The Shocking Truth About Indoor Air Quality and Your Health

The quality of our air that we're breathing, how much does it affect our health? How much does it affect our sleep? Can it help us contribute to slowing down the aging process? What about how we feel? How important is this? And if we are in not optimal quality air, can we change this, especially in our homes? I can't wait to dive into this midlife conversation today because I've got Mike here. He's the founder of Jasper Air Filter, the new filter that I have in my house. I have two of them now, and I have so many, many questions for him because I don't think I fully understood the implications, the effects that we have in our own home with the air that we breathe. Thank you so much for being here today, Mike.

Thanks for having me.

So I've got a lot of questions I want to start with. How did you get into the air filter business? How did you get into building an air filter?

I got into the air quality slash air filtration business after years of being in the wildfire, restoration, flood, and hurricane business. So California wildfires, Hurricane Harvey in Houston, things like that, big catastrophic events. Me and my team would go there, mobilize and restore toxic buildings after toxic disasters. So it was very evident that the air quality after these disasters was very, very poor. And people were really, really sick after natural disasters.

So when you say really sick, we hear. You hear people like cough, coughing, and respiratory stuff. What. What is that actually that's happening to them?

So. So, like, everything got exasperated. So if someone had asthma, their asthma attacks were bad. If they had allergies, their allergies were bad. Autoimmune stuff flared up. It was just a huge toxin load all at once. So it's not just like tree wildfire smoke. It's everything from the building, the buildings that were burnt, the cars that were burnt, things like that. So it depends on the person, but basically everything was just exasperated. So after a wildfire, it's not just the. The tree smoke that you think about. It's the. Everything in the entire city just gets absolutely burnt. So that's kind of the big problem. And, yeah, fl, mold, fire, etc. So I got to see firsthand what people were going through, and then we would. So there's one story about a lady named Tanya, and we restored her home. And then a week after we restored their home and they moved back home. And by the way, this city called Fort McMurray was evacuated for a month, so it was the entire City. About 5,000 homes were lost. And when they came back home, it was fine. And then almost a week later they gave me a call that their baby was in the hospital. And I'm like, what do you mean, what's going on? You know, before we clear a family to come home, we have to do extensive testing. We went back and we tested again and the house was very contaminated again. And the reason that is because even though we clean the indoor environment, the outdoor air can stay bad for a few months after a wildfire. It's in the dust, it's in the soil, it's in the water. Also there's a lot of homes that are burnt down that they're big piles of ash, so the wind is still blowing that ash around. So their house got recontaminated and the insurance company basically said like, so sad, too bad, you know, we're not going to reclean the house again. So what we did is we left a few of our giant industrial air scrubbers there. These are like commercial grade air purifiers and within a few hours the air quality was good again. So then the family was able to move back home and I left them there for a couple months and this kept happening. We were actually kind of running out of equipment because if we were leaving all of our equipment behind on the last job, we didn't have any equipment to restore new homes. So I figured, let me just go to Best Buy, go to Walmart, buy a bunch of regular air purifiers and let them just keep it, buy them five or six air purifiers. So I did that and within a few hours the air quality was tanked again. So that was just a big aha moment for me that whoa, these little residential air purifiers aren't doing very much. No, I was using massive effective machines. But the downside is they were very loud, they were very ugly. And then the vision for Jasper was to create something that was commercial grade but quiet, smart and beautiful, made from metal. So take all the things that I used in mold remediation, floods and fires and, and put it in a form factor that people would be proud to put in their house that would be beautiful and quiet and not a big loud giant eyesore. So I realized I'd be more helpful on the solution side proactively as opposed to the reactive disaster recovery side of things.

And you crushed it with that. I have two in my house and they are like modern looking and they're great. And I have my own little story to share with you about that. When we get more into the functionality of that but which was really eye opening to me with your filter versus another filter. But I have some questions because I lived in California for a number of years and I lived there when we had fire evacu. I lived there when it was wildfire season and you could literally smell the air being different. And I don't think it really registered that it months later you're still being affected by that air. But it's not just fire. I had a house that had black mold. Many of my listeners have been in houses with mold. You have older houses with other things. We use a lot of toxic products, people, even unintentionally. So how bad is the air we're typically breathing in a home outside of even the fires and things like that?

Yeah. So they say that the most common statistic is indoor air is five to ten times dirtier than outdoor air.

It is. I have never. Wow.

Well, if you think about it, where does your indoor air come from? It comes from outside. So there's no filtration that really occurs between the outdoor and the indoor air. Then you also have all of your indoor air pollution. So you have all the outdoor air pollutions, the pollen, the mold, the exhaust fumes from vehicles, the restaurants, the manufacturing glyphosate on your neighbor's yard. So all of that comes inside. And then on top of that, inside we have off gassing from our materials, we have cooking, we have pets, we have allergens, we have your sofa, I.

Would imagine with the fabric protectors and stuff like that.

