Is Your Indoor Air Making You Sick? How to Fix it Fast With Mike Feldstein

Introduction and personal story 0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Thyroid Pharmacists Healing Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Isabella Wentz. Today I am joined by Mike Feldstein, who is the founder of Jasper and an air quality expert. He's got a background in wildfire restoration, air-quality consulting and home remediation during some of the biggest natural disasters and wildfires. Mike started Jasper to innovate in air science and technology. His goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air-quality science.

We're going to dive deep into air equality today with Mike. I'm so excited to have him here with us. Mike, it's so great to have you here. So I don't know if you know this, but you're actually the reason why I was able to start a podcast. What? Yeah, I have a beautiful seven-year-old son. And every time I've tried to, start doing more things, getting more out there, you would be going to preschool and then he'd get sick. And then I'd be like, OK, I have to scale back. I can't really do much work these days because I had to take care of my son.

Last year, you gifted an air purifier, the Jasper, to my sons class, first grade class. And he didn't get sick the whole year. Damn. Yeah. Man, not surprised. The same thing happened with my kid. That's why we do this now. And this is a little special card that the class made for you, the little first graders. So thank you so much for all the work that you're doing to bring clean air to the world. Thank you. This is an ice card. I will keep it and I hope hopefully we will create a wall with all of the schools that we help.

We want to give as many schools cleaner as possible. And the thank-you card is all. The payment we would have. The kids worked really hard. They love their air purifier and it honestly has made such a big difference in so many people's lives. I feel like people don't really appreciate the impact that clean air has on their health. You got into this around COVID time, where you were starting to work with dental offices, right? Because you wanted them to feel free. You wanted to be able to them work on people's teeth without worrying about viruses and different infections in the air.

Is that right or was that your founding story? No. It was the beginning of the, that was our launch story. That's who we did open up for business to first. But Jasper was born because of my work restoring homes after floods and fires. So originally I only designed Jaspar to be an air purifier for wildfire smoke. That was the original vision. I'd go into these really, you know, California after wildfire. We do all our mediation, but like the smoke was a problem all the time, even when the fire wasn't there.

So people's homes are constantly being contaminated all of the. And we would use these big machines called air scrubbers. When you compare those two little air purifiers at best by Home Depot, Walmart, they don't work. So the vision was, as a flood fire mold guy, how do we create an air scrubber that is beautiful and quiet that people would actually put into their homes? So that was the whole vision, was instead of me living in wildfire zones for six months and restoring and cleaning up homes, what if we could just bring commercial air scrubbers to the areas impacted by wild fire smoke?

We were going to launch, so I spent between 2016 and 2020 developing Jasper, and we were getting ready to launched summer of 2020 for wildfire season. And then COVID happened first. I was living in Canada in the time in Ontario and they mandated that every dentist needed to put an air purifier in every single one of their rooms in order to open the doors for business. And based on the amount of air that they get clean would determine how many minutes between patients. So if they just bought like a regular air purifier off the shelf, it would be like an hour between patience or more.

If they had a Jasper, would it be eight or nine minutes? So from the dentist's perspective, It would pay for itself in one or two days. It was a need, not a want. But I never intended to get into medical. Just during COVID, doctors and dentists were the ones who needed them most. And then the patients, they would rave about Jasper to the patient, and then all of a sudden, you know, patient mom with an asthmatic child, she's like, hey, do they sell these things for the home? Then this was like I don't know.

Ask Jaspar. And we had no e-commerce. The only way you could buy Jaspr for first two years was to go to our website and request a consultation and talk to me for like an hour about your situation. Then we would like send people an invoice and ship it to them. So you couldn't even buy them online. And then I'm like, wow, when a dentist or doctor buys a Jasper, it's very much like thanks for keeping my patients safe and like helping us with our business. When a family would buy it, It's like my kids not having asthma attacks anymore.

My kids, I am not snoring anymore, our allergies are gone. my sleep score on my aura or my whoop is up 30 percent. And I like OK, this feels great because the goal is always to create it for people in the most dire needs like wildfire. COVID was an unintended side quest that kind of got us into market. But yeah, and now it's basically now we're 99% families sleep and schools and stuff like that. It's interesting because I've been a very health conscious person and working to get my Hashimoto's into remission.

I did so much cleanup of my home. So I ended up switching from plastics to all glass and I got a water filter. But I kind of, you know, had this like dinky little air purifier in my house. I didn't even think about changing the filter. And we ended up actually having mold in our house and I really fully appreciate the impact that our air can have on our health. Like, what are some of the ways that you see air quality impact people? Well, it's funny because like we talk about air quality. It's almost like air, quality and mold are two separate issues.

People are putting mold in one category and air-quality in another. And they usually think about mold as the visible black stuff behind the shower or under the sink or wherever there was a leak. But everybody's home has mold and it. There's also mold outside. Mold is omnipresent. That's why when you do a mold test in a home, you test inside and outside to see what the difference is that day. But mold is everywhere, and the mold impacting you because you're breathing it in. If it was just behind the drywall, isolated to the surface, it wouldn't impact you.

It's because you're breathing it. So like, whether you talking about VOCs or same thing with allergies, people talk about I have horrible pollen allergies.

How Jasper began and COVID demand 7:00

What are you really saying? The air that you are breathing is contaminated with too much pollen. The area you breathing has contaminated too many mold or bacteria or viruses. Air is the medium in which other things impact you. It is not necessarily that air impacts people. It's that it is the vessel of transmission in which so much can impact you so. And I hope that we take care of we build better homes and we we as humans realize. how important and finite air is before we're forced to because if anybody goes to Bangkok or Mexico City or Beijing or Delhi in India, there's a lot of parts of the world where as soon as you land, you can't really breathe.

You can really see the sky. There's no more optionality. They let their air get so bad that it's right in your face and you feel it and your lungs burn. Here we only have that experience after wildfires and stuff, but the air quality is right now getting a lot worse, especially indoor air. And I'll say that the reason that mold is not a problem outside is outside. We have the sun and the wind and rain and trees and nature is the greatest filter of all time. It takes care of filtering our air and water and everything to a certain extent.

But our homes trap everything inside and block nature out entirely. So if you think about a free flowing stream or river of like clean water versus a stagnant pond that has an algae bloom and is growing bacteria and it's gross, you wouldn't want to go in that still pond. Outside when you feel the wind, that's like the free flowing fresh river and your home is very stagnant. So most people's homes are built like those still ponds, which are just breeding grounds for everything. The air problem is largely yes, we pollute too much.

Yes, We cut too many trees down, but it's largely stemming from what we use to build our homes and how airtight they are. That's giving us a big problem trapping ourselves inside all day. It's been really interesting. So in my journey as the thyroid pharmacist, I started working initially on my own health and trying to get myself into remission and then I Started working with other people with Hashimoto's and there was a subset of them that had multiple chemical sensitivities and these individuals, you know, they are really really sick and they're really struggling with Seemingly benign things like they can't tolerate fragrances.

They can walk past different aisles at stores because some of the products might be off gassing. And I learned a bit about sick building syndrome. What's been really interesting to me is that a lot of these modern day buildings, they're actually predisposed to making us sicker. Can you talk about some about that? Yeah, so a lot of this started since the 1970s, when there was like the energy crisis. And they started changing building codes to make buildings as tight as possible. The goal was, if we can keep the cool in the summer and the warm air in in winter, we'll save money on our energy bill.

Energy efficient homes, is that right? Energy efficiency. And then they moved to like, you know, LEED certified became this global standard of what a good building was, but it was all about energy efficiency, so we are completely optimizing for cost and completely ignoring the cost of sick people. Like what was the original purpose of the building? It wasn't to be these large empty buildings. It was supposed to environment for humans to live and thrive and work and sleep and play. be productive, build companies, solve problems.

Problem is, when that building is now incredibly toxic, everything suffers. So the difference between us, if you look at the data, the different between a sick building and a healthy building, it could be 30% or more in absentee rates. When you at chess players or SAT scores, there's infinite amount of air quality studies like this, where when they have different levels of air quality. Chess players moves get worse. SAT scores go down, you know, absentee rates get worst as well. So you have sicker people, absent people.

You have brain fog like crazy. Think about it. When you go to bed at night for eight hours or so, You're not eating, not drinking. It's a dark room. What is keeping you alive? Only air. Air is so important. It's the first thing you do when you're born. The last thing to do and you die. You do it all night long when your sleep and still pay no attention to it. So we really take air for granted. And the difference between a healthy building and a sick building is a combination of a few things. I think air is the most important by far, but there are other important factors as well, like the like, the lighting.

