You Probably Have POOP Particles On Your Shoes, Nasty Mold In Your House & A Crappy Air Purifier System — Here's What To Do About It: HEPA Filtration With Mike Feldstein of Jaspr.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, the top 2 places that someone should be filtering their air is their bedroom to dial in their sleep, create their sleep sanctuary, and then their kitchen living room space. I went to, like, Best Buy and Home Depot, and I bought a ton of consumer air purifiers, all that stuff between $100 and $500. And within a few hours, the air quality was really contaminated again. What's really different about Jasper is, number 1, the size. As you can see, it's quite a bit larger than most small air purifiers. And Jasper on fan speed 1, which is basically silent, moves more air than most air purifiers on full speed. So that's a really big deal. A lot of people talk about max speed, but what actually matters even more is how much air are you moving on the lowest speed? Because that's the state that it's going to be in 99% of the time. If you live indoors, filtering your air is kind of a non-negotiable.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization. Nutrition, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Well, my guest on today's show just made my recent trip to Austin, Texas a real dream, specifically I'll paint you a picture here. A lot of times when I travel, I literally call up the hotel prior and I ask them two things. I'm a total diva. Get this. I ask them if they have a mini fridge, and that's usually a yes. 80% of them have a mini fridge because I travel with things that I like to refrigerate. I like healthy foods that I can stock up on, et cetera. But then, I also ask them if they might have an air filtration unit that they could place in my room. And occasionally, they do have a pretty crappy air filtration unit that they'll put in my room. But when I showed up in Austin recently to speak at the Hack Your Health event, my friend Mike, my guest on today's show, Mike Feldstein, he equipped my room with the Cadillac of HEPA air filtration units. It's this thing called a Jasper. We'll talk about air filtration and how to select air filtration units on today's show. It's the same air filter that I'm now using as a standalone air filter in my office, which case in point, just yesterday my wife was painting the basement and there's a little screen on this air filter. I'll let Mike explain what it does, but the numbers on it started to go up because it was literally detecting these particulates in the air and it kind of adjusted its level and started to filter the air in my office. So, it smelled really good. But, in Austin, I don't even remember if I told you this yet, Mike, because this was just a few days ago that I left, I slept incredibly even though it was hot out. The room wouldn't go any lower than 66 degrees and usually I don't sleep so well unless it's around 64. Again, admittedly a sleep diva. That air filter, I think, really made an impact on how I slept. And, with the electrical storms and some of the pollution that was down there in Austin, I think it made a big difference. So anyways, I want to talk all things air filtration today with you, Mike, if you're game.

Yes. So, while you were sleeping better those few days, fun fact that you don't know, I jacked that air purifier out of my baby Adele's bedroom and Adele didn't sleep so good those few days.

You didn't. Oh, man.

She's got it back. She's got it back.

I wouldn't have done that if I knew. I wouldn't have accepted that kind of.

Well, it was a good case study for us. On how air quality impacts my baby's sleep and apparently quite a bit.

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

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

You thought of everything. Almost. So, what makes you an air quality expert, dude? Because I don't remember you being as into air quality when I first met you and it seems like you've really kind of taken the whole air purifier world by storm at least based on the size of your expo and the popularity of it at that Hack Your Health event we were at.

Yeah. So, I think I met you in the first time at MMT 2017.

Yeah. And, by the way, to clarify for folks, MMT, that's Mastermind Talks. It's a mastermind group run by another former podcast guest of mine, Jason Gaynor, great book, Mastermind Dinners. Anyways, Mike and I met in that group.

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

Now, now, just, just real quick, how did you even get into that? Like, did you graduate high school and go straight into disaster remediation, or is this like a post-collegiate type of gig, or how did that actually start for you?

Yeah, great question. So I went to business school for a year and then dropped out. I already met my wife in college. And I wasn't learning very much there. I actually got into online marketing and then I was working with a bunch of clients in different industries, e-commerce and then home services. And then one of those spaces was a bunch of mold removal companies. And I found out like, whoa, you know, I was just like 21, 22 at the time. There was a saying back in there in the game that mold is gold. And I was like, whoa, interesting. And so, I really got into restoration initially just from a business lens and I didn't think it would be so captivating and exciting, but it's basically simple demolition and construction with a little bit better preparation and air filtration. That's what mold removal is. You contain a room, you filter the air inside and out, you safely remove the space, you clean the surfaces in the room, you remove the mold, clean the air in the house, and we've remediated the mold. So, that's how I got into it. It was first was from a marketing perspective and then I actually closed my marketing business, took a few certification courses on mold removal. By the way, most of those courses are 2-day to 3-day courses at most.

I was going to say that doesn't seem that adequate considering how big of a problem mold is.

