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

0:00So I've got a bunch of products here that a lot of people will have in their homes that I want to get your opinion on. But first, before that, before we get to this, you walk into a hotel room. There's a street hooker. There's a bag of white powder. It might be pure. It might be cut. You don't know. And a potential mold problem. Which one are you most worried about? I guess I'm most worried about the mold, man. It's what you're most interested in. That might be something different. It's the thing I could least control if I have nowhere else to sleep that night. I could throw the bag away. I could ask the hooker to leave, but the mold is a little bit more difficult. Yeah. I think this air quality thing is one of the big three

0:42areas in health that everybody's going to be interested in over the next few years. Air quality, mold toxicity, light pollution. Those are the big three for me. I think water quality was a big deal. And now we're kind of getting to the peak of that. People understand they need clean water. How did you get started working in air quality? What's the story? Also, I totally agree with that. And I feel like some things are trends, but some things, once the awareness raises, they don't go back the other direction. Like some things come and go. Red lights are kind of popular now-ish, coal plunges, but like in 10 years, I'm not so sure. Agreed. Water filtration, once you start drinking clean water and then you taste, once you get the water awareness

1:22and you can taste the chlorine and the lead and you become water aware, there's no going back to not drinking filtered water and air is the same way. I say the only thing that is rough for people about breathing clean air is you might become an air snob and that might make it a little bit more difficult to navigate Airbnbs and hotels and people's homes. So I got into this by being in the disaster restoration business. So floods, fires, hurricanes, mold remediation. So I wasn't your like local flood guy that you call if there's a toilet leak. We were the ones who would fly to, you know, Hurricane Harvey or Alberta, Canada, or wildfires in California, going to the biggest disasters in the country and remediating. And

2:06the big moment for me, well, first of all, when you remediate from mold, what does it even mean to remediate? You need to isolate the contaminated space. You need to remove the physical mold and scrub the air. Those are the steps. And you would always measure the air quality before, during, and after. And some of the cleanest, freshest air I would ever breathe was after we were finishing a mold remediation job because we had scrubbed the air for four or five days. And then I'd go home and I'm like, it was cleaner at that job site. And the big moment for me, my aha air moment was in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Biggest wildfire in Canadian history. All 100,000 people in the entire town were evacuated for a month.

2:50We went there and everyone's homes were so smoke drenched. So it wasn't fire damage. It was smoke damage, but such significant smoke damage that your entire home had to be gutted and cleaned. And what was unique about this was when the, it wasn't just the, it wasn't just s'mores and campfire. When you had the 5,000 homes that burnt and the cars, every chemical, paint, drywall, the materials that were combusting in those created a very toxic smoke. So we'd go into people's homes, we'd clean them, we'd restore them. It could take weeks. It could take a month. But this one time we finished cleaning a home. We got a call a week later. Baby was in the hospital. We go back to the house. We test the air like, ah, it's actually really recontaminated again.

3:36Then we go out. Whenever you're testing air, you always test outside and inside. If anyone's ever testing air just inside, they do not know what they're doing. You always need to take a control sample of the outdoor ambient air and compare that to the indoor air in that moment. That's how we have the Delta. Because otherwise you could just have bad air in the local environment. Like if you'd taken an air quality reading during the fires, you'd have been like, the air inside is horrible. It's like, yeah, so is the air outside. It's just the same. You know, you're not supposed to do mold testing like 48 to 72 hours after a rain, but no company adheres to that because it would. So a lot of people get, they get mold testing.

4:10The results are in the millions. You look, it rained the day before. It's like, did they do a control sample? If they didn't, of course there's mold spores in the air. It doesn't mean your home is contaminated. It's just what was in the air that day. So we go in there, we check the outdoor air, very contaminated. After a bad wildfire, the air can stay bad for four, five, six months. Gets in the soil. It's the homes that are burnt. It's in the ash. So we call the insurance company. We're like, hey guys, Tanya's home is recontaminated. I suggest she moves, leaves. She heard her family have to leave town, wait in a hotel room. Let's wait till the ambient air is good. Do a reclean. Then her family can move ambient air is good, do a reclean,

4:45then her family can move back. So insurance said, no way, Jose, the check is already on the way to you guys. She signed off like our job is done. Well, that sucks because we have a sick baby here and insurance is like, we're done. So what we did is we left four of our big industrial air scrubbers in Tanya's home. And about two, three hours later, the air was good. Downside, it was a little bit loud. There was these machines running, but the air was good. So we left them there for a few weeks, a month or so. And this kept happening. So we're leaving our scrubbers behind on job sites because you clean the home, but now we have to maintain that because it keeps getting recontaminated. And insurance is not going to do a reclean.

5:28So I'm like, wait, this is really expensive and we need our equipment for the job sites. I can't remember if it was a Best Buy or a Walmart or Home Depot, but I went out and I bought a bunch of little air purifiers, the regular ones you see for two, three, $400. Most of them are very similar. And I left five or six in the home, tested the air again a few hours later, totally contaminated again. I'm like, oh, I didn't know much about portable air purifiers at that time, but they're kind of little small toys. They don't do much. And I'm like, whoa. I was living in Ontario at the time in Toronto and West Coast. I'm talking to people. They're like, we have smoke several days every year, but it only takes one or two

6:00days of the smoke to pass through your city for your home to be drenched. Once that smoke's passed through, it's absorbing into the chairs, into the carpets, into the drywall. The smell part's gone and you get used to it, but the contaminants stay behind. So I was like, whoa, we need something more significant than these air purifiers. Forget these huge fires, but just for anywhere that's dealing with smoke. So it was clear to me, these air scrubbers, super effective. Downside, very loud, very ugly. Little air purifiers, cheap, small, cute, don't do anything. So I'm like, we really need an air scrubber that looks good. It's quiet. It's pretty. So I called the restoration. It was like, it was sad work. So I'm like, and it wasn't impactful. We cleaned the

6:41homes and they're recontaminated. So I thought the most impactful thing I could do is take what I've learned from years in restoration with the floods, the fires and the mold and create a scrubber that's actually designed that looks pretty, that's quiet, that people would want in their home. Because I brought a scrubber home one day and Rachel, my wife, was like, get that thing out of the house. Like, I don't care what the air is like. We're not leaving that thing in the room. And that began my air journey. Let's say that someone's got their exercise and their sleep dialed in. How much could they be leaving on the table by ignoring air quality? Well, let's just anchor with this. You can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air.

7:18The first thing you do when you're born, you take that first breath. The last thing you do before you die is you take that last breath. Out of the air, water, food are three big intakes that are keeping us alive every day. The only one we do when we sleep is breathe. And us humans are really good at getting acclimated to uncomfortable, toxic environments. With water, it's like, we're thirsty, go drink. You're hungry, go get food. But air, it's kind of just omnipresent because we're doing it subconsciously. We're not paying attention. Once you start getting conscious about your breathing, you're like, whoa, this breathing thing is quite interesting. So that's the amount of time you can survive without the three. In terms of, I'll speak in

7:59liters, you breathe about 17,000 liters of air per day. If you're a good water drinker, you're drinking two liters of water, maybe two pounds of food in a day. They say about 70% of all the detox in your body happens in your lungs. So just to level set what our bodies are running off of, like we got some drinks here, but I don't need them. I'm not gonna eat for the next hour or so, but we ain't gonna stop breathing. And I think that is why we don't pay any attention to it. And I think air awareness lags. It was lagging water quality, I feel like by about 20 years. I think since COVID, it feels more like 10 years. I'm trying to condense that timeline a little bit here. But it's the biggest thing, man. When you sleep, I call air sleep fuel. During the day, I call it thinking fuel because it's the only thing that's actually keeping us going. And yeah, you can run

8:45on mediocre air quality, but if you're in a room where it's like hot or stuffy or it stinks, your sleep sucks. And when you flip that and you're breathing in a clean air sanctuary, I think sleep is the number one thing to dial in. So if your air quality, it's like when you go to the mountains, you're like, ah, I'm breathing deeply. I'm breathing effortlessly. When it's humid and polluted, you're naturally restricted in your breathing. Your breathing, your breath pattern is short. And then even when you leave, it stays a little bit short. That becomes your new normal. So the cleaner and the fresher the air, the more at ease you are to actually breathe. So it calms your nervous system down. It helps you sleep better. If you're sleeping better, you're recovering better.

