Do You Have POOP Particles On Your Shoes, Nasty Mold In Your House & A Crappy Air Purifier System (The Answer Is Likely “Yes”) — Here’s What To Do About It: HEPA Filtration With Mike Feldstein of Jaspr.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

Mike Feldstein [00:00:04]: The top two places someone should be filtering their air are their bedroom, to dial in their sleep, create their sleep sanctuary, and then their kitchen living room space. I went to, like, Best Buy and Home Depot, and I bought a ton of consumer air purifiers—all that stuff is between $100 and $500. And within a few hours, the air quality was contaminated again, what's different about Jaspr is number one, the size. As you can see, it's quite a bit larger than most small air purifiers. And Jaspr on fan speed, one, which is basically silent, moves more air than most air purifiers at full speed. So that's a really big deal. A lot of people talk about maximum speed, but what actually matters even more is how much air you are moving at the lowest speed. That's the state that it's gonna be in 99% of the time.

Mike Feldstein [00:00:47]: If you live indoors, filtering your air is kind of a non negotiable.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:52]: Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:00]: Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life show.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:03]: Are you ready to hack your life?

Ben Greenfield [00:01:05]: Let's do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:15]: Well, my guest on today's show just made my recent trip to Austin, Texas, a real dream. Specifically, I'll paint you a picture here. A lot of times when I travel, I literally call up the hotel prior and I ask them two things. I'm a total diva. Get this. I asked them to have a mini fridge, and that's usually a yes. You know, like, 80% of them have a mini fridge. Because I travel with things that I like to refrigerate, I like healthy foods I can stock up on, etcetera.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:42]: But then I also asked them if they might have an air filtration unit that they could place in my room. And occasionally, they do have a pretty crappy air filtration unit that they'll put in my room. But when I showed up in Austin recently to speak at the Hack Your Health event, my friend Mike, my guest on today's show, Mike Feldstein, he equipped my room with, like, the Cadillac of HEPA air filtration units. It's this thing called a Jaspr. We'll talk about air filtration and how to select air filtration units. On today's show, it's the same air filter that I'm now using as a standalone air filter in my office, which, case in point, just yesterday, my wife was painting the basement. And this little, there's a little screen on this air filter. I'll let Mike explain what it does.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:32]: But the numbers on it started to go up because it was literally detecting these particulates in the air and it kind of adjusted its level and started to filter the air in my office. So it smelled really good. But in Austin, I don't even remember if I told you this yet, Mike because this was just a few days ago that I left. I slept incredibly. Even though it was hot out, the room wouldn't go any lower than like 66 degrees. And usually, I don't sleep so well unless it's around 64. Again, admittedly a sleep diva. That air filter I think really made an impact on how I slept.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:04]: And with the electrical storms and some of the pollution that was down there in Austin, I think it made a big difference. So anyway, I want to talk all things air filtration today with you Mike, if you're game.

Mike Feldstein [00:03:15]: Yes. So while you were sleeping better those few days, fun fact that you don't know, I jacked that air purifier out of my baby Adele's bedroom. And Adele didn't sleep so good those days.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:28]: You didn't? Oh man, she's got it back.

Mike Feldstein [00:03:30]: She's got it back.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:31]: I wouldn't have done that if I knew. I wouldn't have accepted that kind.

Mike Feldstein [00:03:34]: Well it was a good, it was a good case study for us on how air quality impacts my baby sleep. And apparently quite a bit might be.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:43]: A business opportunity there too to drop HEPA air filtration units off at Divas, sleep Divas hotel rooms when they're traveling. The other cool thing is I like how a lot of things in my home, a lot of these appliances that I use, I have to buy red cellophane cover. It's this stuff called Saran on Amazon that I use to cover the screens because a lot of these technologies I use in the evening, whether it's like a biocharger or the shift wave chair or whatever, they have these bright screens that obviously disrupt melatonin. The thing I like about that Jaspr you put in my room is you push one button on it and all the lights disappear. So it's not like a blinky airplane cockpit when you're running something like that. So it's kind of a cool feature. I appreciate it. Maybe that helped with the sleep as well.

Mike Feldstein [00:04:33]: Yeah, so it's funny, a lot of air purifiers have a button on the screen that says sleep but what? Those are the ones that do turn off the light. However, almost all of them. When you hit the sleep button, the air purifier only goes to, like, 5% fan speed. So I joke the only thing you're actually putting to sleep is the air purifier itself. Like, most people want to run it on a higher setting and have it dark, and it's just, like, kind of crazy that that's not the case for most of them. So I agree. The bright lights are very annoying. I basically just made the machine that I really wanted for myself.

Mike Feldstein [00:05:05]: Yeah, you thought of everything.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:08]: Almost. So what makes you an air quality expert, dude? Because I don't remember you being as into air quality when I first met you. And it seems like you've really kind of taken the whole air purifier world by storm, at least based on the size of your expo and the popularity of it at that hack, your health event we were at.

Mike Feldstein [00:05:25]: Yeah. So when we. I think I met you in the first time at MMT 2017.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:31]: Yeah. And by the way, to clarify for folks, MMT, that's Mastermind Talks. It's a mastermind group, run by another former podcast guest of mine, Jason Gaignard. Great book, Mastermind Dinners. Anyways, Mike and I met in that.

Mike Feldstein [00:05:43]: Group, so back then, I was on the heels of, like, back then, I was completely focused on wildfire restoration and disaster chasing. So floods, fires, hurricanes, and, yeah, big, huge mold toxic events, remediation, but specifically in the disaster chasing space. So we weren't like the guys that you called. If you had a flood in your basement or, like, a kitchen fire when there were massive fires in California, hurricanes in Houston, like Hurricane Harvey, big Canadian wildfire, we would mobilize to those situations. So I was more of a disaster guy. We did air quality consulting, but it was mostly wildfires and floods.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:29]: Now, just real quick, how did you even get into that? Did you graduate high school and go straight into disaster remediation? Or was this, like, a post-collegiate type of gig,? How'd that start for you?

Mike Feldstein [00:06:40]: Yeah, great question. So I went to business school for a year and then dropped out. I already met my wife in college, and I wasn't learning very much there. I got into online marketing, and then I was working with a bunch of clients in different industries, e-commerce, and then home services. And then one of those spaces was a bunch of mold removal companies, and I found out, like, whoa. You know, I was just, like, 21, 22 at the time. There was a saying back in there in the game, that mold is golden. And I was like, whoa.

