SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to The Model Health Show. Thich Nhat Hanh said that breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Today more than ever, we are encouraged to breathe deeply, to relax, to temper down that fight or flight nervous system, and just to feel more present.

We're encouraged to be aware of our breath, but we're not encouraged to know what we're breathing. Today, you're going to discover one of the most revelatory aspects of health that can make every part of your life better. You're going to learn simple ways to utilize, quote, "nature's air purification systems" in your day-to-day life.

You're also going to learn the shocking amount of time that the average person spends indoors and the impact that it has on our health, and how the homes that modern humans are building are not designed with human health in mind. Plus, you're gonna discover practical ways to improve your home air quality, to improve your sleep, your energy, and more, and the shocking way that synthetic fragrances can affect your gut health and digestion.

That's right, the gut-nose connection should be something that everybody knows about. Plus, we're also going to uncover, keeping in mind how much time humans spend indoors, a nice chunk of our time is also spent in enclosed vehicles, in our cars and so you're going to learn some eye-opening insights about the air filters in our cars.

This episode is absolutely filled to the brim with powerful, life-transforming insights. I'm gonna have all of this and more with our special guest, Michael Feldstein. Michael Feldstein is an air quality expert and a former disaster restoration specialist who spent years inside the country's most contaminated buildings.

That work exposed a simple blind spot: indoor air is the hidden variable driving energy, focus, performance, and sleep. As the founder of Jaspr, Michael now teaches people how to breathe smarter by understanding and upgrading the air that they live within every single day. Let's dive into this conversation with the incredible Michael Feldstein.

Michael Feldstein, welcome back to the show.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Thank you for having me.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Of course, of course.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Round two.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Round two. Let's go. So obviously, as you know, the average American spends upwards of 90% of their time indoors and that environment matters a lot and so my question for you to start things off is, are modern homes even built with human health in mind in the first place?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: No, and on that 90% statistic, that is looking at the country as a whole. If you look at the northeast, just the north in general, and in the winter, for those guys it's more like 99%. And it's funny, if you think about 90 or 95% of a 24-hour cycle, a maximum security prison where you get an hour of time outside, they're actually spending more time outside than a lot of free Americans with their big yards and their parks and everything.

So it's just wild. There's actually... I'll get to the home thing, but there's a term called Zoochosis, where it's the, how animals go insane in captivity. You take a, an animal in the wild and you put them in a home, and they get dementia, they get Alzheimer's, they get like ADHD equivalents.

They get depressed. They get anxious. Zoo animals are just... They're trapped and they're anxious. And if you think about humans, basically free humans putting themself in captivity, and look what's happening to people. The more time people are spending inside. So I think about like a condo or an apartment or like a subdivision.

Like, you walk down the streets on a beautiful evening, and where is everybody? But if you look inside, the ball game's on, Netflix is running. They're home, but they're hanging out inside, even on a beautiful day. So it's just amazing how us free creatures, most of, most people here in this country have put themselves in captivity, and the results are staggering

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's mind-blowing just to start things off, man, that, and that perspective that prisoners would be spending more time outdoors because that's mandatory. You know, you got your one hour outdoor time, and we're choosing this and we're conditioned to do this and this brings us back to the question, which is this place that we're all hanging out, are they designed with our health in mind?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Home is what we call these places, and if you think about a home, I believe a home, its core purpose, at least for me, it's supposed to be a sanctuary, primarily for sleep and rest.

Ideally, we're not spending all of our time at home in captivity in one place, working online, spending our whole lot sleeping there, eating there, working there 24 hours a day in one building. For a lot of people, it's in one 500 square foot apartment with a window that barely opens, and that's too much time.

And then if you look at the way that the homes are built, no. There's no part of the and like, why are we here today? To me, the most exciting thing about having an important conversation is always awareness. Tic tacs, solutions, things that you could buy, meh but when people truly internalize awareness, that's when change happens.

So we need change to happen from the top down and the bottom up.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: The bottom up change is people being like, "Whoa, I gotta go outside. I gotta open a window, and I will not buy a home or an apartment or rent it that is not conducive to my health. That's just not even on the table for me." Like, if you walked in there and you saw visible mold, you would know not to buy this one.

But it's the invisible stuff that's killing people. So they have no awareness of it 'cause they're very numb to those senses, and they're just not aware. So bottom up, the consumer, the homeowners, the people saying, "I demand a better home for my family" and then builders and architects catching wind of that and saying, "Hey, let's build a great home.