No, it's not adequate at all. It's completely unregulated. It's like such a scary, dangerous, serious, important thing, but it's not— it's regulated in a few states like Texas and Florida for sure. But like being— the education you get in those courses is nothing. All the education is in the field doing the thing. And the cool thing is when you do a mold removal job or a flood or fire, you typically test the air before, during, and after. And the air tests kind of don't lie. Like if you screwed up and did a bad job, the test is going to fail. And usually if you're a reputable company, you guarantee success. So if there's still mold in the air, you're going to keep dealing with it until the problem is solved. So oddly, it went from marketing to mold and then from being in the mold business that led mold and flood. It's all kind of connected. So I— in 2013, there was the biggest flood in Canadian history in Calgary, Alberta. And that was my first big flood event. And I actually partnered up with a friend who owned a restoration company for my first couple of years. I wasn't going to just jump into it by myself. So I started working with a company that had a lot of experience. I would kind of do the marketing, build the websites, get the, get, get the, get the customers in the door, and then we would handle the projects together. And then after very short order, I, I got pretty good at it and we kind of went our separate ways and I did my own thing. And yeah, one thing led to the next, but it was just marketing. And that kind of led me into restoration. It was in my early 20s where I was still kind of finding my way. And then I've been in kind of air quality ever since. 11 years later.

Did you ever get mold sickness from all these jobs you're doing?

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

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

Yeah, not just willing to do it. Yeah, sure, I could use avocado oil instead of canola if you'd like. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. I want the guy who's living the life that he's preaching. Right. Which is, I think, why you're having so much success, because I can definitely say behind the scenes, you, you live the way you speak.

Yeah, I try. So the, the heavy metal thing, was that something that you wound up having to detox and remediate in your own body?

Well, yeah, my hair went— this was '26 in the wildfire. My hair got like way gray in like several months. It actually started ungraying as I detoxed. Psoriasis came out in my elbows and knees, massive chronic fatigue for quite a while. And it was, it was the heavy metals, but also so we had hexavalent chromium, then we had PAH, which is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So these are pretty normal in wildfire zones. But when you're dealing with a regional wildfire, it's not like it's a kitchen wildfire. The whole city is a smoke bomb. So the outdoor air is just as toxic as the indoor air. So it gets into your water supply, it gets into the soil supply. Like after a big wildfire, the whole town is quite contaminated for typically about 3 months, which was interesting because we were in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which is 5 hours north of Edmonton, super way up there near oil sands. So they're already kind of environmentally conscious at the, the the community center gym, which is just like the $40 a month YMCA type of thing. They had like a 100-person sauna. And every day when I would go there, I would meet— it was the most beautiful sauna. It was like kind of an average looking gym with the biggest sauna of all time. And I would meet all these chemical engineers that would work for like Suncor and Syncrude and these big oil companies. Every day the engineers would be at the sauna. I'm like, what are you guys doing here? They're like, This is here so the executives and the engineers who know better are detoxing every single day. They have filtered water and saunas in these oil sands.

I hope they're cleaning out the saunas well with all those toxins leaching out into the—

Multiple times a day.

—into the interior. Yeah, that's important. A lot of people don't realize how important it is to clean up a sauna because those toxins go somewhere. Kind of reminds me too, same hotel where you dropped off the air filtration unit for me, Mike, I was having a conversation with another guy in the nutrition and supplements industry. This was Ian Clark of Activation Products. And, he was very concerned about pollution and air pollution and was talking about a lot of his own battles against having to remove a lot of that from his body from a toxin standpoint. And, he said, "Look outside, Ben. You see any rubber on the road from car tires?" I'm like, "No." And, he said, "Well, where do you think all the rubber is going as the cars are driving around and those particulates are going into the air along with the brake dust?" from the vehicles themselves, all of that is actually winding up in the air that we breathe. And, a lot of that in addition to what gets tracked indoors and accumulates in HVAC units, it's a pretty big issue. I mean, I went to India recently and it was a huge issue there. I mean, I was freaking nebulizing glutathione and exosomes to heal up my lungs after that. But yeah, we are surrounded by a plethora of this kind of invisible particulate matter that just gets kicked up by a lot of stuff.

So, it's funny because people talk about food more than they talk about eating. We talk about water more than we talk about the act of drinking, but breathwork and breathing gets a lot bigger airtime than the actual air itself. It's the only one out of those 3 bio requirements where we talk about the act of inhalation far more than the thing that we're inhaling.

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

Actually, the reason Jasper is called Jasper is because there's a mountain in Canada near Banff where companies go bottle the air and they sell it to China in a can. Really? But I mean, that's a very fringe market. In China, it's not a fringe market, but we're not buying cans of air the same way we get filtered water. In China, they get these canisters of filtered air from Canadian mountain air. The way you were talking about the rubber, it's really true. There was a study that the BBC put a lot of attention on about a month ago that showed that humans breathe about one credit card worth of microplastics every week. And they took tons of samples of the dust in people's homes in London and around the UK. So 100% of homes tested positive, 98% of all samples. And then indoor had, I think, like 40 times more microplastic than they found outside. And it's just funny because, you know, everyone's kind of thinking about the water microplastics, but we only drink 2 liters of water a day, but we can breathe 20,000 liters of air a day. And we don't realize that Yeah, they basically did biopsies of lungs and like every set of lungs that they got back, they found microplastics in the lungs and they're admittedly like, we don't know what the health implications are of microplastic in the lungs. It definitely causes inflammation and they're doing more and more studies are coming. So I don't, I don't have any health claims to come with that. But it's wild. Just I think air awareness is just really catching up to water awareness and I'm doing my best to kind of bring that along. Yeah, yeah, it's good to know.