Mike Feldstein [00:07:14]: Interesting. So I got into restoration initially just from a business lens, and I didn't think it would be so captivating and exciting. But it's simple demolition and construction with a little bit better preparation and air filtration. That's what mold removal is. You contain a room, you filter the air inside and out, you safely remove the space, you clean the surfaces in the room, you remove the mold, clean the air in the house, and we've remediated the mold. So back. So that's how I got into it. It was first, was from a marketing perspective, and then I actually closed my marketing business and took a few certification courses on mold removal.

Mike Feldstein [00:07:55]: By the way, most of those courses are two day to three day courses at most.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:59]: I was going to say that doesn't seem that adequate, considering how big of a problem mold is.

Mike Feldstein [00:08:04]: No, it's not adequate at all. It's completely unregulated. It's like such a scary, dangerous, serious, important thing, but it's not. It's regulated in a few states like Texas and Florida for sure. But like being a. The education you get in those courses is nothing. All the education is in the field doing the thing. And the cool thing is when you do a mold removal job or a flood or a fire, you typically test the air before, during, and after.

Mike Feldstein [00:08:31]: And the air tests kind of don't lie. Like if you screwed up and did a bad job, the test is going to fail. And usually, if you're a reputable company, you guarantee success. So if there's still mold in the air, you're going to keep dealing with it until the problem is solved. So oddly, it went from marketing to mold and then from being in the mold business that led to mold and flood. It's all kind of connected. So in 2013, there was the biggest flood in Canadian history in Calgary, Alberta. And that was my first big flood event.

Mike Feldstein [00:09:07]: And I partnered up with a friend who owned a restoration company for my first couple of years. I wasn't going to just jump into it by myself. So I started working with a company that had a lot of experience. I would kind of do the marketing, build the websites, get the customers in the door, and then we would handle the projects together. And then after very short order, I got pretty good at it and we kind of went our separate ways and I did my own thing and yeah, one thing led to the next, but it was just marketing and that kind of led me into restoration. It was in my early twenties where I was still kind of finding my way. And then I've been in kind of air quality ever since eleven years later.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:41]: Did you ever get mold sickness from all these jobs you're doing?

Mike Feldstein [00:09:44]: I got more heavy metal sickness, after a wildfire, especially the wildfires where thousands of homes burn and cars burn and everything in everyone's garage, from WD-40 to old cans of paint. I got more of that sickness because, like, I was, I was scared of mold. The guy you want doing your mold removal is the guy who's scared of mold himself. Like the guy who, when he quotes you, is like wearing a mask. You want the perfect balance between, like, not blowing it out of proportion and telling you to gut your whole house. But like, is also a little bit of a germaphobe and also a little bit the very cavalier mold guy is the guy that you don't want.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:21]: Right. You, you want, you want the chef who's preparing your food to care about toxins and ingredients and the type of oils being used, et cetera. You want them to be just as concerned about that as you are. I do, yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:10:32]: Not just willing to do it. Yeah, sure. I could use avocado oil instead of canola if you'd like. It's like, no, no, no, no. I want the guy who's living the life that he's preaching.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:40]: Right.

Mike Feldstein [00:10:41]: Which is, I think, why you're having so much success. Cause I can definitely say behind the scenes, you live the way you speak.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:48]: Yeah, I try. So, the heavy metal thing, was that something that you wound up having to detox and remediate in your own body?

Mike Feldstein [00:10:56]: Well, yeah, my hair went, this was 26 in the wildfire. My hair got like way gray in several months. It actually started ungraying as I detoxed. Uh, psoriasis came out in my elbows and knees. Um, massive chronic fatigue for quite a while. And it was, it was the heavy metals, but also. So, yeah, we had hexavalent chromium, then we had pah, which is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So these are pretty normal in wildfire zones.

Mike Feldstein [00:11:24]: But when you're dealing with a regional wildfire, it's not like it's a kitchen wildfire. The whole city is a smoke bomb. So the outdoor air is just as toxic as the indoor air. So it gets into your water supply, it gets into the soil supply. Like after a big wildfire, the whole town is quite contaminated for typically about three months, which was interesting because we were in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which is 5 hours north of Edmonton, super way up there near oil sands. So they're already kind of environmentally conscious. At the. The community center gym, which is just, like the $40 a month YMCA type of thing, they had, like, a hundred-person sauna.

Mike Feldstein [00:12:02]: And every day when I would go there, I would meet. It was the most beautiful sauna. It was, like, kind of an average-looking gym with the biggest sauna of all time. And I would meet all these chemical engineers that would work for, like, Suncor and Syncrude and these big oil companies. Every day, the engineers would be at the sauna, like, what are you guys doing here? They're like, this is here. So the executives and the engineers, who know better, are detoxing every single day. They have, like, filtered water and saunas in these oil sands.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:30]: I hope they're cleaning out the saunas. Well, with all those toxins leeching out multiple times a day, the interior, yeah, that's important. A lot of people don't realize how important it is to clean up a sauna because those toxins go somewhere. It kind of reminds me, too. Same hotel where you dropped off the air filtration unit for me, Mike, I was having a conversation with another guy in the nutrition and supplements industry. This was Ian Clark of Activation Products, and he was very concerned about pollution, and air pollution, was talking about a lot of his own battles against having to remove a lot of that from his body from a toxin standpoint. And he said, look outside, Ben. Do you see any rubber on the road from car tires? I'm like, no.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:10]: And he said, well, where do you think all the rubber is going as the cars are driving around and those particulates are going into the air, along with the brake dust from the vehicles themselves? All of that is actually winding up in the air that we breathe, you know? And a lot of that, you know, in addition to what gets tracked indoors and accumulates in egg track units, like, it's a. It's a pretty big issue. I mean, I. I went to India recently, and it was a huge issue there. I mean, I was fricking, like, nebulizing glutathione and exosomes to heal up my lungs after that. But, yeah, we are. We are surrounded by a plethora of this kind of, like, invisible particulate matter that just gets kicked up by a lot of stuff.

Mike Feldstein [00:13:53]: So it's funny because people talk about food more than they talk about eating. We talk about water more than we talk about the act of drinking. But breath work and breathing gets a lot bigger airtime than the actual air itself. It's the only one that, out of those three bio requirements where we talk about the act of inhalation far more than the thing that we're inhaling.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:16]: Yeah, it might be because, I mean, you can't sell clean air packaged up in a bag. You can obviously take the route that you've gone and sell ways to clean it. But, yeah, unlike water and food, you can't, like, sell a consumer package Ziploc bag that you, you know, drink clean air out of.

Mike Feldstein [00:14:31]: Actually, the reason Jaspr is called Jaspr is because there's a mountain in Canada near Banff where companies go, bottle the air, and sell it to China in a can.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:40]: Really?