9:21If you're recovering better, you're performing better, whether that's athletics, academics, your work or whatever it may be. So allergies, snoring, all of it, air is the thing we live off of. So it's interesting. I think a lot of people will be thinking about the trait and the state. So what is it doing to my performance in the moment? And then what is it maybe going to accumulate to cause systemically? Maybe there'll be some disease, maybe I'm going to get some biomarkers that are going to start to be bad, my long-term health's going to suffer. What are the big worries when it comes to short-term performance from poor air quality and long-term health impacts from poor air quality? So short-term performance, we're really

10:04going deep down the rabbit hole, but here's a few, three big studies that were like, whoa, for me. And the fun thing about air is it's not really talked about, but it's massively researched. Like if you type in like air quality, blank, whether it's fertility, asthma, cognitive performance, sleep, the like Harvard and MIT, the big universities who have done massive studies, it's all there. So they did a lot of studies on umpires in baseball. And you know, when the ball strike happens and they show you on the screen, and they're wrong often, and you're like, can't believe this is still a human thing. Blows my mind that that sport still doesn't have some AI. We have self-driving cars, but the umps are still manual. um so the quality the the accuracy of the umpires call accuracy is

10:48directly correlated to the air quality that day two is grandmasters in chess game theory optimal means like the chess player is playing a perfect next move the game theory optimal performance was dramatically um affected by air quality and so are scores. So that speaks to the acute performance of your cognitive performance. Wow. So, and when we're talking about air, we're talking about fresh air and clean air. So you can have, if you think about being in like an elevator with 12 people going up a big building, or you're in an office or you're at like a party and there's 30 people in a home, you're like, I got to get outside. That's like the feeling of stuffy. Stuffy means high carbon dioxide. The CO2 is high. Your brain's not working good. So that's short

11:29term. Same thing applies to, and like, if that's what's happening to the umpire, what's happening to the guy throwing the pitch? What's happening to the guy swinging the bat? It's the very thing that you're operating from. So the short term, I love those three studies. Okay. Well, just for the people that are listening, we have these sensors in front of us, an Aranet 4, which you kindly gave me, and this is tracking primarily CO2? Yeah, that's what it's for. Okay. So at 973, which is on the upper end of what's okay, but that means that if we need to start talking gibberish, we'll be able to look at the different component parts here and find out, oh, 295 parts per billion VOCs. Anyway, we've got lots of sensors and stuff. By the way, I was really excited that the first

12:10time we came to your house to bring some Jaspers by, your whole house was nerded out. You already had another air filter brand. You had air monitors in all the rooms. So seeing that offline, I'm like, yes. Well, you're talking to someone who's spent the last two and a bit years of his life trying to regain his health after basically being infected with poor air quality. Like that, you know, the house that I was in previously. Yeah, it would have been stuff that was in the water and the pipes and all the rest of it. But this is incredibly personal to me. And I've managed to find like the grand wizard of air quality who just happens to live in the same city as me. So anyway, short-term performance,

12:45people are less accurate. Their cognition is impacted. Most of this has been done on people that are doing cognitive tasks, but presumably when we get into physical tasks, emotional regulation, all of this stuff is probably going to be impacted too in the short term. We've jasperized a lot of the city of Austin. So if you go to jujitsu gyms and a lot of the gyms- Dude, it's in Rogan's Green Room. Your field is in Rogan's Green Room. I walked in the other day, I was like, oh, there it is. And that one works hard. I fucking bet it. Yeah, there's a lot of- That one works hard. Substances for it to, yeah, that's the Navy seal of, that's the tip of the spear of air quality. We texted them the other day.

13:18We're like, one is not enough, guys. We're constantly getting photos of that thing in the red all the time. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. All right, so what about long-term? What's happening to long-term health? So the last thing for short-term, I would just say sleep. So we did, I'll be careful about my word, my usage of the word steady. This was a community-led experiment where we gave 150 people jaspers who didn't filter their air before. They were using either Aura or Whoop. And we did one month. So it's four weeks. The first week, no air filter, tracking your sleep. Weeks two and three, Jasper on in the bedroom, fan speed three. Week four, Jasper's off again. And then everybody sent us their data.

13:59We analyzed it. The average- Because they were using some sort of track, like a whoop or- Whoop and aura. Similar, right? Yeah. So the average person slept 25 minutes more per night, a whoop or similar right yeah um so the average person slept 25 minutes more per night 18 deeper sleep and they fell asleep five minutes faster so week one and week four would have been similar weeks two and week three would have been similar but the change would have been up and then down dude that's such a fucking cool study i'm aware maybe it's not lab randomized controlled trial-y thing but um that's fucking awesome we should do something similar to that we should come up with a way that we should that we could um run a bigger version

14:31i'd like to do it in the spring maybe when allergies are really bad here oh that'd be cool anyway let's come up with an idea i think that's fucking sick we should come up with a way that we can we can do that we will so and the cool thing was so everybody had to give us their data and they had to they had to be okay to not be anonymous because I'm like, no one's going to trust the study. If you're like, you have to be willing to put your name on it. So it was man, woman, all kinds of ages, doctors, scientists, teachers. Like we had a wide, a range of people. Um, so that was the first, like, I like to, that's like, um, you know, a beta test study before we go into a big study, like let's experiment in ourselves.

15:07Cool. So it's a big deal for sleep. 30% of people, once again, this is like our own data, stop snoring who snore. And of the other 70%, more than half of them dramatically reduced their snoring. One of my, like, man, when we started this, I never imagined in a million years, we get emails from women all the time being like, we were sleep divorced for years. We bought the Jasper because of some allergies. And now my husband can come back into the bedroom again. Oh my God. You've saved the sex lives of a few hundred thousand Americans. That's funny. So that's like kind of the short term. Naturally your sleep your sleep is the leading indicator of all kinds of long-term stuff so you know with all the toxins

15:50in our body it's like our bodies are so resilient we can handle stuff in an acute setting also like when we test the in austin anyone who gets a jasper um we go to their homes they don't even know we're in austin but when they make an order, we either call them or text them and we hand deliver the Jasper. We test the air before and after. Right. Um, so we test a lot of air. Yep. And the coolest thing, Austin is a significantly, it's a big, it's a big allergy season. Like it's a thing that we talk about here, cedar fever. Yep. So a lot of people go to zero or massively reduced allergy symptoms because we can handle some mold. You can walk down the road when they're like paving and breathe like asphalt and toxins

16:33for a minute. When we test people's bedrooms, often the pollen levels on your pillow or in your bed are higher than outside because they come inside and then they stay in your house. They've got so much to settle. They stay there. They stay in the porous materials. Anything that can get wet from water can also be permeated by air. So if we have a sealed surface, like when I'm doing restoration, if we have like sealed wood like this, we can restore this all day long. We just wipe it clean. But if it's porous, like drywall, like carpets, like insulation, a lot of furniture, MDF, Soft furnishings. The bottom is unsealed. Yeah. And then that permeates. So anything that can get wet will also permeate by smoke.

17:09So you can handle some pollen for an hour or two in the day and not really impact you. The problem is you're breathing it in 24 hours a day. So when you can turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, right now, the average home, the indoor air is five to 10 times dirtier than the outdoor air. Wow. When you flip it, I can tell you in your house, the air is like 10 times cleaner than the air. So your home, it's called home. It should be, it should be this place, this abode where you come to like heal and recover. What are the biggest concerns when it comes to air quality inside of the home? Obviously we've got some things in front of us us like CO2, VOCs, mold, allergies. What are the things that you're talking about? We're talking about air quality. What are

17:49the constituent parts, the macronutrients? Yeah, good idea. And this will incorporate some tips. Through this, there'll be some tips that you can implement immediately. So shoes indoors, very bad. The average shoe tested, 95% of shoes tested have fecal matter on them. Fancy word for poo. If they have poo, they probably have glyphosate as well. Hang on, sorry, sorry, sorry. 95% of shoes have got poop on them. Yeah. Because you walk outside, dogs poo outside. You never wash the bottom of your shoe, like ever. But how much is this? Like, surely this isn't an amount that could be big enough to cause an impact on someone's health. But like a little poo, a little glyphosate, whatever else you walked on, rubber from tires, like your shoes accumulate a

18:29lot of stuff out there. Then you're walking around your carpets. So then it's permeating into the home. And then every time you walk on it, you should see, like, I'll show you later, we do something called the disturbed carpet sample. We can maybe do one before I leave today. We smack the carpet with the particle counter and it's like millions and millions of particles. So the same thing's happening kind of every time you're walking on it. Okay. And what is that? That's like biological material? It's a little bit of everything. It's everything from mold spores, dead skin cells, hair, pollution, pollen. So speaking of like the home, so we got the shoes, cooking, cooking's a big one. So even if you're using organic avocado oil, which I think

19:05avocado oil is not in anymore. Um, but if you've got good oil or beef tallow, beef tallow is still good. Grass fed grass finished steak, still good. So even if you're cooking with great ingredients on a great pan, the, the high heat and the proteins create something called PAH, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So when I was testing homes after fires we're always looking for hexavalent chromium and pah so even though those two things by themselves are good the chemical reaction of the heat really contaminates your home so you know you smell all the bacon on all the cooking smells great but even when the smell passes those those reactions are still embedded into your home right and most people aren't using their range hoods