I got a few Visas and Amexes in my trachea. I actually was not aware of that amount of microplastics we breathe in. Now, obviously, it's going to be different based on where you live. I have a central HVAC system and then I got these standalone air filtration units spread around the house for things like wildfire season, somebody painting indoors, et cetera. But, I actually have a few questions for you related to air filtration units. So, this Jasper that's— you can't see it behind me in my office because I've got the screen in front of it, but it has a number in the middle of it that gives me a reading that I think is the PM reading. Is that correct? And if so, what's that number actually mean? Why is that the central focus of the center dashboard of the unit?

So, that number is called PM2.5, and that means particulate matter under 2.5 microns in size. So basically these are the particles that are small enough to enter our lungs and our bloodstream and cause the most impact. So when you look at the outdoor, if you Google like air quality Spokane or air quality Los Angeles and you see the AQI or like the outdoor air quality, the PM2.5 is the most common metric we use to measure particulate in the air. It's not the only thing that matters and it's You know, it's not the only thing that Jasper is filtering, but it's the best thing that we can use to, to use the variable. We call it the fan speed algorithm because it uses PM2.5, but it's also using VOCs as an input that's not on the screen, which is when, when you painted, it would likely have gone up in speed just from the VOCs themselves. Okay.

That's why. So because when I walked in my office last night while she was painting it, I could hear the unit working harder. Like you could hear that the fan speed was elevated. Yeah, but the PM number wasn't through the roof.

Yeah. So that's because it also— we're going to upgrade it soon where we actually add like a VOC scrubbing indicator because right now that's not abundantly clear. But there's those, those two are the primary sensors on board. So yeah, PM2.5 is the most harmful particles. Typically that's going to kick up from things like wildfire smoke, cooking. Cooking is going to be a big one. Cleaning, hairsprays, if people shower, barbecue smoke, if your neighbor across the street is like cutting drywall and doing some renovations, that's gonna likely impact you as well. Because, you know, your house is not really separate from the outside. Your indoor air comes from the outside and then it gets trapped inside. So that is the best sensor that we can use to control the fan speed. And, it basically just means the particles that are small enough to get deep inside of us.

So, the PM2.5, 2.5 microns and under, what's the scale? What would be a good number and what would be a number to be concerned about?

An excellent number is under 10.

Oh. Well, that's good because I'm averaging 2 to 3 in my office. You have a 2? Yeah. But again, remember, I live out in the middle of forest and I'm running central HVAC unit as well.

That is good though. 2 is insane. I'd like to see a picture of a 2, man. 3, 4 is pretty much—

Yeah, I'll snap a photo for you after this.

99% of people, the lowest they'll ever see is a 4. Often they're like at like a 6, 7, 8. Crazy thing is in Beijing, if you get an air purifier, the outdoor air is about a 50.

Oh my gosh. Yeah.

That's the outdoor air. And that would be their lowest fan speed. Wow. Like, excellent to them is 50. So excellent is very location dependent. You live in a part of the world that actually is excellent air with the exception of wildfire smoke blowing through. Same thing with the CO2. I'll get back to the PM2.5. The outdoor carbon dioxide is typically 400 everywhere globally. But when you're surrounded by large trees, I've seen it on like Vancouver Island, British Columbia, And probably areas like you as well, the CO2 itself can actually get to 385, 390, which is pretty awesome.

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

Sort of. And like when a home— most people live in a condo, an apartment, or in a subdivision-style home that's like over 90% of people. And there's no time when the developers and the builders or the architects are sitting around a table being like, how do we make healthy homes designed for optimal human performance? They're saying, how can we make as many homes as possible for as cheap as possible and sell them as quickly as possible? So a big issue is the materials in a home should off-gas and cure for months.

However, they don't—

before you move, before you move in, before they move in, before they get installed. But the way the supply chain works, you know, they're pressing those drywall boards and then shipping them, and then they're going to be installed like weeks later. That's how the supply chain works. So all of these materials have not had their adequate off-gassing period. So generally, most homes, the HVAC system, which I refer to as the lungs of a home, are there. It's literally the last thing. Even 99% of custom home builders, the last thing they think about, like how many square feet, how big do you want your master bedroom, what's the floor plan, your pantry, your kitchen, your views. It's almost never considered about like optimal lighting, air quality, water quality. And then if they are considering HVAC, it's only from a perspective in heating and cooling. They don't think about airflow and fresh air like a a commercial building would. So they're like— a home was built to keep the indoor air in and the outdoor out as much as possible. It's not really designed to be an optimal breathing zone. So some healthy home builders, healthy home consultants are now kind of coming around to this and doing things better. I think it really needs to be top down, like the few builders who are building healthy homes are able to charge more and have like unlimited demand. But consumers need to start kind of demanding a better product, like Everybody gets a home inspection when they buy a home. They pay $500, $600, $700, $800. Home inspector comes over and all they're looking for is what's going to hurt your pocket. A roof thing, a cracked piece of drywall, maybe a banister that's damaged a little bit. But the home inspection is not looking to see if this house is making you sick. So generally, most homes have— almost every home has bad water and almost every home has bad air. Unless you do something to improve that. I've almost never seen a house out of— with good air. The particulate level is still usually adequate unless they're cooking. Not great, but unless it's like a bad pollution day or you're actively cooking or cleaning, because those particulates pretty quickly settle on your surfaces, in your carpets, on your bedding, in your furniture, in your clothing. The VOCs are a big deal as well because that off gases from paint, from furniture, from your baby's crib. From a picture frame, all kinds of stuff, even from the ink from books.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, related to building the home the right way or setting up the right way, shout out to Paula Laporte. The Prescription for a Healthy Home book is one that I got for myself, my architects, and my builders for this new home I'm building in Idaho. And she has a great section there on the type of HVAC systems that work really well. And I interviewed her and I'll link to it, the show notes for this show if you're listening in, are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/JasperPod, J-A-S-P-R, the name of this air filter Mike designed, JasperPod, J-A-S-P-R Pod. Mike, a few times you've alluded to cooking. What is it about cooking that's bad? I mean, because we cook all the time. Is it the pan that's being used? Is it the smoke and the off-gassing from the food itself? Or, what is it about cooking that's a problem?

