09: Breathe Easy: Transform Your Health by Prioritizing Air Quality

Welcome to Modern Thyroid and Wellness, the podcast that explores the intricate dance between health, wellness, and thyroid, unraveling the threads that weave our vitality together. I'm your host, McCall McPherson, and I'm so thrilled to guide you on this journey to optimal wellness. Welcome, Mike. I am so happy for you to be here today. Thank you so much for taking this interview and enlightening us on how important air quality is. So excited to dig in today.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, so here for it.

I love it. So I want to frame this as I almost feel like we put priority on reducing, like, the toxic burden and load backwards a lot of the time. So I think, you know, we focus on, hey, we want to eat organic and, hey, let's be careful what we put on our skin and the products that we use, shampoo and soap and everything. But I wanted to lay a little bit of foundational information and share with people. Number one, like, as a clinician, we learn, listen, like, the fastest way to get pollutants into our bloodstream is through breathing. So our lungs are very, very efficient at absorbing things because we have to survive on oxygen, right? So we absorb that oxygen through our lungs and we transport it directly through our body. So essentially what that means is they can. Our lungs can absorb 100% of toxins or if. Especially if they're small enough pollutants, and immediately integrate those into our physiology, into our body. Whereas, like, skin. We only absorb 60 to 70% of things through our skin. Like, our skin acts as, like, this protective barrier ingesting. We actually have a whole physiology based around trying to metabolize and detox all these compounds that are harmful for us. But our lungs, I feel like, are put on the back burner all the time in terms of people protecting themselves from getting exposure through air pollutants. So I kind of wanted you to start, like, you have a fascinating story of how you ended up in this sector. I kind of want you to share it with people.

I'm happy to do that. And just like on the prioritization thing, I actually heard a. A stat this week that 69% of all of the detox that happens in our body happens in the lungs. And that, like, the fastest way, when you're getting a surgery and anesthesia or whatever, like, the fastest, always through breathing is always the fastest way to do stuff. And it's just kind of symbolic of the way I think people live our lives. You know, people are quicker to book a 10 or $15,000 retreat to try to go fix themselves in a Week or two versus just making a teeny change that they could do every day. Or like, constantly making a task list in a to do list. And people get addicted to checking off little meaningless boxes on their to do list and overwhelming themselves with a very stressful life when really, like, it could be a lot more simple than that. There could be a few more. You know, like, my best diet ever was not eating after bed. No, sorry. Not eating after dinner.

Yeah.

And going for a walk every day. And like, as long as I do that, I'm pretty good. And then of course, I can layer it up. But if I made my baseline, like, I wanted to work out four times a week or two a days, and then that falls apart and I'm left with nothing. So if my foundation is just like no bread and no food after dinner, it's like, wow, that got me a long way. Right?

And it's like, we eat, I don't know, three to four pounds of food a day. And I read a stat as I was prepping for this that we breathe 11,000 liters of air every day. Like that. The comparison of where we're putting our energy to try and get healthy seems disproportionate. Like, just breathing clean air makes that much more of a difference than eating healthy food. It's fascinating because again, no one is emphasizing breathing clean air. Or not enough people are. It's like, low on the priority list.

More about, we talk about our food, we talk about our water, but literally, breath work is more popular than air right now. Meaning we're thinking about. No one talks about eating and drinking compared to food and water. We're thinking about the stuff we're consuming, not how we consume it. And then with air, breath, work, and breathing gets all this attention. But like, I call clean air step zero in anyone's breathwork journey. Otherwise you could be hopping and puffing and hyperventilating and doing holotropic breathing and just pumping in mold and toxins and pollutants. Not a good idea. And I'll share my origin story, but just to kind of round out that. That stat there. So, yeah, two to three pounds of food. Two to three liters of water. 10 to 20,000 liters of air. Three weeks, you can survive without food. Three days, you can survive without water. Three minutes, you can survive without air. Very common. A family spending two to $3,000 a month as a family food budget is fairly normal these days. Between your grocery bills, probably 500 a week, and then a couple meals out here, and there's your water budget. People don't realize, but they're spending could be five to $10,000 a year on water. When you add up your hydro bill from the city, that $7 Fiji at the airport, your Pellegrinos, your Perriers, your filtered water when you go for dinner, your pool water, your Ollipops and your poppies and all your alternative waters, flavored water. People's water budget is thousands. And then their air budget, the thing you consume most of, it's like $30 a year. I change my furnace filter, so.

And then they never think about it.

Yeah. So the focus and energy and investment relative to consumption. So we double click on it after. But there's some really powerful studies showing that the average human breathes about a credit card worth of microplastics every week. So you act, everyone's worried about microplastics in your water, but because you breathe so much more air than water. The study that the BBC Shine Light on showed 98% of all studies collected of air and dust had macro microplastics. 100% of all homes tested had microplastics. And basically they showed when they got biopsies, almost everybody had a lot of microplastics in their lungs. Now, they don't exactly know how harmful microplastics in the lungs are. We could assume it's not a great thing. And it's not about, like, be afraid. This is another thing to worry about. It's the fact that like, there's a lot of stuff you can do and poor air outside is not nearly as big of a problem as poor air inside. The average indoor air is five to ten times dirtier than the outdoor air. Which is why you like nature. It's why you like going for a walk. Because even, even a walk is nice on a cloudy day because you're literally going into an area where the air could be 10 times cleaner. And your body loves that. So you, we just give it like a label like it's stuffy inside or I like nature. But when you get in, what do you like about it? The way you feel? Well, if you close your eyes, you're not even seeing the nature. The only thing that's happening is you're breathing way fresher air outside.

And like it's, the air is so much cleaner, it's so much more toxic inside. But we spend all day inside like.

95% of the time.

Right. So again, I think this is such a valuable topic that needs to be talked about that I feel like is, you know, we have to catch up. We have to escort people into this way of thinking because again, we're focusing on important things. But I think that there. This is such an important topic for people to learn.

I love the saying that someone's Jasper. They've called the Jasper the laziest way to be healthy. They're like, with food, it takes a lot of willpower.

Totally.