Let's start building awesome homes."The good news is a great-- it's not quite planned obsolescence, but homes nowadays are built for like 25, you know, the 30-year mortgage is 30 years because that's generally how long a home is supposed to last.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: The bank doesn't want to insure it get lend it to you because by 40 years, it's an old worthless home.

It's ready to be knocked down. Where homes that were built s- 80, 90 years ago, some of the best homes are 100-plus years old because they were building them good and they were building them to last. So they were quite sustainable. So now we got these little tight homes that don't breathe with toxic paint, with toxic floors, with carpets.

You know, we literally trap ourselves indoors. We cook in there, we clean in there, we have chemicals, we have fragrances, we're off-gassing like crazy. And the indoor air is generally five to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air, but sometimes it's way more than that and outside, we got nature's air purifier, God's scrubber, call it what you will, the wind, the rain, the trees, and the sun, the greatest UV light of all time.

But we built these tight little homes that we kept nature out of, and like, I like to use the pond analogy, pond versus a flowing stream. If you got the flowing river, the water is pure, it's clean, it's filtering itself naturally. But as soon as it gets stagnant, now you got the algae blooms, you got the bacteria, you got the mosquito infestation.

That's the water that makes you sick, and it stinks. So if you think, you go outside, we feel the wind, the air is flowing, it's cleaning itself. Our homes are like stagnant little ponds- that we then dump a bunch of chemicals into.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So there's my answer for no homes are not built for human occupancy. They are not built for vitality and health, and the way we occupy them is further making that a bigger issue.

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know what? This just reminded me. I just came back from speaking at an event in Chicago, and I went by one of my friend's house. I've known him for years, but I've never been to his house. He lives in Chicago.

And he is, at the time when he was still a full-time police officer, he's the wealthiest police officer in America, Jamal King, by the way, and everybody can check out his episode. We'll have that for you in the show notes but he retired from the police force and I also, when we found out that he was so wealthy we thought it was like some training day stuff like- you know, what are you doing?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: You know Those guys aren't on the list ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hustling, you know, whatever. But it was really through real estate and through investing and building businesses. And so I went to his house and I was expecting it to be like this, one of these modern homes that you see freshly built here in LA, but his house was actually like 150 years old and it was built I, like I think in the late 1800s or something crazy just like wow.

And the stability of the home and he has a lot of the original design of certain things. He has extended parts of it but, you know, it was just s- so marvelous to see, to see the architecture of course, but just to also see the durability and stability of the home and how he, hi- him and his family are thriving in that environment and I was just like really just thrown off by seeing that.

And this is something, it's just like you being wealthy, this is something he was intentionally looking for and it's just a different mindset because we wanna go with what's kinda modern and what we believe to be the ideal home structure and so outside of that, within our homes, we have a lot of opportunity to kinda control our microenvironment.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right? The larger environment-

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: That's the real environment. Right. You should think from the bedroom, then the home, and then outside. We think about the environment as outside- Yeah ... but your primary environment is your bedroom and your home, and then you wanna go from the inside out.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right, and it's where, literally where we spend the most of our time.

So investing there and being aware of these things is a game-changer. And so I wanna ask you specifically, you know, with our audience and also just the people who are passionate about health and wellness, we spend a lot of time thinking about our food, we spend a lot of time thinking about exercise and movement and sleep, and all these things obviously matter. Like, massively but would you say that our air quality is potentially even more impactful on our health than all those things?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Well, I like to just think about it from the perspective of how long can you survive without the thing, right? So like you said, three weeks without food, three minutes without, three days without water, three minutes without air.

Then if you look at it from the total consumption, you eat a pound, two pounds of food in a day, drink a gallon maybe, few liters if you're a good water drinker. When it comes to air, you're breathing 20,000 times a day, breathing 15 to 17,000 liters of air. So your raw consumption of air is so high.

You know, when someone's dealing with a mold thing or an allergy, you're usually not eating or drinking it, you're breathing that stuff in and if you're spending 90% of your time indoors, you're breathing it in at home. So when I just think, like this conversation, I'm enjoying this little bit of water, but I'd be okay.

I can go quite a while without water and quite a while without food. If I stop breathing, this podcast is gonna end real quick.

So I think that humans are completely ignorant to air because it's the only thing that we can do consciously and subconsciously. You know, if you're thirsty, you have a sense for thirst and you go and seek out the water.