Big time sofas are big. Carpets, paint, all that stuff. So. And then outside we have the greatest air purifier of all time is nature. It's trees, it's the sun, UV light, it's the wind, and it's raining. So we don't have those functions. We don't have nature inside our homes to wash away the spores and have UV light and all that stuff. So we have all of the pollutions plus more with none of the filtrations. And in this part of the world, homes are built very airtight. They're like little Tupperware boxes that we live inside. So with no airflow, things come in, they get trapped inside and they stay in there. And that's why indoor air is just a lot more toxic than outdoor air because there's no filtration process and poor ventilation. Because since the 70s we've really been optimizing for energy efficiency. So we want to keep the heat in in the winter and the cool in in the summer. And the downside is Energy efficiency is at odds with environmental health. So the more we try to contain everything in the environment, the more that we trap all the bad stuff inside too.

Well, and then I'm thinking of just other things that we add internally in our house. Like if somebody's burning a candle or they are doing, you're just adding all these other things on top of this, this, this already big cluster of things that are affecting us. This is really big news for me though. I didn't realize that inside air was 5 to 10 times worse or dirtier. Which brings me to my next question. So I live in outside of Phoenix. Right now I'm in Scottsdale area. Just crazy hot summer that we just wrapped up. And on my weather alerts on my phone every day it says poor air quality. So in my mind I was thinking, oh well if you're inside it would be better. But based on what you're saying, even when you it says pour out air quality outside, you have to think your air inside is actually even worse.

Is that so? On a really bad air day, like let's say there's a wildfire going on right now, the indoor air. So just to like set some metrics here. So PM 2.5, that's the number on your Jasper. Hopefully it's like a 3 or 4 or 5 most of the time. That would be good. So normal particulate indoor would be like 5 or 10. Now normal outdoor air, similar, there's a bunch of different competing things to measure in the air. But when there's wildfire smoke it could be like a 250 or a 350 or 400 which is like what Delhi is and really polluted parts of the world. So that's similar to when there's a wildfire smoke. Now indoors would like stay inside. Schools canceled. You know, there's a poor air quality advisory like what you would have seen in California. Your indoor air on those days could still be about 150. So on the worst of days when there's like a critical event, your indoor air could be a little bit less bad. But on average day to day the indoor air is much worse. So it's good though that these, I'm glad that Apple and Tesla and Google with their weather apps are starting to look at air quality.

Yeah.

So for you guys, when it's really hot out, air is always going to be bad out when it's 100 degrees because you're just cooking everything on the ground, right. You're cooking all the, you're cooking up the Asphalt, you get ground level ozone, sulfur dioxide. So you just like when it's super hot, just like when you cook food, you smell it more. When you cook water, it boils, right? So when you're cooking the ground naturally, more stuff goes into the air.

Okay. If we don't smell things. So like you could be in a house and not smell things. And I know for sure now, like our air quality even in a newer home. I didn't realize how much we needed the right filters in here. So if you don't know if somebody's like, oh, I live in a new home and I don't have this problem, or I always have outside open air. What if we don't know about our air quality and we don't know what could that be doing to our health? And do we need to be concerned about that? Because some people are like not. They're not in a wildfire area and they know they don't have mold.

So before Jasper, in addition to doing the disaster stuff, I also did air quality consulting for about eight, nine years. And so if somebody was sick at home and they didn't know why, you know, they're at home, they're just chronically unwell. They've been to lots of functional medicine docs, they've done testing, they might have taken allergy shots, they've tried exercising, they've tried all this stuff, but they just are not well. Then they go on vacation or they go camping and they feel great. And then they come home and they're sick again. And then they have this aha moment. Is my home making me sick? So my job was to go into homes where people were unsure if their home was making them sick and do a deep dive into what's lurking in their air. What's lurking? You know, air, water, the, the whole thing. Mold assessment and see asbestos, lead, bacteria, all that. And just see if there's stuff in the environment that's making people sick. And probably half of the work that we did was in brand new homes.

Wow.

Brand new homes. So that's because the brand new home, everything in that home was recently manufactured. Every piece of drywall, your paint, your carpets, your furniture, it's all brand new. So that. Think about that new car smell. You have the house equivalent of that. So normally if you were to build, like I always tell people, if they're buying a brand new house and they have the time to let it breathe for a month or two before they move in, that would be great. Not everybody has that luxury or awareness to do so but if not when you're in there, and the. If the temperature is a permit, kind of keeping the windows open as much as you can early on, filtering your air is also important. But windows open and good ventilation because they don't allow the materials in a new home the adequate time to off gas before they ship it and install it in your home. Literally, it gets manufactured, then it's instantly sealed and packaged, then it's in the distributor, and then it ships to your house and then they install it. So it doesn't really get much breathing time. So in a new home, you have all of these new building materials with a lot of off gassing and VOCs. So, yes, you probably don't have a mold problem if the home was built correctly yet, but you more likely have like VOC and off gassing issues because of all the new building materials.

You know, I watch topics come and go as trendy. Like, you know, I hate to use it as a trendy thing because I definitely was in black mold too. But it seems like in the last few years, everyone talks about their black mold experience. And I have this theory that it's just. That's the thing that's front of mind, like people are talking about. So they're now looking for it. I don't know that everybody really had black mold issues. Maybe some did, but I think there's just a lot going on that we don't pay attention to. And if it doesn't fit in the box, we. We look for the thing to fit it into.

Absolutely.