And you got to go to the gym and a lot of important parts of one's health journey. But the nice thing about clean air and clean water, like with you usually fat, sugars, like addictive food, is often harmful food. But there's nothing nice about dirty water or dirty air. So what I like is even for me, you know, last night, it was Halloween and we made some bad food choices last night, me and my wife, she's pregnant. She wasn't feeling like candy. We were driving our golf cart home after trick or treating and she smelt fries. So we ordered McDonald's. We got delivery, got some McNuggets. We got some fries. This probably happens once a year, right? Our sleep score definitely took a hit. But I was like, you know what? I ate really bad today, but I drank really clean filtered water all day. I didn't have any alcohol, had no pop or soda, and I breathed really clean air. So then for today, I just had to clean up the food. But when I'm. When every day, my like habits normally take a lot of willpower. I love when I could just do like. We're probably spending about $400 a month in filtered water here because we get the glass jugs from Mountain Valley Spring. We have ro. We have water softener. I feel amazing about my investment in clean water.

Yeah.

And you know, I have to pay for it just like everybody else. But wow, I feel it. Like, I don't feel like an expense like water cost money or air cost money or good food cost money or seeing a health professional cost money. I view it as investing in myself. So I put myself on my balance sheet. And every time I spend money on good water, good food, my value goes up in terms of my health as opposed to my, like, expenses going up.

I love that. Absolutely love that viewpoint. And so true. Also, your productivity goes up. Just saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if anybody's in a sales role or an entrepreneurial capacity or can get their job done in less times or wants to get a raise or a promotion when your sleep goes up. So by day, air is thinking fuel. It's literally the only I'm not eating or I'm drinking a little water right now, but I'm not eating anything. So the only thing fueling this conversation from keeping me alive is the air that I'm breathing. If there was no air in this room, we wouldn't be talking right now. Right. And at nighttime, air becomes your sleep fuel. So you're not drinking water, you're not eating food, you're not even getting sunlight at night. Literally, the only thing sustaining you, your sleep fuel, is your air. So when you go from like a low quality fuel all night long to high quality fuel, so now you're sleeping better, you're healing, you're recovering, and then all of a sudden it makes your ability to be more productive, have more energy, be more present with your kids, with your spouse. Yeah, just like energy. So background stuff. My background was in wildfire restoration, floods, mold, and hurricane cleanup. So not like your weren't the local guys that you could call to get us to come over and, you know, handle your kitchen, your little or your little flood. Nah, we were a traveling band, so we would go to wherever in the continent was the most destroyed. So recently the hurt, you know, Asheville, North Carolina and Florida got hit by some big hurricanes. So we would have been in those environments for like six months after handling heavy duty cleanup. Fort McMurray, Alberta, wildfires in Canada, California wildfires, tsunamis. Like, we would handle the worst of it. And when there's a. You don't realize it, but when you're handling bad fire damage, you're also doing floods and mold because homes get water bombed by planes. So you have a house which is now also totally flooded, also very structurally damaged, because when the water from a plane lands on your house, your whole structure, the house is bent. And then your house has been. I've seen fish on rooftops many times.

Because that is crazy. I never would have thought of that.

The plane grabs all the water from the lake and then drops it. So there's seaweed, there's fish. You'll find like a fish in someone's living room after a fire. Like, what the heck? How did you get here? And then mold, and then mold that wasn't intended to for weeks. So I would say I dealt with the gnarliest floods and mold after fires by dealing with water bombers. So just like stuff you'd never think about. Now I have also done at stages, a little bit of regular floods and fires and mold. So I'm very well versed in that too. And I also did air quality consulting for about eight years. So we were the Ones where if you were sick at home, chronically unwell, but you weren't sure, then you go on this camping trip, this hiking trip, this vacation, you feel awesome. You're like, I'm healed. I'm right. And then you go home and you're like, I'm tired again. My energy's low. And then you think you're like, oh, I just feel better on vacation. That might be slightly true, but people have this aha moment. Is my home making me sick. And we were the ones who would get that phone call and we'd go into your house, and we were like, the MRI for the home. We were looking for mold, for floods, the water quality, asbestos, lead, bacteria, like, anything that's toxic, voc, all of that. And then my job was to then give that family a plan on how do we go. It's like when you get your blood test from a regular doctor, it's like, we'll call you if you have cancer. Like, they don't call you. No one's striving for optimal. They're just driving for, like, and what they call normal. You're like, wait, 20 years ago, that was considered obese and diabetic. You're just shifting normal based on average. But if everybody's getting sick, you're calling everybody normal. So the exact same thing that I'm sure you see all the time, all day, every day.

Yeah.

Is the exact same for the house. So, like, what would be considered safe levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and mold? What are they considering safe? So one camp says there's no safe amount of ozone. The other camp is, like, constantly raising the threshold of what is normal based on what's average. And I whenever. When I was dating my wife 10 years ago, and she would say, I'm so weird. And I'm like, is that the opposite of normal? And is normal synonymous with average? Because if you call, you're saying weird, and I'm hearing the exceptional. So that's what I did. I was going into rough spots, and I got to see how sick people were after fires, how sick people were after floods, how busy doctors offices were exasperated. Autoimmune, asthma, respiratory stuff, all the stuff was worse. And then we were using these industrial commercial grade air purifiers called air scrubbers. The same thing we would use for a toxic mold cleanup or a big wildfire. Hotels, apartments, homes, like, heavy duty stuff. And each of those machines was like, equivalent to 10 or 20 little air purifiers.

Yeah.

But I remember some of my customers, after they moved back home. They unplugged them because they were loud and they were ugly. So these machines were amazing when it came to, like, cleaning the air. But the downside was they were super loud, they were super ugly. They weren't practical in an everyday house. On the flip side, all that stuff that you see at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Amazon, they're cheap and they're cute and they're small, but they're ineffective. And they're made from plastic, and they won't last very long. So I'm like, whoa, these little air purifiers are like golf carts or Honda Civics. These industrial things are like tractor trailers or pickup trucks. I'm like, where's the Yukon Denali at? Where's the luxury suv? I want to take my kids to school, want to bring my stuff. I want to look good while doing it. So I realized the market was missing this, like, middle ground air purifier that was going to be commercially inspired but beautiful and made for the modern home and people who would want the best there. So I did no market research at all. I just created the air purifier I wanted for my family, for my Wildfire customers. So it had to be effective. It had to be steel. It had to be beautiful. So, yeah, all that. That background doing restoration led me to. To want to be more proactive and less reactive. And now here we are, we get to talk about air.

