows, they have no ventilation, they have no air filtration. They use the cheapest, most toxic cleaning products. They have the worst fluorescent and LED lighting possible. And once I saw that Finland study I'm like, you know Jaspr is here to raise air awareness and health awareness. We can't tackle this on our own. But what we are going to do is this. So our school is opening and our goal is to be the healthiest school in America.

Mike Feldstein [01:02:42]: And what better time than with the tailwinds of MAHA. So what are we doing? Air filtration throughout the entire building. Water filtration, we're doing like circadian rhythm lighting similar to what you guys did. And it will, it will match the sun as much as possible. Huge screened in porches so the kids can have that indoor outdoor environment as much as possible. No toxic cleaning products whatsoever. So we're, and then we're going to be benchmarking all of our statistics on sick rates, runny noses, absenteeism, all of it. And it's called Kindling Academy.

Mike Feldstein [01:03:14]: So if anyone's in Austin and wants to check it out, check us out at Kindling Academy. But also if you want to just follow along for the journey. We'll be doing a lot of studies, we'll be creating a lot of content, we'll be bringing in a lot of like outside mentors to teach the kids like real life skills. Whether and we're having not in our first year but in the second year we have an organic wellness chef with all hyper, hyper local source foods. So this will not be a money maker, it will not be hopefully we'll break even but we want to prove out how, how will these kids perform and what will life be like if the let's optimize the kids school to be the healthiest place and then we have a sauna and cold plunge. So when the parents maybe we'll use it for the kids too. But when the parents come and drop off and pick up their kids for an hour before and after this will build community. Drop off your kids, take a sauna, meet some of the other parents.

Mike Feldstein [01:04:03]: You know when we're kids we have friends built into life and then you become adults, you're like where do I meet friends? And there's no better place than the parents of your kids friends. So yeah, Kindling Academy coming to you At Austin in August. Check it out if you're interested.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:18]: Dude. Hey, I love it. Be. I can imagine, you know, Bobby bullying little Kevin and. And their parents working it out in the sauna afterwards. You know, a little song, a little cold plunge. Talk things out, make things right, which is great. It's gonna be the best.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:36]: Yeah. Yeah. And then Centner Academy, I don't know if you've looked them up. In Miami, I did a podcast with Leila. She sounds like a woman after your own heart. Because I think they're trying to do a lot of this with Centner Academy as well. And then the last thing you should talk with the Starrett family, Kelly and Juliet Starrett, because they've been a big proponent of the whole stand up kids movement and stand up desks in the classroom. My son's had a brief stint at private school and I bought the entire third grade classroom stand up desks, which is great.

Mike Feldstein [01:05:10]: So the Centner Academy, that'd be another cool feature.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:13]: What's that?

Mike Feldstein [01:05:13]: I'm just writing both those down. Centner Academy Miami. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:15]: So Centner Academy C E N T N E R in Miami. Very forward thinking, doing some of the things that you just described. And then I think it's the standupkids.org or maybe standupkids.com, something like that. But Kelly and Juliet Starrett have really been a big force behind the idea of the biomechanics of the classroom. And that would be also another cool thing to look into.

Mike Feldstein [01:05:43]: I just think we got to start like our homes are really important, but like we can't forget these kids schools. So. And like everybody want homeschooling is just a big burden for a lot of people. And like we looked at all the schools Montessori, and it's going to be rooted in Montessori. Montessori will be the educational foundation, but a little bit more project based learning and a little bit more inquisitive learning and what do you call it, collaboration and stuff. Before this, I had a call with Jamie Lee. Jamie Lee Sheils. They've owned multiple schools too, so they're helping us out with this dude.

Ben Greenfield [01:06:17]: Incredible. Kindling. Kindling.

Mike Feldstein [01:06:21]: Kindling Academy. It's not a dot com.

Ben Greenfield [01:06:23]: Kindling Academy. Okay. Everything we talked about from Kindling to my previous podcast with Mike to the Jaspr work, the Jaspr studies, the Jaspr website, our Jaspr discount codes, all that I will [email protected]/airquality. Mike, as usual, this has been incredible.

Mike Feldstein [01:06:45]: For the folks out there. Yeah, this will be the Biggest deal we've ever had. You know, we're out here. So Code Ben, code Ben for two weeks, 14 days following the drop of this podcast, Code Ben will give you a $400 discount on Jaspr. And if you add more, it will save you even more. You know, we're not in Best Buy, Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, none of it. Our whole thing is we just want to raise air awareness, make the world's best air scrubber and talk to health conscious audiences and then give them the best deal possible. So Code Ben will be $400 off if you add more, which if you like clean air, you should put it in your room, put it in your kid's room, put one in the living room.

Mike Feldstein [01:07:27]: Code Ben will be $400 off for two weeks, 14 days following the release of this podcast.

Ben Greenfield [01:07:33]: Frees up a little extra money to buy one of those GD930. I love it. GD930. Yeah, Mike, thank you so much, dude. All right folks. BenGreenfieldLife.com/airquality for the links, the codes, the show notes and your questions, comments and feedback. From healthy hotel rooms to new Uber business ideas.

Mike Feldstein [01:07:57]: Healthy kids. Don't forget the kids.

Ben Greenfield [01:07:58]: You leave it there. And of course, healthy kids. I got to send you a copy of my Boundless parenting book too, Mike. You'll love that.

Mike Feldstein [01:08:05]: We'll give it to all the parents in the school.

Ben Greenfield [01:08:07]: Get it in the mail today. All right folks, thanks so much for listening in. And Mike, thank you.

Mike Feldstein [01:08:11]: Take care, man.

Ben Greenfield [01:08:12]: To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete Boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

Ben Greenfield [01:08:29]: In.

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