What I like about the idea of looking at just air quality in general and filtering is there's so many different things like it. It could be mold, it could be. There's so many things that could be the contributor. And when you really take the layers back, it's just the air quality that you're breathing from whatever is there.

I think it's kind of like, you know, I've seen people go on vegan diets or carnivore diets and have tremendous success.

Yeah.

And it's like, because at that same time, they usually also cut out the sugar and the bread. And they. Maybe it was. They were just being intentional about what they were eating now. Which is why I think so many different diets for a certain period of time are successful for people because they're just taking their health more seriously. So with the mold thing, sometimes I call it the new lime.

Sometimes, yeah, it is. Because lime was a thing before mold. Now it's. Now it's like that you're right.

It's kind of the new lime and it's important.

And I feel, and I'm not meaning to be insensitive because I understand people are really just doing the best they can, figuring out what's going on with them. But it's like whatever is top of mind on social media is what people think they're saying.

I got, I got an important thing to share in this regard because I was the guy who would remediate homes. I was the, like, the difference between a $2,000 mold removal quote and a 60,000 mold removal quote is often how good the salesperson was at selling fear.

Wow.

And I've done mold removal jobs for 1500 and 15,000 that were very similar in scope. I was new in the time and, you know, work working for different businesses early on. I wasn't always doing it all on my own. And the training to become a certified mold removal guy through the IICRC is the main one. It's a two day course.

Okay.

Course it's about, I don't know, 500 or $1,000. So it's like it takes longer to get your driver's license than be a certified mold remediator. So mold is actually making a lot of people sick. It's a real big problem. The problem is, and this to me is a road to hell is paved with good intentions. I will say there was two sayings in the mold industry. One is mold is gold and one is the mold rush.

So wait, so mold is as in this is a moneymaker because of mold?

Well, let's say you are a contractor and you're used to demolishing a bathroom before you rebuild it. You would get 1000 bucks, 1500 bucks at most, to remove the bathroom. Let's say you're gutting a basement, maybe five, six grand. That's a moldy basement. It might be 40,000. The process of demolition is very similar. So what you have to do when you're remediating mold, let's say you have a leaky sink in a bathroom that needs to be remediated. What do we do? First thing that we do is we contain the bathroom. So we use a 6 mil poly film and we basically seal off the door and we put a zipper. So that's a contained environment. Now then we put an air scrubber or two outside in the home. Then we put another air scrubber in the room. Then, you know, we do all of our demolition, we rip everything up, we take out all the infected materials, we double bag it we take it out of the house. Then we use a HEPA vacuum, and we HEPA vacuum all the surfaces, and we use an antimicrobial spray and we wipe all the surfaces. That's mold remediation. So if it's a whole home, it's just more of that. So a lot of the time when we were doing mold remediation, most of the time is the setup. It's like when you paint, it could be like a whole day or two of setup. And then like, the actual painting doesn't take that long. So because early on there was less people who are good in mold remediation, the fear is high. So the price was high. And then people got attracted to that industry because they're like, wait, I'm removing the same drywall. I just have to put up some poly film and do some cleaning. And the price is way higher.

Makes sense.

And then, you know, I'm just going to call it functional medicine as a whole was like, whoa, I'm getting a lot of patients coming in for mold issues. I need to get certified in mold. So they take a day or two course, a webinar, a couple day course, and they're trying to do their best, but they have patience. They got staff, they got a business to run. They can't go out and now become mold experts. And the real mold experts that I know were people like the mycologists were the ones working at the lab. So when I was dealing with, like, hotels and big jobs, I would bring in microbiologists and mycologists to do intensive testing. We would culture it. Actually, they had a mobile lab. One of the labs I would work with, they would bring the lab to the job site and culture the mold right there because they needed it live to really see, like, what species is it and do like a really deep dive. So most of the stuff and then mold testing. So if you test your blood or your urine for mycotoxin levels, everybody's got it. Yeah, Like, I've almost never. Unless someone's just finished a heavy detox. I've never seen someone that doesn't have it. If you live on Earth, well, just.

Being outside, you're going to mold lives outside. So you're going to have that just from being outside.

So think about this. You're chronically ill and you don't know why. You go to a functional medicine doc, they take a test, blood test, you got the mold. Then they say, let's send someone to your house to test your dust. You got the mold it's aspergillus penicillin. It's the same stuff. Ah. And then what happens is if you have physical visible black mold from a leak, you have to remove it and you have to take it seriously.

Yeah, we have that in our house that we ran.

No doubt about it. You want to remediate properly, you want to get it removed, you want to clean other porous materials in the home, you want to get your ducts cleaned, you want to get your carpet steam cleaned.

But you said if you have visible.

Clear, visible physical black mold, and if you smell it and it's musty.

Yes.

So when we were testing homes for mold has, per training and guidelines, we're supposed to not test the home for like 48 or 72 hours after it rained, for example.

Okay.