You get hungry, you go seek out the food. Air, literally, your body breathes for you when you sleep. It's the first thing you do when you're born, it's the last thing you do when you die, is take that first breath, you take that last breath. So I just think people don't pay attention to it because they take breathing for granted.

I was recently on a trip about a month ago led by James Nestor, if you know him.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Wrote the book Breath.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. He was on the show. We'll put that in the show notes for everybody, too. It's fire.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Great book, great guy, and he led this trip. we went nine hours off the coast of the Dominican Republic, and we stayed there for a week, and we swam with humpback whales and the trip was called Conscious Breath Adventures, and I didn't know why at first, but whales are conscious breathers. They don't breathe subconsciously and mama whale, she takes a 20-minute breath to take a nap, so she literally is able to take that deep breath, go to sleep and then come up when it's time to exhale.

But our human bodies have evolved in such a way because we don't have that capacity or at least the awareness of that capacity, so we really take air for granted, and we're so good at adapting to the environment. So like if you go into someone's home and it smells like a wet dog or something, or like a place, a restaurant, you walk in, it kinda stinks, within five minutes you're used to it.

We're so good at adapting to the environment. Otherwise, life would just be so uncomfortable all the time 'cause we'd be hyper-aware of all of our surroundings. We wouldn't be able to get anything done. Yeah. So we kinda get used to it. We get numb. It's just like people with, like, chronic pain. Somehow you still see them functioning, getting things done, moving through life, but painfully and yeah, I just think that the air awareness is the first piece. It's like growing up, we all drank tap water. We drank from the hose. We didn't even pay attention to the fact that it tasted plasticky or like lead, and even if we did, we didn't think that was harming us or that was not normal 'cause it was normal.

Normal is common. It doesn't mean normal is healthy and good, and the goalposts of normal keep shifting. So yeah, I just don't think there's much awareness, and that is the coolest thing when you can wake somebody up to the quality of their air or the importance of their breath. I don't think there's a better tool than taking a few deep, slow breaths to change someone's state.

And then, you know, breathwork, if you look up the Google Search terms, the term breathwork has been surging, so everyone's going hyperventilating on their moldy pollen-filled air, and air quality itself is just kinda chugging along slowly. So people are becoming aware of their breath and taking a deep breath.

You know, we talk about food more than how we eat. We talk about water quality more than how we drink it, but for whatever reason, we talk more about breathing than the air that we are breathing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. Bars. Holy moly, man. I wanna take a step back and look inside of our environment, because again, the building materials are very different today.

 What we are placing inside of the home, the ventilation strategies, all of these things are not, again, designed with human health in mind. And we can make micro changes to this micro environment, of course, but I wanna really illuminate some of the most concerning culprits in our internal environment, in our homes.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Okay ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: So what are those things within our homes that are causing the most, degradation to our air quality?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So, it's the building materials themselves. So when a home is built by a builder and they're building thousands of homes at a time, quality is not their priority. Speed, price, margins, you know?

Developers look at their thousand acre piece of land. They're not saying, "How do we build these vessels for human health?" They're saying, "How many homes can we build? How fast? How cheap? What's the bank rate?" All that kind of stuff. So the fact that, you know, they all go up with cheap framing, it literally rains on the home.

You watch the house soaking. There's not much of a process to dehydrate the wood or to protect the wood from getting wet. So, like, before it's even built, that wood-framed structure is getting wet also basically every home is built with cavities behind the wall, right? So between the drywall, there's a gap, a six-inch gap or so.

So there's just, like, there's cavities all throughout your home in between the ceilings, the floors, and the walls, and that's where it's not conditioned, it's not cleaned. But they're not... You know, through all your plugs and your vents and your cracks, we're breathing all the stuff that's hiding behind the walls, whether it's mice poops or rodents or mold or bacteria and things infesting.

So the cavities, the insulation so it's the building materials themselves. Then you got the paints and that's a problem. The older the home gets, the more that stuff is off-gassed. So the first year of a new home is the most harmful. When I was doing air quality testing and consulting, probably half of the business was people who bought a new home, and they moved into it, and they instantly got sick.

It's like new home syndrome. Actually, never heard that word before. New home syndrome is a real thing. You know, we had sick building syndrome. That got really popularized, like, 15, 20 years ago, but new home syndrome is when people are moving into these brand-new homes where all the paints and the off-gassing and the formaldehyde and the fumes are just basking there.