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

You don't see that much on Naked and Afraid. They don't say, I'm gonna go outside now.

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

So you're saying like barbecue grill air wasting from the grill indoors might not be so good for your lungs?

Not so good. And anything in your home that can get wet, like your clothing or a book or a couch or carpet, anything that can get wet from water, means it's porous, so it also absorbs air. So it's not just that you think about the cooking particulate or the chemicals being in your air, but they now get absorbed into the drywall. Anything that can get wet absorbs air and then has— that gets disturbed by a dog or a cat or by walking or by the airflow hitting it, and then it just kind of stays in your indoor environment and it doesn't go anywhere. So with cooking, the big one is the PM2.5. So that happens no matter what you cook. And most range hoods They are not adequate. They're installed too high. Sometimes they vent indoors. They don't even actually vent outside. So you have like high heat and protein. And then, yeah, you have nonstick pans aren't great. The oils that basically all the stuff you don't want to be eating is extra bad to be breathing. And then even the things that you do want to be eating aren't necessarily the type of air that you want to get trapped into your indoor environment. This is interesting.

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

So there's a few ways to answer that. The first thing is the whole home HVAC systems can be good depending on what one you have and how the HVAC is configured overall. But if someone's not doing it right, they can actually be harmful because they diminish the airflow of your whole house. Like the HVAC system wasn't originally designed to accommodate that filter. So some of them have their own fans and there, there's different ways to install them. I'm sure in your new home it'll, it'll be done even better. But in an average home, let's say you have a 3,500, 3,000 square foot home, a 4-bedroom home, like if you're cooking bacon in the kitchen, the baby's bedroom on the other side of the house within minutes can be up to over 100 because your HVAC system, it's designed to mix the air throughout your whole home. So air quality issues are not isolated, whether you're burning incense in one room or you're cooking or you're using hairspray, it very quickly contaminates the whole house. You may not always smell it because the filter could pick— could filter out some of the odors and the heavier particles. But the finer particles like the PM2.5, will become a whole home issue rather quickly. In terms of the kitchen, so yes, the number— the top 2 places that someone should be filtering their air is their bedroom to dial in their sleep, create their sleep sanctuary, and then their kitchen living room space.

And, and whichever room of the house you're doing your Wim Hof breathwork.

Yes, it's amazing for breathwork. Like, if you're, if you're bringing— breathing in a lot of air rapidly, probably better instead of having 800,000 particles to cut that down to 20,000. Just like when you breathe, drink water, you don't want to drink pond water. Even though that pond water looks totally clean, we've been educated to know there's invisible things in that water that will make you very sick. We don't have said air awareness when it comes to air.

And I was kind of joking about the breathwork comment, but the gym would be a pretty important place, would imagine. I have an Aller Air and Bryant HVAC central air system in my home, but the gym, which is separated from the home, I have this really nice Cadillac of air filtration built-in systems called the LifeBreath that does recirculation and humidification. And yeah, it's a very good unit. And I think the gym is another important place to think about.

So, a fun thing that you may enjoy if you don't already have one, you should put a CO— do you have a CO2 monitor?

I don't remember. There's a pretty fancy panel out there in the gym. I think CO2 is on there.

So if you can, you should check it. If not, there's little ones that are like $150, $200. I carry one everywhere I go because that number matters a lot too. But the interesting thing is the harder you work out, the more CO2 will be in the room, right? And then maybe if you can like achieve the same speed with a lower CO2, then that would be a sign that you're breathing more efficiently. With similar output. So CO2 is a really cool thing to monitor and measure. But back to your comment about the kitchen, having a good range hood, like it's on my roadmap. Eventually I would like to make really a new range hood that has a Jasper, a Jasper range hood so it can act as a scrubber or a vent. But in the meantime, everybody should do a Kleenex test. So like hold the Kleenex. Like I love talking about free tips. That people could implement today for their air quality at home without having to buy a thing. So like one of those things would be taking a Kleenex or a napkin or a paper towel and hold that up to your range hood and make sure it's pulling it up because a huge amount of the time that filter is nasty and it's not even sucking. Same thing with any bathroom fans in your house. Make sure the fan is working. That's like number one. And then also your range hood should not be any more than 36 inches above where you're cooking. From an aesthetic perspective, a lot of people have it 4 or 5 feet above, but it's way too high to actually suck up those particulates. Also, if you're boiling things and cooking, if it's reasonable to, use your back burner instead of your front burner. The back burner is going to capture way more air and particulates than your front burner.