And we're always supposed to test inside and test outside. And we're looking for. It's called a control sample. We're trying to find the variability between the indoor mold and the outdoor mold. So how bad of a business would mold testing be if you canceled jobs every time it rained? So nobody does that, right? Like, nobody does that. The customer is not going to pay you. You're. You still gotta pay your staff salary. So it's really not that practical for people to do that. And everyone's trying to do their best. And then there's various different types of mold tests. So there's the ermi, there's the aerosol, there's a bunch. Certain tests skew towards false negatives and certain tests skew towards false positives. So a really good comprehensive test. They're going to use multiple different types. But mostly I joke about this a lot. When I would go into a home with other mold assessors, we know in the first two minutes if there's mold or not. Now we're just collecting the data for the customer. You know, the second you walk in, you can smell it.

Interesting. I'm glad you just shared it. So we did. We were renting a house in San Diego, but we had that. We had the visible. We could smell it. It was musty, the whole thing. And then when I paid out of pocket to have somebody come in and same thing, like, they could visibly see it, they could smell it. And then you're right, they just went through every room and did the out. They did all the stuff for that, to do all that for the full report.

And if you think about it, I mean, once there's mold, it makes sense to check around the house. But, like, I just assume if I'm Doing mold remediation. I'm assum. We're dealing with that room and then we're cleaning the rest of the house. I just assume it's reasonably everywhere. So I'm washing just the same way I would remediate after a flood or a fire to detox a home. Right. I'm washing all of the clothes and all of the bedding all at once. I would take to like a laundromat dry cleaner and get it all cleaned in one shot. And while it's out, I would steam clean my beds and my carpets, my soft materials and I would do a deep clean. So I would assume that there was reasonable mold everywhere, but I would really deal with the source. And if you think about this, let's say your water's too hard or you're chlorinated, which it is. If you have city water water, do you A, get a water filter or B, gut your whole home and throw the pipes out?

That's a great point. No, you're right. Everyone does a filter filter the water.

So how is the mold impacting you? Are you eating it? Are you drinking it? Are you absorbing it through your skin? Are you breathing it? It's an air problem. So same way mold, pollen, VOCs, etc. These are things that we breathe and they only impact us inside way more than outside. So it's pretty, pretty simple. And that's why I'm very passionate about what I do.

Yeah, this makes a lot of. I never really thought of it. That water filter example is so on point because you're right. I don't know anyone that guts their whole house for their water situation.

You know, the pipes aren't great. There was maybe some lead pipes or some copper, whatever, but you just filter your water at the point of use. You can filter it at the shower, you can filter it at the top, you can filter it at the whole home level. And at the top you can filter it at the fridge. Right. You filter it before you consume it. Awesome. It's a reasonable solution. Unfortunately, this air purifier industry, Amazon, Walmart, selling $99, 199 air purifiers. That's the equivalent of British.

So, okay, tell people, because a lot of people listening probably have a Brita. So explain what you mean there. Tell what's that? Doing one of the little cheap filters.

It's better than nothing. It's way better. Zero to one is always a big improvement. But you know, there's Berkeys, there's reverse osmosis, there's whole home filters, there's echo waters, there's dechlorinators, there's levels to the game of water filtration.

Totally.

And like level one is. And then the best to me is spring water just getting real water drink.

Yeah.

Right from the source. That's what I drink and that's the best. So I use, I use ro and I have a whole home filter for my showering, water washing stuff and then spring for drinking it. And yeah, with the air industry, because people are used to spending seven to $10,000 for a whole home water filtration system just goes into or 5 to 10 grand for a new oven or a stove or 25 grand to renovate their bathroom.

So yeah, this is like wild because I'm thinking about like the level of fear around like oh, your air fryer is, has some Teflon on the thing. But like why are we're looking at these little things instead of looking at these? This one thing that could just clean up the air in general. You know what's wild is that I have your air filters and we have two in our home right now. And I noticed that when I wash my hair and blow dry my hair, the air filter goes all the way up to the, to the top level. I'm like what the heck is in my hair products that it's doing that? It's so it gives you kind of real feedback or when you're cooking, like we have it set on. I forgot what the setting is. Yeah. Yes. So and basically if something enters your house or you're working on something or there's construction out, you can hear it turn up higher, like it's filtering it out. I don't think any other air filter I've ever had has done that.

I love the stories. My mom like a month ago was like sealing the picnic table 100ft off their, their lake place in Canada. And just when she sealed it and opened the door, it went red.

Yeah.

Like remember this is the best way to paint the picture for people. If you're ever been at the beach and you see someone using their sunscreen or at the pool, one of those aerosol cans, you can smell it like 100ft away in all directions. Which means all of the air between them and you, it's all just got contaminated. It's like if you take a bathtub and you put two or three drops of red food coloring, the food coloring doesn't stay by itself within seconds. It's equally dispersed on all the water. Air is the same. So when you have a localized air problem, it quickly becomes a whole home air problem. And like, if you're thinking about a 500 or $1,000 air purifier as expensive, sure, maybe it is. But if you think about it as $2,500 for a whole home air filtration system, and now you and your family are breathing 95% cleaner air all day long, all night long, and you're sleeping better, and you're not breathing in mold and allergies and pollen. It's quite cheap, really.

Wow. Yeah, that's. I mean, when I saw the thing with the hair dryer, and I'm like, what? That's a total. Because that's probably. That's the one thing that I'm definitely not free of toxins on is, like, my shampoo and my hair products or whatever. But, like, to see that actually happen, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is crazy. So when people have. Because I already know, like, questions that people will say, like, when you look at your home and you're using an air conditioner heater, there's these little inexpensive, like, filters you put in. Those from Home Depot. What are those even doing?