I know, right? And I've heard you give the analogy. I want to circle back to, like, the little air purifiers, because a lot of people, I think, buy those. Like, they're cheap, they're readily available. You can pick them up at Costco or Best Buy. I've heard you give an analogy of trying to heat. The comparison of those to trying to heat a bathtub using a kettle and how little of an. In like a tea kettle, how little of impact they actually have. Give that analogy for people so that they can understand.

Yeah. So think about a kettle. You want to make a cup of tea. It's a perfect tool, beautiful tool. You want to use the French press. You want to make some tea. The kettle is a wonderful way to heat under half a liter of water. Awesome. Maybe even a liter. But the reason, if you ever tried, and I have tried to heat a bathtub with a kettle, the hot water tank wasn't working, and we want to use the bath. It doesn't work because the water is going to be cooling down faster than you can heat it up. You would think I'LL just fill it, dump it, fill it, dump it. No, you really can't. The water is cooling down at a rate that's faster than you can heat it up. So even though the kettle is theoretically an amazing water heating tool device, it's not designed to heat the bathtub. Similarly, the water heater that's heating your bathtubs and your showers couldn't heat your swimming pool. You know you need a different and the one that heats your pool couldn't heat the community pool. Know you need a different size tool based on the size of the job. So most little air purifiers, they are like kettles. So if you have like a teeny, teeny 8 by 8 room, like a tiny, tiny bedroom or a nursery, and you kept that air purifier running 24 hours a day on the loudest possible setting, then it will be very helpful. So like a teeny Air Purifier 299, a Little Levoid, a Shark, a Winix on full speed 24 hours a day with those little bright lights on. It does something where it falls apart. It does nothing on any speed less than full speed because it's just way too small. So then it's kind of loud and annoying. And you can't rely on any of the smart modes because you would have to be on full time all the time. And because the fan and motor are very cheap, it's not like a very pleasant, nice white noise, soothing sound. With Jasper we used all commercial grade parts, very high quality. It's called the Nidec DC brushless motor. So it's supposed to be like a very soothing. It's more of a high quality sound as opposed to like a cheap little computer fan. It's a high end motor so it can be silent in your bedroom and still move a lot of air. Or if you like a little bit of white noise, you can turn it up to fan speed too and have it operating like that. And the reason that it's also we made it so aesthetic, going back to the kettle analogy, can go to Walmart and buy a $19 kettle. It'll probably be black plastic. I'm sure you can picture it right now, big switch on the side, you know it's plugged into the wall. It may or may not have that little base thing, but a it's going to have plastics in it and now you're heating a bunch of plastics at high heat and it's going to look horrible. So every time you're done using the kettle, you shove it in a drawer or, you know, there's a kettle for 70, 80, 90, maybe $100. Maybe, maybe it's Restoration Hardware or West Elm or probably still, Amazon still. And it's going to be glass or it's going to be black metal and it's going to actually look quite beautiful on your countertop. And you're not going to hide it every time that you use it because like it's functional decor. It's something that, right, it looks like art. And it's also effective. So I always explain, like you can make a DIY air purifier for $200 that's better than almost every air purifier at Walmart. So and often I encourage people that are on like a really low budget. DIY air purifiers are very good. There's one called the Corey Rosenthal box. It's pretty effective. I'm actually working on a new DIY model myself that people will be able to make for even cheaper. The downsides are it won't have a modular fan, so you're going to have to run it on full speed all the time. So it's going to be a little louder, it's going to be a little.

Uglier, but like a lot uglier than a Jasper. I can vouch for that.

A lot uglier. A lot uglier. So. But I would rather people get something that's effective even if it's ugly, then does nothing for you. Totally. And much rather that. And you know, there's also some effective air purifiers that are 5 and $600 that are pretty big and loud and they look like they belong in space station, but. So they're loud and they're ugly, but they're not effective. Where Jasper was designed for was somebody who wanted a machine that was really effective and beautiful and quiet and just has a filter twice a year. So it's like it's not for everybody. And I really like to like last thing I would want is someone to think clean air is prohibitively expensive. It's not. It's if you want something that's kind of headache free, maintenance free, and looks beautiful, that's sort of where we come in. Because that's what I wanted for my family, my friends and my customers. So I heard this quote by a singer named Mike Posner. He's had some really famous songs and he said whenever he would try to make a hit song, he made a song that he hated it and so did everybody else. So he said when he tried to make a song that he loved that was creatively fulfilling, a song that he loved. Once in a while the whole world agreed. So the vision for Jasper is like has this restoration mold guy who still wants a well designed home. I'm just going to make what I really want and some percentage of people out there will want the same thing. That's what Jasper really is.

And that's enough for you? Yeah, I love it. And tell me like when we think about like indoor air quality and what are the things that we aren't aware of that either A, release out toxic compounds that we're inhaling or B, just like ones that we should be aware of or things that we're doing that could produce them.

Great question. So I'll set the table with outdoor pollution and indoor pollution. Okay. And then I'll give you guys some free tips that you can do to implement some of those things right away. So outdoor pollution is pollution. It's cars, it's restaurants, it's factories, it's the person using bounce sheets in your neighborhood and or using toxic stuff in their home. And it's the rubber from the tires and the cars and it's the glyphosate on your neighbor's yard and it's three blocks away, someone's doing a renovation and the contractors cutting two by fours or they're sealing their driveway or there's road construction happening 12 blocks away. Like even if it happens a mile away, it's still an air pollution problem and it's still impacting you. Your home is not separate from the outside air. Then in the indoor environment we have all those outdoor pollutants in our house also allergens, pollen and mold and cedar, all that. Now inside we also have mold from leaks and high humidity. But then we have cooking. The biggest indoor air pollution thing by far is cooking. We have cleaning products, we have Lysol, we have Clorox, we have hairsprays, we have the poop from our diapers, you know, our baby's diaper. We have fire retardants and PFAS from all of our and VOCs from furnitures, carpets, coffee tables, nightstands. You have formaldehyde in your bed. You have the paint. Even if it's low VOC paint, there's still chemicals that allowed that paint to bond and adhere to that wall. There's candles, there's incense, there's sage, there's pans, there's cooking oils, there's pets, there's cat litter, there's pet dander. So it's really overwhelming. And like you said earlier, we spend over 95% of our time indoors. Now, the world's best air purifier is nature. It's the UV light from the sun, it's the rain, it's the wind, it's the trees. They have filtration systems, their barks. When you hear about trees cleaning the air, it's actually their bark that works as a filter. Really, Just the way your HEPA filter has all the pleats. The bark is actually an incredible. So it's bringing in all the air and the bark actually acts as a air filtration system, similar to the way that a regular filter does. So the best air purifier of all time is nature. Unfortunately, most of our homes, we left all that shit outside. So we have our homes that are like little Tupperware boxes. We have all of our outdoor pollutants, we have the indoor pollutants. We spend 95% of the time indoors, which is a curse and a blessing. It's a curse because that's way too much time inside. It's a blessing because we have this one environment that we can make our healthy, clean air, clean water, good lighting, sanctuary for, not very expensive. And we'll get into the specific toxins. But there's a. Have you ever heard of a term called zucosis?