These are good tips. Interesting. Okay. So, the Jasper unit, I'll link to pictures of this thing if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/JasperPod, J-A-S-P-R-P-O-D. How is it any different? Because there's a lot of standalone air filters. Probably one I've talked about most on this podcast has been the Air Doctor. And, that's when I still have a few of those, but I would love to kind of hear why the heck you even had to go down the road of making a different kind of air filtration standalone system. I would have rather not.

I would have rather just talk about others and recommend what the best thing out there was. I enjoy teaching about air more than I enjoy inventing new products even though They're both important work. And the reason I switched from the consulting and remediation side to the solution side is I could talk about air all I want, but I had no ability to actually change things. So it's much more impactful for me to come over to the product side where if I see a, a gap in the market or a problem, I can do something about it. So to answer the question of what's different than Jasper versus Air Doctor, we'll also answer the question of what's different between Jasper and mostly all consumer air purifiers. So I created Jasper on the— because of my experience with wildfire smoke where people were really, really sick after wildfires. Even after we would clean their house, we'd get a call, baby's in the hospital. We go, we test the air. Air is all toxic again. And this is because the outdoor air is bad for months after a wildfire. So we started leaving our giant air scrubbers, industrial air scrubbers. They look like a subwoofer meets a photocopier. They're super effective at cleaning the air., but they're so loud and they're so ugly. So it makes sense to use that for a mold removal project or asbestos removal. But if, if you put that in a house, everybody unplugs them and hides them in the closet because they're just really loud and ugly. So I started leaving those behind in my customers' homes after wildfires to keep the air quality at a safe level. And then I'm like this, we're running out of equipment here. We need more equipment to do new jobs. So I went to like Best Buy and Home Depot and I bought a ton of consumer air purifiers. All that stuff between $100 and $500. And within a few hours, the air quality was really contaminated again. So the analogy I like to use for most air purifiers, it's kind of like a kettle trying to heat a bathtub. Like, a kettle is awesome at heating water if you're trying to heat a cup of tea. But if you try to fill your bathtub with a kettle, that water is going to cool down far faster than you can heat it up. Another one is like the little air purifiers are kind of like golf carts. Those big air scrubbers were like tractor trailers. It's like, where's the Yukon Denali? We needed an SUV. We needed something that can take the kids, take the stuff, and look good while doing it. So what's really different about Jasper is number one, the size. As you can see, it's quite a bit larger than most small air purifiers. And Jasper on fan speed 1, which is basically silent, moves more air than most air purifiers on full speed. So that's a really big deal. A lot of people talk about max speed, but what actually matters even more is what's the fan— how much air are you moving on the lowest speed? Because that's the state that it's going to be in 99% of the time.

Because that's the quietest setting that a lot of people are going to have it at also. Like, we're podcasting right now and the Jasper is on, just so you know.

Most companies, when you hear them talk about the square footage coverage of the air purifier, that's assuming it was on full speed all the time.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, why wouldn't they?

So the other thing is we use steel, not plastic. Most air purifiers are made out of very cheap ABS plastic.. And when you create 1 pound of plastic, it creates 3 pounds. It's a 3 to 1 ratio of carbon in the atmosphere. So you're like cleaning your indoor air at the expense of massively polluting the outdoor air. Most plastic air purifiers last 3, 4 years. Jasper is good to last 25 to 30 years because we basically built— I wasn't trying to make the smallest, cheapest, cutest air purifier. I was trying to make an air scrubber that's quiet and beautiful and smart that will last a very long time. So because of my background in floods and fires and mold, I was really creating a commercial product that would fit in a home. And originally I was designing it specifically for wildfire smoke. I would have never thought in a million years that I would have been at a biohacking conference talking about allergies and sleep and human performance. That is not why I built this thing.

So by the way, Mike, a couple of times It seems like you differentiate between the term scrubber and purifier. Is that correct?

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

And what's a HEPA air filter?

A HEPA air filter is a filter that HEPA is just a standard. It means high efficiency particulate air, and it means that it filters 99.97% of particles at 0.3 microns. So HEPA is basically just a standard that we've been using since the early 1900s for surgical operating rooms, for NASA, the Space Center. It's just the highest standard of filtration that we currently have. How long do the filters last? 6 months. Theoretically it could be a little bit longer for the HEPA, but we also have carbon in the filter and the carbon will get absorbed up and used up by the odors and the VOCs and the gases. So 6— it's actually funny because the filter actually improves for the first few months because as the filter gets blocked up by dust and different particulates and pores, there's, there's more restriction. So it's harder for harmful particles to pass through. But then there's a point of diminishing returns. Where the airflow starts to diminish. And then because you have less air passing through, it performs less effectively. And I would say the air efficiency times efficacy equals effectiveness. So you want a filter that filters really good. But even more important than that is you want something that moves a lot of air. Like you'd rather have 95% of $5 than 99% of $1. So when a lot of filters talk about that 99.9997, whatever, That just means per pass. You could have an air filter the size of a water bottle in your car that could be HEPA, but it's moving so little air that might be good for your, your hamster cage. It's not going to clean your house.

And how much square footage does one Jasper cover approximately?