Now it's kind of branching into EMF and other stuff, too, and the water. Water is pretty controllable because you could have a water bottle. You can filter your water very easily. But air, lighting, noise, materials really impact the way people feel in buildings. So now there is just the beginning of a shift to maybe say, hey, maybe we should build a home to be healthy for people and people are willing to pay a premium for a better environment. But yeah, it really started from an energy thing and no one realized like, how do we get more energy efficient?

We make it tight. Let's trap all the chemicals, all of the mold, each other's sicknesses inside. What could go wrong? And now we're kind of being like maybe there's a happy medium here. Yeah, absolutely. And we know that mold, various chemical toxins, and various infections, they're all triggers and exacerbating factors for autoimmunity. Typically, I used to think of pollution outside of the house, but your house was always your safe space. This is where you retreat. If the air quality outside is not great, then you stay inside.

And that was always like, okay, if there's pollen on the trees, you say inside, but for a lot of people, and I think during the pandemic, especially, they started noticing they were spending more time at home and they we're actually getting sicker. they weren't even exposed to like outdoor germs or outdoor air as much because of all the restrictions. What are some of the chemicals and toxins and things that we need to think about that might be present in our homes? Growing up in Canada, I think that the reason that people were so much more sick in the winter was because how much time we spent inside.

We went from like 95% indoors to like 99.9. And I think that's why people were getting sick and like no, no sun also. So you have no Sun, you Have no fresh air. so what's in a home? Well, think about what a Home is and the way home is manufactured and built. Most people live in condo or an apartment or a subdivision master plan community built home type of situation. The way that those are built is you know, developer developers look at 100 acres, 200 acres and they go, okay, how many acres are there?

How many homes can we build? how fast, How cheap? That's the equation. They typically aren't going around saying, hmm, how do we improve human health through building and design and development? And the incentives are wrong on every level. So typically they're borrowing money from the bank to build the home. Well, the more months that go by, The more your interest goes up. so your incentive, incentives, are to built very quickly. And then most people think about it. You get a home inspection. The biggest purchase you're ever going to make in your life is typically your home and you get a home inspection.

What is that home inspections typically looking for? First of all, I became a certified home inspector just to see what the training and the standard was. It took me five days to get certified. There was an online course. And if you look at almost any home inspecting contract, it says we're not we are not responsible for the roof and we aren't responsible anything environmental. They miss a lot of things, don't they? Of course, because what people are paying them to look for isn't to protect your health, it's to Is my water heater old?

Is there a crack in the foundation? Are there some plugs not working that are going to need to be fixed? How about the lights? A heaving or bowing floor that's uneven. So they're looking through the lens of how much is it going cost you to repair this structure. They're not going in and giving the home a health score and saying how healthy is this home for you and your family to move into. So people are thinking about this home as this investment this place to raise their family. And it needs to be a top down and bottom up effort, but there's very little emphasis put on like what's the health of this thing.

Where the consumer needs to say, no way I'm buying a subdivision home. Because if people stop buying them, they'll stop building them. It's a simple supply and demand thing. So we need builders and architects and developers to want to build more healthy homes. And people also need to demand it. So in your home, basically every material was manufactured, usually in China. And when they make your floorboards, your walls, you're lighting your furniture, for that matter, they manufacture it. and as soon as they're done, They basically shrink wrap it, put it on a boat.

It goes to a warehouse and then it's in. Your home. So the off gassing doesn't happen.

Why indoor air quality matters 17:00

The offgassing happens in Your Home. That's why when people bring like couches home often, we'll get a message like, hey, I just brought a new couch home on our bed and my Jasper is going crazy. What's going on? I'm like it's because your thing is off gassing a lot. You just bought this toxic bomb into your home. So it is all the building materials themselves, the insulation, drywalls, paints. Nothing about that is natural at all. Then you have cooking, then you all your cleaning products, all of your personal care products.

Then you have all the pollen from outside came inside and settles inside. You have All the mold. So if you think about the Tupperware growing mold on the sandwich on a piece of bread, that happens when the lid is closed. If the Lid is open, the Mold does not grow because it's not breathing. so you Have a home that's made from toxic materials that also doesn't breathe. And if your home is in breathing, how is the person in the home supposed to breathe? Yeah, it's really interesting. I recently saw an article about somewhere in the Scandinavian countries, they found that women who regularly cleaned their homes with cleaning products, a lot of times they're toxic, ended up having lung disease and asthma and all kinds of issues that you would expect more or less to come from a smoker, right?

A lot us know that we're Not supposed to smoke. It's not good for us. And we don't smoke inside of our homes. But sometimes it's like those cleaning products. We shouldn't fragrance either. Yeah. Fragrance is the new smoking. I have seen that so many times where people do those Glade plugins or just like artificial fragrance inside of their homes and they don't realize all of that is like really building up in their system. So whether it's cleaning products and I'm a big proponent of like using vinegar and maybe some branch basics and doing things that are a little bit cleaner so that we're not breathing that in.

I think that's one part of it is trying to minimize the exposures that we have. But I mean, if you're living in a new house, like, what can you actually do? Because you've got new furniture, right? You've Got new building materials. And every now and then you might need to like bleach something, Right? What do you do, how do You get rid of all of that chemical toxicity that builds up? Well, I'll start telling anybody out there who's going to buy a home. When you go to a buy home, You should even like if you go in for the inspection, and you smell any air fresheners, I would immediately unplug them, all of them.

Take them out of the house. Lair the House out for a little bit and close it back up and redo the Inspection. Because the way that 99% of time what air freshers really mean is they're hiding mold. Interesting. Almost every time I see air fresheners in a home that's for sale and I unplugged them, we find the mold shortly after. Instead of dealing with the source. So the way those air freshers work is not by giving you a nice smell, it's by hijacking your ability to smell. There's a lot of chemicals in those fragrances that make you unable to sell anything else but that.

So you won't smell mold or garbage or anything. So if there's air fresheners, people buy an expensive home, they go in, it smells clean. It smells so nice, right? It's so great. And then, yeah, when you start drinking filtered water and breathing filtered air, you started being very unable to tolerate fragrances. What can people do? We still use bleach. Some of it is necessary. Toilets. Yeah, not a lot of bleach. Turn the bath just the way that you like use the bathroom. If you're bleaching a bathroom, good protocol would be closing the door when you are done and leaving that bathroom fan on for the rest of the day.

So while that bleach is off gassing, it's being vented outside your home. If you're bleaching a more central area of the home, open a bunch of windows. Like fresh air is the key to almost all of this. Scrubbing air helps, but like ventilation and just getting it out of home is even better. Okay. So I have a question for you. Sure. You grew up in Canada. I grew in Chicago and Poland and I hold places, hold place. And we had a habit of opening up our doors and windows. If not daily, we would do it on a weekly basis.

of 2022 to Austin, Texas. And for anybody that doesn't know Austin Texas, it's like 100 degrees, five to six months out of the year. I call my mother-in-law and I was like, how do I air out the house? So what do you do? She said you don't. She's, like you just have to wait until the winter. What's your take on that? What would you recommend for people living in like really hot climate here? Yeah. So, I mean, it's a hundred in the day and it still 82 at night. Typically, we open our doors in morning still before breakfast, 637 in a morning.

We still leave them open for 10-15 minutes every day like when breakfast is cooking. The it's so, you know, it is very easy to grow up being like, don't ever have the AC or the heat on and have windows open. You're like wasting money or wasting energy. If we're doing this for a few minutes a day, we are talking about pennies a Worth it, worth it. The downside is suffocating yourself. And it's like if you know what's really cool. When you go, I mean, you travel quite a bit when you come home and your house smells when.

You come back like it just has that like stuck effect. It's interesting because even if. Leave your vents on a little bit or your Jasper's running, it still can get a. Little bit of that stuck affect. Why? We forget how much us as humans are a part of the airflow cycle because we're breathing. We're opening doors multiple times a day coming in and out. Were breathing in the home. were sitting on couches were walking across the floor like we are just think about water. moving your hand through it, you're moving the water around.

If it's not stuck, it staying. It's cleaner when it is moving. So is the air in your home. By living in the home and being there, partially you are contributing to polluting by the way you live, but you also moving air a lot more. I would say either A, open it up anyway, or leave a bathroom fan on all the time. just actively V-venting. There is something people can get called an ERV or an HRV. Basically it brings in, it works like a fresh air intake, but in an energy efficient way. In Canada, most provinces have this code now.