19:44and the fan extractor above the stove yeah that's a good idea opening windows or using are still embedded into your home. Right. And most people aren't using their range hoods. And the fan extractor above the stove. Yeah, that's a good idea. Opening windows or using your range hood is a good idea. Like we've only started cooking indoors very recently. We've only created indoors very recently. Imagine going back a thousand years ago and trying to explain the concept of inside. Like we built these little Tupperware containers that we live in. The average American spends 95% of their time indoors. Like we're like in these Tupperware boxes now, you know, mold doesn't really grow outside. Dust isn't really outside. These are indoor problems. Outside we have the

20:13sun, the wind, the rain, the trees. That is like nature's air purifier. That's taking care of the outdoor environment. We build these tight homes. We leave nature outside. So the problem is the best example is if you think about a river or a stream flowing water, that's typically pretty clean water, but as soon as it stagnates, that pond gets the algae, gets the bacteria, life wants to move. Water wants to move. Air wants to move. So we got cooking. We got the shoes. Then we have all the chemicals that we're using, the hairspray, the Febreze, the Glade plugins, all the candles, the incense, some of the stuff here. The other one is the building materials themselves. So I think part of the reason I'm on this planet is to eventually build homes better.

20:57So homes are built way too tight. They don't breathe. And think about your home. Outside is like the river. And then your home is like the pond. So if your home can't breathe, the people in the home can't breathe. And think about your home. Outside is like the river, and then your home is like the pond. So if your home can't breathe, the people in the home can't breathe. And since the 70s, the energy crisis, they changed all the building codes to make homes super tight to be energy efficient. A quick aside, if you wanted an eight sleep but could never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time.

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22:10wisdom at checkout. Where does air come from in a house? This sounds like a stupid question, but I was thinking about this this morning and I was like, hang on, why am I not always suffocating inside of my house? I know it's not completely hermetically sealed, but surely the circulation, especially in a place like the UK where there's not a massive amount of AC happening, I would have just assumed that there's no airflow. Where does air come from? Well, let's think about a water bottle or a Tupperware container. We don't have to poke very many holes into it for it to fill up with water, especially when it lives in the water. Because also how cool is this? They say the breathable, like us humans, we need a very

22:50particular blend of air to survive, like a very specific composition. If we hike 10,000 feet or more, we can't really survive there very well. If we go underwater, we can't survive. They say if the earth is an apple, the breathable area is the skin on the apple. So it's a thin little layer that we can survive in. But our homes are in that layer. So because our homes are in it, just like if you took a bottle or something, you put it in, submerge it in water, you know, there's water resistant and then there's like waterproof, but even very tight things. So how does the air get into your home? Windows, doors, even closed windows and closed doors, it gets in. Your attic, because your home has debris that has vents,

23:32right? Your bathroom has vents. Your stove has a vent. Your attic has vents. So every little leaky spot of a home, there's something that you can do called a blower door test. So any way that your home is venting out, that's where the air is coming in. And it's like a pressurized container. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So what about CO2? We talked about some of the things that are kind of particulates inside of the home, but this is you recycling the air yourself inside of it. I think CO2, like the way we have sports tickers, I'm walking around the airport and look them all down the street. I see sports scores everywhere. think CO2, like the way we have sports tickers, I'm walking around the airport and like

24:05the mall or down the street, I see sports scores everywhere. Like the CO2 should be that present. Because people, I found this out this morning from the guys, there's people taking these iron nets through the airport and waving them around and being like, oh, I thought that I needed to be worried when I was outside. It turns out the airport's killing me. The airplane too. Wow. So carbon dioxide, you know, us humans, we breathe in oxygen. We breathe out CO2, trees and plants. They do the opposite. The outdoor carbon dioxide is about 460 to about 500. So indoors like 600 to 800, decent. Once you get above a thousand, it's okay still, but that's when the brain fog starts to kick in a little bit at 2000 now we're really gonna start feeling it and at 3000 you're like

24:51i'm exhausted i can't think so this is what like people are when you talk about like when most people hear about climate change they're thinking about things like natural disasters which doesn't really like freak them out that much like it won't happen here once in a while. When I started monitoring air quality in 2014, it was about 395, the outdoor CO2. It's 460 now. So just the ambient CO2 PPM has gone up by like 10, 20%. Wow. And there's a huge difference between a 400, it feels like, and 600 and 800. So imagine- We noticed that, sorry for interrupting. We noticed that inside of the studio because we've got these things everywhere. And this, in order to make it sound good for everyone at home, you can see on the ceiling.

25:37No one else can see on the ceiling, but you can. There's all of these sound deadening panels. This is as hermetically sealed as we can. Double cavity insulated from the outside. We go to Rogan's studio, he's on a floating floor. Like you would get in Rick Rubin's music studio or whatever, the whole floor is double walled off the ground so that you have like deadening, so that you're not actually hitting the foundation. And then you open his door and his door is double thickness. We've just gone for single thickness here. But anyway, all of this stuff. And we noticed, if I have a round table episode with four people and we're three hours deep, we can't open the door because light comes in, sound comes in from outside.

26:13It's a bit of a mess. I'm like, fuck. I have this choice between somewhere that is well sound deadened so that it does the job of being a podcast studio or somewhere that can circulate air really well so that the people that are in here don't get a ton of brain fog as well. And this will get up to, I think we've hit like 1800 before, but we've got pretty high, especially with four people plus producer. Maybe there's some people coming in and out. You're like, fuck, like, all right. The whole goal of everyone being here is to think and speak clearly. And because we're all here breathing the air, we're now limiting the ability for people to be the best. So my commitment to you and I'm very close. I'm probably about

26:49two or three weeks from a perfect solution. I've been speaking to everybody because we're, we're building a little podcast studio in town. It's going to be called clean air studios. You might have it before us. So what we're going to be able to do is put a little, um, air exchanger all the way on the other side because what happens is if we put the ventilation in here that would ruin everything yep it's gonna go the opposite side out there and then pull the air slowly and quietly so it will not impact your sound at all and it's gonna just be a slow gentle exhalation so that's our commitment it's either that or i put a fucking rainforest in here and just have a shit ton of foliage and plants.

27:27Then the humidity in the mold would take us out. Oh my God. Well, look, okay. So this is something that I think probably a lot of people are maybe feeling. And I know that I did. Like, oh, is this another thing? Is this more burden for me to consider with my life? I'm trying to avoid ultra processed foods and seed oils and blue 40 and red five and colors. And oh my God, I got to go to the gym and do my VO2 max training and my HIIT. And then I've got to get strengthened and I need to make sure that my vitamin B12s work. And now you're telling me that I've got this other arduous bit of homework on top, like in a world filled with Cheetos, how much are people majoring in the minors when it comes to air? And how much do you think actually

28:13this, this should be in the bucket of stuff that you care a lot about? Dude, that's why I have dedicated my life to this mission because I don't have, or like to exercise willpower ever. I believe that your environment tells you how to feel. So if we hang out on the dock or in the mountains, good luck being stressed there. You know, go to a spa, you hear the flowing water and the gentle music and the nice light and the wood and the stone, you feel great. Go to a place that's like bright and loud, black and pink walls, a dentist office, like you're going to be stressed. It's like good luck getting relaxed if it's like loud or hot or polluted. It's way easier. Like I will never try to work if I'm not in an optimal work environment.

28:58I'm like, let's just fix the environment. Instead of trying to like take all my sleep pills and whatever people do, I'm like, let me just get a really good bed, get it cool, dial in the environment. It's the laziest way to be healthy is to control your environment. You know, move to a city that you thrive in, go to an environment where you feel amazing, have a bedroom that is conducive to supporting you, have a kid's schools and a classroom that makes you feel good. As soon as you walk in, you feel calm. So yeah, people are massively majoring in the minors. And I love that phrase. I think taking care of air, water, lighting, these are easy, passive things. Once you've done it, you don't need to think about it again.