So, so square footage is the wrong metric because what matters more is two things: cubic volume. Okay. You have 8-foot ceilings or 15-foot ceilings. It's a big difference. And then also what type of HVAC system, because if you have a central air unit, that's additive because it's mixing the air in the home. And if you have a— if you don't, you don't have that extra mixing power. Ceiling height matters. Layout matters, like one big room versus a bunch of smaller rooms. That matters a lot. So generally the actual way to— and then, you know, when people talk about square footage, they don't tell you how much it cleans the air in that square footage. So it's like if you put an air purifier in 2,000 square feet, versus 200 square feet, it's going to clean the air way more in the smaller space. So it's kind of like marketers want to make everything simple, but not everything is simple. So if when I do have to speak generally, it— I like a Jasper up to about a 1,000 square foot space. So, but it's better in a smaller space. So the, the optimal configuration is one air purifier for your bedrooms and one in your kitchen living room. If you have a home office or a gym that you use regularly, that would also be a good idea.

Okay. How much does one of these cost?

So this is a fun thing that I'm quite excited about because when we originally came out with them 4 years ago, they were $1,975 and we only sold to doctors and dentists. In 2023, we got it down to $1,399. At the beginning of 2024, we got it down to $999. So our standard price is $999. At the end of the episode, we'll give a little special discount for your most loyal listeners. But the fact that it's now— and like, as people add more to their cart, it creates a bundle so it can get as low as about $700 per unit. And I think it's important that people don't think about it as an air purifier as much as they do a whole home air filtration system. Because if you think about like a $7,000 to $10,000 water filtration system, that sounds really easy, reasonable. But like just a water filter, $1,000 would sound high. So water is very easy to filter because it comes in through a single pipe through your home. So we can filter all your water with one filter by capturing it all, or we could filter it at the point of use, at the bathtub, at the shower, at the sink faucet. Air is sneaky. It enters your home through your vents, your doors, your windows, your attics, every crack and crevice in your home. It's a lot sneakier. So, you really want a decentralized whole home air filtration system. I like to use the Sonos analogy. So, back in the day, you would have one giant speaker and it'd be either way too loud when you're beside it or you can't hear it in the other room, you just feel this obnoxious bass. And then, along came Sonos or a hardwired system where you can actually have reasonable volume in every room.

That's actually what we have in our house. There's a few little iPads sprinkled throughout the house and you control it, but it's all hardwired throughout the house, which is nice too, because it's lower EMF. Yeah.

So think, and by the way, the Jasper has no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, and no EMF. That was really important. That's why we don't have any apps on it.

So that means like probably rough math with shipping and everything, you might be able to outfit a relatively large house for under $5K. Under $3K.

For example, if somebody buys 4, we give 20% off and that will stack with your 20% discount. So it's actually more like 40% off. So now you're getting like 4 of them with shipping for under $2,500. Okay, that's pretty good.

Now I'll link to that stuff in the show notes. If you go to bengreenfieldlife.com/jasperpod, J-A-S-P-R-P-O-D, because I think the $200 goes away, well, like 1 or 2 weeks after whenever this interview comes out.

Yeah. So I know it should come out sometime in, I think, yeah, first week of August or so. So the day that this episode comes out, So the code will be Ben and it'll be $200 off per Jasper, not total, per unit. That's pretty good. And that'll be good for the first 7 days that this episode is live. Just to, you know, honor your most loyal listeners. We don't use, we don't use big Facebook ads and Google ads, so we'd rather work to educate audiences and pass the discount there. And then, after that first week, it'll be $100 off per Jasper and that code will be live forever. So there'll always be an offer there, but for the first week, It'll be a little bit bigger of an offer.

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

So, why is that? So there's the same reason that HEPA air scrubbers have neither. There's the same reason that surgical operating rooms have neither. It's the same reason that the space station has neither. The reason why I don't use any of those things. So like UV is like a $5 light that we could add to the Jasper. So by no means is it a cost basis thing. The problem with UV is twofold. UV is awesome for filtering water, for cleaning your phone case, for surfaces, but it needs at least 20, 30 seconds, ideally several minutes of contact exposure time. So everybody learned during COVID that soap is— if you wash your hands for 1 second, the soap didn't have enough contact exposure time to kill that bacteria. So UV works the same. So because the air passes through the air purifier so quickly, there's no contact exposure time. So people can search as far as they want. You'll never find one study that's like— we've tested them because we wanted to do what's best. So we tested for mold and dust and bacteria and everything. And when we run the Jasper with UV and without, there's no difference. The only thing that changes is UV lights create ozone. Ozone is not your friend. Ozone is good for odor removal. We would use it in wildfire situations, but after we would ozonate a home, we would have a dissipation period. You have to take the plants out of the house. You have to take the animals out of the house. And, ozone plus rubber creates formaldehyde. So, not only is ozone just not great for your lungs, which is why California heavily restricts— they have their own carb emissions where you can't have ozone-generating air purifiers. So, it's more harmful than helpful.

Clarification, by the way, ozone is not good to breathe, but ozone plasmapheresis or some blood oxygenation, ozonation treatment, that's different.