No.

Well, I'm going to make it a thing. So the cosis is what happens to animals. It's specifically focusing on their mental health, but it's really the whole animal zucosis. It's like psychosis, but it's what happens to animals in captivity. So the average elephant in the zoo only live 17 years. The average elephant in the wild lives 55 years. Dolphins in the wild swim 100 miles a day. Dolphins in captivity don't swim at all. Whether you look at the monkeys, the birds, the primates, the reptiles, all of it, animals in captivity are struggling. They're dealing with dementia, anxiety, cancer, depression, banging their heads against the wall, autoimmune, chronic inflammation. I'm like, sounds a little bit like us, right? So if you think about it, I call the subdivisions the zoos, and our homes are the cages, or your apartment building is the zoo and your apartment is the cage. So we're spending 95% of the time indoors. All the same stuff that happens to animals in captivities is happening to us too. And we're trying to blame it all on the food, and I think the food is a part of it. But I honestly think if you were eating this your same toxic diet, and you are living in amongst the trees, in the nature, you'd be doing a lot better. And the average prisoner in maximum security prison gets an hour or two every day outside for fresh air and sunlight, which means humans are actually closer to the zoo animals, literally. Prisoners in prisons get more fresh air and community and sunlight than the average American or Canadian. And to me, that's wild. And I share that in conjunction with all the stuff that's in our home. Because everybody's worrying about, you know, they have the big food budget, the water budget, and then you're busy, you're mopping, you're vacuuming, you're cleaning your surfaces, you're dusting. This is the same as if you had a fish tank at home. And every day you'd scrub the glass bowl of the fish tank. But you never filter the water or change the water or if you have a swimming pool, it's like you have to have a filter system for your pool and pumps. You can't just scrub the side of the pool every day. So here we are in our homes with very polluted water or air, in our case. We're adding tons of chemicals to our little fishbowl, we're scrubbing the perimeters with more chemicals, but we're doing nothing to ensure the water or air in our little fishbowls and clean. So I like to give that whole perspective of how we're living, what's going on, and how much of that is from our modern lifestyle inside.

Right. And it's like the other thing that's happening simultaneously as we're kind of devolving into this era of spending all of our time inside is we are making houses more energy efficient and sealing them up and closing them in so they can't breathe. I remember. So Mike came over to my house to install my Jasper himself, like the amazing human that he is, and he did some testing on my house and he's like, you know what? Your house breathes pretty well. Like, you don't have a ton of. I think it was carbon dioxide. Was it? Yeah, in my house. And I'm like, oh, is that because I have all these plants? He's like, no, it's because. Yeah, it's because your house is old and it actually can breathe. And I think people are so excited about these new homes and energy efficiency, which is comes with a slew of obviously benefits, but also were locking all of the toxins inside the big deal.

So when I was doing air quality consulting for a decade, as common as any other reason, we get a call with people who are sick from their new home. New homesickness. So, wow.

There's a term called new home sickness.

Well, that's what I call it because, wow, it's a big deal. Think about that new car smell. You think it's a good smell because you've associated it with the sensation of luxury. So you're excited. It's the leather, first of all. Not just that. They intentionally make it a very fragrant experience. They're not dumb. They want you to have a smell associated with new car. So they don't let any of the materials off gas. It's off gassing into your lungs. Same thing with the home. When I was doing mold restoration and floods and fires and toxic cleanup, we were trained, when we got certified, to spray lemon deodorizer around the whole home on all the carpets, like this big pump bottle. News flash, there's no lemons and lemon deodorant. Not one lemon. Because we were taught if it smells clean, it must be clean. So this is why all the cleaning products, you see, the shampoos, the hairspray, the air fresheners, everything is fragrant because that way people think when the cleaning lady leaves, the maid is done. It's smelling fresh. She must have done a great job today.

Everything's clean.

Yeah. Because it smells clean. We've trained ourselves to think that clean actually smells like neutral. I should smell like. Nothing totally clean should smell like you're on a camping trip. Maybe some pine, maybe some dirt. That's clean. It's the electrified air after a rainstorm that's clean. It's all been washed away. Clean is not chemical. Fragrances. Yeah. So everybody sort of trapped in these homes tons of fragrances, tons of chemicals. And yet we were trained to add more fragrances to further create that smell for people. So in a new home, first of all, yes, it's tightly sealed. Since the 70s, we've been optimizing for energy efficiency. And. But the problem is energy efficiency comes at the cost of environmental health. Yeah. Because you are living in a tight little box. And most of the materials in your home. Let's say you buy a new couch. Got a new couch. So, yes, it has fire retardants. Yes. It has coatings and all that chemical stuff, stuff to make adhesives, all that. That is made in a factory. And then the day that that couch is done being made in the factory, it's instantly sealed into an airtight container. It's then shipped to some warehouse. You know, so it's probably made in China. Then it will ship to America, it'll be on a boat for a month. And they ship it in the airtight stuff so it's not capturing new odors and getting dirty makes sense. But then it's going to sit in a warehouse. Then you're going to go online or go to the store and buy it. It will ship to you in two or three months. But it only sits in the warehouse for a little bit. But it's been airtight wrapped the moment it's been packaged. So the entire off gassing process happens in your home. It doesn't like, it doesn't get the manufacturing doesn't happen. And then they, they set it outside for it to breathe.

Right.

So every time, you know, you're buying that crib for your baby, you're buying setting up that new nursery, you're getting that new carpet, that table, that couch, that whatever, all of that initial off gassing is happening in your home.

Then the, the other thing too after that, right. Is so it off gases and then the pollutants that are let free in our home then get absorbed by our furniture too. So it's like this cycle, right. And then they're re released and then we rebreath them and.