29:37No. And is water one of those things? I don't want to be ignorant to water and still drink the hose water and still drink tap water. It was like a little bit of awareness. And I got a water filter at home and I changed the filter twice a year. And when I go out, I buy a bottle of water. And if it's $7 for the glass one, I'll take that one. If I reversed osmosis, I'll add some electrolytes back to it. Like easy. The majoring in the minors is perfect because people want to sell people stuff. So they make all these things. And it's not that those things aren't true and those things can't be seriously impactful. There was a study done in the UK, actually. If someone types in BBC microplastics air study, 100% of homes tested positive for microplastics in the dust. And dust is a good way to sample your air um 98 of all samples had really

30:26high levels of microplastics then they partnered up with a lab and they when they were people were getting biopsies done 100 of people's lungs had microplastics in them and they say the average person breathes about one credit card worth of microplastics each week so i haven't done the comparison but i believe that people are breathing way more microplastics than they are drinking them because it's not a thing. You know, air is so abundant. It's free. Um, you go outside, it's pretty good outside still, even in a polluted place, fresh air is still generally solid. So I think like 80, 20 basics, if you can have clean air, when you sleep clean water water when you're drinking, and don't use lights, artificial lights,

31:08before sunrise or after sunset, let's start there. And then if you want to have clean air everywhere and your bath and your shower and your pool and deck out your whole home with red lights, go for it. But these three simple things where the environment set up, a couple of little red light bulbs, a salt lamp off Amazon for 50 bucks, a countertop water filter for your drinking. Yep. And like zero to one is always the biggest step. Also, by the way, you can make an incredible air filter for 60 to $120 with Home Depot parts. Type in DIY air filter, Corsi Rosenthal box is like the most popular design, but it takes a few hours. The downside is it's kind of ugly and loud and it doesn't have a sensor in it, but I'd way rather people do that

31:50than buy a little plastic box from the store that doesn't work. So these three things. I want to get onto some ways people can do this for free around the home, but I've found this stat. 99% of the world's population lives in places where air pollution exceeds WHO guideline limits. How much do different cities compare in air quality? Like everyone knows that Los Angeles has got smog, but how much of that smog actually sort of finds its way into homes and lungs? What about, I hear that Miami and Florida is really bad. Obviously Austin's pretty, I don't know about the rest of the world. What are the more dangerous places in your experience? So, you know, I used to, I travel now. One of my major considerations

32:31when I travel is air quality. Like Mexico city looks like a beautiful place with a big vibrant culture, but I'm not going to go there more than a day or two. And I'm going to be scrubbing my air when I sleep. Um, Bangkok, Delhi, Beijing, like there's a lot of cities with bad air. Now in America, um, it's very regional, but everywhere has its problem. Like you can kind of run, but you can't hide. So yeah, Florida, you're dealing with a lot of mold. Also hotels in particular, they're penny wise pound foolish. So they turn off the AC when the guest leaves. So now that there's no airflow, you get a bunch of mold accumulating and now they're gutting hotels. So like Florida is mold central. Austin has a lot of mold. Part of that's because of the humidity. Part of that's because

33:16the homes in Texas are built so poorly. So you have these attics and then all of the HVAC. So I grew up in Canada. We had basements. We put all the furnaces in the AC in the basement. Here they're in the attic. So you have, it's like 105 degrees out. You have 70 degree cool air blowing through the ducting, but the ambient air in the HVAC is 105 degrees. Well, condensation guys, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. So everyone's attics has so much mold. like everyone's the homes are built so bad also they use flexible ducting here in texas i'd never heard of flexible ducting you don't have rigid metal solid sheet metal mechanical easy to clean you can clean it if you try to clean the flexible duct the rotor rips it open and now you're you can't even duck

34:01clean it anymore um arizona a lot of people moved to the desert being like, ha ha, I'm getting away from mold. I see some of the most mold toxicity in Arizona. Why? Two reasons. Number one, all that desert sand used to be underwater. So that there's ancient mold in that desert sand. Then you get the haboobs that blow through. The what? It's called a haboob. It's a dust storm. Okay. I think Sidney Sweeney had some of that. But also because the relative humidity is only like 20% outside, it's so dry that you have no exposure to it all. So you get a little bit of a leak and then you have this huge flare up. So some of the most, like the functional medicine doctors that we work with that specialize

34:41in mold, Arizona is actually a hotbed, Not because it's in the outdoor air, but because you have this cool, moist box inside a dry area and you have a home that still leaks. What about the bester? Where have you been that's typically... Because I think about the UK and you're right on the building material thing. The UK, at the very least, our homes are built out of brick as opposed to wood and then cavity insulation with organic material that while it's being built, it gets rained on and then it gets heated and then it gets rained on and it gets heated. And you've basically baked in wet organic material into the skeleton of your house. And that's now next to all of this like fibrous insulation. And now who

35:24knows what's going to happen? where's the best um the best air i've ever breathed was costa rican rainforest very good okay um vancouver island very good also i had my carbon dioxide detector out there and it was like 10 less than the rest of the world in the rainforest that's why when you walk by trees even like here on ladybird lake like as soon as you go under with the trees, you like feel that cool freshness because like they're breathing on you. So it's like a localized air filtration system. Do you ever see those studies done that people who grew like pumpkins, like prize-winning pumpkins and watermelons and different plants and stuff like that, they said that singing to the plants caused them to grow

36:05more effectively. And then people realized if they did a study, it was just that people were breathing on the plants so much that they were getting additional CO2. It was so good. You could have just been like, but instead you're singing them some beautiful operatic. So the next test has to be breath work versus song. That's it. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's the RCT. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not makes a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients

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37:12drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom that's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom uh okay so i want to show you some products that people probably typically have in their homes. They do have them. So we've got incense sticks. How do you feel about those? I like them outside. Okay. Yeah, you can't really combust stuff in your home and expect that not to pollute your home. So I like the vibes. I like the smell. I would not light them in my home. If I was going to, I would be scrubbing my air, opening my windows, but no bueno. Okay. What about like bug killer and stuff like this? No. Okay. No. No. Also, if you are going to use these stuff here, we'll get to the other stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bug killer, no.

37:54Okay. Just read this stuff. So hairspray, TRESemmé hairspray, like extra hold, stuff like that. Because people want to look good. They're going to have to use these products somewhere. You don't want bugs in your house, right? Like, how am I going to get rid of the bugs? How am I going to get my hair to look nice? So these are like, and also we still want to enjoy life. We all have to make our decisions. And again, not get so autistically obsessed with each individual small thing that we don't ever feel like we can move without killing something. I feel like the sickest people I typically know are often the most health aware. They're perpetual healers. So they like heal something. It's kind of like a gift to humanity. Honestly, they like figure out one problem and

38:34then they obsess over the next one. And the neuroticness, that stress keeps them constantly sick. They're always like, what is the thing to optimize? They focus on it and they kind of manifest it for themselves. What was an unexpected benefit consequence with Jasper, because it has sensors on it, when people use their hairspray, it kicks up. Yeah. Every morning mine goes mad at me when I spray my deodorant. It goes fucking crazy. So depending on the products you use, if you're using better products, it will react less. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. use if you're using better products it will react less so that's funny yeah so it becomes like a a lot of like the low tox non-tox influencers they use their jasper has their little like

39:12which product is the most toxic oh that's funny okay what about uh stuff like this but if you're if you're going to use the hairspray and stuff i would recommend if you can do it outside if you can't open a window and then if not go in a bathroom and leave the bathroom fan on. Okay. Um, so this is like a bathroom, bathroom air freshener. I'm glad you pulled this one up. Okay. This is a fragrance. Okay. So everybody's got these Glade plugins for breeze. It's not about the brand fragrances. Yeah. Get this, the fragrance market in America. So by fragrances, I mean the air pollution industry, the indoor air polluting fragrances. Get this, the fragrance market in America. So by fragrances, I mean the air pollution industry, the indoor air polluting fragrances, it's about a $7 billion market in

39:49America. Air filtration is about a three and a half billion dollar industry. So the indoor air polluting industry is double the air filtration industry. We're going to flip it. Nothing worse than getting into an Uber with the Christmas tree of death. This is what I was thinking about about so that's from one of the guys that works here that's from his car that's from his car that lives on the vents that's on the vent in his car no who kyle big guy that was outside we're gonna talk to kyle after this okay do you not a fan of those either they're the worst so also fragrances like um i believe dr sachin patel taught me this and it's honestly changed my life he's like don't eat unless you're salivating.

40:27Okay. What's that got to do with fragrances? I'll tell you. Good question. So when you salivate, that tells your gut and you're like, that tells your digestive enzymes, hey, this is what's incoming. So get ready for these foods. That's why you smell something delicious. You start salivating your guts like, yes, this is what's incoming. And then it's creating custom enzymes to break down the food. It helps with your digestion, your absorption, your nutrients, all of it. The way all of these smells work. If you have the hockey bag or the gym bag and you spray it with Febreze, it didn't clean the stuff. All it did was block your olfactory system, which is your smelling system. So you could no longer smell the stuff. It binds

41:03to the receptors in your nose. So now you're, you're nose blind. You can't smell the thing anymore. Why is this such a problem? Um, because we rely on our sense of smell. So now if you can't smell, your body's not going to create those digestive enzymes. Your gut doesn't know what's coming in. Your smell is massively connected to your taste, to your gut, to new nutrition, to your absorption. So like I carry a bag of a really non-toxic deodorant with me. And if I like hug someone with speed stick, I give them a primally pure. And then they're like, is this because I stink? And I'm like, actually, yes, but it's not that you stink. It's that your deodorant stinks. And then all the people around you, I think synthetic fragrances are going to be known as the new secondhand smoke.