Mike Feldstein [00:14:40]: But I mean, that's a very fringe market. In China. It's not a fringe market, but we're not buying cans of air the same way we get filtered water in China. They get these canisters of filtered air from Canadian mountain air. The way you're talking about the rubber, it's true. There was a study that the BBC paid a lot of attention to about a month ago that showed that humans breathe about one credit card's worth of microplastics every week. And they took tons of samples of the dust in people's homes in London and around the UK. So 100% of homes tested positive, 98% of all samples.

Mike Feldstein [00:15:14]: And then indoors had, I think, like 40 times more microplastic than they found outside. And it's just funny because, you know, everyone's kind of thinking about the water microplastics, but we only drink two liters of water a day, but we can breathe 20,000 liters of air a day, and we don't realize that. Yeah, they did biopsies of lungs, and like, every set of lungs that they got back, they found microplastics in the lungs. And they're, they're admittedly, like, we don't know what the health implications are of microplastic in the lungs. It causes inflammation. And they're doing more and more studies are coming, so I don't, I don't have any health claims to come with that, but it's wild. Just a. I think air awareness is just really catching up to water air awareness, and I'm doing my best to kind of bring that along.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:59]: Yeah, yeah. It's good to know. I got a few visas and amexs in my trachea. That's. I actually was not aware of that amount of microplastics we breathe in. Now, obviously, it's going to be different based on where you live. You know, I have a central HVAC system and then I got these, these standalone air filtration units spread around the house for things like wildfire season, somebody painting indoors, etcetera. But I actually have a few questions for you related to air filtration units.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:24]: So this Jaspr, that's, you can't see it behind me in my office because I've got the screen in front of it, but it has a number in the middle of it that gives me a reading that I think is the PM reading, is that correct? And if so, what does that number mean? Why is that the central focus of the center dashboard of the unit?

Mike Feldstein [00:16:44]: So that number is called PM 2.5 and that means particulate matter under 2.5 microns in size. So basically these are the particles that are small enough to enter our lungs and our bloodstream and cause the most impact. So when you look at the outdoors, if you google air quality Spokane or air quality Los Angeles, and you see the AQI or the outdoor air quality, the PM 2.5 is the most common metric we use to measure particulate in the air. It's not the only thing that matters. And it's, you know, it's not the only thing that Jaspr's filtering, but it's the best thing that we can use to use the variable. We call it the fan speed algorithm because it uses PM 2.5, but it also uses VOCs as an input that's not on the screen, which is when, when you painted, it would likely have gone up in speed just from the VOCs themselves.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:39]: Okay. That's why. So because when I walked into my office last night while she was painting it, I could hear the unit working harder. Like you could still on the green was elevated. Yeah, but the PM number wasn't through the roof.

Mike Feldstein [00:17:50]: Yeah. So that's because it also, we're going to upgrade it soon where we actually add like a VOC scrubbing indicator because right now that's not abundantly clear. But there's those, those two are the primary sensors on board. So yeah, PM 2.5 is the most harmful particle. Typically that's going to kick up from things like wildfire smoke, and cooking. Cooking is going to be a big one. Cleaning hairsprays, if people shower barbecue smoke. If your neighbor across the street is cutting drywall and doing some renovations, that's going to likely impact you as well because your house is not really separate from the outside.

Mike Feldstein [00:18:30]: Your indoor air comes from the outside and then it gets trapped inside. So that is the best sensor that we can use to control the fan speed and it basically just means the particles that are small enough to get deep inside of us.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:44]: So the PM, 2.5, 2.5 microns. And under. What's the. What's the scale? Like, what would be a good number, and what would be a number to be concerned about?

Mike Feldstein [00:18:53]: An excellent number is under ten.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:55]: Oh, well, that's good because I'm average, like two to three in my office.

Mike Feldstein [00:18:59]: Do you have a two?

Ben Greenfield [00:19:00]: Yeah. But again, remember, I'm running. I live out in the middle of forest and I'm running central HVAC unit as well.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:06]: That is good, though. Two is insane. I'd like to see a picture of a two man. Three.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:11]: Four is pretty much for you after this.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:14]: 99% of people, the lowest they'll ever see is a four. Often they're like, at like a six, seven, eight. The crazy thing is, in Beijing, if you get an air purifier, the outdoor air is about 50.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:29]: Oh, my gosh.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:30]: Yeah, that's the outdoor air. And that would be their lowest fan speed.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:34]: Wow.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:35]: Like, excellent to them is 50. So excellent is very location dependent. You live in a part of the world that actually has excellent air with the exception of wildfire, and smoke blowing through. Same thing with the CO2. I'll get back to the PM 2.5. The outdoor carbon dioxide is typically 400 everywhere globally. But when you're surrounded by large trees, I've seen it on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and probably areas like you as well.

Mike Feldstein [00:19:59]: The CO2 itself can actually get to, like 385, 390, which is pretty awesome.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:04]: Okay. All right. So what you said about the home is interesting. I'm just curious about what you know about home construction and the breathability and airflow. Right. In terms of what you're seeing as far as these higher PMs and some of the homes that you've been in, is anything related to the actual construction of the home itself that you think is important for people to know?

Mike Feldstein [00:20:27]: Sort of like, when a home, most people live in a condo, an apartment, or in a subdivision-style home. That's like over 90% of people. And there's no time when the developers and the builders or the architects are sitting around a table being like, how do we make healthy homes designed for optimal human performance? They're saying, how can we make as many homes as possible for as cheap as possible and sell them as quickly as possible? So a big issue is the materials in a home should off gas and cure for months. However, they don't before you move in before they move in before they get installed. But the way the supply chain works. You know, they're pressing those drywall boards and then shipping them, and then they're going to be installed like, weeks later. That's how the supply chain works. So all of these materials have not had their adequate off-gassing period.

Mike Feldstein [00:21:16]: So generally, in most homes, the HVAC system, which I refer to as the lungs of a home, is. It's literally the last thing even 99% of custom home builders, the last thing they think about, like, how many square feet? How big do you want your master bedroom? What's the floor plan, your pantry, your kitchen, your views? It's almost never considered, like, optimal lighting, air quality, or water quality. And then if they are considering HVAC, it's only from a perspective of heating and cooling, they don't think about airflow and fresh air like, a commercial building would. So they're like a home was built to keep the indoor air in and the outdoors out as much as possible. It's not designed to be an optimal breathing zone. So some healthy home builders, healthy home consultants are now kind of coming around to this and doing things better. I think it needs to be top-down. Like, the few builders who are building healthy homes are able to charge more and have unlimited demand.