You can't build a home without one. Texas building codes are ancient and they are horrible. And most attics we see in Texas, there is a lot of mold because you have that hot attic. And your HVAC is in the attic. So you have your cold duct work flowing through, and it's not a conditioned attic, so your attic is 110 degrees. Always. There's 78 degree or 75 degree air flowing 100 degrees and 75 degrees condensation drip, drip drip. Moldy attic, then you have mold in your HVAC system. Now we have a problem.

And that's like everybody. You should not be able to have an unconditioned H VAC space, which is our attic. So the building codes here have like a long way to go. The next phase of Jasper and our vocal getting the word out there is going to be going into more builder conferences, architectural conferences developer conferences. And just as much as right now we're trying to educate people from the bottom up about making better choices, doing the same thing on the builder level, because like when real estate prices over the last couple years dropped a lot.

Healthy home prices haven't dropped at all. All the healthy home builders, which there are not a lot of, there, are a lotta people who have money and not allowed a time, and they value their lifespan more than their wallet, And they're willing to spend 30% more on a home to make it a super healthy, home, a clean air sanctuary, use good materials, good air filtration, Good water,good lighting,Good acoustics. The healthy Home Builders are thriving. So when they realize it's a good business decision for them, I love when you can align incentives.

So when a builder who's very skilled, but not aware, and they're building crappy homes, you know, people really value curb appeal, pretty bathrooms and pretty kitchens, they put no value on the environmental health. I think when the environment becomes part of the equation of a buyer, this whole thing is going to work itself out. Yeah, it makes sense if that's incentivized, because right now, like you said, the incentives are, get it done quick and make it look pretty. And sometimes it's like, you've got these gorgeous bathrooms and the gorgeous kitchen, and then you look around, they put it up so quickly, You know, the, when the wolf came to blow the house down, right?

Like if something were to happen, The house is just like not sturdy, not stable. Probably, you know I had one person who had this beautiful home being built and it rained in the middle of the building process and they didn't have the roof on the homes yet. Right. Yep. And so it's all the time. Yeah. And they didn't properly dry anything out and they had to remediate the home because of obviously water damage that occurred because the roof wasn't up yet. So you see a lot of these things where these homes are going up so quickly.

Maybe there's material shortage, maybe there is labor shortage. not a lot of incentives to follow the rules. Sometimes there are codes that have been established, right? But maybe the builders or their team take shortcuts and so they don't follow those codes or even custom homes might have some issues that were not quite vetted from a safety standpoint. You talk about the HVAC systems being the lungs of your home. Can you tell us more about what that means? Yeah, totally. Your HVAC system, when I say that, Hvac or H-V-A-C, heating, ventilation, air conditioning.

So when we say H VAC, what we're referring to is basically your furnace and your air conditioner. It's the stuff that heats and cools your home and lets your own breathe. More often than not, they design a home, you know, even if you're building a custom home. They look at the square footage, the look of the floor plan. You know they mock up your bedrooms and your kitchen, and they do the layout. And they a two dimensional floorplan of like where you, how you gonna live. Then at end of it they go and then let's run the duct work.

Instead of doing that all has one collaborative cycle saying hey, here's the home here is the angles of sun. What is the most effective way to have this home breathing properly?

Sick buildings, toxins, and home materials 28:00

Who really cares if your bedroom is on this angle or that angle? You can figure all that out. But in tandem, you should be thinking about how the home is breathing. Is the fresh air intake? Going on the neighbors on, the side of the home where you have a neighbor who has a dryer vent pumping their bounce sheets out which is going right into your intake or is your Intake on this side at the, home or a neighbors barbecuing or where your barbeque ing so there's like Think, about where, you're breathing in and breathing out and it's if you Have that lens it doesn't necessarily cost more money to be thoughtful it just takes thought and patience to, be, thoughtful so Yeah, if your home is not designed to breathe, then everything is going to compound inside the allergens, whether it's allergans, wildfire smoke, mold, VOCs, all of it.

And it is very easy to build a healthy home for a few thousand dollars more. So maybe a million dollar home. It's going be like a 1,000,005 million and 10, 000. We're talking about a one percent difference in price to have your air and your water. and it just conscious material choices and things like that. Yeah, that's why I'm very optimistic because it's not a prohibitively expensive investment here. People are spending more money on their fancy supplements every month, hundreds of dollars a month often for many, many years.

And often, like I just think humans are really bad at allocating capital. So like people have a million dollar home and then a thousand dollar bed. Huh? What's the primary function of your home? Isn't it supposed to be like a healthy, clean, safe place for you and your family to rest? Maybe sleep, eat, hang out together. So like maybe get the home that's like nine hundred and fifty thousand instead of a million and get like ten thousand dollar beds that are amazing for your spine and your back and you're neck and turn, you know, make sure there's no annoying bright lights and soundproof your bedrooms like make your bedroom sleep sanctuaries for all the money that goes into your home.

If it can't even give you a sleep sanctuary, what is the point of this thing? So I think just like really coming back to first principles with community and with home and thinking about what's first, principles of what actually important about this thing. A lot of home designs have so much wasted space and weird layouts and extra rooms and five bathrooms. It's like maybe for the three of you, like, maybe three bathrooms would be good and spend that extra 50 grand on great lighting and great air and water for you guys to live off of.

So yeah, HVAC lung of your homes and it just it's the whole idea of the way the system works to support the person instead of just being like this object that you buy. Yeah, it's interesting because most architects and builders, HVAC people, they're not necessarily trained in air quality. And I think for a person that can afford to buy a brand new home, They can actually look for people who know what they are doing with that regard. But how do you find them? your approach if there was somebody that was listening and they were maybe like, Okay, I'm on the market.

I want to build a new home. There's a group called the Building Biology Institute that I recently joined. They got a whole bunch of good professionals. And even if you're the cool thing is like even If the home doesn't have all the systems in it directly for a few that for five, six, seven thousand dollars, you can get a home water filtration system for three thousand. You could have four Jaspers. lighting, you can change all the light bulbs in your house for under $2,000. So even if the home isn't dialed in entirely, taking care of your air and your water and you're lighting.

It's something you could also do after the fact relatively easily. I think it's really more about the awareness. If you are building a custom home, great, find a healthy home builder. But to fix those few things after that fact, it is not breaking the bank. And that's great news for some people that maybe are living in an apartment or maybe they are renting a space. You can take it with you. Even a countertop, you know, like those shower filters, those chlorine shower pretty great. They do a good job.

So if you have point of use filtration for your water, or a countertop reverse osmosis, and you put some electrolytes in it with a with the shower filter, you're talking $150 for a shower, filter 300 for counter top water filter. And even if he put one Jasper in your bedroom, your like a little over $1,000 all in, And now you're drinking clean water, you are showering in clean and you sleeping in air. That's like the 80-20 is dial in your water and dial your sleep environment. And like even if someone can't afford to dial their whole home, I think turning your bedroom into a sleep sanctuary, if you just optimize sleep, everything else takes care of itself and it makes you make all the other good decisions easily.

Cause it's like, yeah, caffeine in the afternoon, not going to, like just if you view everything through the lens of, will it support sleep or not? I just think clean air, less mold, let's Paul and less bacteria. Good for sleep. Comfortable bed. Great. Quiet. Maybe use some white noise or pink noise. Block out the lights. If you're sleeping better, everything else gets easier. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people have sleep issues because of mold and they just take magnesium. It's fine. Or ambient or valium that will fix you.

I love magnesium. I loved all the things, but it's like you're spending 10 to 12 hours, eight hours six hours if you are an entrepreneur or if your a mom, right? But you spending so much time in your bedroom and just getting... Your baby sleeping like 18 hours a day in that room and they have all of the same environmental problems as your bed room. So all of the environmental issues, they're going to be, you know, really impacted with a tiny, tiny human versus an adult. So it's like a dose related response, right?

Something I'm really expecting to see changed. About 25 or 30 years ago, dentists didn't wear masks or gloves. Finger directly in the mouth. That seemed normal at the time. Then they all got herpes on their fingers, Right? That I didn' know. Did they really? It's more common to have that infection in dentists. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm gonna remember that one. But now that seems wild. Like now if you go to pretty much any office or home, it's pretty unlikely nowadays that if You know, a public place they have water fountains.

If you go to an office, they usually have either a nice tap or culligan or bottled water. if you Go to someone's home, it's not that likely that they're just giving you straight tap water anymore. Like over the last 10, you know you're likely not drinking directly from the hose like the water awareness is like 10 or 20 years ahead of air. I think we're going to look back on these days and think anyone who wasn't scrubbing their air on their home or scrubing their hair in the office. I. Think it's going.