41:44Because back in the day when you would smoke, if you complained at someone like you or the Debbie Downer, like killing my vibe, then the research came out. It's like, oh, secondhand smoke has bad or worse. Surely the amount of whatever human blow off from a smell is so much less, right? Like I spritz some perfume or deodorant at the start of the day and it's three hours later. How much is left on my body? How much is that putting out into the world? Well, in my home, as soon as someone opens the front door, I immediately know if someone's wearing perfume or cologne instantly. You become attuned to that. What do you say to the people that say that's a kind of fragility, that your level of sensitivity now to good and bad

42:25means that you're less robust not more healthy i love this so i i want to be highly sensitive but also resilient so um it doesn't ruin my day like you know sometimes people are like i used to if i turn it would like it's dark someone would turn on the light i'm like ah no huberman says you just ruined my next four days like yeah you screwed my week. Um, ah. And I would get like angry. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There was an issue. And then my reaction was really big. So now I'm like, let's turn the light off. Like I'm resilient. Okay, Andrew, I understand that that's significant. I'm quite resilient. So it doesn't ruin my day. I want to be sensitive. I want to be empathetic. I want to feel my environment, but then also not be, you know, hit by a tidal wave.

43:11Yeah. So you mentioned Febreze and this is an interesting one. Like fabric, extra strength, fights, odors, and freshens. I think a lot of people, I certainly thought this for a long time. I'm like, all right. So if I've got something that's on my couch, that's on this rug, if I spray that, that is like, I don't know, getting in there and deconstructing the particles or something somehow. Is there anything that does that? Or is it just straight up wash your shit if you need to wash your shit? Yeah, wash your shit. Put it outside. The sun is the greatest UV light of all time. That's the best disinfectant ever. Okay. So the dog comes in, the dog smells, the dog's on the rug or the couch or something like that. You would say,

43:48take the covers off and then- Fresh air and sun. And put them outside. Yeah. Way better than a freeze or something else. What the fuck else? Also sunscreen, by the way, think about this. If you're like on the beach or by the pool and you see someone using that spray sunscreen, Number one, it messes up the plants and the water and everything. But if next time you notice it, someone could be 50 feet, a hundred feet in any direction. Watch when they spray, you'll smell it. So if you can smell it a hundred feet in any direction, outdoors, another way to think about that. Let's say you take a red bathtub, take red, sorry, a bathtub, put three drops of red food coloring in just like a few drops within seconds the entire bath is equally distributed with the red it doesn't stay

44:30localized air is basically water it moves the same so they it just kind of contaminates the whole area what do we think about candles because i know that a lot of people like the idea of candles candle light this is a glade limited edition warm apple and spices uh flavor it's fucking edition i guess how do you feel about candles generally can we have safe candles um this is one of those like decision things personally i do use candles i love candles i think they do some you know candle or no. I think no candle is the most optimal move you can make. But I mean, on the light side, candle's like the best light you could have. Yeah, it looks beautiful. It's very relaxing. Good for the nervous system.

45:15If you can find a really, really, very sexy. Yep. Candles and Cuddles is the new Netflix and chills. Very good. So if you can have a beeswax candle, a really good one with a good wick, like a wooden wick or a hemp wick. So I've done tests before. There was something on our Instagram where we, um, we would, we tested some candles and we blow it up beside the Jasper. So a beeswax candle is like a natural ionization. So I, I like beeswax candles. Are there any companies that you recommend? I'm still in the process i've got like 25 different ones okay um when i have one that i can vouch for i'll tell you cool cool but that's how i feel all right let's but extinguish the candle outside okay the black

45:55smoke at the end if you have like a little snuff that's decent too but i usually go outside and blow my candle out outside okay or i mean i pretty, I'm quite jasperized. So if it's like your water is coming in, let's say you've got city water or well water. Basically you're pumping contaminated water into your house any way you cut it. So you have to filter it. Air is the same. Air is a little bit sneakier. With water, we can filter it in a jug. We can filter it. Like there's one water pipe coming into our home. So we filter it at the point, the shower, the whole home. We filter it. Like there's one water pipe coming into our home. So we filter it at the point where the shower, the whole home, we got it. Air is coming in through all these different areas.

46:30It's a lot sneakier, which is why the way we have to air filter is a little bit different than the way we have to think about water filtration. Who is particularly susceptible to air issues? I'm thinking older people, kids, immunocompromised. Is there an avatar of a person who's particularly vulnerable to air quality? Well, if the average adult is breathing 15 to 20,000 times a day, toddlers are like 40 to 60,000 and infants can be like 60 to 100,000 times. Think about the modern birth of a baby. I would say the baby, baby's an elderly. So they get birthed in this like hospital with these bright lights and rushed around and beep, beep, beep, beep. And then they get rushed home and they're in their nice nursery, Instagram ready, fresh paint on the walls, lots of VOCs, bunch of toys, off gassing.

47:19This is really important. There's these diaper pails that people put into their nurseries so they change baby's diaper you pop it in this little airtight container if you ever go into a baby's nursery it smells like shit significantly newsflash if it smells like shit it is shit and if it's shit it's bacteria a lot of bacteria so mom is trying to do everything for her healthy little baby meanwhile the baby is being intoxicated by shit particles, sharticles all night long. So he could literally just put that outside. When my daughter Aria was newly born, I remember it was our first child. We were living in British Columbia at the time. Rachel, my wife, she was, we had this diaper pail. I'm not going to say the brand.

48:01They'd probably hate it, but they're all the same. And I'm like, yo, every time I'd go in there, I'm like, ugh. I'm like, Rach, I really think we've got to put this thing outside. It's like the shitty diaper should go directly outside. And, you know, I was first kid, like, you know how many things I'm dealing with? And it was, you know, so it's convenient. Optimizing the diaper pail is low down on the list of things to do. I need to try and keep this thing alive. So I'm like, cool, let's run an experiment tonight. I noticed if I try to make change, it's difficult. If I call it an experiment, she's really willing. So I said, tonight, let's run an experiment. Let's put the diaper pail into our bedroom.

48:32I'm going to sleep on the couch in the living room. She's like, ew, no, we're not. I'm like, exactly. So once she realized we would never in a million years put the diaper pail in our bedroom, but our baby who's breathing 100,000 times a night with a developing immune system is breathing all this poop. So, hey, mom and dad, please take the diapers outside. Yeah. And it's a free intervention. Free. Okay. Talk to me about what ways people can improve the air quality in their home cost-free. Cost-free. So let's start with the poopy diapers outside, shoes off, use your range hood, range hood beating the exhaust fan above your stove. A huge one is used. The bathroom fan is not for poop smell. The bathroom fan is for humidity.

49:14So, um, I would recommend buying a, um, a switch like, you know, dimmer switches are awesome. One of the greatest inventions ever. So also you can get a um a bathroom fan that has a timer on it like 30 30 minutes 60 minutes two hours hit the two hour button at least an hour so think about it you take a shower think about how much water a towel can absorb so you have like a couple gallons of water either sitting in the in the in the drain or on the towel and then it's just drying into your home often bathroom doors closed excess moisture over time now we have a mold problem so your home has those exhaust fans to get that excess humidity and moisture out of your home so use your bathroom fans use your range hood when um get your your dryer the dryer vent clean

50:03out the lint drawer a lot of people have um home fires from their dryers too um you know using better products like just being aware of the cooking products of the cleaning products chemicals you use but the ventilation is a huge part of it if you live in a if the temperature is reasonable open your windows i know in germany and a lot of places in europe like airing out the home forget forget the word for it, starts with an L. They like letting the home air out is conventional. Like when I think about, hey, I need to get more air into the house. Yeah. AC systems pulling air in from the outside. Surely that's the same as opening a window. And it's cool. Like I've heard of HEPA, HEPA filters,

50:57dehumidify, all this stuff. Like, is this not fixed with people's normal air flows if they live in a house that's got AC? One day, not yet. So I'm just going to call it, it's called your HVAC system, heating, ventilation, air condition. That's the, think about your furnace and your AC. That's the lungs of your home is the way I think about it. When most homes are built, most people live in a builder grade subdivision home or like an apartment. When these homes are built, these are built by bankers on spreadsheets. They're not sitting around and saying, how do we build the healthiest home? They're saying, how fast, how cheap, how many square feet? Let's make them pretty. Let's sell them quick. So what happens is your furnace and your air conditioner are strictly designed to heat and cool your home, and they're designed to do it energy efficiently. So what happens is the furnaces and the AC and the air handlers are not sized