So, first of all, what are they called? They're called furnace filters. Why? Because they're filters for the furnace, not for the human. I actually use the lowest grade furnace filters I can buy because if you use a more intensive filter, it really restricts your airflow. And now I'm hurting my ventilation, my ability to heat and cool my home. They don't pretend when you buy a furnace that this is a whole home air filtration system, because it's not. It's a furnace. It heats your house, cools your house. When you buy an air conditioner, they're not, like, by the way, it also cleans the air. So I like the machine to do what it's intended to do. And then a lot of aftermarket companies have come out with, like, more intensive air filters. And by the way, I tried for a couple years before I launched this Jasper to create a whole home air filter. That was the vision for the company originally, but it was so ineffective. They were loud. They were ineffective. Because you want your furnace and air conditioner to turn on and off throughout the day to be efficient. They don't run 24 hours a day. It turns on, it turns off. So when it's off, it's not doing anything. And you can't focus your cleaning efforts. So you're literally cleaning, like, the hallway or your crawl space as much as you are your baby's nursery. This doesn't make any sense. So you want to be filtering the air, a point of use where you're breathing it and be closest to the source. So that's why one in the living room area is great to capture all the cooking particulate. And then in the bedrooms it's great because whatever, now it's going to be making sure the room where you're actually sleeping is dialed in. So yeah, the whole home.

You have me as I'm listening to you. We have one in our bedroom and we have one near our, like between our kitchen, living room. Perfect, you know, and we hear them go up in those areas. But now I'm like, I want one of my office because it's a whole different area of the house.

Your bedroom one. Do you like silent or white noise when you sleep?

Well, we played with both. We have it on silent right now, but I'm going to. But the white noise, I like that you can put it on and have the white noise.

So fan speed 2 on dark mode is better. 90% of people use it that way. If someone like wants dead dead silent, then they obviously don't have to. Yeah, still helpful. The Jasper on silent mode is still moving many times more air than a little air purifier on full speed just because it's much bigger, much larger fan, much larger motor. We just did a sleep study where we gave 150 people Jaspers who were using oura rings and.

Oura ring.

Yep, everybody was willing to publicize the information in their name. So we're going to be publishing it very soon. But basically the results were pretty staggering. So it was August study. The first week Jasper was off. The second and third week Jasper was on in the bedroom. And then the fourth week they removed it from the bedroom again. So the average person slept 25 minutes more per night, 18% more deep sleep and five minutes to fall asleep faster, five minutes shorter to fall asleep. And if you think about it, the average bedroom, when we test the air, has about a million particles floating in it. So if I had my commercial air sensor here and I did a test, you'd see about a million particles between 0.3 and 10 microns in size. So that's your dust, your dust mites, your pollen, your mold, your pollution, your insect parts floating around, bacteria, all the stuff in the air. And when you put the Jasper in your room within about half an hour, that's 95% cleaner. So imagine I call air sleep fuel at night and I call it Thinking fuel in the day, you know, it's the only thing that we've been doing from the moment we're born to the moment we die. Three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air. And that's why I think we aren't aware of it. It's because it's like the only thing we can do subconsciously that keeps us alive all night long. So this is my favorite thing about Jasper as a company is what it's done for people's sleep, but also sees allergies. So if someone has a lot of allergies, that's because they've been bombarded by allergens 24 hours a day. Because your bedroom air is just as bad and worse than the rest of your house, which is worse than outside. So if your home is a clean air sanctuary, if your bedroom is a sleep sanctuary dialed in, then you can go outside for an hour or two a day and handle some pollen, handle some mold. It's not a problem. But it's when it's beating you down 24 hours a day at night, you can't enter parasympathetic states. You can't heal, you can't rest, you can't recover. But when your fuel source is pure and it's clean at night, you can heal in that state. Which is why people are sleeping better. Their allergies are almost going away entirely. So it's not like the air purifier is the silver bullet per se, but it's by not breathing all this other stuff, your body can heal by itself.

You have me, really, and the light bulbs going on. Because the house that we lived in San Diego, the last house, was a very old rental. And when we moved out, my husband was really sick and we blamed it all on black mold, which black mold was definitely visible and part of it. But there was also the grossest, like 20 year old carpet that the landlord refused to change. Like it was 20 year, 20, 20 year old carpet. It was so gross. And I just think about my. We didn't have an air filter in there, so that makes sense. Or if we did, it wasn't a Jasper air filter. It wasn't a good quality one. And that makes sense now why he just felt so sick all the time in that house. Like it was just circulating, all of that without any kind of filtration thing.

Yeah. So you always have the opportunity to remove the source or deal with the problem. So let's say with water, are you going to like trench a water line and like Dig a new well. Like, even still, you're going to have some water issues. So with water, it's obvious you're not going to be able to deal with the source for your house water. So you filter with what you got. With a carpet, for example, you could remove the carpet, clean the carpet or filter the air, or both. Or all of the above is the best. So there's a lot of times where like, people still want to use a candle, they want to burn incense, they want to do stuff. So it's like you kind of have to choose. You have to like, either remove the toxins and the particles and don't do them, but if you are going to do them, like, at least do something about the harmful stuff.