Mike Feldstein [00:22:15]: But consumers need to start kind of demanding a better product. Everybody gets a home inspection when they buy a home. They pay five, six, seven, $800. Home inspector comes over, and all they're looking for is what's going to hurt your pocket. A roof thing, a cracked piece of drywall, maybe a banister that's damaged a little bit. But the home inspection is not looking to see if this house is making you sick. So generally, most homes have. Almost every home has bad water, and almost every home has bad air unless you do something to improve that.

Mike Feldstein [00:22:49]: I've almost never seen a house out of good air. The particulate level is still usually adequate unless they're cooking, not great, but unless it's like a bad pollution day or you're actively cooking or cleaning, because those particulates pretty quickly settle on your surfaces, in your carpets, on your bedding, in your furniture and your clothing. The VOCs are a big deal as well, because that off-gas is from paint, from furniture, from your baby's crib, from a picture frame, all kinds of stuff, even from the ink, from books.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:19]: Yeah. Yeah. Well, related to building the home the right way or setting it up the right way, shout out to Paul Laporte. The prescription for a healthy home book is one that I got for myself, my architects, and my builders. For this new home, I'm building in Idaho. And she has a great section there on the type of HVAC systems that work really well. And I interviewed her and I'll link to it. The show notes for this show, if you're listening in, are going to be BenGreenfieldlife.com/jasprpod J A S P R the name of this air filter Mike designed. Jaspr Pod J A S P R pod Mike, a few times you've alluded to cooking.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:54]: What is it about cooking that's bad? Because we cook all the time? Is it the pan that's being used? Is it the smoke and the off-gassing from the food itself? Or what is it about cooking that's a problem?

Mike Feldstein [00:24:05]: Well, first things first. I wonder when the word, I haven't looked this up yet, but when did the word outside even get invented? Like, it's hilarious that we talk about wanting to go outside or like indoors. Like forever. We lived, it was just, there was no inside outside, you know, a roof over your head for shelter when you sleep, maybe some wind, maybe to keep the predators out a little bit like that. But then we made homes tighter and tighter and tighter.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:32]: Yeah, you don't see that much on naked and afraid. They don't say, I'm going to go outside now.

Mike Feldstein [00:24:36]: No. Like 1970s is when the energy-efficient movement started. And energy efficiency is at complete odds with environmental health because energy efficiency is all about keeping things in and keeping things out. So if, like, cooking is great, but cooking indoors, not so great, especially if you're in a place where you're not opening doors and opening windows. So the same pah, which is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that get created from wildfires get created from high heat and protein. So like, that's why bacon or steak, all those fats at high heat, create a bunch of stuff that can be great for you to eat, but it doesn't necessarily mean you want to be inhaling it.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:18]: So you're saying, like, barb barbecue grill, air wasting from the grill indoors might not be so good for your lungs.

Mike Feldstein [00:25:24]: Not so good. And anything in your home that can get wet, like your clothing or a book or a couch or a carpet, anything that can get wet from water means it's porous. So it also absorbs air. So it's not just that you think about the cooking particulate or the chemicals being in your air, but they now get absorbed into the drywall. Anything that can get wet absorbs air and then gets disturbed by a dog or a cat or by walking or by the airflow hitting it, and then it just kind of stays in your indoor environment and it doesn't go anywhere. So with cooking, the big one is the PM 2.5. So that happens no matter what you cook. And most range hoods, are not adequate.

Mike Feldstein [00:26:03]: They're installed too high. Sometimes they vent indoors. They don't even actually vent outside. So you have like high heat and protein and then, yeah, you have nonstick pans that aren't great. The oils all the stuff you don't want to be eating are extra bad to be breathing. And then even the things that you do want to be eating aren't necessarily the type of air that you want to get trapped in your indoor environment.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:28]: This is interesting. I didn't know that about the vent hood being too high. So it sounds like I need to hang a Jaspr from my kitchen ceiling. But I know for a fact, based on what you're describing to me, that my central HVAC unit isn't getting all of that. Because when I've been observing my Jaspr when I walk into my office every time because I always have that screen blaring at me. The PM does go up when people are cooking in the kitchen, which is pretty far from my office. So these PMs lower than 2.5 from cooking are circulating through an entire house. And it kind of begs the question, should you just try to stop them before they disperse through the house? Like, put a standalone air filter in the kitchen itself or close to the stove?

Mike Feldstein [00:27:11]: So there are a few ways to answer that. The first thing is the whole home HVAC system can be good depending on what one you have and how the HVAC is configured overall. But if someone's not doing it right, they can be harmful because they diminish the airflow of your whole house. Like the HVAC system wasn't originally designed to accommodate that filter. So some of them have their own fans and there's different ways to install them. I'm sure in your new home it'll, it'll be done even better. But in an average home, let's say you have a 3,000-square-foot home, a four-bedroom home. Like if you're cooking bacon in the kitchen, the baby's bedroom on the other side of the house within minutes can be up to over 100.

Mike Feldstein [00:27:53]: Because your HVAC system, it's designed to mix the air throughout your whole home. So air quality issues are not isolated, whether you're burning incense in one room or you're cooking or you're using hairspray, it very quickly contaminates the whole house. You may not always smell it because the filter could filter out some of the odors and the heavier particles, but the finer particles, like the pm two five, will become a whole home issue rather quickly in terms of the kitchen. So, yes, the number, the top two places that someone should be filtering their air is their bedroom. To dial in their sleep, create their sleep sanctuary, and then their kitchen, and livingroom space.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:31]: And hand, and whichever room in the house you're doing your Wim Hof breath work.

Mike Feldstein [00:28:35]: Yes, it's amazing for breathwork. Like, if you're. If you're bringing. Breathing in a lot of air rapidly, is probably better, instead of having 800,000 particles to cut that down to like 20,000, just like when you breathe. Drink water. You don't drink. You don't want to drink pond water. Even though that pond water looks clean.

Mike Feldstein [00:28:54]: We've been educated to know there's invisible things in that water that will make you very sick. We don't have said air awareness when it comes to air, and I was.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:03]: Kind of joking about the breathwork comment, but the gym would be a pretty important place, would imagine. I. I have an AllerAir and Bryant HVAC central air system in my home. But the gym, which is separated from the home, I have this nice, like, Cadillac of air filtration built-in systems called the Life Breath that does recirculation and humidification. And, yeah, it's a very good unit. And so you know that. And I think the gym is another important place to think about.

Mike Feldstein [00:29:30]: So a fun thing that you may enjoy if you don't already have one, you should put a co. Do you have a CO2 monitor? I don't remember.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:38]: There's a pretty fancy panel out there in the gym. I think CO2 is on there.