So whenever anybody has a chance and you are buying a new home or new furniture, I highly suggest, if you can, give it a few weeks where you open the windows and you open the doors as much as you can, and you let the home breathe. That's a good step. Then in terms of the way we're living, shoes indoors, great first step in terms of a way to bring a lot of pollution in.

You know, dog poop, glyphosate from your neighbor's yards, everything you picked up outside doesn't just stay on the ground or stay on the shoe. You're spreading that inside, and that's aerosolizing every time you walk on the floor. Then you got all the fragrances, the incense, the candles, the cleaning products.

Dishwashers. You know, you smell that thing. Dishwasher is the one major appliance that doesn't vent outside. So you got this plasticky chemical puck. You pop it in there. You high heat, and you aerosolize all of that, and you smell it, and you see it steaming out. So, like, dishwashers are one of the really, really big ones.

In fact, um, I think it would make a lot of sense to put a dishwasher against a perimeter wall or treat it like an oven or a stove where it's actually venting outside. Cooking, you know, even if you have high heat and, uh, good quality ingredients, the, um, chemical byproducts of cooking indoors... Like cooking inside, inside is a new concept, never mind high heat and oils and cleaning and we have the cleaning products.

So it's a little bit of everything. The fragrances are significant, though. I'd like to double-click on that 'cause fragrances are everywhere. People are putting them on their body. The fragrance market in America is currently about a $7 billion market. The air purification market is about three and a half billion.

So people are spending twice as much money polluting their air than filtering it and cleaning it Oops, what are we doing? So I think synthetic fragrances in the home and out in the world is like the new secondhand smoke because you go through businesses, you go in the malls, you go on pretty much everywhere now, casinos, hotels, they got that signature scent, and that scent is not your friend.

What that does, it's like the Febreze or any of those other chemical sprays. It doesn't disinfect. There's no disinfectant in fragrance. All it is doing is hijacking your olfactory system and binding to your receptors, so you can't smell the garbage anymore. You've lost your ability to smell, and they're pushing through a chemical.

You know, these are like, there's IP on these fragrances. They're designed to hijack your ability to smell and flood your senses with something else, so you don't smell the gym bag anymore. So fragrances to me have to be at the top, and the fact that people, the Christmas tree of death in the Uber, you know?

We need a scent-free Uber, Airbnb. So it's just a human ignorance thing. People think if it smells good, it must be good. So when they make cleaning products, they add fragrances in to make it smell good. When I was doing mold and flood restoration, in the training course, they would tell you, when you're done cleaning a home from mold or from a flood, they'd give you these big jugs of lemon deodorizer.

There's no lemons in there, by the way. It's a lot of chemicals, and they'd say, "Make sure you spray this throughout the whole house, so when the customer comes home, it will smell really clean." And they're like, "If it smells clean, then the customer will never complain because they think if it smells clean, it must be clean."

But clean should smell neutral. It should smell like pine. It should smell like wood. It should smell like cedar. It should smell like natural materials, or it should smell like nothing so a little bit of everything.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's so fascinating. Again, no lemons necessary. These are just designed to give us this experience of a thing but my question would be, uh, this is really important because this is a big part of our brain is dedicated to this olfactory ability to smell because it's so critical for our d- im- uh, our survival- Yes ... and even how we interact with our food. That's a big part of our ability to smell, is to the digestion process is even influenced by that, right?

And so can you talk a little bit, uh, about that connection? Is there any data potentially with getting our smell, sense of smell hijacked with fragrances possibly influencing how we're digesting our food?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: I'm so glad you asked. So I believe big time. So if you think about it, I really...Do you know Dr. Satya Patel at all?

SHAWN STEVENSON: I do, yeah.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So he taught me, "Don't eat unless you're salivating." He preaches that and, you know, I'm down some weight, and a lot of that is actually by practicing that deeply. So I will not put any food in my mouth unless I'm salivating and, you know, when you smell a delicious barbecue outside or something, you start salivating, you get hungry because your nose knows, and it's detecting what's about to come in it, and then your body starts creating these digestive enzymes to say, "Hey, steak incoming, broccoli incoming, chicken incoming."

And then those enzymes are getting ready to break down whatever that is so you can absorb the nutrients and process those foods and, like, gut health is, like, an epidemic right now, and I noticed when I'm indoors, specifically places with scents, I don't salivate at all. There's no salivation process. So I take my food, you know, some people verbally pray over their food.