Well, it's the same thing we do with our bodies. I mean, I teach people to be a health detective with their bodies and if I think about it, like, it's not realistic to tell people that you're going to avoid all toxic loads. Like, that's, that's not possible. We're living our life, you know, you're constantly exposed to them. But we work on how do we open up pathways, how do we, like, do we use a sauna, do we use red light, do we do dry brush? Like, how are we eating, how? Like, you were doing all these things to get our bodies in this better state of detoxification and filtering, really. So it makes sense that we would do the same thing with our air.

I agree. I think one, a quote that I really liked by somebody was he called his Jasper the laziest way to be healthy.

Oh, wow.

Because he's not a healthy dude. Not at all. He loves indulging in delicious fried foods and he's not one for exercise. But he's like, I could get behind this. He's like, I just have to invest money and then plug it in. He's like, I don't have to do anything. So, like, I find especially early on in the health journey, like, it's taken me a while to be, you know, I just got the, the levels thing going.

Yeah, I've got one on too.

And doing the whole CGM thing. Yeah, A lot more testing and a lot more mobility stuff. But like air and water and even food, eating healthy is hard because, you know, the bad food is so addictive. It's so delicious and addictive. The cool thing that I love about clean air and clean water. Clean air and clean water are delicious. There. There's nothing nice about polluted air, polluted water. So with so many health Things like, you know, you got to have the suck of the workout to have the benefit afterward. But clean air and clean water, like, they taste better to drink, they feel better to breathe. They're like two of the only things that passively, lazily are getting you in the right direction. So even on those days where your willpower is low and you didn't do all the other stuff, like it's hard to get in the cold plunge. It could be, yeah, easier, but still difficult sometimes to go in the sauna. So totally, I'm happy to be championing something that is willpower free.

How much does Jasper help with things like, I mean, hopefully none of my listeners are smoking cigarettes, but if they're around like secondhand smoke, would it filter that out? Like how much does this actually filter out?

I'm glad you said secondhand smoke because if you're going to say how much does it help with being a smoker? No, probably single, like 1 or 2%. It'll help them not have all the other stuff. But yeah, with secondhand smoke it's very effective.

Really.

Like, and sometimes people has a neighbor or condo. Yeah, air purification, air scrubbers, it's the same thing that we used for toxic cleanup, mold, fire smoke, etc. So it's the same reason that it's so effective of remedying a home from wildfire smoke. Like of course, a vape or a joint or a bong hit or cigarette smoke. Very effective for that cooking, like a neighbor who's cooking or if the neighbor is using the bounce sheets or the glyphosate or all that stuff like HEPA air filters. So most of the air purifiers you see at Amazon, Walmart, the filters are fine, the filters are good. We don't, I don't have a problem with the filters. Most of them are very good. They try to get very sneaky with the way they market them. They talk about coverage for square footage. For example, air purifiers don't care about square feet. They care about cubic volume because do you have 8 foot ceilings or 16 foot ceilings that would cut your square footage in half. And when they talk about coverage, they don't tell you if it's making your air 95% cleaner or 2% cleaner. They just say covers a thousand square feet. That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean by define covers? So and like when I've gone deep down the rabbit hole. So like a lot of the air purifiers that you see when you look at their lab Data, their lab data is based on the filter removed from the purifier. With a very, very low fan speed, way lower than the machine actually runs. So of course it gets a hepa. So there's very interesting marketing there. And like I did a video on Instagram a while ago, I was at a Target and there was an air purifier there. It was like $300 and it's like extra large multi room air purifier. It's like this big, like the size of a watermelon. And it said 1400 square feet. And then in little tiny small print it's like, I forget if it said seven or eight foot ceilings with one air change per hour. I like about four, four air changes per hour. So normally when you like by that standard, Jasper would do 7 or 9,000 square feet, but it doesn't because it would be so ineffective. So the real problem is, is people are like, oh, I have dust or I have allergies, let me buy an air purifier. They go on Amazon, they set the price bar really low. They say extra, extra large room. But it's not a TV where you can just say 55 inches, 60 inches. And it's a clear understanding of what you're getting. The whole square footage thing is just a very sneaky way to discuss it. So like, you know, I would love to put on our website, the business side of me would be like, yeah, put 7,000 square feet on, like we just absolutely crush everything. This would be dishonest. That's why I much prefer a podcast because some things are simple, some things are a little bit more nuanced. So I don't feel comfortable saying that we cover any amount of square foot unless I disclose what I mean. So when I say a thousand square feet, I mean eight foot ceilings. And at that point we're going to get the air about 80% cleaner. In a bedroom setting, we can get the air like 95 to 99% cleaner because it's a smaller space. So yeah, it's a very interesting space. But I think over time when people realize that my number one favorite feedback we could ever get is I've owned all these different air purifiers and I wasn't sure if they actually work. Yeah, this is the first one to actually know it works. I feel it work and I see it work. And that's why I literally got out of the fire restoration and flood business to switch over to this side because we were remediating a lot of homes that did not need to be remediated.