Mike Feldstein [00:29:42]: So, if you can, you should check it. If not, there's little ones that are like 100, 5200 bucks. I carry one everywhere I go because that number matters a lot, too. But the interesting thing is the harder you work out, the more CO2 will be in the room. And then maybe if you can achieve the same speed with a lower CO2, then that would be a sign that you're breathing more efficiently with similar output. So CO2 is a really cool thing to monitor and measure. But back to your comment about the kitchen. Having a good range hood.

Mike Feldstein [00:30:15]: Like, it's on my roadmap. Eventually, I would like to make really a new range hood that has a Jaspr range hood so it can act as a scrubber or event. But in the meantime, everybody should do a Kleenex test. So like hold the Kleenex. I love talking about free tips that people could implement today for their air quality at home without having to buy a thing. So like one of those things would be taking a Kleenex or a napkin or a paper towel and holding that up to your range hood and making sure it's pulling it up because a huge amount of the time that filter is nasty and it not even sucking. Same thing with any bathroom fans in your house. Make sure the fan is working, that's like number one.

Mike Feldstein [00:30:55]: And then also your range hood should not be any more than 36 inches above where you're cooking. From an aesthetic perspective, a lot of people have it like four or 5ft above, but it's way too high to actually suck up those particulates. Also, if you're boiling things and cooking with within reason, if it's reasonable to use your back burner instead of your front burner, the back burner is going to capture way more air and particulates than your front burner.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:22]: Evan, these are good tips. Interesting. Okay, so the the Jaspr unit. I'll link to pictures of this thing if you go to Ben Greenfieldlife.com/jasperpod J A S P R pod how is it any different? Because there are a lot of standalone air filters. Probably the one I've talked about most on this podcast has been the AIRDoctor. That's when I still have a few of those. But I would love to hear why the heck you even had to go down the road of making a different kind of air filtration standalone system.

Mike Feldstein [00:31:51]: I would have rather not. I would have rather just talked about others and recommended what the best thing out there was. I enjoy teaching about air more than I enjoy inventing new products, even though they're both important work. The reason I switched from the consulting and remediation side to the solution side is I could talk about air all I wanted, but I had no ability to actually change things. So it's much more impactful for me to come over to the product side where if I see a gap in the market or a problem, I can do something about it. So to answer the question of what's different than Jaspr versus AIRDoctor will also answer the question of what's different between Jaspr and mostly all consumer air purifiers. I created Jaspr because of my experience with wildfire smoke, where people were really really sick after wildfires, even after we cleaned their houses. We'd get a call, baby's in the hospital.

Mike Feldstein [00:32:38]: We go, we test the air. Air is all toxic again. And this is because the outdoor air is bad for months after a wildfire. So we started leaving our giant air scrubbers, industrial air scrubbers. They look like a subwoofer meets a photocopier. They're super effective at cleaning the air, but they are so loud and they are so ugly. So it makes sense to use that for a mold removal project or asbestos removal. But if you put that in a house, everybody unplugs them and hides them in the closet because they're just really loud and ugly.

Mike Feldstein [00:33:07]: So I started leaving those behind in my customers' homes after wildfires to keep the air quality at a safe level. And then I'm like this. We're running out of equipment here. We need more equipment to do new jobs. So I went to, like, Best Buy and Home Depot, and I bought a ton of consumer air purifiers. All that stuff is between 100 and $500. And within a few hours, the air quality was contaminated again. So the analogy I like to use for most air purifiers, it's kind of like a kettle trying to heat a bathtub.

Mike Feldstein [00:33:34]: Like a kettle is awesome at heating water if you're trying to heat a cup of tea. But if you try to fill your bathtub with a kettle, that water is going to cool down far faster than you can heat it up. Another one is that the little air purifiers are kind of like golf carts. Those big air scrubbers were like tractor-trailers. It's like, where's the Yukon Denali? We needed an SUV. We needed something that could take the kids, take the stuff, and look good while doing it. So what's different about Jaspr is number one, the size. As you can see, it's quite a bit larger than most small air purifiers.

Mike Feldstein [00:34:04]: And Jaspr on fan speed, one, which is silent, moves more air than most air purifiers at full speed. So that's a really big deal. A lot of people talk about Max speed, but what actually matters even more is what's the fans. How much air are you moving at the lowest speed? That's the state that it's gonna be 99% of the time.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:24]: That's the quietest setting that a lot of people are gonna have it at. Also, like, we're podcasting right now, and the Jaspr is on.

Mike Feldstein [00:34:30]: Just so you know, most companies, when you talk, hear them talk about the square footage coverage of the air purifier. That's assuming it was on full speed all the time.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:40]: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Mike Feldstein [00:34:42]: Yeah, why wouldn't they? Um, so the other thing is we use steel, not plastic. Most air purifiers are made out of very cheap ABS plastic. And when you create one pound of plastic, it creates three pounds. It's a three-to-one ratio of carbon in the atmosphere. So you're cleaning your indoor air at the expense of massively polluting the outdoor air. Most plastic air purifiers last three, to four years. Jaspr is good to last 25 to 30 years because we basically built it. I wasn't trying to make the smallest, cheapest, cutest air purifier.

Mike Feldstein [00:35:13]: I was trying to make an air scrubber that's quiet beautiful and smart that will last a very long time. So because of my background in floods and fires and mold, I was really creating a commercial product that would fit in a home. And originally I was designing it specifically for wildfire smoke. I would have never thought in a million years that I would have been at a biohacking conference talking about allergies sleep and human performance. That is not why I built this thing.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:39]: So, by the way, Mike, a couple of times it seems like you differentiate between the terms scrubber and purifier. Is that correct?

Mike Feldstein [00:35:47]: More most simply, a scrubber is an industrial air purifier. In mold removal land, we call them air scrubbers because there are two ways to clean air. You could vent it out, so you could just take a big fan and vent it out your window. In some cases, though, you want to scrub the air. So, like, if you have a space heater, but you vent that heat out the window, it's not going to heat the room. So you want to, you want to have a closed space so you can clean the air in the room multiple times over. So generally, an air scrubber and an air purifier are essentially the same. They're usually powered by a HEPA air filter, but air scrubber is just kind of like a commercial grade version.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:30]: And what's a HEPA air filter?

Mike Feldstein [00:36:32]: A HEPA air filter is a filter that Hepa is just a standard. It means high-efficiency particulate air, and it means that it filters 99.97% of particles at 0.3 microns. So HEPA is just a standard that we've been using since the early 19th hundreds for surgical operating rooms, for NASA, the space center. It's just the highest standard of filtration that we currently have.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:59]: How long do the filters last?