To feel. It's gonna be surprising that we used to do things that way. When I went to like, I can't remember how last year, probably the most recent time I want to a functional medicine doctor here. And they gave me these intake forms, like fill out these nine form, nine pages of forms. Page, page, the dentist too, even the massage therapist. They want me to fill like a multiple choice, a Q&A form that's like six pages long. And it's asking if like my paternal grandmother had this infection and if, like, I'm pregnant, you know, they're asking hundreds of very abstract questions to then sit down and talk to me about it.

And they didn't ask me what my water or my air or. My food. Huh. The functional medicine doctor did ask. Me a bit about my diet, but they asked me nothing about. my hair and I. Like. Do you like we're now on the side where we are getting 50 reviews a week of people who's autoimmune, inflammation, allergies, snoring, sleep, cough attacks, like everything. It's like if you start going from eating horrible food to great food, big difference. If you go from drinking tap water to like really good spring water, huge difference and air is the thing that we do 15 to 20,000 times a day.

That's why I think this is like a multi-factorial approach. So many people in my life with sleep issues, I gift them a Jasper. You know, Ari and my daughter, same thing. She was getting sick all the time at school. Put a jasper in the class, doesn't get sick anymore. Study out of Finland, they put air purifiers in classrooms, 30% decrease in absenteeism. It's been incredible. I mean, like, we were getting sick every other week. And the times where our son got sick, I actually brought it home this last year.

About what home? Illness. So I was out somewhere and he ended up getting from me. so I would catch things first, but there was like nothing from his school, which was unheard of. If you're a parent of young children, you know, it's like okay. this is gonna be... They tell you it's normal too. They were telling me that it was normal, they're like, your kid will be sick. I'm reading online, talking to a doctor, like yeah, between two and five, two to six, get constantly infection, runny nose, cough, it is normal.

How could this be normal? Because the previous six months before that, we were traveling, were on planes, in hotels, weren't hiding in bumble wrap, and she was fine. But now that she's in school, six, seven, eight hours a day with windows that don't open with glade plugins with harsh chemicals, with bad cleaning protocols and no air filtration. I'm like, this is insane. And I am going there and I m feeling the particulate in the VOCs and the dust and he horrible lighting and they're only outside 15 minutes a da.

Of course, they are sick all the time. To me, it's just absurd. It's like shocking still that one machine cleaning there in the class makes all these kids way less sick and their parents and colleagues like the true cost of a sick child is unmeasurable and like what is it going to take for it to be a standard question and you said it like when the HVAC and the home builders aren't air aware the same way doctors aren t like trained on nutrition The HVAC slash air guys aren't trained on air. They don't realize that their job is managing the lungs of people's homes.

they just think about heating and cooling. not home health. So I don't think it's going to take that much of an effort. I think a few leading naturopaths starting to talk about how what they're speaking on stages at events and pushing the ball forward a little bit and like that should be a standard triage question because I mean, we did a sleep study a year ago. We're doing another one now 150 people or rings jaspers. The average person slept 25 more minutes per night and 18% deeper sleep. Well, yeah, you stop breathing mold and pollen and VOCs and dust all night long.

It made a big difference. Now you went from playing defense all where you could actually heal and rest and recover. So I don't know exactly how fast, but I'm gonna stay focused on this air problem for as long as I need to, because it just seems fairly obvious that if you're meeting a doctor, any health professional, that triaging them for the air they're breathing in their bedrooms should be one of the first questions you ask. And somehow it's not even on the list. It's really interesting you bring that up, cause I went to this wonderful clinic and I got there and they were having like these scented candles.

What makes it wonderful? Uh, it was just an integrative clinic and, and they were offering a lot of great services to people, but they had scented candles and all of these, like, air, just a lotta scents there. And I got there and I was like you know, you guys, do you have mold in this building? And all of you are doing such amazing work, but you have sick clients coming in and you yourselves are at risk for getting sick from this. And they were covering up the sense with mold and they weren't like, we didn't even realize that.

They reached out to their landlord and had the place fixed and remediated. But to your point about people just being, they are such beautiful healers and know so much about healing. and doing so many great things to help others, but yet they were missing this little component that they need to pay attention to, little huge component, that was potentially making the clinic staff sick. And all of the people that were seeking their help, they we're coming in there and like getting exposed. Have you ever been to Alive and Well?

I have been too alive and well, yes. So I go there, I get my Sun Life smoothies near there.

Cleaning products, ventilation, and fresh air 41:00

Yeah. And you know, great management, beautiful space, Great services, well designed. You know I've always got my air quality, put my particle counter with me. I'm like guys, the air in here is horrible. So people are coming to heal. More importantly, your staff are here eight hours a day. This area is unacceptably terrible. Like, I can't recommend someone to come here based on the situation. So anyway, the same thing we did with the school. We put 18 Jaspers in that place. And we measured the air before and after, and the Air is 20 times cleaner.

Wow. Now when you walk in, it is noticeable, like shockingly noticeable. And a lot of the team, we've been getting these amazing messages from the teams about how much better they're feeling at the workspace and morale and culture and patience. You walk and it's very obvious. And the cool thing is now a lot of the patients are investing in jaspers for their home. So, but it's just amazing. Like, you know, now they're going to have more jasper's in the space and everything else. They even had the live water.

It wasn't a budgetary issue. There's spending thousands of dollars a month on filtered water, They didn't realize the extent of the air issue or how easy it was to fix. And in 90 minutes, they made their air 20 times or 95% cleaner. Now there's no cedar, there is no pollen, no allergens, and no mold. People go there when they're sick. So they are doing sauna and ozone and then IV. When people are at their peak detox, their off-gassing, The nurses are getting sick all the time in the little IV drip drop lounge.

So now we have two Jaspers in that room scrubbing on like a medium speed at all times. It has a guest of that business. Even when you go for a massage, when I go get a message, I always bring my Jasper with me. Smart. Because if you don't, you're in a 10 by 10 room. And you are basically making out with the therapist and the last three people who are there, because if they're not changing and scrubbing the air, your breathing everybody's air. So all it took was the person who got a massage an hour before you to have a kid in there.

Their child had a kit in their class that was sick. Now you got sick because you're in this small environment. And a question I loved used asking to dentists when we used to sell the dentist, I go, hey, do you wash your hands in between patients? Yeah. Do you clean your equipment? Yes. do scrub the surfaces? yeah. You scrubbed the air and at the same time, you know, cut to scene of All of the bio aerosols being shot out of their mouth has that the water tools like blasting under your gums and the air is being filled and they're like, no.

And once they had that moment of awareness and dentists have some of. The most toxic environments of all dentist and hygienist are two of The Department of Labor Department Of Defense has dentis and hygenist is two. Of the top most dangerous jobs in America. More than like nuclear workers, policemen, firefighters, like coal miners, because they're literally blasting into people's mouths all day long. The air quality, when we measure for like bacteria and viruses, even in the lobby of a dental office, it's off the chain.

I will never go to a dentist that's not scrubbing the air in every single room. i've tested way too much air and dental offices. So the dentists who are aware have had commercial grade air scrubing for years. So it's like, are you, the only two reasons you're not, you are not aware or you don't care. So I'm like now we handled the awareness. Look what's in your ear. Oh shit. Now you get to decide if you care or not. I think dentists are five times more likely than the general population to develop adult onset asthma.

Interesting. And everybody goes to the dentist. Actually, fun fact, The dentist comes here now. It's an employee perk. One of my son was just asked, we went to the dentist yesterday and he was asking if there's ever dentists that come to their house. And I said no, so you'll have to look me up like that. Maybe we turn into a bigger thing where we invite, well, have Jasper and friends and we'll get everybody to come here that day. We set them up in the basement. There's lots of air scrubbing here.

in our own environment where there's not other sick people because like what a play, you know, it only takes one day to grow at a bad hotel room or one-day at the dental office to get like really sick. Oh, yeah. And all it would take from a dentist is a $999 investment once ever, for seven grand, they're good. But and then a lot of like a hygienist are sick all the time. They just don't know. So yeah, I think as much as possible, just kind of, like, shining the light on the issue for people. And I.

Think we'll start to do more stuff where we do like man on. The street style videos where I go into the dental office and like take a sample of the air and run it. But there's already so much data like people People know dentists are one area of doctors who are very aware because they get taught about bio aerosols in dental school. But even still, most of them don't invest in air filtration. So yeah, anybody who has a dentist that doesn't have significant air filters running in every room, I would not recommend going back there.