My prayer for my food is I smell everything on the plate slowly, and I take a deep breath into everything on my plate. You should, everybody try it. It's incredible. If you smell your food up close, your mouth will instantly pool with the most satisfying saliva ever and then just take another minute and chew your first bites really slowly and even breathe slowly with the first few bites of the food in your mouth, and you're gonna just feel your gut, like, relax.

Because, yeah, so if you're... You know the guy with the... I carry Primally Pure deodorant on me. I usually keep, like, 10 in my bag, and if I, like, hug someone or I'm sitting beside someone and I smell the Speed Stick, I give them one as a gift, and they're like You know, they're not usually get- ... a stranger handing them deodorant.

And I'm like, and then I, I give them the rent. I'm like, "I smelt your speed stick from 12 feet away, and now, you know, my gut's not doing its thing." This is like a secondhand smoke thing. The fact that my digestion process is impacted by someone's scented deodorant 13 feet away, this is a problem. So yes, absolutely, your olfactory system, your ability to smell is impacting your gut's ability to get ready for the food, which I think has a huge factor.

It'd be great to fund a study and be a part of it where, if you look at gut health of people who are wearing perfume and chlorine and synthetic deodorants. Yeah. 'Cause, like, when people switch off of that stuff, it's a big deal. So, you know, I love when people get Jaspr's and they start scrubbing and filtering their air, but you gotta also deal with the source.

So if you can go get clean air, stop using fragrances on your body, and stop using them in your home, it's a huge difference. And I really love that tip about don't eat unless you're salivating.

SHAWN STEVENSON:  Wow. Satchin Panda has a lot of emerging research or, or research around, uh, circadian rhythms and how, you know, to, to kinda optimize what's going on with our genes.

And when we talk about, like, these circadian clocks in our bodies like, these are really powerful genes and proteins that control the rest of our genes and proteins. And so even the time of day in which we're doing things can heavily influence, like, our epigenetic expression- Yeah ... you know, our expression of health and disease.

And one of those times that's deeply influenced, um, with the environment that we're in is our sleep quality. Hm. And we talked a little bit about this the last time I saw you in how our air quality can make a huge difference when we are trying to truly recover, right? There's a difference between, you know, relaxation and real recovery.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right? And so let's talk a little bit about that, and, and maybe if you have any new insights as far as our sleep sanctuary and the importance of the air quality in our bedroom.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So for me, I stopped using the word sleep a couple years ago for myself, because sleep is, like, a dormant word. Like, going to sleep, nobody wants to turn off.

That's not very exciting. I wanna be awake. I wanna be alive. Like, being sleepy, you know, and I also, I never use the word tired. I think that is really negative self-talk. I will call myself low energy mode, but even when my iPhone's on that little yellow bar, it can still send pictures. It can still do some texts, but the overall processing power comes down a little bit.

So when I'm in low energy mode, I talk less, I listen more. Tired sounds like you don't wanna be there. Like, if you're tired- Go lie down or something. But low energy mode allows me to be very comfortable in that state and still go out and do what I gotta do and live my life. Just I'm on my yellow bars.

And I rebranded for myself the word sleep to healing time. 'Cause, like, when you're sick, you, like, go to bed, you're like, "I hope I feel better tomorrow." That's when all the good shit happens. You go to sleep, you wake up, you feel awesome. You feel incrementally better. Typically, that's when all the healing happens.

You're like, "Does my back still hurt?" Like, you might wake up tomorrow a new man. It could be a really big difference, whereas you don't usually have that shift in the middle of the day. I mean, a power nap can be pretty nice, but when I internally rebranded sleep to healing time, became very excited to me because it sounded like I was doing something good.

It felt proactive. Now, my mind had to get out of the way to, to get to a unconscious state because the mind is what prevents your body from healing. You know, when it's feeling... We all know if we're feeling a lot of stress and anxiety, our heart beats faster. So we already know right off that bat, you know, when you have a stressful information incoming, you feel, you get hot, your heart beats faster.

Do you think that process is healthy for your body or unhealthy? So you know your experience is impacting your thoughts and your thought is experiencing impacting your body. Like, I was, with Max Lugavere yesterday and he was talking about a few studies. You know, he's a expert with the Alzheimer's and the dementia and he was telling me some studies about how an air purifier, never mind an air scrubber, how

It's dramatically improving the or decreasing the likelihood of people having dementia and Alzheimer's. So he was quoting some studies on that, and also blood pressure. And I like to think about it the other way. Instead of thinking about is cleaner air helping your health imagine you pollute your room more.