Mike Feldstein [00:37:01]: Six months. Theoretically, it could be a little bit longer for the HEPA, but we also have carbon in the filter, and the carbon will get absorbed up and used up by the odors and the VOCs and the gases. So six. It's actually funny because the filter improves for the first few months because as the filter gets blocked up by dust and different particulates and pores, there's more restriction. So it's harder for harmful particles to pass through. But then there's a point of diminishing returns where the airflow starts to diminish. And then because you have less air passing through, it performs less effectively. And I would say the air efficiency times efficacy equals effectiveness.

Mike Feldstein [00:37:43]: So you want to filter, that filter is really good. But even more important than that is you want something that moves a lot of air. Like you'd rather have 95% of $5 than 99% of $1. So when a lot of filters talk about that 99.9997, whatever, that just means per pass, you could have an air filter the size of a water bottle in your car. That could be HEPA, but it's moving so little air that might be good for your hamster cage. It's not going to clean your house.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:12]: And how much square footage is one Jaspr cover? Approximately.

Mike Feldstein [00:38:16]: So square footage is the wrong metric because what matters more is two things, cubic volume. You have eight-foot ceilings or 15-foot ceilings. It's a big difference. And then also what type of HVAC system, because if you have a central air unit, that's additive because it's mixing the air in the home. And if you have a, if you don't, you don't have that extra mixing power. Ceiling height matters, and layout matters. Like one big room versus a bunch of smaller rooms, that matters a lot. So generally the actual way to.

Mike Feldstein [00:38:45]: And then, you know, when people talk about square footage, they don't tell you how much it cleans the air in that square footage. So it's like if you put an air purifier in 2000 sqft versus 200 sqft, it's going to clean the airway more in the smaller space. So it's kind of like marketers want to make everything simple, but not everything is simple. So if, when I do have to speak generally, I like a Jaspr, up to about 1000 square foot space. So, it's better in a smaller space. So, the optimal configuration is one air purifier for your bedrooms and one in your kitchen livingroom. If you have a home office or a gym that you use regularly, that would also be a good idea.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:27]: Okay, how much does one of these cost?

Mike Feldstein [00:39:30]: So this is a fun thing that I'm quite excited about, because when we originally came out with them four years ago, they were 1975, and we only sold to doctors and dentists. In 2023, we got it down to 1399. At the beginning of 2024, we got it down to $999. So our standard price is 999. At the end of the episode, we'll give a little special discount for your most loyal listeners. But the fact that it's now and, like, has people add more to their cart, it creates a bundle, so it can get as low as about $700 per unit. And I think it's important that people don't think about it as an air purifier as much as they do a whole home air filtration system. Because if you think about, like, a 700 to $10,000 water filtration system, that sounds reasonable.

Mike Feldstein [00:40:15]: But, like, just a water filter, a $1,000 would sound high. So water is very easy to filter because it comes in through a single pipe through your home. So we can filter all your water with one filter by capturing it all. Or we could filter it at the point of use, at the bathtub, at the shower, at the sink. Faucet air is sneaky. It enters your home through your vents, your doors, your, your windows, your attics, and every crack and crevice in your home. It's a lot sneakier. So you, you really want a decentralized, whole home air filtration system.

Mike Feldstein [00:40:46]: I like to use the Sonos analogy. So back in the day, you would have one giant speaker, and it'd be either way too loud when you're beside it or, like, you can't hear it in the other room. You just feel this obnoxious bass. And then along came Sonos. Or, you know, a hardwired system where you can actually have reasonable volume in every room.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:05]: That's actually what we have in our house. There's a few little iPads sprinkled throughout the house, and you control it, but it's all hardwired throughout the house, which is nice, too, because it's lower. EMF.

Mike Feldstein [00:41:12]: Yeah. So think. And by the way, the Jaspr has no Bluetooth, no wi-fi, and no EMF. That was really important. That's why we don't have any apps on it.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:19]: So that means, like, probably rough math. With shipping and everything, you might be able to outfit a relatively large house for under 5K under 3K.

Mike Feldstein [00:41:30]: For example, if somebody buys four, we give 20% off and that will stack with your 20% discount. So it's actually more like 40% off. So now you're getting like four of them with shipping for under 2500 bucks.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:42]: Okay, that's pretty good. And I'll link to that stuff in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldlife.com/jasprpod, J A S P R pod. Because I think the $200 goes away. Well, like one or two weeks after whenever this interview comes out.

Mike Feldstein [00:41:55]: Yeah. So I know it should come out sometime in, I think. Yeah, first week of August or so. So the day that this episode comes out. So the code will be Ben and it'll be $200 off per Jaspr, not total, per unit.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:06]: That's pretty good.

Mike Feldstein [00:42:07]: And that'll be good for the first seven days that this episode is live. Just, you know, honor your most loyal listeners. We don't use, we don't use big Facebook ads and Google Ads. So we'd rather work to educate audiences and pass the discount there. And then after that first week, it'll be a $100 off per Jaspr and that code will be live forever. So there'll always be an offer there. But for the first week, it'll be a little bit bigger of an offer.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:29]: That's pretty good. I'll link to that because, yeah, that's 20% plus another potential 200 plus the free shipping. So yeah, you could even if you didn't have a central HVAC, do a whole house like this, which is incredible. Now, Mike, you see a lot of air filtration companies bragging about two things, UV light and negative ion generation. Tell me about it. I don't actually don't know the answer to this question. I should have done my research beforehand. You don't have either, so why is that?

Mike Feldstein [00:42:54]: So there's the same reason that HEPA air scrubbers have neither. There's the same reason that surgical operating rooms have neither. It's the same reason that the space station has neither. The reason why I don't use any of those things. So like, UV is like a five-dollar light that we could add to the Jaspr. So by no means is it a cost basis thing. The problem with UV is twofold. UV is awesome for filtering water, for cleaning your phone case for surfaces, but it needs at least 20, to 30 seconds, ideally several minutes of contact exposure time.

Mike Feldstein [00:43:27]: So everybody learned during COVID that soap is if you wash your hands for 1 second, the soap doesn't have enough contact exposure time to kill that bacteria. So uv works the same. So because the air passes through the air purifier so quickly, there's no contact exposure time. So people can search as far as they want. You'll never find one study that we've tested because we wanted to do what's best. So we tested for mold and dust and bacteria and everything. And when we run the Jaspr with UV and without, there's no difference. The only thing that changes is UV lights create ozone.