This is. I'm so glad you're on my show right now. And I'm asking these questions because we've had many different filters over the years. Like and we were guilty of some of the cheap ones, like just to get them on Amazon. And I've had people give them to me over the years too. I had like random ones and there was one I liked for a while and then it kind of stopped working. And so yours is the first one where there's like actual instant feedback. So one I like that. Just like to know, like I'm blow drying my hair and the thing went up or we're cooking and you can see it, or you're boiling water. Like you literally can see and hear it change. And I also can track like you said, my sleep and even see the changes there. And it's pretty wild. So I love that. And also just aside, maybe it's just a girly note or maybe it's not just a girly note. I just like the way it looks. Yours is super modern and cool looking and it fits in any house or room without it being this weird thing.

You know, you can go to Walmart and buy a kettle for $19. It will make your water hot. But every time you use it, I don't know about the microplastic side, but every time you use it you're going to go hide it in the closet because it's hideous to look at. Or you might get like an 80 or $100 kettle from another store like or Restoration Hardware or even probably Amazon too at this point. And it's made from glass or steel and it looks nice and you leave it on your counter so it's like it's functional decor. So it was very important to me to have something that elevates the aesthetic of the home because I believe that part of stress. You know, I believe in noise pollution, I believe in light pollution. I also believe that being in a beautifully designed space is very calming and that your environment can increase and decrease your stress. Like even fake plants like the one I'm sitting in front of now, like I think that the fake plant can actually have a really positive impact on how I feel in a space. So creating a product that is the fake plant can yeah just like a beautiful decor. You know, imagine all the walls were bright.

I'm thinking like I like a real plant for me actually will help clean the air but the plastic ones can will attract more dust. So I would think that that would.

The problem with the real plants are. Is. So NASA did a study a long time ago, and I was guilty of courting it for a very long time. No one's ever been able to recreate the study. And I've tested it a ton. Like, I've put all my air quality sensors in a very small space and use lots of plants. I've never been able to move the air quality even a 1%.

Really?

No. The thing is, you would. You would literally need trees in your home.

Okay. It's like having news I didn't know. I always would think, well, I have no. Nothing to base it on. But that's what we've been told, I guess. Is that real clamps clean the air?

Because plants do clean the air. Like, trees are the world's best air purifier, but there's trees and there's billions of them. So like a little house plant, like a snake plant or something. I think it's really good for the vibes and the feng shui. And, you know, having a living thing in the home is great. Yeah, but. But I've tested everything possible, and no one's ever been able to recreate the NASA study. Also, real plants can create humidity issues and have pests. Like, plants like to be outside. That's their natural environment. Just like.

Yeah, that is one negative of real plants. I. I do get bugs in them. So.

So I like plants. We have some, but they're not air filtration systems like anyone can. Who has an air monitor at home. Literally put it in a small room and test it for yourself. I've tried it because I thought that would be a really elegant solution to deal with people's indoor carbon dioxide.

Speaking of that, what about carbon monoxide? Would these filters detect that? Would it help? What would happen?

Carbon dioxide is.

What I said, carbon dioxide. Yeah.

Okay.

Carbon monoxide, though.

Monoxide. No, they won't detect it at all. And I intentionally didn't put the sensor in there because a carbon monoxide detector, like a smoke detector, should be a dedicated sensor that should have battery backups and ideally be hardwired. So I don't want people to have a false sense of security.

Yeah.

Have a. Have a power outage and pretend that this is that. And now they don't change their actual car.

So you still need to have a carbon monoxide detector. Not. Yes, yes. Don't just rely on this. Yeah. And you can't just rely on your live plants, which I would have thought. And you cannot just rely on your little Amazon thing and you also just can't rely on that your doctor told you that you have mold or you have Lyme disease or whatever. There's. We've got to take. Just like we're cleaning up our body, we got to clean up our air.

Yeah, just like the whole. And ultimately, like air filtration is great and all that, but at the end of the day, like, I want to just give people a few free tips that they can also do.

Please.

So one of them is test your vent above your stove. Make sure that the range hood is actually working. So do a tissue test, hold it up and make sure it's pulling. Do the same for your bathroom vents because ventilation is just as important as air filtration. Yes, we want to clean our air, but we also need fresh air. So bathroom fans make sure that their tissue is being pulled. Range hood, make sure that's being pulled. And then make sure they're actually venting outside. A lot of people have vents that are venting in their attic or in their crawl space or behind the wall in a cupboard. Make sure they're actually venting outside. When you cook, it's annoying when you're like cooking, but when you can use the back burner for like boiling things or sauteing or. I'm not sauteing, simmering or whatever. Because the back burner at the stove gets more captured by the vent because it's more directly under it when you're cooking. If the temperature permits. Open your windows when you're cooking because you want to let all that particulate get out. Cooking is one of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution. And get outside more. As much as I want you to filter your air more inside. Humans spend over 95% of our time indoors and that's way too much. So like breathing fresh air outside has nature intended it for it to be is also super important. There's something I've been geeking out over lately called zookosis. You heard this term before?

No.