So add more chemicals, add more garbage, add more dirty diaper pails, and sleep in that environment and see how you feel. You know, if you add more, whether it's noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, when you add more toxins to the system, your ability to heal yourself gets really impacted.

That's why people are like, "I need to go to the nature. I feel so much better there." You didn't have to do anything. It wasn't that the nature healed you. It was that removing yourself from the toxic environment allowed your body to heal itself. Get that sun. Drink some good water. So yeah, to me, the bedroom must be the sleep sanctuary.

And, you know, people have a million-dollar home, or we're in Los Angeles now, so let's say a two-million-dollar home, little one- ... and maybe a thousand dollar bed that's off-gassing formaldehyde at a great degree with a toxic pillow that's off-gassing, that was also acting as a sponge, pulling in the pollen, pulling in the mold, pulling in the pollution.

Then you're sleeping on that bed all night long. So maybe spend, instead of a million-dollar home, maybe get a 950 and put 50 grand into your bedrooms, and turn your bedrooms and your kids' bedrooms into sleep sanctuaries. How do you make a sleep sanctuary? So getting an organic bed. There's a bunch of different ways to approach that.

There's no particular one I recommend, but, like, find a non-toxic bed. Do your own research. Make sure you're not using any artificial lights after sunset or before sunrise. Let the sun do its job and tell you when it's time to have light. If you wanna use, a little red light or a dim, warm lamp, okay.

But these big, bright fluorescent lights, LEDs and stuff, don't do that. Like, in your bathroom, get a little tiny red light. Get the smallest light possible for, for nighttime because, you know, I heard Huberman do, explain that when you see bright lights at night, even for one second, that can impact your circadian rhythm for days

because if you imagine, naturally, other than fire, there was no light available at night. We did not evolve with this. This is an... The light bulb is a very new thing. So let's make sure we have good minimal lighting in our bedrooms and wherever we're gonna be at night and early in the morning if you're an early riser.

Let's get clean air in the bedroom. Let's get make sure it's a quiet, cool environment with a non-toxic bedding situation. And wow, you know, I think I talked about the sleep study last year, can't remember. But when we gave 150 people Jasprs, I call it a sleep study. It was a community, community science, no doctors involved.

150 Jasprs to people of all walks of life who were using Whoop and Oura to track their sleep. The average person, when they measured a week with no Jaspr, two weeks with Jaspr, and then one week without, they were sleeping 25 minutes more per night with Jaspr on, 18% deeper sleep, and they were falling asleep five minutes faster

and I actually think white noise, if you live in a city, is almost mandatory because, you know, the jungle is not a quiet place. So you can sleep in quiet, but that's like, that's going real ancestral. Now we're going into the cave. It's not a silent place, and the background noise of your home, your HVAC system turning on and off, the sirens, the road noise, just the life out there that is happening, especially in a city.

Being able to tone that down with white noise that's mimicking wind or rain. Jaspr actually emits what's called pink noise even more than white noise, which is actually even more beneficial for sleep. Um, so I just think, like, reframing what your house is. It's a place for you and your family to heal at night, have a great breakfast together, get cozy, get a smaller home.

You don't need six rooms with chairs everywhere and a home that takes up your whole yard. You have a smaller home, you have a bigger yard. For that 50 grand you could save on a little smaller house, get an outdoor kitchen, get a screened-in porch, get great beds, and make your home do the, what it's supposed to do, a place to get calm.

Instead of the home being the place that makes you sick, make it the place that makes you feel awesome.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, man, I love that. I love that. The thing is, when it comes to our sleep quality and having good air quality in this environment, this is something that we shouldn't have to do.

You know, like, if we were still living in more natural conditions. But, you know, this is an adjustment for us to make, and we could do all kinds of things. Just thinking about before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in Missouri, right outside of St. Louis. We lived in a place called Wildwood, and it was just, like, super clean.

My sleep was notably better. I didn't have to do a lot, you know? Like, we didn't even really need curtains, Uh, just because there was no streetlights out there as well.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Streetlights suck ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so, but coming here, I had to really stack conditions and especially lean into the air quality, especially with wildfires

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes

SHAWN STEVENSON: And things like that, which you've helped me to reorient to. That's what we talked about last time. Chemical fires, you know? Yeah. And so this is something where I had an air purifier that was just, like- running in our living room. You know and after my conversation with you, it was like, "This needs to be something in our bedroom."