Mike Feldstein [00:44:03]: Ozone is not your friend. Ozone is good for odor removal. We would use it in wildfire situations. But after we would ozonate a home, we would have a dissipation period. You have to take the plants out of the house, you have to take the animals out of the house. And ozone plus rubber creates formaldehyde. So not only is ozone just not great for your lungs, which is why California heavily restricts, um, they have their own carb emissions where you can't have uh, ozone generating air purifiers. So it's more harmful than helpful Clari.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:31]: Clarification, by the way, ozone is not good to breathe. But like ozone plasmapheresis or some blood oxygenation, ozonation treatments, that's, that's different.

Mike Feldstein [00:44:39]: Yeah, it's different, it's different for your cold plunge. It's different for your blood. Ozone is not bad. It is not great for your lungs. Um, so that's my first thing about UV, and then everything else. You know, there's hydroxyl radicals, there's negative ions, there's electro like when it comes to air, less is more. I don't want to emit more things into the air. I just want to filter and capture things out of the air.

Mike Feldstein [00:45:03]: So often, often those other filters, they have quite an odor to them. And that's because they're adding these charges to the air. You know, to like deactivate your dust and make it fall to the surface. I would prefer to just have a filter that captures it while it's filtering it. I don't want to add anything to my air. I just want to filter things out of the air. Um, and I don't want anything that creates ozone.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:25]: Yeah, but the argument some people say is with a negative ion generation, you're creating the same type of beneficial electrical activity that you might experience of hiking outdoors or swimming underneath a waterfall or something like that. Like that. That's usually the argument that's made.

Mike Feldstein [00:45:40]: I bet you there is a time and a place for it. The way I kind of internalize it for myself. It's like I would like to use my cold plunge for like two to four minutes, but I don't want to live in cold water I. A lot of these things are hyperbaric. Chamber or sauna. Like, I would not doubt the benefits of doing this in isolation as a biohacking measure, but having that 24 hours in my home is not something I am interested in doing.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:06]: If you were, you can get the plug-in negative ion generator on Amazon for like $40. If you did want the waterfall thing or a Himalayan salt lamp, apparently those things turn it out. Yeah. I'm on the same board with you as ozone and formaldehyde. I would say as far as negative ions, I haven't seen any damage as far as they're concerned. I'm just not sure of the extent of the healing effects for how much efficiency or time you'd want to spend putting it into a Jaspr unit.

Mike Feldstein [00:46:32]: I haven't tested it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would create an increase in our EMF load by adding more electrical components.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:40]: That's a good point. Okay, so this thing has like a turbo mode. What happens if I push that?

Mike Feldstein [00:46:44]: So we're actually gonna, we're gonna change that button to deep clean. That was designed for dentists and doctors, specifically during COVID So when they would be done treating a patient, when the, you know, while the dentist, between patients, they sanitize the materials, they wipe down the surface. So they would hit that turbo mode and it would run at full speed for five minutes and do a deep clean. So it'll put the Jaspr on full speed and then it will automatically go back down to smart mode. Fun hack. A little pro tip. If you hold that button down and then you tap it, you can adjust the time so you can actually save it, change it to up to 30 minutes. So what some people do is they tap that turbo button when they're leaving their home.

Mike Feldstein [00:47:22]: So the Jaspr can do a deep clean on. It's on full speed, which is a little bit noisy.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:27]: Okay, so that's interesting. Now, as far as the actual objections here, because people always jump into the comments section, they've got something they bring up. What is kind of pushback you've gotten on this thing, as far as people questioning about whether or not it filters what it says it filters, whether the filter is good enough? Like, have you gotten pushback on anything from the air filtration industry?

Mike Feldstein [00:47:50]: Not a ton. The number one pushback that we have gotten by far is people would have liked us to create a smaller unit by far. They want a smaller one.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:59]: You can do that.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:00]: No, we tried. We probably spent about $100,000 trying. No matter how hard we try to make a smaller one, just to. I don't think that the small air purifier market is underserved. I think for a small air purifier, you can go on Amazon, and there's a ton of products out there. I don't want to create products that already exist just to capture more of the market. Um, a small air purifier means it needs to be running basically at full speed to move as much air as we move on our silent mode. So I would rather have something that's a fair size that does the job.

Mike Feldstein [00:48:31]: Like, you can't pull your boat with your golf cart, no matter what kind of turbocharger you put on that thing. It's just too small to get the job done. So a lot of people would like a smaller one. Some people have asked for a black one. Um, we've had very little pushback in terms of effectiveness because there's so much high quality. Like, anyone who uses Oura or Whoop or Fitbit almost always sees an improvement in their sleep. My favorite testimonial is it's the first. I've had a bunch of air purifiers before.

Mike Feldstein [00:49:00]: I wasn't sure if they worked. I thought they worked. This is the first one I actually knew worked. And despite all the third-party lab data, that's great. You can actually feel the difference. And because we put the screen with the number right on top, it's fully transparent. People get to see it work and feel it work.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:16]: Yeah, it kind of. Kind of gamifies it. Honestly, I look at it every time I walk out of my office or walk into my office. So, yeah, I do like the dashboard on it. The idea with the EMF, you said no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. You mentioned EMF a couple of times, but if you measured it, like, if somebody has this plugged in next to their bed, you know, the one space to the house where arguably, you want the lowest EMF, what are they gonna see?

Mike Feldstein [00:49:37]: So Ryan Blaser, who I believe you connected with recently, he was just at.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:41]: My house a couple of weeks ago, building biologists got. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Feldstein [00:49:45]: So he's got a. He's at Test My Home and has really wonderful. A lot of him. And Brian Hoyer, I think, is some of the best when it comes to EMF. So when it comes to EMF, I like to lean on third-party people, because EMF is not my background, I'm EMF aware from the consumer standpoint. And, you know, I have a tri field, but it's like a consumer-grade product. It's not commercial grade. So when you measure EMFs, you know, you'll see a tiny bit like an inch or two off the unit.

Mike Feldstein [00:50:16]: So with most Wi-Fi and Bluetooth emitting devices, Ryan's rule is 8ft. So, like, if someone has a baby monitor or something like that, he says, keep it 8ft from your bed. With the Jaspr, like six inches is probably fine, but 2ft, you know, there's anything that has a motor, has some amount of EMF.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:34]: You could have it on the other side of the bedroom and it's still going to clean the air.