I'm going to have to check for that next time I go to the dentist. You mentioned you can test your indoor air quality. Is this something that a professional would do or can an individual do that in their own home? It's a great question. So I used to do air quality testing and consulting. There's two things primarily we were testing for. One was mold and one was air-quality, which meant like particulate and VOCs. Everybody has mold, and the crazy thing is people test for mold. If I test your home at 8 a.m., noon, or 6 p.

m., we will have wildly different results all three times. So it's, I don't know how much this is true for blood work. I've always had a suspicion that it really mattered though, like what you ate, what your drank, when you slept. Like I always have a suspension that like, we're getting these blood tests, but like I, always suspected that varies a lot based on my current state. The same is massively true for your air. I actually tested air 90 minutes apart in Lakeway near you. And it was like 5x the count.

90 Minutes apart. The wind shifted, the wind blew, events kick on like it's massively different. So the best test for mold typically is your nose. Like the nose nose, if it smells musty and moldy, it typically mold. If that's the case. you should go and basically check every point of potential water so you know looking under the sinks looking in the toilet bowls looking. In the bathrooms things like that I've almost I mean I have tested like collectively as a company we tested probably 5000 homes Ive tested many hundreds of homes and once you've done 50 60 The lab test is just a waste.

I know every time within 20 seconds of being in a home, if it's moldy or not, the lab chest is telling us what we already know. And everybody had some amount of mold anyway. It varies in species and severity, but so what? You still have to go find it. Check your attic, check your crawl space, and check for your foundation. The visual inspection and smelling is the best test you can do. What I do like, though, is actually I really like a carbon dioxide tester. I like one by a company called Aronet, A-R-A-N-E-T-4.

It's about $150 on Amazon, and that's checking for carbon-dioxide. So that is going to tell you when you want to open your windows and open doors and get fresh air. Also, I like another prop brand called AWARE, A-W-A-I-R, the model called the Element. It's also about $150. Putting one of those in like your bedroom and in your kitchen. What's cool about those is it gives you the historical on like a line graph, like stock. So you can see how your air quality looks over the past month. And you'll notice your Air is usually fine.

But when you cook, when your clean, When it's a bad air day, if someone does incense, If someone vaped and then walk in you're home, you have a spike. So, you know, like your air is generally okay. And then throughout the day or the week, it has these spike moments and it can take days for that to be out of your ear. Why? Because it gets into your carpet, your bedding, Your couches, etc. Then when someone is scrubbing their air, all of a sudden you see a spike come up. Jasper's turn on and It's gone in like two, three, five minutes.

Like when you're cooking, for example, or when You're using sprays or chemicals. So I do like a couple air monitors in the home. One in a bedroom, one in common area. They're $150 each. It's like setting up a ring camera. You can do it yourself. The testing, I mean, depending on your specific situation, but personally, like I have a hard time recommending everyone. pays a lot of money for air testing or water testing. I felt horrible when I would charge people $1,500 as the professional to go in and test their air and all roads led to you need to filter your air.

And if we test your water, all road neatly like there's no good tap water and there is no general indoor air, indoor on average is 5 to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air So we do a particle count every time we go to people's homes. They know air is almost always bad. So it's like you could spend fifteen hundred dollars or two or three or four thousand dollars on testing your air. But for that price, you can just get air filters. You know, You could test your water. Yeah, it can have a lot of chlorine and some other chemicals.

so maybe just spend the money on filtering your Water. Often people spend money in the diagnostics and then they have no budget for the solutions. You make such a good point there. When I started working with people with autoimmunity and Hashimoto's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I was doing a lot of lab testing with them. And sometimes those labs, the functional medicine labs are like $500, $1,000, effort to do them. So you have to plan a day when you're going to Do the tests and then takes four to six weeks to get the results back.

And before you know it, you are in this process for three to 6 months and you still not feeling better. I've gotten so many test results with people. They have toxins in their system, right? And they have all of these different imbalances where I got to a point where i was just recommending everybody do like liver support and do sauna to help clear toxins out of their bodies because I already knew like I'm like we already know that you have Toxins in your system and we Already know if you Have a chronic health condition that You should probably filter your air that filter your water, and you need to clean up your personal care routine.

Here's a checklist. Because a lot of times, like you said, it could be such a long and expensive process. And then you're still feeling like crap. You haven't done anything about it for six months because you were waiting for some very specific thing. like once in a while it can be I would say like for me and like think about the word supplements itself and I find that a lot of I'll just call like I don't know if this is accurate but would naturopathic medicine be considered Eastern I Don't exactly know Maybe but like let's just say there's like pharmaceutical like medicines and drugs and then there is like natriopathic more holistic more supplements Integrative, I would say, is maybe a good way.

Okay. Yeah. So integrative. But like less drugs and pharma. To me, as an outsider, it's feeling more and more like drugs in terms of supplements first. Whenever I go to these trade shows, it's all about supplement, supplement supplement supplements. And it was like, let's just do a quick blood test and we'll get you your supplement stack. I'm like I don't know if 27 pills is what I really need right now.

HVAC, healthy homes, and building design 53:00

The word is supplement. It's supposed to be supplementary to your food and to you lifestyle. They're not called primaries, but people are majoring in the minors. You're making the supplemental thing the main thing. You could still be drinking tap water, breathing moldy air, not sonning, never going outside, having dirty carpets, and taking 25 pills. Like, okay, I just don't think this is going to get you the result you want versus like, let's just take care of air water food and go for some walks and get some fresh air.

see what that does for a couple weeks. And then, you know, start if you're doing testing, maybe like block and tackle the obvious things first, like, let's sleep as good as we can swap out some chemicals, because those things are things that within 72 hours, the 80 20 changes can already be made. You can throw out all your harsh chemicals you could stop wearing your shoes indoors you can open your windows when you cook cook and instantly your environment is going to support you so much more and i mean i'm biased because i've been doing all these things for years and now This was my missing piece.

So I get to see it from this side. I'm sure people see from the other side, but I like it feels frustrating for as many life changing moments that we see people experiencing all the time that taking care of air and water isn't like table stakes for someone who's feeling sick. Yeah, I think you make a really good point. So I came into functional medicine, integrative medicine from being a trained pharmacist, right? So very well versed. If somebody's sick, here's the medication. Here's a pill for that.

And then when I got into more functional and root cause medicine I kind of found myself working with clients who were essentially in that same boat, but they traded regular pharmacy for what's called green pharmacy. Okay, there's where I was looking for. It's called Green Pharmacy because their practitioners would put them on 20 to 30 different supplements. And this person, one person I worked with was drinking eight cups of coffee a day and having insomnia, anxiety, palpitations. reducing her caffeine intake, right?

And then as we dug deeper, like her, she was colonized with mold and nobody was talking to her about that, yet they were having her on 20 different supplements. And we ended up essentially working on the caffeine and take and working, on getting her off of many supplements, sticking with some magnesium, and then doing some of that cleanup, their foundational things, the air you breathe, food you eat, water you drink, your daily habits, If you're spending time indoors, if you are getting good sleep, If your filling your life with purposeful relationships.

And these are like the foundational checklist. Like if your not doing these things, like, the fanciest, most expensive supplements, and I own a supplement company, Recology, right? And I'm saying this as a Supplement Company owner, Like the best supplements are not going to move the needle very far if Your not those foundational things. Um, one thing that I wanted to ask you about is you keep mentioning the word air scrubber. I mean, there's air purifiers, air filtration. Can you talk us through like what, what does all that terminology mean?

Sure. because people know what those are. No freshening is going down. Air fresher means chemical sprayer means it shouldn't a bunch of fragrances and chemicals out that are going to hijack your ability to smell and just make you smell that. So that freshens your hair. Not so fresh, not so. Fresh. And that is a more popular category than cleaning your air. Every Uber's got them. Hotels got him. Bathrooms have them people are spending more money on covering things up than dealing with the problem.

Air purifier versus air scrubber. Fundamentally, they both work the same. There's a filter, there's fan, air moves through it, it filters air. So they're both air filters. The difference between an air scrubber and an Air Purifier is typically the scale. So it's like what's the difference? Between a pickup truck and a golf cart or a Honda Civic and the Yukon Denali like and they're both cars like a small sedan. Like think about, yeah, large SUV versus small sedan. They're both cars. Both automotive, you know, vehicles.

But one is very small and designed to be efficient and get you around town. And one that's designed pack more stuff, and hold more people. So an air scrubber is the term of what we were using for mold jobs, floods, fires, industrial. An air Scrubber's like an industrial grade air purifier. It's cleaning the air like 10 or 20 times more than an Air Purifier, purifiers like incremental. There's a reason you buy an AIR Purifiers at Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Amazon, $100, 200, 300, 400. They purify your air.