Yeah, it's different for your cold plunge, it's different for your blood. Ozone is not bad. It is not great for your lungs. So that's my first thing about UV. And then everything else, you know, there's hydroxyl radicals, there's negative ions, there's electro— like when it comes to air, less is more. I don't want to emit more things into the air. I just want to filter and capture things out of the air. So often, often those other filters, they have quite an odor to them, and that's because they're adding these charges to the air. To deactivate your dust and make it fall to the surface. I would prefer to just have a filter that captures it while it's filtering it. I don't want to add anything to my air, I just want to filter things out of the air. And, I don't want anything that creates ozone.

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

I bet you there is a time and a place for it. The way I kind of internalize it for myself, it's like I would like to use my cold plunge for 2 to 4 minutes, but I don't want to live in cold water. A lot of these things are hyperbaric chamber or sauna. I would not doubt the benefits of doing this in isolation as a biohacking measure, but having that 24 hours in my home is not something I am interested in doing.

Oh, if you worry, you can get the plug-in negative ion generator on Amazon for $40 if you really did want the waterfall thing or a Himalayan salt lamp. Apparently, those things churn it out. Yeah, I'm on the same board with you as ozone and formaldehyde. I would say as far as negative ions, I haven't seen any damage as far as they're concerned. I'm just not sure of the extent of the healing effects for how much efficiency or time you'd want to spend putting it into a Jasper unit.

And I haven't tested it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would increase our EMF load by adding more electrical components.

That's a good point. Okay, so this thing has like a turbo mode. What happens if I push that?

So, we're going to change that button to deep clean. That was designed for dentists and doctors specifically during COVID So, when they would be done treating a patient, while the dentist between patients, they sanitize the materials, they wipe down the surface. So, they would hit that turbo mode and it would run on full speed for 5 minutes and do a deep clean. So it'll put the Jasper on full speed and then it will automatically go back down to smart mode. Fun hack, a little pro tip. If you hold that button down and then you tap it, you can adjust the time so you can actually save it, change it to up to 30 minutes. So what some people do is they tap that turbo button when they're leaving their home so the Jasper can do a deep clean on its— on full speed, which is a little bit noisy.

Okay. So, that's interesting. Now, as far as the actual objections here because people always jump into the comment section, they've got something they bring up, what is kind of pushback you've gotten on this thing as far as people questioning about whether or not it actually filters what it says it filters, whether the filter is good enough? Have you gotten pushback on anything from the air filtration industry?

Not a ton. The number 1 pushback that we have gotten by far is people would have liked us to create a smaller unit. By far, they want a smaller one.

You can do that?

No, we tried. We probably spent about $100,000 trying. No matter how hard we try to make a smaller one, just to— I don't think that the small air purifier market is underserved. I think for a small air purifier, you can go on Amazon and there's a ton of products out there. I don't want to create products that already exist just to capture more of the market. Um, a small air purifier means it needs to be running basically on full speed to move as much air as we move on our silent mode. So I would rather have something that's a fair size that does the job. Like, you can't pull your boat with your golf cart no matter what kind of turbocharger you put on that thing. It's just too small to get the job done. So a lot of people would like a smaller one. Some people have asked for a black one. Um, we've had very little pushback in terms of Effectiveness because there's so much— Yeah, high quality. Like anyone who uses Oura or Whoop or Fitbit almost always sees an improvement in their sleep. My favorite testimonial is it's the first— I've had a bunch of air purifiers before. I wasn't sure if they worked. I thought they worked. This is the first one I actually knew worked. And despite all the third-party lab data, that's great. Like, you can actually feel the difference. And because we put the screen with the number right on top, It's fully transparent. People get to see it work and feel it work.

Yeah. It kind of gamifies it honestly. I look at it every time I walk out of my office or walk into my office. So yeah, I do like the dashboard on it. The idea with the EMF, you said no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, you mentioned EMF a couple of times, but have you actually measured it? If somebody has this plugged in next to their bed, the one space of the house where arguably you want the lowest EMF, what are they going to see?

So, Ryan Blazer who I believe you connected with recently—

He was just at my house a couple of weeks ago, building biologist guy.

Yeah. Yeah. So he's got a— he's at Test My Home and has really wonderful— a lot of him and Brian Hoyer, I think, are some of the best when it comes to EMF. So when it comes to EMF, I like to lean on third-party people because EMF is not my background. I'm EMF aware from the consumer standpoint. And, you know, I have a Trifield, but it's like a consumer-grade product. It's not commercial grade. So when you measure EMFs, you'll see a tiny bit like an inch or two off the unit. So, with most Wi-Fi and Bluetooth emitting devices, Ryan's rule is 8 feet. So, if someone has a baby monitor or something like that, he says keep it 8 feet from your bed. With the Jasper, 6 inches is probably fine, but 2 feet. Anything that has a motor has some amount of EMF.

You could have it on the other side of the bedroom and it's still going to clean the air.

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

Yeah, okay. That makes sense. So again, I'll link to this thing if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/JasperPod, J-A-S-P-E-R Pod. Mike, what else? Is there anything else you want to share about this thing that's unique or air filtration in general?

Maybe a bit about mold. So, people always say, "I wonder if I have mold.

I don't think I have mold." You mean in the house or in the body? In the house.