51:45for filtration at all. Also, because we've so optimized for energy efficiency, typically people leave their HVAC system on auto mode. So you only want your HVAC running when it needs to run. Heat up, that temperature turns off, cool down. And if it's on all the time, it's pretty loud. It's pretty annoying. So Jasperper originally i spent the first two years actually trying to design a hvac infiltration system i thought that would be the perfect solution pop it in the furnace out of sight out of mind whole home would be good it was loud and it was quite ineffective because what happens is it chokes out the airflow so the system is only designed to move the air through it and heating cool. So a

52:25lot of people during COVID, they're like, get the Merv 16s. They got these super intense filters, shove them in their HVAC system, and then their motors blue because you're choking out the system. So when you think about air filtration, you want efficiency and efficacy, which means efficiency is like, how many particles are we stopping? Efficacy is how much air is flowing through it. So unfortunately, long-term, that's our vision with Jasper is to create HVAC products that'll be the lungs of your home. That's not just heating and cooling, but it's thinking about pollen. It's thinking about mold. It's thinking about wildfire smoke, and it's actually designed to breathe. Probably not for a few years, but unfortunately those systems are just, humans are so like,

53:02temperature is like the first thing for us yeah we're so aware of thermal comfort yeah you walk into a room that's 30 degrees or like even 25 degrees and you're like oh this feels a little bit hot in here i'm not really too comfortable you walk into one that's got 2 000 parts per million of co2 and some vocs in it and you're like no i don't know i think i'm all right and that will build up over time. So that makes total sense. What's really exciting, man. The human body is the best sensor of all. Um, after I had tested hundreds of homes from, from mold, I got a sense. So I could walk into a home and sense the mold right away. Um, the same way, like I like this party trick. You take five people, go outside, do it in the morning, whenever no one's checked the weather yet.

53:43And you get everybody to write on a napkin what temperature they think it is outside. Yo, often everyone is, you can have five or six people. They're typically within one or two degrees of each other. Pretty accurate. Pretty accurate. Our temperature sensors in our skin are dialed in because we look at the temperature every day. And we've limited our understanding of weather and environment to hot, cold, cloudy, sunny, rain or no rain. But like, that's just a part of it. I want to create a weather app and we're probably going to do it soon where it's like, it's cloudy and it's cool, but the clean is there in four months. Awesome day to go outside. Like the weatherman is so negative. Um, so when you start paying

54:18attention to the humidity, if you look at your relative humidity every day, your body instantly knows, and it will affect you just as in a good way, you'll become aware. So think about it like dry sauna or go to the desert and go to the rainforest. You know what dry feels like in your hair, in your throat, it's too humid. It's too dry. You kind of have a sense of that because I've lived with a carbon dioxide detector so much. My, I can little party trick for me. Sometimes like friends would be like, he knows what the CO2 is, I guess. And then they pull it out. I'm usually within about 30 to 50 ppm of what the CO2 is. So your body is attuned to this. Fucking Aaron, I just need you. I'm just going to carry you around all the time.

54:53Well, once you've Aaron edited for a while, you might be calibrated. I'm trying to. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Whoop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. And now the brand new Whoop 5.0, 7% smaller. It's got two weeks of battery life, shows you how fast you're actually aging. It comes with hormonal insights for women managing their cycle or pregnancy or men hiding from it.

55:34Once you see the patterns, you start making better decisions. It's that simple. Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for your Whoop 5.0 strap. Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. So let's say that someone is buying a house or moving into a new home, considering moving into a new home, if you were viewing a house or an apartment, what would you check before signing? What

56:08problems would make you walk away? What would consider you fixing it straight away? A lot of people are going to be thinking, going into a new apartment, going into a new house, oh my God, this feels like I need to be something that I really care about before I get in there. How can they effectively and efficiently work out whether or not this house is going to be good for them from an air quality perspective? So in 2014, I got certified as a home inspector because I was interested. And I was, by the way, it was like an online course I did in three or four days. By the way, getting certified in flood, fire and mold, it's a two-day course. So you think the mold professional is coming to your house? They didn't go to mold university for a year. They did a two-day course for like $500

56:50and a little room with an easy test. That was to get certified in all this remediation stuff. So the certifications mean absolutely nothing. Typically, if you look at a home inspection though, there's exclusions in there. it says we're not looking for anything environmental no mold and typically no roof stuff so you're paying 400 to a thousand dollars maybe two thousand to get a thorough home inspection and they're only looking for something that's going to hit your wallet in the next couple years how old's the roof is there a crack here does the gfci plug work or not work but like your your home could be infested with mold and they don't even mention that part they They're not even trained to look for that.

57:27So red flag number one, if you go into move into a home, if there's any plugins and scents and fragrances, you have to demand a re-inspection. Get all those fragrances out of the home. Let the home breathe for a day or two. Close it back up. The number one trick that people selling homes do that are infested with mold, they put plugins in. So you come in, you think it smells good, you think it smells clean, you think it smells fresh. No, they're just blocking your ability to smell the mold. Then you buy the home, you realize you have a $200,000 remediation product, you all get sick. So I'm looking at it a lot from the mold and the environmental standpoint. I would recommend air quality and mold testing.

58:04It's like the biggest investment of your life. It's the thing that your family lives inside. And how expensive is it going to be to try and fix your health if you go in somewhere that ends up hurting you? The most. Two years. I mean, for me, incredibly expensive, incredibly effortful. Are old homes worse when it comes to air quality, new, old? They can be. When I was doing a lot of air quality testing, about a third of the work we were doing was, you know, have you ever, like sick building syndrome was the idea of the home making people sick. It was more thought of in commercial buildings where absentee rates would be high and performance would be down. And they realized Harvard did a study by Dr. Joseph Allen that showed that the cost of optimizing your employees' health and environments massively outweighs having absent

58:51sick team. I think a home is the exact same. Yeah. Yeah. It's the most efficient way that you could do that. Okay. What are some things or what are the best assessments for home air quality? Let's say that maybe someone really cares about this or they're working on their health at the moment and they think, okay, I've got some money to be able to spend on this. What's the gold standard? I've heard about ERMI tests. We've had a bunch of those done. What's good? What's not good? What should people go for? I wish I had a good, simple answer here. It's a little bit nuanced because on one hand, mold is the real deal. Like it can make you really sick. It can really impact you. But the mold industry,

59:29there's two words that they use. And this was actually 10 years ago. They called it the mold rush. And that was nothing compared to now. And mold is gold. Think about it. If you're like a contractor and you're demolished, if you're a demolition contractor gutting a bathroom before a mediation, before like you get a new fancy bathroom, it's about a thousand dollars. If there's black mold on that bathroom, it's $10,000. Because it's more comprehensive. It's more scary. The only difference is about four hours in preparation time. You put in a scrubber, you use some antimicrobial. The labor is like three more hours of labor and like $50 more in materials. But one feels like it's been a nuclear spill and the other feels like

1:00:04somebody's choosing to put new tiles in. Yes. So a lot of contractors got into the mold game. Then as mold awareness goes, what happens? The functional medicine doctors are inundated with people coming in for mold stuff. So then a lot of companies pop up doing urine testing and blood testing. And a lot of them- The Mold Co. Ariana from the Mold Co. Go to the Mold Co. That's the company in America that you need to use. She's the best I've seen by far. Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone is thinking, I want to do the testing for my body, that is the Mold Co. They do testing and the therapeutics, and they'll help you go through your detox protocol. She's following the shoemaker protocol. She's got the scientists that were the initial like Padawans of the main guy that came up with the main most evidence-based mold detox protocol on the planet.

1:00:50She's awesome. So friend of the show. Yeah. I like her too. So some industries, for whatever reason, they get this conflict of interest label on them where it's like the home inspector shouldn't be the contractor or the mold inspector shouldn't be the remediation guy perverse incentives but the you go to the accountant you go to the lawyer do you have a problem yes you go to the mechanic so with but the eye doctor it doesn't sell you the glasses for whatever reason but it ultimately comes down to trust i actually the best mold inspectors are the remediation guys because they actually remove the stuff like you go to a surgeon to check you out there's not this whole other industry that's like let's see if you

1:01:29need surgery i don't do surgeries but i'll just check is there anything that you can say around how to work out if a home inspector is of quality or not because i understand these are a bunch of warnings mold rush gold rush thing. This is why the industry might be a little bit perverse in its incentives. But is there anything that we can say about how to assess the people that are doing the assessment? And the good thing here, this is not a big ag, big pharma, evil cabal situation. This is a road to hell paved with good intention situation. I don't think there's really bad actors in this space. The functional medicine doc's just trying to get you a good test. And then they'll like get your home tested.