The whole thing. So yeah, you have all the off gassing, the VOCs, etc, and then yeah, they're trapped. So anything that's porous, as a general rule, anything that can get wet from water can absorb air. So shirt I'm wearing, it can absorb water. It could get wet. It could also really take on the smell of smoke.

Right.

Whereas let's say like a piece of metal or your granite countertop, if you pour water on it, you could just wipe it right off. Right. So it's not going to absorb air either. Now where there's tricky stuff, I only learned this for from Wildfire Restoration. A lot of furniture, like tables or IKEA stuff, the top is sealed and coated, but the bottom is mdf. It's rough. So I learned this. So when we were doing restoration, the restoration, the insurance would be like, yeah, you could keep that table. Yeah. But if that bottom wasn't sealed and it was MDF particle board, it's absorbed when it would be garbage. And even your doors, often your whole door is like sealed with white paint. But if you rub the top of your door, it's unsealed. So that would be garbage after a wildfire or mold event because they absorb stuff. So yeah, you have this and then you're cooking so anything that's a. Carpets, insulation, couches, bedding, pillows, fabrics, they absorb everything. So in the new homes, you have all of the stuff. The new furniture, the new paint, the drywalls, the roofing materials, all of that is. Is there. So if somebody is moving into a home and they have the chance to let the windows sit open for several weeks before they move in, even after they move in. Like, if someone's building a new home, if they can move in in, like, spring or fall, or if they're in a temperate climate and just, like, let that house breathe a ton for the first month or so, or if baby's nursery, you're getting that done. First of all, I always recommend getting an old crib, a secondhand crib, or a nightstand so the off gassing is already done.

Yeah.

But if not, get baby's paint room painted five or six months and then leave the nursery door shut with the windows open as much as you can so the paint and the crib and the furniture can off gas. Last thing you want to do for baby. Baby's been in the womb nine months. Take baby out of the womb, put it in a bedroom, trap it in with VOCs, bunch of mold, poopy diapers. Like, come on, guys, what are we doing here?

Right? So this kind of bleeds into the conversation of, tell me, like, tips and tricks that people can do.

Yes.

At home now, because those were like, like some great ones, but tell us some more.

Okay, we'll start from the baby's nursery. I have young daughters, so that one's always top of mind. But do not use a diaper pail. That's number one. Do not use a diaper pail. If you are using a diaper pail, those are for pee diapers only. And you should be taking them out very, very often, because if it smells like poop, it is poop. Pretty simple rule, right? If it smells like asphalt, it is asphalt. It smells like garbage. It's garbage. Go back to trusting your senses. If it smells like sunscreen, it's sunscreen. Like, when you see someone doing a thing that smells, it's not that it smells like that thing. It's you're putting that thing in your body via your nose. That's what smelling is. Like, if you're smelling steak, you're inhaling it. And, like, just because you can eat something and your digestive system can break it down doesn't mean your respiratory system, it doesn't have all the features of your gut to break things down. So your smell when something smells bad or toxic, is your body saying, please remove me from the situation. I made this smell not very good for you for a reason. And then so in the poopy diapers outside, I wish I could tell you Jasper is the. Is the solution. It's not. Not having poo in the diaper is the solution. We dealt with that with our family. We had that going on for a little bit. But I think every family that wants to keep poopy diapers in the bedroom has a rite of passage. But the diaper pail in your bedroom tonight and see how you feel. See what it's like sleeping in a shipbox.

Have you tested the air, like with poopy diapers?

Oh, yeah, of course. It's bacteria.

Wow.

Well, how could there not be? Right? Yeah. If we do like a bacteria culture in a baby's room, it's an infested environment. There's poop there. Of course it's nasty. In 2025, we're gonna have a whole content arm all around, like showing these studies in real time, all the time. Yeah. But yeah, the bacteria cultures in a bedroom are profound. Yeah. Jasper helped with the bacteria part a lot. But it won't help with the poopy smell. That's just. That's a powerful force.

Yeah.

So that's number one. Baby stuff. Don't wear shoes inside. If you do, do a quick vacuum, a quick swiffer, quick mop if you can. Like if the contractors coming over, shoes get worn. But ideally, like have a big sign. Big sign. And in Texas, where I live now, everybody wears shoes in people's homes. It is normal. So we have an ever increasing size sign in the front that's like, please leave your shoes at the door. And we. And it started small and the sign keeps getting bigger. And it's funny, I actually have a friend, you might know her, Molly Eastman.

Sounds familiar.

She's in Austin. She's like A Sleep is a skill is the name of her podcast. And when I went to visit her apartment in Austin, there's a mat, like a shoe mat outside in the hallway at the person across from her in the hall that says, please leave your shoes at the door. And then on their door, it's like what they said and pointing across the hallway. It's just really cool. I like that. I love it. So no shoes inside. And then improving, like some of the store stuff, you know, using the branch basics for cleaning or using vinegar and water, using less lower toxic or no toxic hair products, skin products. Don't Use sunscreen inside. Don't use aerosol sunscreen anywhere. Don't use the recirculate mode in your car unless you're using it for two seconds to go through a dirty area. This carbon dioxide detector that I'm holding right here, it's 550. Outside air is 400. If I put this in my car and I turn on recirculation mode, it's going to be over 3,000 in under two minutes. So why do you think you're so tired on that long road trip and you're like, I need to open the door. I need to open my window and get some cold air? It's not the cold air. You are choking on carbon dioxide and your body is begging you for some fresh air. So carbon dioxide is a big one. The range hood over your stove. I can't remember if we tested yours. We probably.

You did. Mine is a recirculator. And you're like, mccall, that's horrible. It just recirculates.

Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. Those are like, a few areas that are like, so worth it. It's not going to be for a very long time because I'm really focused on what we're doing now at Jasper. But eventually I will create a new range hood, a new vent for above the stove. So that way you won't even need a Jasper in your main living room at all. So how crazy is this? You need to turn your range hood on when you cook.

Right.

Why doesn't it have a sensor just like Jasper? So as soon as you start cooking, it automatically turns on. And if you're just cooking a little asparagus, the light will be maybe yellow and the fan speed will be on mildly. But if you're cooking bacon or steak, it's going to go red and it's going to be dumping air. And so we're going to eventually make a way better range hood. That actually makes sense. We're going to make better bathroom fans, too.