Due courses is what happens to animals in captivity. So if you Elephants in the at the zoo live 17 years on average. Elephants in the wild live 55 years years. Dolphins in the wild swim 100 miles a day. Dolphins in captivity basically don't swim at all. Basically. Monkeys, dolphins, all animals in captivity. If you zucosis is what's happening to them. So they all have anxiety, depression, mental health disorders, obesity, inflammation, chronic health issues. Cancer is off the charts. So I'm like, sounds kind of familiar to another species. Wow, sounds like us. So I like to think That I call subdivisions. The zoo and our homes, the cages. And how crazy is this? Even in a maximum security prison, the inmate gets one hour outside per day. Most people on their own free will don't have an hour per day. So if you look at all the chronic health issues that we're dealing with now, but we're essentially self imposed captive animals. And on top of that, we're not even cleaning our cages. So that's something that I've been really studying a lot lately. Zucosis.

Okay, I'm gonna have to look at this now. I'd never even heard of it.

And when you're cleaning your home, just like I've been, I'm starting to get Jaspers into a lot more hotels because they have their housekeeping strategy where they clean the room. Like when I would clean up a dirty home from a catastrophe or a toxic issue. It was a two pronged approach, surface and air. And if you think about people's general home cleaning principles, they clean the floor, they clean the counters, and they don't clean the air. So if you imagine you have fish in a fishbowl, do you think that just wiping the side of the bowl is sufficient or do you think you also have to change the water?

Totally.

So with our homes, we're cleaning the surfaces, which is the fishbowl, but we're leaving the same dirty water in there without filtering it. Your fish die in a fish tank. They get diseases if you don't have filtration, and to change the water. So with our home, we need to filter our air and we need to open our windows and use our vents to change the air. So it's very, very similar. When you can think about it in those obvious, practical, more visual terms, we can't think about air because we live in it. So we need these analogies to try to understand what we're living in.

So good, Mike. So many aha moments here, y'. All. If you go to midlife conversations.com forward/Jasper and it's spelled J A S P r. So midlife conversations.com forward slash Jasper, J A S P R. It'll. We'll make sure it redirects to exactly where to find this. And I know if you use code, Natalie, Jill, you get a savings. But like you, you shared a and even more special savings for when this airs. What was that?

All right, so November 8th is the day this is coming out. That's really soon. So you know, we're not at Best Buy, we're not at Walmart, we're not at Amazon and the reason we're not at these places is because we wouldn't be able to pass the discounts to the customer. And also they would kill our ability to offer incredible service at Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy. We're not able to provide the service. They kind of hijack that process. So I will say one thing I didn't mention. Basically what's different about Jasper in a nutshell it's made from steel instead of plastic. It should have about a 30 year lifespan. It's commercial grade air purifiers and commercial grade sensors and it looks beautiful. So that's kind of its differentiating factors. And our lifetime warranty is probably just as big as any of those factors. So why do most air purifiers have a one year warranty? It's because the company only expects them to work well for a year. They would love to have a three or a five year warranty. It would help them sell more but they can't. It would probably put them out of business. So we have a lifetime warranty and the way our warranty works is badass. Let's say your Jasper breaks either six months or five years from now. We ship you a brand new Jasper the next day so you don't have to keep the old box or the receipt, nothing. You take the new Jasper out of the box, you put the old Jasper back in the box. We give you a prepaid shipping label from UPS and we schedule UPS to come pick it up at your house at 9am the next day. So no finding an obscure box and going otherwise you waste half your day. I never even use the warranties that I have.

I forget I have them.

Yeah, they make me pay pre authorized credit card deposits. We don't do any of that stuff. So we call this the last air purifier you ever need to buy. So on November 8th we'll have code Natalie Jill which will be 400 off. And the reason that is is because it's Black Friday near the end of November. So we're going to make our biggest offer ever and we'll definitely sell out before like around before Black Friday. So the reason why we do this is I like to educate a very health conscious audience. Yeah if people don't buy Jaspers, totally cool. I like to create get more clean air advocates in the world. So Code Natalie Jill from November 8th honestly through the month of November. But I would do it before Black Friday. It's $400 off and then forever after November we'll keep the code up forever.

At 10% off, it just won't be $400 off. So do it November. Do it November.

And if people buy more Jaspers as they put more in their cart, we give them bigger discounts for bundle.

Oh wow.

So yeah, we say, you know, it's a bit of an investment upfront, I get that. But after there, for a little bit over a dollar a day, you have clean air for life and you'll never have to buy another one again. So for those who this resonates with, hopefully it's for you.

I mean, this really resonates with me. And like I shared earlier, I just am really a fan of people being their own health detective. So we have to look at all these different areas and that's why I like featuring specific products that help with that. So air filter was something I really hadn't dove into. And I wanted to talk about this because let's. Like you said, we're filtering our water. Why aren't we filtering our air? And just like we're talking about supplements for our body or what we like detoxing our body like this is. These are all those important things. So I hope my listeners, I hope you, those listening, you at least are looking at this on another level, that this is another variable. It's not just being our age. It's not just the hormones. Those are two big things. But it's not just age and hormones. Always there's all these other variables and air quality is a huge one. So thank you so much for being here today, Mike. This was super helpful.

Thanks for having me.

Sam.