1:02:07Then you have someone come and wave their wand who did their two-day mold course, thinking they're doing their job great. It rained yesterday. You got the mold. Let's start gutting everything. So it can be alarmist. And then some of the tests were designed so ermi for example it's a good test but it's designed to be kind of alarmist and it's checking your dust so was there any mold present in the last six months like yeah if you test your blood for heavy metals or mold bpas you got some of it so like ah i got the mold and sometimes you feel relief you're like i finally found the thing but this is not an absence presence black or or white binary thing. It's like, that's where mold co is actually

1:02:48great. It's like what species, how much let's test again. It's pretty cost-effective too. So I think it's, the industry is working its stuff out. I think if you are buying a home, I think actually calling a couple remediation contractors to take a look could be good. Hopefully, you know, it's all like, how do you know which contractor is good? You don't. Most of them aren't. Probably, at least for me, what I did was I put us and I'm lucky because I got people to follow me or whatever. I asked some friends. I put a story up on Instagram, but where I found them was I asked a bunch of friends and I was like, hey, does anyone know good mold remediation? Ask, ask, ask. And Toolman, there was this company in Austin, came up a bunch of times, had a conversation

1:03:29with them. He was very highly booked and managed to find time. And I was like, hooray, that was good. All right. Talking about Jasper, you, I guess, took what you found when doing the salvaging of homes and then tried to make that more commercially available. Again, for people who are like, right, I think this is a big deal. I really want to work on my health. What, from a air scrubber perspective, how does Jasper work? Why is that a big deal? How much can that help? Like, and how do people need, where should they put it? Yeah, so we call Jasper an air scrubber, not an air purifier. The reason that is, it's kind of like saying, uh, a Yukon Denali versus a Honda Civic. They're both cars. They're both vehicles.

1:04:12They have four wheels. They have windows and doors and airbags, but like one's designed to commute a couple around the city and put a bag in it. The other one will take, uh, take your, take your kids, take your stuff, be safer, look good while doing it. Golf carts and pickup trucks, one can pull your boat, one doesn't. So the scrubber is like the industrial grade air purifier. So the SUV only came onto the market in roughly the 1990s when they're like, how do we take a military grade vehicle and make it for the modern family? Before that, there was no SUVs. Now over 50% of cars that are purchased in america are suvs it's practical so a scrubber a jasper is typically it's about five small little cheap air purifiers

1:04:52it's made from so what it does is air is flowing through it passes through a filter that's capturing all the stuff letting the the air like like the goal is not to have like special optimized air. It's supposed to have air as nature intended it. So we're not adding anything to the air. We're just filtering the stuff out. What makes it unique is the fact that it's because we made it from steel, you know, it's supposed to last, it's designed to last 10, 25 years, which is why we're able to give it a lifetime warranty. I hate buying products that break. Um, so if in its simplest sense, it moves more air and because it's much larger, the filter on it is about four and a half pounds. Most air purifiers filters are like a third of a pound, half a pound.

1:05:37They're tiny little filters. Jasper's is like a tractor filter. So because it's bigger, that means two things. Number one, it can move more air silently. There's two in this room. You can't hear them at all. So it allows them to be silent. So Jasper moves more air on the lowest fan speed than most air purifiers move on the highest fan speed. There's a metric called CFM, cubic feet per minute. And we bottom out at about 100 CFM on the silent setting. A lot of air filters max are about 80 CFM. The sneakiest thing out there is you walk down the shelves, you see a little filter on the shelf and you're like, covers a large room, 1500 square feet. You're like, great. I don't think it's working. Newsflash.

1:06:16If you don't think it's working, it's not working. It should be one of those undeniable things. Like if you put it in your bedroom on fan speed three, turn off the light, it's a no brainer. You will feel the difference immediately. Or you put it in your living room. The way we designed, and like, thank God for modern technology. The sensors there 10 years ago, 15 years ago, would have been thousands of dollars. But now sensor technology got smaller and cheaper. So it can be silent and smart. But as soon as you start cooking or a candle or incense or wildfire smoke or pollution, the number on the screen goes up. It goes to orange and red. When you hear it, it's because you want to hear it and it comes back down.

1:06:52Basically like Jasper is a child of a mold man who has a wife who cares about interior design and I wanted something that was effective and beautiful. Would you have designed something that was significantly uglier if you hadn't had your wife's input, do you think? I would have just used the scrubber. Right, yeah. It wasn't, yeah. yeah and people i would keep the scrubber in the basement and people would come home and be like whoa it feels different in here but like she's like but it's loud and but it's ugly we need to get this thing out of here so it's the combination of i like aesthetics i also think speaking of design trends or or health trends i think design is actually a health trend. I think when things look good, you feel good.

1:07:27Aesthetic matters. And so making something that is beautiful, that's inconspicuous, that's smart, that's quiet, no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, no EMF. I didn't do any focus groups. It was for the mold, man. I wasn't, you know, I was doing the disaster work. So I'd go to the California fires, the BC, the flood. And then in between the disasters, I was traveling a lot in my twenties. I did not have the energy to start another company. We were, we just had 50 and I didn't even think I was going to go through with the company. And I originally created them just for wildfire smoke. So I figured, Hey, it'll be summer. There'll be smoke. We can go there, help. And then COVID happened. So what ended up happening is they mandated in Ontario that every

1:08:06dentist needed an air filter in every room to open their doors for business again. So it was a requirement in Ontario, but based on the airflow would determine the time between patients. So if you had a little air purifier, you were an hour between patients. If you had a Jasper, you were eight minutes. So it became, the dentist would pay it off in one day. So then our first thousand customers, our first thousand, we were called Jasper Medical when we launched because we launched to the dental industry during COVID. Didn't see that happening. I had 50 sitting in my garage. I'm like, I just wanted them for like my grandparents and my family. I'm like, I saw the impact for me. I don't know if I could do business right now.

1:08:44COVID is like, nope, you're getting back in the game, son. So about a thousand dentists in Toronto had them. By the way, we had no e-commerce for the first three years. The only way you could buy a Jasper was to, there was a free consult, because I was a blue collar guy. So request a quote, free consultation. You'd call me and I would talk to you for half an hour about your mold situation, about your dental situation. Because of restoration, I knew how to do airflow calculations. The dentists were confused. So I'd be able to look, okay, give me the length times width times height. And I'll tell you how many minutes between patients. The turbo mode on the Jasper was invented for dentists during COVID

1:09:16so that it'd have one button to deep scrub the air. And then we just left it there for consumers. Next guy can come in. I've been cycled through a variety of machines. I've got Jaspers all over the house. Thank you for helping me to keep my house clean. But I'd gone through the bedroom machine. That was kind of interesting, but really, really loud and pretty ugly. I'd been through, what's the Aquatru? Air doctor. I'd been through those. That was like, you know, okay, this seems a little interesting, but it feels like more of a one-stop shop to go to Jasper. We did an air test at your home on video of those other filters. I wasn't there. You weren't there, but it's on video. The air coming, because we have hundreds of these on video,

1:10:00we tested the air coming out of the other machine. It was the exact same as the ambient air. So it wasn't cleaning anything. Brilliant. Okay. Well, I had a lot of very expensive air hair dryers floating around. Where should people, let's say that someone's like, all right, I, I think this is important. It feels to me like I've got maybe some sinus stuff, maybe some allergy stuff, maybe some mold stuff. And I want to, I'm going to believe that air quality is important. Where do you prioritize putting air purifiers first or air scrubbers first? Like what's the first place that you put a Jasper? Well, our logo is kind of the A is a tree that kind of looks like a mountain because the long-term vision for these products should not exist. If we build homes good

1:10:37and we don't pollute so much, we won't need these things anymore. The real air filtration is the trees. I like it because I want clean air in my bedroom for sure. To me, clean air, clean water, clean food, good lighting. I'm good. I don't do the other stuff. I take a sauna occasionally. To me, it's a no brainer. If anyone goes and hears the first 20 or so podcasts I did, I didn't mention Jasper one time. I'm like, oh, would that be salesy? Then I'm like, wait, once the be salesy? Then I'm like, wait, once the dentist started to show off the Jaspers, then mom's like, do they sell these for the home? And they're like, I don't know. Call them. She puts it in the home. She's like, hey, no more asthma attacks, no more allergies. I'm like, oh, this is feeling like a mission now.