I love you don't have to turn.

The bathroom fan on when you shower. It's going to just have a humidity sensor in there. And if the carbon dioxide is high or the humidity is high, will turn on. If it's not, it will turn off. And they'll probably run for like five minutes every two hours just to do a little bit of an air exchange in your home.

Yeah.

So if you have a tight home, but you don't have some fancy air exchange system, you don't need one. So with all that said, do A tissue test. Make sure your bathroom, make sure your bathroom fan and your, your stove range hood vent are actually venting. And then make sure they vent outside. Not into the counter, not into the cabinet above, not into the attic, but actually outside. If they're not pulling a tissue, they're not working. Also, cleaning those once a year is a good idea. If you are boiling something or doing a stew. Use the back burners, not the front burner. Because the range hood captures a lot more whether it's the gas or the particulate from cooking. The front burner is really only like half under the range hood, whereas the one in the back is like entirely under it. So the vent works way better for the back one. When you're done showering and you leave your bathroom fan on, ideally for two hours, close the bathroom door so the humidity can be dumped out and not, you know, filtered. If you open in the door, you're just kind of dumping the humidity everywhere. It's kind of like using that front burner on the range hood. Those are the big ones. If you have a dog, brush it more than you think you should because your dog is basically a blanket. Would you ever take a blanket, go outside, rub it on the glyphosate filled grass, rub it on the tree, rub it on the pollen, rub it on a dog's butt, then come home and shake it out on your bed. You would not do that if you have a dog that's going outside. That's what's happening every day, cleaning the pods. Because you know, 95% of people are shoes. You just generally test 95% of shoes. There's fecal matter on there, there's poop on your shoes. Your dog's paws are no different. So a little bit more hygiene for outdoor pets. You shouldn't wear your shoes inside, which means you should also give those paws just a quick wipe down before you enter the home. So the source is important. And then of course, filtering your air. And then it's. I'm the air guy, so I stay in my lane. But I believe a whole home water filtration system is a no brainer. If you have hard water, a water softener, but if you're using reverse osmosis, this is horrible. Drinking water. It is horrible, literally. And I use kids. I think kids have the best, like deep intuition for stuff. So we went down, we were on the rabbit hole of drinking like La Croix and Waterloo and bubbly and Olipop and Poppy, all these like flavored carbonated waters and stuff. And I Just like was never drawn to reverse osmosis. It was like a chore to drink it. Well, since it's like dead water, they strip out everything. Since we got really good spring water delivered, we only realized a month later the kids stopped asking for juice. We stopped drinking and buying the olipops. And we're all crushing like a few liters of water or gallon of water a day. So the ro and the whole home stuff is amazing for showering your skin, your hair, your bath. Because you're not gonna have chlorinated shower water. You're not dumping all that chlorine in your air. But for actual drinking water, the spring water can't be beat. So I'm not a fan of remineralizing water. It's a thing you can do, but I'm like, why would I take. It's like we had perfect water from the ground. The city just fills it with chemicals because they have to, because otherwise would make you sick. So they remove the bacteria and replace it with chlorine. Then I have to strip all the chlorine out. Then I have to add back some stuff. I just don't want my water that doctored that I'm drinking. So if I can get it from a spring, I feel good about that. And then the other huge one. And it was so polarizing for me. Two days ago we're trick or treating. I have these wonderful neighbors, Bob and Joyce. They're in their 80s. Our whole street is young families and they're like the grandparents of the street. And you know, we're walking in Austin's like a dark sky preserve. Where I live there's no street lights and most people's homes are dark.

Yeah.

But I'm walking by Bob and Joyce's house. It's nine o'clock at night and it looked like a zoo. Literally bright fluorescent lights. So you walk by like it felt like they were living in this artificial cage. You know, I see the trees, I see the moon, I see the dark night sky. And then they're at their like kitchen counter, windows open, like on display. Bright lights like they were a friggin bracelet out of a store at a department store. Just this bright light shine and there's like really polarizing. You're like, wow, we all, everyone does that. So we've been on a war path year and I used to be extreme. Replacing all of our bulbs, getting red lights and timers and replacing the fluorescence. Honestly didn't need it. All we really needed was a couple lamps in each room and we just don't use overhead lights at night.

Right. And that is so triggering for me. Like I immediately, if my husband has our overhead light on in the bedroom, I'm like, how can you live like this? This crazy.

I heard it was a huberman thing a while back. But just turning on the light in your bathroom for one minute to use the bathroom at night can affect your sleep for up to a week. Wow. Well, it makes sense. It's like you weren't meant. It's like imagine it was three, like back in the day. Other than like the only light you'd see at night was a candle or a fire. All red, red hues. And you probably wouldn't even see it much at night except for the little candle. And then you just blasted yourself with daylight in the middle of the night. So your body is like, what did you just do? So just because it's a minute, you really shocked your system here. So it's like, it's like, I think that's real for me. A bright light at night, like it hits like trauma for me.

Like it's a. I feel it. And it's funny. Like other people don't feel it. I don't know if they're not tuned in or they're just not sensitive to it, but that is like, I'm so sensitive to that.

And once you start drinking filtered water, if you go get tap water at a restaurant, it tastes like chlorine. Once you start using non toxic products on your skin and your hair, you start. And I don't do tell people. There's one really big downside about buying a Jasper. So there's one bad downside. It turns you into an air snob. Right?

Right.

It really will. All of a sudden you go to your friend's house, your family's house, the mall. Maybe before it was just Bath and Body Works and Lush. That were nauseating.

Yeah.

Now the whole mall, now you're gonna smell speed stick on someone 10ft away. When you all of a sudden start using cleaner products on your body and breathing cleaner air at home. People's normal air.

Yeah.

Doesn't feel so normal for you anymore.

It happens with literally my 10 year old daughter, like we are Jasper, obviously. And like she will go somewhere, she will smell something and be like, I can't even take it. It's like a parenting moment of pride. I'm like, yes, we've established this so early on. I want to tie in this conversation a little bit in two ways to thyroid hormones. That I thought was fascinating. And just like some studies that I found. So one was pretty interesting in Italy, and it looks at the rates of autoimmune diseases, including Hashimoto's and arthritis, and, and found a 12% increase for autoimmune disease with every 10, I think it's nanograms per meter increase in what's called PM10 exposure. So like direct correlation, and then that's not a, that's not a 12% increase overall. It's. For every amount of that exposure, it increases an additional 12%, which I thought was fascinating.