And so I got one specifically in my bedroom and in my son's bedroom as well. And so this has been a game changer. Every day, and I didn't share this with you- Yeah ... but every day he gets up, he turns off the Jaspr, and he goes to school. Right before bed, he turns on his Jaspr and makes sure that it's running at night.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: We gotta give him, we gotta give him some feedback. Uh-huh. He should not turn it off.

Because a lot of the dust and particulate will accumulate during the day when he's not there. So the energy cost on the Jaspr is, like, pennies to run, and it won't really impact filter life 'cause the carbon life is gonna last about six months regardless.

So during the day, the pollen and the allergens and the mold don't sleep, so it's still gonna be accumulating on his bed, on his pillow. When I go on, when me and my family travel, I turn my Jasprs on to full speed when we're gone. Because that way when we're gone, the noise is not an issue, so it's deeply scrubbing the environment when we're gone, and then when I come back, I turn it to an appropriate level.

 I sleep with my Jaspr on fan speed three, and then when I leave in the morning, I put it on smart mode so it's just quiet throughout the day, quietly cleaning. Then you, I increase the speed for bed, but I would not recommend turning it off when he goes to school. The air will be a lot cleaner.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And the question would be specifically during sleep, like, what's going on here? You mentioned the pilot study that you guys did. Yes. But I went and dug this up, and I shared this, last time that you were here. This was published in the journal Sleep, and they took individuals who were experiencing poor sleep quality, and they placed them into this eight-week study to see if improving their air quality in their bedroom at night could improve their sleep quality. Now during the first four weeks of the study, scientists tracked their sleep quality without any interventions.

Then during the next four weeks, the researchers had participants to utilize air purifiers in their bedrooms and monitored if it made any notable difference on their sleep quality at night. At the end of the study, the scientists and participants were shocked at the results. The study found that improving bedroom air quality helped participants to fall asleep faster- which is congruent with you; go through their sleep cycles more efficiently, which is congruent with you; wake up less often at night; and spend more actual time asleep when they were in bed, which is again congruent with what you found as well.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so overall, but what was the result? They were waking up feeling more refreshed and had- they had more energy throughout the day.

This does make a difference because again, this, especially during this time, this is where I love that reframe of sleep to, did you just call it healing?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Healing, healing time.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Healing time. And it truly is. So how can we stack conditions? And you've obviously mentioned Jaspr a couple of times, and you mentioned its intelligence, right?

There's a smart mode and it... And I see it, you know. if our Jaspr's on smart mode and somebody's cooking downstairs, Jaspr starts getting a little concerned. Starts talking a little bit, you know, and just like picking this stuff up and cleaning the air and, you know, the same thing with maybe, a door's open  and there's the wildfire had recently happened.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Even if the doors are closed, if the wildfire is going.

SHAWN STEVENSON:We'll just say if I open my window and then just like within a minute, Jaspr starts getting angry. And so let's talk about what makes Jaspr so special and in particular Reframing from we don't just want an air purifier. You mentioned air scrubber.

 MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So what's the difference?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So my background was wildfire restoration, hurricane and flood cleanup, and mold remediation. So how do you clean up after a flood or a fire or a mold situation? It's all of the same. You gotta clean the surfaces, and you gotta clean the air.

It's like if you got a fish tank, you gotta filter the water and scrub the surface. The water cleaning is the main thing that you have to do. So when it comes to cleaning a home, there's some dusting and mopping and vacuuming that people do a lot 'cause it's more visible, and people love doing stuff actively.

It's almost too good to be true. You know, air quality, cleaning your air is the laziest way to be healthy. It's so passive, and, like, people are so addicted to suffering and work that they have a hard time even receiving such a passive solution. So how do we clean up, let's say, a big toxic mold event? We'd remove the mold.

We'd sanitize the surfaces, isolate the area, and we would scrub the air. So we'd use these industrial-grade air scrubbers. So an air scrubber is basically like what a golf what a Honda Civic is compared to, like, an Escalade or a pickup truck. They're both cars. They got doors. They have wheels. They drive.

They got passenger seats. But one is designed for work. One is designed to pull your boat. One is designed to commute around town. So a scrubber is an industrial term. That's what we used in restoration for the mold and the flood and the fires, and when I was comparing and contrasting the scrubbers we were using...