Maybe they're going to make the Air 10% or 10%, 20% cleaner. An air scrubber is shooting to make the air 90 to 99 percent cleaner. So purifier is like incrementally slightly cleaning the area. You know, great for like a dormitory that has dust to decrease dust, slightly purify it versus scrubbing it. It'd be like what is a Brita filter versus like. a badass home filter. You know, you can get a $30 water filter or $3,000 one. They both take stuff out of water and one does it on a much higher degree, like a, much bigger scale or a kettle versus, oh, a kettles good for teacup.

Water heater is good. For your showers and bath and a pool heater does your whole pool. There all are just elements that warm water, but the scale that they operate in is entirely different. And Jasper. There's a reason that it's 30 inches tall and made out of steel. It's designed to scrub your air. Is designed, to make the air 20 to 25 times cleaner in your bedroom. So 60% of people, probably more now who buy Jaspers had all kinds of air purifiers before. And my favorite and most common review is I had owned all these different air Purifiers, before I got the Jasper air scrubber.

and whoa this is the first one that i know works i feel it i see it it's undeniable versus the purifiers like i bought them i plugged them in sometimes they'd make noise i never knew if they work so i'd never change the filter Almost even five years later, almost nobody ever cancels their filter subscription. Nobody wants to buy the filter every six months. No one likes to spend the money or invest the in themselves. But it's undeniable for them. They know how much better they sleep. they know much they feel that they call it, you know, it is one of the laziest ways to be healthy.

It doesn't take any willpower whatsoever. So the scrubber is just a very effective air purifier. And I think, once upon a time, an air purifier might've been good enough. You know, if you live in the Amazon or Costa Rica or Vancouver Island in like a rainforest somewhere, you probably don't need to filter your air. Leave your doors, If you're like outside all the time and a ton of fresh air, as long as you don' have humidity problems, You're probably fine. But if your living in a city or even in rural environment where there's farms that are being sprayed a lot, the same way your probably not drinking straight from the hose and drinking pond water, You probably don't want to breathe air that's just especially indoor air.

You know, where does the rubber from your where is the pollution go? Where do all the air in the factory goes? The world is all sharing air and then it's magnified when it is inside. So I think air purifying was probably OK once upon a time. But now that air keeps getting worse and our homes are built worse, and worse scrubbing our air is what we need to do in order to have a clean environment that is, you know going to support us. Thank you. That makes so much sense because I know I started off with getting these like dinky air purifiers that are 50 to $100 at, I don't know, Costco, right?

And I've recommended for people when I see that they have elevations and different toxins. And just as a, you know... I'll be like, You need to invest in a really high quality air Purifier. and I oftentimes point them to the Jasper, but some of them are like not getting better. And then I'll check in with them and I will say, okay, did you actually get the air purifier? They're like, yeah, we got one at Costco instead. But it's like it is not going to move the needle. So if it takes out 10 to 20% of the toxins in your environment, that's a great start, right?

That's better than nothing. It's not going to really move the needle because you need to get to that 90 to 100 percent of cleaning of the air. Otherwise, you're still going have, let's say, 80 mold spores coming your way instead of 100. Sure, that's better, but clinically and your health is like you are not gonna see the difference. Also, they're typically cheap little plastic machines. They're loud. they are ugly. Jasper on its silent mode right now, the one that's there's a few of them near us.

One of the most like four feet from me right. Now, we can't hear it. The microphones can pick it up. That's moving more air than a little air purifier on it's loudest setting a lot more because like most of these brands that you see on at the store at The Costco and the Best Buy is in the Walmart. These brands make hundreds of products. They make everything their brands, they don't even make anything. You know, They just put their logo on thousands of things. They have great distribution. they sell them at Walmart and Best Buy and these big stores.

Their giant companies like Honeywell makes tens of thousands Of things or do they make? Anything like is there even a Honey well factory, you know and you Know, there are fine company, but they're not specializing in anything they just like. You know, there's companies that make like, I saw the other day, Philips, you know they make light bulbs and they toothbrushes, like they're giant brands that makes everything. Basic. Basic we make one thing just an air scrubber. We don't make water filters.

You don' make diffusers. we don make multiple different sizes. So arguably it'd be very difficult for them to even understand the problem. And right now because the markets very uneducated you go to Amazon you punch in air purifier you say extra large room you save price low. And these companies very sneaky with their marketing. So you look, it says this filter filters 99.97% of particles. Oh, that sounds great. This thing covers 1500 square feet. What do you mean covers? What does covers mean? Just covers means you clean the air 5% or 90%. So what people, it's very sneaky marketing.

So when they tell you that 99.97, that means just the filter in a controlled lab environment. You could have a Kleenex sized filter, little tiny sheet of paper. That's HEPA. But so it cleans the air, but it so, It's like a space heater. Space heater is great for a closet. you can't heat your whole home with it. It is too small to get the job done. What most people are using is like teeny tiny space heaters in large room. And they're not feeling the difference because it's not the right machine for the job.

But what's really uncool about it is it marketed as if it was large room. You know, it says extra large, 1500 square feet, covers this big space. That, first of all, if you go into the fine print that usually seems like six, like seven foot ceilings, that assumes it always on full speed. So when they give you that stat, its assuming it on the loudest mode all the time. And then what is covers? It doesn't say it's going to make the air in your room 20 times cleaner. They can't see that because it won't.

So that's why we just made a machine, you know, as a guy who was an air quality guy, mold guy flood guy fire guy. I'm like, I would want I want a Machine that I could remediate a moldy house with. And it would be, you know, my wife really likes design. I do too. So something that is beautiful and effective was kind of table stakes. And no one else was really trying to solve that problem. They're just trying For us, it's 99%. So flipped on its head 30%, only 30% of the time do people ever change the filter.

And that's just once for us even five years later, high 90% people are still changing it five year later. Nobody changes it unless they are feeling the difference constantly. So yeah, scrubber versus purifier, big difference. It makes such a huge difference. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. I really appreciate you explaining to that because a lots of us want to be smart consumers.

Testing indoor air and practical fixes 1:06:00

So we will actually take the time to research what is going to move the needle for us. A lot the marketing can be very deceiving. deceiving. I just tell people like you shouldn't need I don't really track anything. Like I Don't Need a step counter or a sleep counter. Once I stop trusting myself and I outsource my feelings to like a data or sensor for me personally. That's just like It's getting away from trusting myself. And I tell people all the time, like Jasper versus the other one, I'm like, just buy both if you're unsure.

First, buy the one if really want. If you notice it's making your life way better, great. But we both know what's going to happen. You're going buy another one. It will be very annoying for you to return it. They're not going make it easy. Then you're going to try a Jasper within 24 to 48 hours. You're gonna be like, whoa, this is making meaningful difference. And that's why we do almost no marketing and the customers are the marketing because they just tell their friends and their family, you know, it's in the school and teachers tell everybody.

I think the best thing to do is just make a product that works. So seems to be working. So in addition to having it in my son's school, I have a few of them in house and I put one in the bedroom. I used to have this thing where I would sometimes just wake up in middle of the night. The air was kind of feeling like stuffy and i would just have like some coughing going on. And since I've put the Jasper in room, it's like not happening. i am waking up a little bit with the baby every now and then. What's your plan for the birth?

Definitely gonna have the Baby in that same room with Jaspr. Okay, I was just double checking. So for anybody out there in Austin, a couple fun Austin perks. Number one, if anybody buys a Jasper in Boston, we hand deliver it to your home. You just buy it online normally we reach out to you we deliver, it we test the air in your If you're unsure, we do 30 day sleep trials. So you could just message us. We'll drop Jasper's off at your home, no credit card or nothing, and let you just borrow Jaspar for a month.

Will you put three or four so you can try them in each room? We pick them all up. Pick up some of them, whatever you want. But the other thing we in Austin is when people are having babies, We deliver Jaspers to their birthing suites. And that's just a free service we offer. You're already covered. Whether you having a home birth or a birth in a hospital, I brought Jasber for my baby's birth at St. David's. And then a few other people have now had Jaspers in there. When we turned Jasper on in the hospital and test the air, the area in hospital was horrible.

We got the error and they're like 50 times cleaner. I like this saying, your baby first breath is more important than your babies first steps. So baby comes into the world, typically in a hospital, with the dirtiest, most contaminated, infectious air ever. Then baby becomes home and goes into this new nursery, painted, VOCs, new crib, little poop box beside it. No poopbox for you, right? Have we talked about the poop boxes? We haven't talked the about poop-box, please share. All right, so diaper pails are not your friend.