So do you know what particles are PM10 at all?

No, tell me. I would love to know.

So, yeah, PM10 could be things from a construction site, could be unpaved roads, it could be industrial emissions. However, it also includes death, pollen and mold spores.

Wow. So stuff that we're exposed to every day.

Exactly. Now, the nice thing about PM10 is it's. It enters our upper respiratory tract. Bad part, the good part is it's too large to enter your bloodstream. So it's still very harmful. No doubt. PM 2.5.

Yeah, I did a lot of reading on that too.

And you know, PM 2.5 is smaller than. It's 30 times smaller than a human hair. So this could be your vehicle exhaust, your wood burning chemicals, wildfires, things like that. And these are tough because they go deep into the lung stream, lungs and then bloodstream. And the funny thing is, the bad thing about them is. So they're more harmful than PM10 because of their small size and their ability to reach deep into lung tissues. Yeah, but they're too big. So stuff like PM 0.3 is so small that you're breathing it out. So PM 2.5 is that sneaky little size. Yeah, that's small enough to get in, but too big to get out.

Yeah. I found a study on that in JAMA that correlates it with cognitive decline and dementia. PM 2.5, which was fascinating, like, and.

I mean, it makes sense. Right? Right.

And isn't one of the earlier symptoms of like, exposure, like brain fog, kind of cognitive, Lower cognitive function. And then you think about that, that's like the warning sign. And then long term, literally, it can cause dementia.

Yeah. So the short respiratory stuff could be coughing, throat irritation, brain stuff, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, lightheadedness, runnier, stuffy nose, increased phlegm production, shortness of breath. But it's interesting, it's kind of like a car. You know, if you buy a car, you know, when you go to the gas station, there's the 87. They got the 91. Sometimes they even have the 93 or the 94. And some cars like just take the regular fuel, it's fine then a high performing car, and I'm trying to be a high performing human right, wants the best fuel it can. And what are the symptoms of bad fuel in your engine? If you have your Corvette or Ferrari and you put the cheap gas in it so that the car won't start, it will start, but the engine is going to run less efficiently, it's going to have less miles per gallon, it's going to have less energy, it's going to maybe not sound as nice. The fuel won't burn as clean over time. It's going to do damage to the engine. So it's your air is your ultimate fuel source. And like you can feel a long fast without food and a pretty long fast with minimal water too. Try air. Fasting won't go very good.

So it's the one thing we can't fast from for sure. One other thyroid study that I thought was pretty cool was PM10 and it said women that were exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide in particulate matter, particularly PM10, exhibited lower levels of thyroid hormone production. So free T3, which is what I preach all day long, and free T4. So literally these chemicals are taking your thyroid hormone secretion and they are reducing them in real time, which again, fascinating. And like if we put so much effort into how we eat and how we exercise and all these things in relation to thyroid and Hashimoto's et cetera, it's the air that we're breathing all day, every day that may be this huge missing piece that even me as like a clinician needs to put more emphasis on.

You know, it starts with us. So on the, on the woman's health and thyroid health piece, it's also we breathe in a lot of heavy metals as well and heavy metals are a big problem. So in some of my notes here talks about how air quality and thyroid health, especially for women, it's because of the thyroid glands sensitivity to environmental pollutants. So a few of the big things is you have your hormone, your hormone disruption. Heavy metals, mercury, lead and mercury is, is happening from wildfires, it's happening from the decaying of rocks, it's just everywhere. Then you have your autoimmune thyroid conditions, metabolic health and weight. Because PM2.5 exposure is linked to thyroid hormones which can slow down your metabolism as well as, you know, good thyroid health being essential fertility and pregnancy and Fetal development. So then that gets massively impacted. And then. Yeah, just generally if you have. Because of the thyroids and obviously I'm not a health and body expert. I only know the stuff from the layer of, from air. I don't get to see that side of it firsthand. But I understand that if thyroid health is incredibly linked, you know, it's very sensitive to environmental health. So if we have a ton of pollutants overwhelming our ability's body to heal. So I call sleep healing time. I found sleep to be a negative word in the, in the house. My kids are not excited to go to sleep, right? I'm not excited. It feel. I'm like, I like life, I like day, I like energy sleep. Sounds like I'm hitting the off button. It kind of has a negative connotation to it.

Yeah.

Whereas healing time is like, yeah, let's go. It's like a sauna, it's like a cold plunge. I'm doing my eight hour wellness routine. I'm going to go do some healing now. If you're sick, you don't usually heal during the day. The next day you're like, I hope I healed last night. So if sleep is healing time and if the only fuel for your sleep is air, that's why I call air healing fuel and sleep fuel. And if the average bedroom has about a million to 2 million particles floating around between 0.3 and 10 microns, if we start filtering our air in that bedroom, we reduce the pollutant load by 95%. So yeah, there's a. And our human body. In every hotel I go to, I test the air and I make videos. I can, I usually go from 1.7 million particles to about 200,000 in the first 20 minutes.

Wow.

So it's instant. And now our body, because your body is playing defense, you can handle pollen, allergens, mold, you're good a couple hours a day. When you go outside, when you go for a walk, it's the 24 hour beatdown. It's like we can handle like work stress, we can handle life stress, but when it rains, it pours. And when it's 24 hours a day, so you're at night trying to have your healing time, but you're breathing in mold and allergens and pollen and toxins and smoke. So your body's like, yo, can you leave me alone? So I can enter healing time because it's playing defense. And then if it's playing defense to keep all those foreign toxins out, it can't actually do its healing process. And if you keep all the other stuff out, you heal. Then guess what? During the day you can handle a little pollen, a little smoke, a little mold, a little bright lights at the office. You're not that sensitive. Like we're robust, tough human beings. It's the 24 hour beat down that, that really wears on us.

And right. And if we're going to be in one place for eight hours doing nothing and can literally let our Jasper do its thing and reduce the overall burden so darn much. It's an easy way. Some impact.

It's so cheap, clean air. So $1,000 air purifier, expensive. A $10,000 water filtration system, expensive. However, let's. You could own that water filtration system for 10 years. So we're looking at $3 a day for right? Whole home, clean, filtered air, filtered water, let's say $1,000 air purifier, expensive. But let's say $2,600 with all the discounts and bundles gets you four Jaspers or a little over 2,000 gets you three. So for under three grand you got four Jaspers. So now you have a whole home air filtration system. Even with your filters, you know, you're talking three or $4 a day. So you're talking for, for under $10 a day, which is like a Starbucks. You can't even get a subway sub for $10.