1:11:18This is feeling really good. So I wanted one per bedroom, not five. So you asked me a couple questions like, where would I rank it? Like I said, if budget is entirely an issue and you don't, and you just want something to sleep, Google Corsi Rosenthal box, make the DIY one. That's going to be awesome. I made Jasper for myself. So the filter is a three-in-one filter. It automatically comes every six months. You just change the filter in 30 seconds. You can, you know, i like things that are easy so the i remember about eight years ago i bought a different brand about 10 years ago i bought a couple air filters and then little light comes on i go back to the store they don't sell the filter anymore what size so i'm like the stress i don't need another appliance to manage and maintain yeah

1:12:00so i like so we designed the product and by the way we only make one thing. It's called the Jasper. No small one, no big one, no water. We are radically obsessed with one thing. And has we, you know, we're on like our fifth filter. So every six months, a new filter comes like, well, that looks different. Cause when you only do one thing, you could just keep making it better and better and better and better and better. So I think given the current state of the off gassing in the homes and the mold, it's like a really good 80, 20 or a 95, five. Um, if you care about aesthetics and service, and then the way we designed the thing is what the thing I'm honestly more proud about than how Jasper works. Like I'm so proud

1:12:37of the team, man. Um, if someone's Jasper breaks, they get a brand new one shipped to them. They take the new one out of the box. They put the old one in the box. We give them a prepaid shipping label. We cover the cost, which is like almost $100 to take it back. So I'm like, if you trust us and you make your one-time investment in the machine, and then the filters, it's twice a year. You know, by the way, I hate subscriptions, but sometimes they make sense. The guy who comes to my house to change my water filters twice a year, the toothbrush head that comes every three months. The car maintenance, there's a few that make sense. This is one of them. So to me, air for sleep. So you'd prioritize bedroom?

1:13:16If you had one, you would put it in the bedroom? Yes. Right. Does it have to be near you? Nope. It can be anywhere in the bedroom. Air don't care. You can put it in the corner. It's round. The reason that we made it a cylinder is because because it's 360 degrees if you have a boxy machine that's taking in the air on one or two sides they if you read the manual it's like you have to keep it like one or two feet from the wall which puts it in the middle of the room so it slots up against the corner corner wall okay so if bedroom's number one where's number two it's where you spend your time in other news if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start.

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1:14:24about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. So typically, bedroom is where people start their journey. If someone's like, you know, money's not a big issue, I'm in. They put one per bedroom and they put one in their living room. The bedroom ones, they keep on dark mode. They run it on a high fan speed setting. The one in the living room, they keep it on smart mode and that's it. But if you're starting with one bedroom, anywhere in the room.

1:14:59What about kitchen? Because you said about the, I guess most people know. Nowadays, the kitchen living room is kind of merged. You don't have to put it beside the stove. Just kind of put it anywhere in that space. Some people put one in the home office. So, um, you know, we're going to do that sleep study next year. The other two studies that are so important, I think about Jasper like a lab. It's like, let's just put our money where our mouth is and prove stuff. So the other two studies that are so important to me, hopefully, uh, we can, we can this done, is number one, we want to work with some big companies and put Jaspers into 50% of the employees' bedrooms, even if it's like a work-from-home environment, because we want to measure the performance and the absentee rates.

1:15:37For $2 a day, if we could create a program, man, I moved to America four years ago. I still don't understand all this blue cloth and this health insurance stuff. Like we're paying thousands. The team's paying thousands. Don't really know how it works. They're still getting medical bills. But like, why not just like put that money into something that actually will change their life that people can see and that they can feel. So a lot of the businesses we do work with, they put them in, they gift one to all the team at home and like the team feels that it's good for morale. Well, presumably putting one in the fucking office would be a good idea. If you've got some shared working space, co-working space.

1:16:09A hundred percent. Jocko's team, Echelon, all 54 employees have one in their bedrooms at home. Um, so I think it's like a, it's a no brainer. Cool. Where should people go if they want to find out more? If you want to find out more. So, um, today is someday. So what we're going to do is from today for the next two weeks, we're going to put a site-wide discount. To me, it's all about air awareness, but I know I've only made a lot of my big health purchases, whether it's like an eight sleep or whatever. I wait for Black Friday. Fund this discount. Discounts get me going, even though like the $50 and the $300, but like, I want to get a deal. So I've learned that that really matters for myself. So what we're going to do is today,

1:16:52the day the podcast drops for the next two weeks, we'll have a $300 site-wide discount on jasper.co. So no discount codes, no nothing like that. J-A-S-P-R.co. By the way, this is going to be our Black Friday discount. It's kind of the only time we do a sale, except for when there's wildfire smoke, we do them locally. But Black Friday is $300 off. A couple of years ago, we were sold out for three months. So typically we get sold out by months. So the intention here for the listeners, if anyone resonates with this, then it'll be $300 off.'ll be 899 instead of 11.99 the other thing like i said we put our money where our mouth is so if you'll know in like three days if it's life-changing or not in the first 30 days please keep the box if you don't we'll send you a new

1:17:38one but please keep the box um if it's not absolutely you're not feeling the benefits seeing the differences, cook, put it in your living room for a day on smart mode and cook and put it in your bedroom on fan speed three, dark mode, track your sleep, feel the difference, and then try a night without it. Like the results speak for themselves. But if it's not a no brainer, $1 would be too much money. If it radically changes your sleep and your life, then it's cheap. So if it's not a no brainer for you, we will not only give you a hundred percent refund, but we will also bear the cost of return shipping because it sucks when you buy a product and then you got to pay the money to ship it. And it's annoying. So our thought is

1:18:13like, how do we just de-risk it? Um, last thing I really wanted to say that I kind of forgot, man, is that for next year, our study is the school, man, you haven't walked. I think, oh, did I take you? You did took me around the school. So it's done. The school opened two weeks ago. Okay. We got jaspers in every class. So in Finland, they did a study a couple of years ago. They put air filters in 50% of the classrooms. Absentee rates dropped by about 30% in teachers and students. So we're using the school. It's called Kindling Academy here in Austin. Has a living lab to show schools. If we put clean air, clean water, natural lighting, non-toxic products, and the kids are outside next year, we're trying to get

1:18:48some organic food. How much will these kids thrive? And public school systems in America are funded based on attendance. So there's these truancy laws. You want to go on a trip for two weeks? You kind of can't, you get in trouble. So if we can prove this out, we're also gifting Jaspers to all the local schools. So we have a bigger data set. So if we can prove this out, we're also gifting JASPRs to all the local schools. So we have a bigger data set. So if we can prove out that we can reduce absentee rates by 50% with good air, good water, good lighting, I think the air is the main thing. It will become financially aligned for public schools to create healthy environments for the kids. So keep an eye on

1:19:19that. But yo, jaspr.co, J-A-S-P-R dot C-O, no code required. That's where you could find us. Do you ship internationally? Oh, thanks for asking. So right now, as of today, we're only in the U.S. and Canada. But before, and hopefully by, not hopefully, it's happening, by the last week of October or the first week of November, we will also be in the U.K. and Australia. Yeah, because of you. Well, look, dude, you know, between you and Ariana and Matt Cook over in San Jose and Gabrielle Lyon and her guys, this is kind of the tailwind of the journey that I've been on over the last two and a half years. I don't want anybody to have to go through the challenge that I did. But I also know that in smaller doses,

1:20:06people are being insulted by their environment, by toxins, by... And to the people that aren't ill or don't know somebody that's been ill, a lot of it can almost sound like talking about ghosts. Yeah. It's like, oh, this is like woo. It's sort of like this weird, invisible, spiritual polygeisty thing. Maybe it's an oversensitivity. Maybe it's optimizing, majoring in the minors. Like, like bro i know the difference that it had to my health and there are certain people out there whose physiologies are just more sensitive to what's going on around them and if that's you or if that's someone that's in your life you really really need to look at this stuff carefully and you can you can get a good ro uh desktop tabletop like water purifier

1:20:44for like 200 bucks 250 bucks and that's it and yeah you got to get the filters or whatever but like that's it that's done right and the same thing goes for air quality like you make people can't afford to move house if they've got some issue that they're concerned about to do a full remediation okay well at least we can maybe get the air that you're breathing immediately to feel a little bit better so for me and if the mold's impacting you or the allergens it's not because you're eating it or drinking it like the air that you're breathing immediately to feel a little bit better. So for me- And if the mold's impacting you or the allergens, it's not because you're eating it or drinking it. Like the environmental stuff, you're breathing it. So if you can filter

1:21:12the stuff out, you will feel way better. It's a big deal for me, man. And I appreciate- Sleep better, breathe better, feel better. I appreciate all of the effort that you've gone through to try and create something that helps people to be more healthy. We're just getting started. It's a big deal for deal for me dude i want to see you take on the fucking ac industry i know that that's on the the the in the future it's somewhere on the horizon for you as well i think that that would be a huge solution but i appreciate you i fucking love jasper i use them all and uh hopefully we've educated people i don't want people to be scared right like look air quality yes it's a big deal that you should think about.

1:21:45There's free ways to do it. There's ways that you can mitigate the problems. And then if you want to, it's the laziest way to be healthy. Unreal. All right. man. Mike Falzstein. Really appreciate it. Appreciate you too. my beauties. Dude. Yes. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers.

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