We actually found one that's pretty good, but, Most diaper pails, pop the diaper in there, people empty them like once or twice a week. You walk in baby's room and it stinks like poop. Rule of thumb, if it smells like poo, it is poo. If it's poo it bacteria. So if you look at the airborne bacteria levels of most nurseries, they're off the chart. Here's a little baby, not really much immune system yet. Babies can breathe 60 to 100,000 times a day, very high respiratory rate, come home. And they are being bothered by mold, VOCs and poop So Jasper is helpful, but it's not the full solution.

The best thing is those diapers go outside immediately. And most of those diaper pail products, if they were actually airtight, you wouldn't smell poo. We actually found one, it was 70 bucks on Amazon. I'll give you the link. It's worth sharing. it works more like a trash chute in a building. and it is so small that it has to be emptied every day. But it like opens. You put the diaper in and then it closes. So you're never open to the pit. Like you're never open to all the diapers and we take it out every day and that stays in a bathroom.

And yes, we have Jaspers, but like what? Just talk about air awareness. You have a baby, first kid, the person you might love most in the world that you are definitely most concerned about its health and you have it sleeping in an infested bacteria room 18 hours a day with no awareness, so that's why this whole air thing is pure awareness or nobody would have their babies sleeping in a freshly painted room with poop. I'm just horrified because I didn't even think about that with my first son. We had the diaper pail like right next to the crib, right?

And it was like literally like poop particles floating around. So I am horrify and we didn' even have like a good air purifier in his room. Thank you for that. Wow. Any burst in Austin, we got you covered. Awesome. Well, I will definitely keep you posted. So you actually travel with Jaspers with them in your car whenever you go to get a procedure. I fly with him. Oh, yeah. If I have a massage therapist I like going to, first time I go, don't bring it. Second time, if I liked them enough that I'll keep going, bring and I just gift it and say, let's just keep this here.

That way it'll be good for you. It'll good me. Good for all your guests. Here's how you keep it on Fan Speed 2, Fan speed 3. Yeah, anywhere where I go regularly has Jaspers there. Interesting. When I travel, I ship it to the hotel. Some airlines let me fly with it for free as a medical device. One doesn't let, me I'm like, are you kidding? Especially I remember one airline didn't, and I was like it was during the LA wildfires. I could be an asthmatic who's sick, who is going to a wildfire zone, then my golf clubs would be free, but not my air scrubber.

But most airlines let you take it. That's actually really great advice for somebody that has asthma, eczema, allergies, breathing issues, or multiple chemical sensitivities. Because I would have never thought of that to actually you can bring an air purifier with you and you think you have to get a doctor's. Actually, you could bring in air scrubber with If you're in Miami, by the way, there's a hotel called the Carillon Hotel, C-A-R-I-L-O-N, and they have 150 Jaspers there, one in every single room, One in all 28 treatment rooms and in All the common areas.

We got the air there like 30 times cleaner building wide. This was a case study we did to see how clean we could get the Air in a Hotel and how much better everybody's sleep would be. And it's having a huge effect. Interesting. You've done a lot of cool case studies. I think you published recently something about snoring and sleep divorces. Hey, that was yesterday. Nice, you got that. Cool. Yeah, sleep divorce. This is a big thing. A lot couples aren't sharing a room anymore. And a lots of the time it's because one of them was snorting.

Husband usually. Also, I thinks husbands are less embarrassed or just societally women don't necessarily love to talk about their snore problems. It is usually husband though. But yeah, very often they put the Jasper in the room and the snoring is gone. Or someone who's tracking their snore went from two and a half hours a night to nine minutes a. Now for a lot of people, you know, there's a l of other factors to what may have caused it. But a lo of the time it could be the air. I think it's wild that people need CPAP machines.

So they need literally a machine to pump the air down their throat so they can breathe. And at the same time, filtering their air is not a part of the equation. So we've had now a couple testimonials from people who got rid of their CPAP machines. Oh, wow. Yeah, just a Couple. That's not something I'm saying to replace it. But if you need a Machine to help yourself breathe, you know, the average bedroom we test has about a million particles floating around. mold, bacteria, VOCs, rubber from your tires, hair, insect parts, all of it.

You'd think if there was any respiratory issues, let's just go to breathing super clean air would be like table stakes. Especially if you have a CPAP machine, the filters tiny, it's made for like giant fur or like big things not to like shoot into your throat. But there's basically no air filtration. I think anyone who needs a c-pad machine should also want really clean in that bedroom. It's just an awareness thing. But yeah, we do a lot of these little fun studies and tests and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, it just makes sense. It's like it's not going to hurt. And in some cases, that can really make the situation significantly better. I would love for everybody with autoimmunity, with chronic health conditions, asthma, allergies, anybody that's really trying to live a healthier life to have access to a high quality air scrubber like Jasper in their homes, at least in our bedrooms, right? And I always make sure to tell people, You can actually make a pretty good DIY one for about $150 at Home Depot in a couple hours.

That will clean the air almost as good as Jasper. What I don't like to see people do is go to a store, think they're buying something that works and buying a little plastic piece of junk with no service and no support, and that doesn't work. So if Jaspers expensive or you don' value the aesthetic and the support and lifetime warranty, maybe some people don. I built Jasper really for myself. What would a mold guy who wants clean air at home do? He would build Jaspar. But you can make a pretty good DIY one.

So if you Google Corsi Rosenthal box, C-O-R-S-I, Rosental box or just DIY air purifier, there's a few good designs out there, but basically you take like a box fan, and a few filters and you tape them all together. And it makes a really good air cleaning machine. The downsides, a little bit loud, very ugly, but at least it cleans the air really well, really, well. So if it's just in your bedroom for white noise, or you live in LA and want to just run it during wildfire season, this is pretty reasonable thing to do.

Or, you know, if you're in a dorm, in an apartment, and just don't have the budget for Jasper, I would wait for $150 half a day project, some duct tape, Some fans and some filters. You're going to have a really effective solution. So I'd much rather see people do that and have something that works. I like when there's different, you know, different cars. There's, there are different homes. Jasper is for someone who wants turnkey. They want the smart sensors. they want their effectiveness. The want to steal.

the want lifetime warranty. want support. Just make my life easy. Want the filter to show up and they just change it in 20 seconds. Cool, we're here for that. But there's a good DIY option for somebody who doesn't want to spend the money to invest the I have to say the filter is gorgeous. So I it in my living room and it's not like one of those things that I like try to cover up or shove in the corner. It like really works with a lot of different aesthetics. And we've actually used the customer service.

My son's classroom, they were doing a construction and there was some dust on the sensor. and so it wasn't quite dialing in correctly and the team was awesome. They got back to me within like 15 minutes and they're like, This is what you need to do." And we were able to take care of it ourselves versus... And if not, we would have replaced it the next day. Yeah. And they were like, if this is an issue, We're going to send you something brand new tomorrow if it's a problem. We were we able figure it out.

I'm not a very... What's the word? I am not like a DIY fixer type of person.

Air scrubbers, purifiers, and DIY options 1:18:00

Me either. At all. Yeah, but it was easy enough for me to figure it out. It was like, okay, just wipe this up. And I was, like amazing. So I've had such an incredible experience with Jasper Air Scrubbers, in my home, at my son's school. I'm recommending them to a lot of my family and friends. Everybody's going to be getting gifts for Christmas and I know what they are. it makes it easier. If you have somebody in your life that could benefit from Clean Air, I highly recommend that you check them out And anyone whose kid public schools have been very difficult to work with.

But if you have a child who's in a private school, doesn't matter what kind, but they're just easier to. We will donate Jaspers to your kids school. If they are not for profits, we give them filters for free. Also, if it's a for-profit school We will still give you the Jasper for free and then we'll give You heavily discounted filters. But if you have a kid in school, we will donate them not just for your kids class. We'll donate to all of the classrooms. So that's kind of our like, I think the most important.

I want the Jaspers to be in a place. where they're the most impactful and the Most impactful place that I know to put them in is in a classroom because you could have 10 or 20 people benefiting from that clean air all day every day. So like literally like we get these emails every Day. If you heard us, please reach out. We'll make it happen for you guys. What inspired you to start your own school? All right, so the school what inspired me was twofold. Number one, When my daughter Aria was two and a half, she's five now went to school.