In the house. Mostly in the body too. I've never heard of someone that did a urine or blood test that isn't actively detoxing that didn't have some level of mold unless they're actively working towards detoxing it. Because if we do an air test right now outside, especially if it rained recently, the mold levels are quite high. Outside, it's different though. We get the UV lights from the sun, we get hydroxyl radicals from the wind. So mold is not really a problem outside. You don't see black mold growing on your garage or in your car or on the sidewalk. Mold is really an indoor problem because we left— the best air purifier in the world is nature. It's trees, it's wind, it's sun. Unfortunately, we left that outside of our— we left that shit outside. And So when it comes to indoor air, there's always mold, there's always dust. It's just a thing. So I like to talk about mold in terms of mold load. So it's not if you have mold, it's how much mold do you have and what species do you have mold? Because it like if you're filtering your— it's like if you have water that's not clean coming in from the city or from your well, the answer is not to dig a new well. The answer is to filter the water that's coming in. So when it comes to mold, and I say this passionately because I used to be a restoration guy, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, a specific type of nail. So when I was the remediation guy, my lens was we need to gut, you know, we need to demo your whole basement, rip up your kitchen, your bathroom. That was the hat I was wearing. And that's largely what brought me into this space where mold remediation is important if you have visible physical black mold, but the dry— behind your drywall, under your kitchen sink, if there was a leak, you got to remove that mold. But when you just go and do a basic air test and you see mold in the air, playing Whack-a-Mold and trying to find it and start demoing your whole house is a horrible, horrible thing. Because like, if you test the house, there's a reason why when you do your mold removal and then we do a clearance test, there's no mold. The reason that is, is because typically remediation companies, they turn off the air purifier and then they do the mold test. So you've literally had whole home air filtration running. They don't even know. That's how they teach us. If you come back a week later or even 2 days later and we test for mold again, it's going to be moldy again in your air. So the best way to deal with that is a reasonable amount of ventilation, you know, cracking doors and windows when you cook, letting some fresh air in your home. And then like your house, like when you have adequate air filtration, you almost never have dust. If you see a lot of dust accumulating in a home, that's a sign that your home is not being filtered.

Also why the shoes off rule is a good idea.

95% of all shoes test positive for fecal matter. So, the same way you think about the water, no but— you obviously have an incredibly health-conscious, aware audience. And, if you feel— it's like once you've realized that, "Whoa, I filter my water and I'm looking at the food I eat," Air is just the same. It's like you need air to survive. You breathe it all that long. It's the first thing when you do when you breathe. It's the last thing you do when you die. And I think because of that, we just aren't aware. It's the only thing we do when we're sleeping, subconscious and conscious. So just with things like mold and dust, airborne bacteria, dust mites, all these things like insect— unless you live in the Costa Rican rainforest or on Vancouver Island or something, Unless you're actively doing something about it, if you live indoors, filtering your air is kind of a non-negotiable.

Wow. This is a lot. I'm actually learning a ton here. And honestly, one of the things I'm going to immediately change is my approach to cooking, the ventilation, opening the doors, and maybe even lugging the Jasper up to my kitchen when I'm having a party.

We'll get you another one over there.

Yeah, my wife will love it. The feng shui of the kitchen constantly adapting. Alright. So, BenGreenfieldLife.com/JasperPod, J-A-S-P-R, no E, J-A-S-P-R Pod. I'll link to the product. I'll put our discount in there. Well worth outfitting a home in my opinion, especially with everything I've learned about air pollution since I got back from India. But, what were you saying, Mike?

The one more thing I wanted to say that means a lot to us is even better than the Jasper itself I would say is our support and education. So we have something called the lifetime guarantee. So as long as someone's changing their filter twice a year, the Jasper has a lifetime warranty. So the way that works is even if your Jasper breaks in 6 months or 6 years, it doesn't matter. What we do is we ship a brand new Jasper the next day. Not— we don't repair units, we ship a brand new one. You take the new Jasper out of the box, you put the old Jasper in the box. We do not expect you to keep the box. We give you a prepaid shipping label and then we schedule UPS to pick it up off your front porch at 9 AM the next day because we believe that it's not cool for a company to have a product that's warranty doesn't match the life expectancy of the product. So what's really important to us is, you know, Jasper is a premium product, but it's also the last air purifier anyone will ever need to buy. And if someone doesn't feel awesome in the first 60 days, same thing, we'll send them a shipping label. We'll take it back. If you're not feeling awesome, we would rather you take that money and invest in some other biohacking tool or wellness tool that's going to make you feel better. So, it's really important that people know that we put our money where our mouth is.

Ben Greenfield: Wow, look at you. It's a guarantee right there, folks. Mike, this is incredible. I'm really happy to hear that this thing's legit. Again, I've been trying it for a few months before this podcast. I gave the green light on doing a podcast with you about a month into my own experimentation. So, I'm very impressed with it. And, thank you for sharing your knowledge, man. Thanks for having me, man. Alright, folks, BenGreenfieldLife.com. One more time, Jasper Pod, J-A-S-P-R Pod. Check it out. Connect with Mike's company. He's doing a good job. This thing's sexy. It looks good. Great conversation piece as well, especially if you put it in turbo anti-fart mode. Alright, Mike. I'll catch you on the flip side. Folks, thanks so much for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield and Mike Feldstein from Jasper. Signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com/JasperPod. Have an incredible week.

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