Mike Feldstein [00:50:37]: Oh, yeah. Like, you know, some people have it on the other side of their nightstand and in the corner. In fact, there's a reason I didn't mention this earlier, but you can see the Jaspr takes in air 360 degrees all the way around. Some filters only take it from two sides, so you have to keep those about a foot from the wall so they stick out in the middle of the room. Because of our design, you can stick it in the corner, you could put it beside a couch, behind a couch, right against the wall. So it's designed to, like, seamlessly tuck in wherever it can fit. So despite the fact that it's a little bit bigger in size, it makes up for that in its functionality because you can put it right against any surface.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:12]: Yeah, okay. That makes sense. So again, I'll link to this thing if you go to BenGreenfieldlife.com/jasprpod J A S P R pod Mike, what else? Is there anything else you want to share about this thing that's unique or air filtration in general?

Mike Feldstein [00:51:27]: Maybe a bit about mold. So people always say, do I wonder if I have mold? I don't think I have mold.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:35]: You mean, you mean, you mean in the house or in the body?

Mike Feldstein [00:51:38]: In the house? In the house. Mostly in the body, too. I've never heard of someone who did a urine or blood test that isn't actively detoxing, that didn't have some level of mold unless they're actively working towards detoxing it. Because if we do an air test right now outside, especially if it rained recently, the mold levels will be quite high. Outside, it's different, though. We get the UV lights from the sun, we get hydroxyl radicals from the wind. So mold is not really a problem. Outside.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:03]: You don't see black mold growing in your garage or, in your car, or on the sidewalk. Mold is really an in. It's an indoor problem because we left, the best air purifier in the world in nature. It's trees, it's wind, it's sun. Unfortunately, we left that outside of ours. We left that shit outside. And so when it comes to indoor air, there's always mold, there's always dust. It's just a thing.

Mike Feldstein [00:52:27]: So I like to talk about mold in terms of mold load. So it's not if you have mold, it's how much mold do you have and what species do you have. Mold, because it, like, if you're filtering your. It's like if you have water that's not clean coming in from the city or from your well, the answer is not to dig a new well. The answer is to filter the water that's coming in. So when it comes to mold, and I say this passionately because I used to be a restoration guy when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, a specific type of nail. So when I was the remediation guy, my lens was, we need a gut. You know, we need to demo your whole basement, rip up your kitchen, your bathroom. That was the hat I was wearing.

Mike Feldstein [00:53:07]: And that's largely what brought me into this space where mold remediation is important. If you have visible, physical black mold behind your drywall, under your kitchen sink, or if there was a leak, you got to remove that mold. But when you just go and do a basic air test and you see mold in the air, playing whack a mold and trying to find it and start demoing your whole house is a horrible, horrible thing. Because, like, if you test the house, there's a reason why when you do your mold removal and then we do a clearance test, there's no mold. The reason that is, is because typically remediation companies, they turn off the air purifier and then they do the mold test. So you've literally had whole home air filtration running. I don't even know. That's how they teach us.

Mike Feldstein [00:53:52]: If you come back a week later or even two days later and we test for mold again, it's going to be moldy again in your air. So the best way to deal with that is a reasonable amount of ventilation. You know, cracking doors and windows when you cook, letting some fresh air in your home. And then, like, your house, like, when you have adequate air filtration, you almost never have dust. Like, if you see a lot of dust accumulating in a home, that's a sign that your home is not being filtered.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:16]: Also, why the shoes offer rule is a good idea.

Mike Feldstein [00:54:19]: 95% of all shoes test positive for fecal matter. So the same way you think about the water. No, but like, you have an incredibly health-conscious, aware audience. And if you feel it's like once you've realized that, whoa, I filter my water and I'm looking at the food I eat, the air is just the same. It's like you need air to survive. You breathe it all along. It's the first thing you do when you breathe, it's the last thing you do when you die. And I think because of that, we just aren't air-aware.

Mike Feldstein [00:54:48]: It's the only thing we do when we're sleeping, subconscious and conscious. So just with things like mold and dust, airborne bacteria, dust mites, all these things like insect part, unless you live in the Costa Rican rainforest or on Vancouver Island or something, your air is, unless you're actively doing something about it, if you live indoors, filtering your air is kind of a non-negotiable.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:09]: Wow, this is a lot. I'm learning a ton here. Honestly, one of the things I'm going to immediately change is my approach to cooking, the ventilation, opening the doors, and maybe even lugging the Jaspr up to my kitchen when I'm having a party.

Mike Feldstein [00:55:24]: We'll get you another one over there.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:26]: My wife will love it. The feng shui of the kitchen, constantly adapting. All right, so, BenGreenfieldlife.com/Jasprpod. J A S P R. No E, J A S P R pod. I'll link to the product. I'll put our discount in there. Well worth outfitting a home, in my opinion, especially with everything I've learned about actually air pollution since I got back from India.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:48]: But what were you saying, Mike?

Mike Feldstein [00:55:50]: The one more thing I wanted to say that means a lot to us is even better than the Jaspr itself, I would say, is our support and education. So we have something called the lifetime guarantee. So as long as someone's changing their filter twice a year, the Jaspr has a lifetime warranty. So the way that works is even if your Jaspr breaks in six months or six years, it doesn't matter. What we do is we ship a brand new Jaspr the next day. We don't repair units, we ship a brand-new one. You take the new Jaspr out of the box, you put the old Jaspr in the box. We do not expect you to keep the box.

Mike Feldstein [00:56:23]: We give you a prepaid shipping label and then we schedule a UPS to pick it up off your front porch at 09:00 a.m. the next day because we believe that it's not cool for a company to have a product that's warranted, doesn't match the life expectancy of the product. So what's important to us is Jaspr is a premium product, but it's also the last air purifier anyone will ever need to buy. And if someone doesn't feel awesome in the first 60 days, same thing. We'll send them a shipping label. We'll take it back. Like if you're not feeling awesome, we would rather you take that money and invest in some, some other biohacking tool or wellness tool that's going to make you feel better. So I just, it's really important that people know that we put our money where our mouth is.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:00]: Wow, look at you. It's a guarantee right there, folks. Mike, this is incredible. I'm really happy to hear that this thing's legit again. I've been trying it for a few months before this podcast. I gave the green light to do a podcast with you about a month into my own experimentation. So I'm very impressed with it and thanks you for, and thank you for sharing your knowledge, man.

Mike Feldstein [00:57:21]: Thanks for having me, man.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:22]: Alright, folks, BenGreenfieldlife.com. one more time. J A S P R pod, J A S P R pod. Check it out. Connect with Mike's company. It's doing a good job. This thing's sexy.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:31]: It looks good. Great conversation piece as well, especially if you put it in turbo anti-fart mode. All right, Mike, I'll catch you on the flip side, folks. Thanks so much for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield. Mike Feldstein from Jaspr, signing up from BenGreenfieldlife.com/jasprpod. Have an incredible week.

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