She was getting sick all the time. And I just saw how the school was. I'm also I was going to say not designed to be healthy, but it was almost like they designed it to make her as sick as possible. From lighting to the School, not breathing to, the chemicals to no air filtration. It was, almost, like if you said, how do I invent a school to? Make kids as. Sick as frequently as? Possible. They basically checked all. The boxes. That was frustrating. Then we got her into a new school. We got Jaspers into that school and she basically stopped getting sick overnight.

And then my next daughter, Adele, she started in a school with air filtration and basically never gets sick. So there was a study in Finland done a couple years ago at this point, I think. where they put air purifiers, not even great scrubbers, they would air-purifiers in 50% of classes and in different schools, and they had a 30% absentee drop in students and teachers. Wow, 30%. So 30%, with medium air filtration, right away. Duh. Like it's like imagine having a school that had no sinks to wash your hands and then they added sinks and soap and all of a sudden people stop getting sick like way less like you wouldn't be that surprised because that's you want to watch your services, you wanna wash their hands, and you need to scrub your air.

Like anytime when I was doing restoration, mold, floods, fires, it was always a two-pronged approach. We need to clean the surfaces and clean air simultaneously. If you only clean surfaces, the building would still be contaminated. Somehow this hasn't made its way over to conventional hygiene, where people are mopping and washing floors and using chemicals to scrub their windows. But the air is... Like if you think about a fish bowl or a swimming pool, you don't go into the pool and scrub the walls of the Pool with a sponge.

You get a water filter and a pump to move the water and filter the Water with the fish tank, right? You filter The water with our homes. It's the air that we really need to be cleaning a lot more than the services won't make us sick. The only time the service is typically are going to make a sick like, You know, if You smell garbage, If you smell Garbage in the house, it's because that garbage is off gassing. into your air. So with the school, the reason that we're doing this is because we tried a number of different schools and they were either, I'll just call them in the category of nature school.

Great community, great nature, lots of time outside. Amazing, actually, especially for young kids. Really great. But they didn't teach them really anything. They didn't really learn how to do any basic math. They don't learn to read. Rachel, my wife, started to teach Aria how read in 15 or 20 minutes a couple of times a week. She very quickly was learning how how do read it. It's like, why aren't they doing that? And now that she reads, she loves reading, She can order off menus. she read signs.

The whole way she interacts with the world is much. She sits beside me on the computer and can actually see what I'm working on. she reads my calendar to see What I am doing in a day when she's not there. So it's really broadened her perspective and experience with life being able to read and being to do math and count and think. It's been very helpful. Then there's other types of schools that were very academically rigorous and like no nature or community. so we couldn't really find a good balance.

But The big, big driver for me was how sick kids are getting in school and how normalized that they're making it, that your kids should just be always sick all the time. You know, both of us experienced it. Then I saw that study in Finland. I'm like, this is just the push that I need to want to start this. Also, I am 35 now. Since I met Rachel when I was 19, we were making curriculums for fun. So we have 16-year-old curricula and mind maps and life skills that we are thinking about like what does a child need And a lot of it was just like, they're going to learn it in life.

Some of was going be from us. And school is where they are spending most of their waking hours. So it makes sense that that is a really great place to grow and to experience things. And the fact that these environments like if you can dial in your bed between your bedroom and your workplace or your room and for a kid a school that's like two thirds of your life. If you could just dial it in the classroom in a bedroom or the class the bedroom in office and get your work and sleep environments dialed in.

That's going to move the needle a lot. Then the other third is like miscellaneous other. Maybe you're in your living room, maybe you are outside going for walks, going restaurants. Can't do so much about that. But if you can dial in you, you working your school, your sleep moves the Needle. And I got inspired by that study in Finland. So we wanted to find a build a school that was Montessori inspired. but more collaborative, more entrepreneurial in nature and just a really healthy environment. So my role is the Chief Wellness Officer.

I'm responsible for making sure air filtration, water filtration circadian rhythm lights screened in porches. There's no screens in the school. Will we bring them in at a later ages? Maybe. Right now the schools just three to nine. They have enough screen time at home. So the only screens we have will be on our screened in porches. But fresh air, good lighting, clean water, like I think the environment just being a healthy place. And then incredibly skilled, well-paid teachers that have great philosophies and great structures, you know, we're not here.

And the school is called Kindling Academy. Why kindling? Because I believe every child has a spark within and they just need a little bit of well placed kindeling and a bit oxygen. It's not like we are going to shape your child or craft your or architect or engineer them. I think just giving them an environment to be around other kids in a supportive way. And then a lot of community stuff. So we have like a 20 person sauna that we're going to put at the school and some cold plunges. so when parents pick up and drop off their kids, there's like community wellness for the families.

We're not just accepting a child into the School. It's really accepting that family has a community. Like you said to yourself, like with longevity and health and all that, community is one of the biggest parts. When you're a kid in school, you have friendship built in. The most convenient people to be friends with in the adult phase of life is your friends, your kids, friends' parents. You can hang out with them. They hangout with their kids. And one of the schools we went to, they weren't great at teaching, but they were amazing at community.

It was awesome. We almost stayed despite of all the other things. So we really view it as the families joining the school. as opposed to just the kid. And people have to want to be able to, you know, go on a camping trip once or twice a year and just like being, teaching something once a month and collaborating with the school. People who want be a part of their kids' lives and have the community part their life. If not, there's lots of other great schools. I love it. What a beautiful vision. It combines all the different elements of keeping kids healthy, of teaching them and having that beautiful community.

Stay tuned, it's gonna be awesome. We open next August. So at kindling.academy, we got Instagram, We got a website. If you want to join the waiting list, feel free or we're gonna open source every single thing we do. Our profit and loss statement, all our financials will be transparent. What we pay the teachers, how much does it cost to renovate? the air filters, the water filters the the non toxic chemicals we use, everything's going to be open source. So if anyone has a school or their kids go to a School and they want to just give them like, and we're going To be publishing all of our absentee rates, their runny noses, The costs against state averages.

And if we can get the big big vision is this, if We can Get the absinthe rates down by 30 40 50% public schools are funded by attendance. So we want to align the incentives where public schools, it will become a no brainer for them to invest into healthier buildings for their kids. So the goal is to make that the healthiest school in Austin, but really the Healthiest Kids in America and do it in such an undeniable way that people cannot help but take note and optimize their schools.

Schools, babies, and the Kindling Academy vision 1:28:00

And who would have thought that airborne disease would dissipate in higher quality air, right? Like, who'd have though that air scrubbers could get rid of so many cases of airborne diseases? What a surprise. What shock, yeah, nuts. It's so generous of you and thank you for donating to my son's school and a few of my mom friend's schools. Everybody is like, this has made such a big difference. It is not just me and my sons friends and teachers, but also like we're getting these stories from all over the place.

I was so excited to bring you on the podcast to share about your expertise on air quality. And I'm excited too. Be here. Um, I don't know what day this comes out, But, um, it would be nice if we gave your audience like a Big discount code or something. Let's do it. What's a code that you have used in the past or a simple one? We can use Isabella, I-Z-A-B-E-L-LA. Okay, so that's the code, Isabela. Today, the day that this comes out, for the next two weeks, code Isabelle will be $300 off. Wow, thank you so much.

For two And then after that, it'll still be $200 off forever. We'll just leave the code up forever, but I know even when it's health purchases, I take action when there's deals on things and you don't have to wait till Black Friday. So if somebody wants to. invest in clean air for their bedroom, for the home. Code Isabella will be $300 off for two weeks from the day that this comes out and $200 off after that. And yeah, with the lifetime warranty, if Jasper ever breaks, we ship you a brand new one.

You take the new and out of the box, you put the old one in the Box, We send you A prepaid shipping label and we cover the shipping both ways. So we call it the last air scrubber you'll ever need to buy. And also, if it's not a no brainer for you at home, keep the box for the first month, we would take it back. Doesn't happen often. But if does, you know, We want this to be a No Risk Investment for You. So either you buy it and it is like life changing for your family and It's the best deal you've ever gotten you want to buy more.

Or, and by the way, if you bought one with code Isabella and then you reach out a month or two later and you're like, I want two more, we will honor that same $300 off. So do not feel pressured to buy more than one. If you just put one in your bedroom and your put it on fan speed three and put on dark mode, the life changing sleep will happen. if your cook a lot, you probably also want to put in common area in you living room somewhere on smart mode so it can adapt to the cooking and tell your friends.

Thank you so much. That's so generous of you. I know it's made a really big difference in my life and you're making such a huge difference and so many people's lives by cleaning up their air. Couldn't do it without you, otherwise I'd just be shouting from the rooftops into the void. So thank you! My pleasure.