You can't get a Starbucks for $10 at this point.

The cake pops are four bucks now, right? So McDonald's is like $50, like it's crazy. So, so we're talking $10 a day. And when you got a lifetime warranty, so for $10 a day and you could even get some for, you know, a thousand dollars, you could probably put a couple good lamps in almost every room. So you know, to get your whole home set up with clean, clean air, clean water, clean lighting is maybe about $10,000. And then we're looking at under $10 a day forever. To have my house be air and water sanctuary, right. I used to think about air purifier and filtered water is very expensive. It took me a long time to pull the trigger. Also when I realized I'm like, whoa, a ten thousand dollar mortgage in my home, it's like I was gonna drop 20 grand on a bathroom renovation when my bathroom worked just fine, right. To have a prettier vanity for some Instagram pictures. And so I feel better. It's like, whoa, for less than a price of one bathroom Renault, My whole family's gonna have clean water and clean air. So it really took a shift for me. My first 50 podcasts I did, I never even told the world Jasper existed. I didn't even mention it one time because it felt expensive and it felt bad to tell people about solutions. And then once I invested in my own water and I started to buy Primally care skin products and buy better cleaning products, you know, I have to pay for all the other stuff too. And I'm like, honestly, when I, my money's going to go somewhere and I would rather go into clean air, clean water, clean food than crappy food and Starbucks and sugar. And when I just took, and I looked at what I was spending in a year and I just, I took budgets from the bad stuff to the good stuff. And when those four, four glass jugs of water show up every two weeks, I feel amazing.

Right? Yeah. And I think, again, like in this conversation, I think air has been left out of the conversation of improving your health and your health span too much. Like, when clearly it is a, even the most important aspect of this and myself personally, but also professionally being guilty of, you know, neglecting it too much as well. So I am so glad we had this conversation.

You are, you breathe.

You are what? You breathe. Yeah. And we breathed all darn day. So let's make it good.

Breathe in stress. You will feel stress if you have. That's why breath work is so effective. Just hearing someone go ah relaxes everybody in the room. And what is what made that sound? It's just air. So, yeah. Do you know what day this comes out?

I don't, but I can plan it accordingly however you want.

So what I've done for your audience today, and just so you know, at Jasper, you cannot find us at Best Buy or Walmart or Home Depot or Amazon. And there's a couple reasons why. Number one, we'd have no control out of giving people discounts. We would not be able to speak to a health conscious audience. And if Jasper is gonna, if we're gonna raise air consciousness and raise air awareness, we need the early adopters to clean air to be people who understand health and know how to educate their friends, their cousins, their family and get the word out. Also, because of the way our lifetime warranty works, I'm very proud of it. By the way, if someone has a Jasper that breaks after four months or four years or eight years, it doesn't matter, we ship you a new Jasper the next day, you take the new Jasper out of the box. You put the old Jasper back in the box, give you a prepaid UPS shipping label and we schedule UPS to come to your front porch and pick it up. So I hate when I have a product with a warranty. I have to have some crazy do I have the box and do you.

Have the paper receipt?

I do not hoard boxes. I did not print out the receipt. If I kept the box for everything I owned, my house would just be a hoarder house. I don't have the box and then they want me to do videos and photos and sit on hold the customer service for half an hour. Even iPhone. It was a great warranty. They pre authorized my credit cards like $1500. So we don't pre off credit cards, we just send you a new one. We prepay the shipping, we book them to come to your house. I don't like having to go to FedEx and wasting half a day to return a product and then a month later maybe the new one shows up and the shipping costs as much as the thing. So our belief is if someone's Jasper breaks, if your Jasper breaks, that's our fault. That's not your fault. It shouldn't break. That's why we can afford to have a lifetime warranty. So I'm very proud of that. So what we've done as a product. Why does most air purifiers have a one year warranty? If you think about it, no company wants to have a one year warranty. They would sell way more if they had a 3 or a 5 or a 10 year warranty. It's because they literally think their product is going to break after a year. They have no confidence. It's called planned obsolescence. Most companies are making products where you'll have to replace it every two or three years instead of just making something so good that people will use for a lifetime. So we've built Jasper the last 30 years, so we're expecting we're going to have to replace everybody's every 20 to 30 years. So if you buy it for your kids nursery now they're going to take it to college and or they put it in their kids nursery. So what we're gonna do, this episode comes out today, November 11th and has an early Black Friday because we're going to be sold out like months, right? Real Black Friday.

We actually had to wait to have this podcast so that you weren't sold out because you had been sold out for so long.

And we might be a little sold out when the podcast comes out today. November 11th.

Right.

But it'll be like two or three weeks. It'll be something reasonable. But this is the biggest offer we've ever had ever at Jasper. So it's $400 off is the code. And it's just even if you buy one, it's 400 off. If people are buying two or three or four, they save bigger discounts the more that they buy. So 2 is an additional 200, 3 is an additional 450 and 4 is an additional 800. So the savings get huge and then the filter is changed twice a year. But basically, and that includes your lifetime warranty. So basically, for a little over a dollar a day, once you've invested in just for once, you get clean air for life. So starting today, November 11th until November 18th, it's a one week offer for your most loyal listeners. So code McCall MCC A L L. Code to McCall MCC A L L is $400 off at our website, Jasper co. And that's no E. So it's J A S P R dot co. And as mentioned, guys, opening your windows when you cook, use the vents, keep your shoes at the door. Try to get better products. Consider lamps instead of overhead lighting at night, look at filtering your water. Something is better than nothing. There's a lot of options out there. So at the very least, I hope that your air awareness and air consciousness grew a little bit today. But for anybody out there who's like, you know what this is? I want Jasper, I want an air purifier. That's beautiful. Today's the day. This is the week. Code McCall is $400 off from today, November 11th until November 18th. So I hope more than anything you guys learned something. But if this offer helps, even better, I love it.

I'm actually going to go buy more for my own house. So thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for creating this product which truly is so impactful in health for thyroid people and beyond. And yeah, I appreciate your time. I'm excited to share your message.

Thank you for helping. I could not do it without you.