So the downside of a scrubber, why doesn't everyone just get a scrubber? Because they're these 100-pound giant metal boxes that are loud, and it would be like having a truck in your living room. It'd be a huge eyesore, a huge noise pollution event. Those are designed for remediation, construction but when you look at an air purifier, a scrubber though, the goal is to get the air like, 99% clean.

It's to scrub the air just like a water filter. We wouldn't be okay if a water filter only filtered 10% of the water or 20%, if it got incrementally better. We need to filter out all that bacteria. So an air purifier, the goal of a purifier is incremental. It's trying to purify the air. It's like a freshener.

It's cute. It's trying to get the air 10, 20% cleaner. That's why you see these little purifiers at the store and they say it covers 1,500 square feet, 'cause people don't know better. If it was a space heater and they told you that little space heater heats the whole room, you'd be like, "No, it doesn't. It does a closet.

It does a small bedroom. It doesn't do a big area." 'Cause you could feel the temperature more than people can experience the air difference. So the scrubber, the mission and the vision for Jaspr originally was to create the world's first air scrubber that looked beautiful and quiet, and it would be something you'd be proud to have in your home, like functional art.

That's why it's made from steel, so it's very industrial. That's why it has no apps, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no EMF. It's meant to be rugged, but it's meant to be good. You know, in the early '90s, late '80s, that was when the SUV came on the market, when they took military-grade trucks and said, "How do we make these family-friendly?"

There comes the SUV. Now that's over half of all cars sold. So Jaspr was originally just supposed to be for wildfire smoke. Then COVID happened. It ended up being for doctors and dentists. And then when moms started buying them for their kids, that's what's kind of taken it mainstream and become, you know, the same way a dishwasher and a stove and an oven and a microwave have become non-- like water filtration has become a no-brainer appliance.

I believe over the next 10 years we're gonna look back at this time and think it was crazy that we didn't all use to scrub our air. So at the most basic sense, it's an industrial-grade machine that has the aesthetic and the performance and the quiet that you would want in the modern home. So the other really big significant thing is when someone's looking at a purifier or a scrubber, they're looking at it from the exterior.

They're looking at the shell but the real magic is the filter. So people think, "Ah, I gotta change my filter twice a year." What, well, you're actually buying the filter. Like Jaspr's heart, its core is the filter. It's four and a half pounds. Most air purifiers have filters that aren't even half a pound. You open them and they're these flimsy piece of paper.

Jaspr, the real magic is in the filter and a lot of people, they look at it and it doesn't look that dirty, and they're like, "Wait, do I even have to change this thing?" Here's the cool thing. When we take it out, if we weigh it, it's often a pound or two heavier. When we look at the air quality coming out, even though you can't see it, the exterior is just the pre-filter.

The real filter's on the inside where all the microscopic stuff is so small. You know, mold spores are too small for the human eye to pick up. When we send those filters that look clean to the lab, they're not very clean. So when we often pop in a new one, you feel the air flow like double or triple. You you see the air clean- cleaning power go way up.

So often people are just assessing it off their eyes, but the real magic is the filter itself. Um, I wanna make sure before you're off, I gotta tell you about the school, man, because I planted the seed last time when I was here, and that's when it was just in its infancy, but it's really happening. So we're opening a school in Austin in September.

It's called Kindling Academy, and the mission is to make it the healthiest school in America. There was a study in Finland a few years back where they put air purifiers in half the classrooms across a few schools, and the air purifiers decreased the absenteeism in the teachers and the students by 30%.

So just filtering the air meant the teachers weren't getting sick, the kids weren't getting sick, which is profoundly impactful. So this was frustrating. We couldn't find a great school. Really no schools. You know, you're talking about how homes are built poorly, let's focus on the kids first and get these schools healthy, 'cause that's where the kids are going all day to learn.

 And you can make one room good, that's gonna help 20 kids breathe better and learn better all day. So right now, schools are not optimizing for human health, so we're gonna turn this school into basically a showcase, and we're gonna put air- two air scrubbers in every class, water filtration, circadian rhythm lighting, natural lights, non-toxic products.

I think we're gonna get the absentee rates down 50 to 70%. We'll work with some doctors and scientists to make it scientifically valid, and we're also gonna donate scrubbers to a lot of other... We already started donating scrubbers to a lot of schools. So they'll be part of the data set to make this, like, scientifically valid, because if we can make this a no-brainer, then all of a sudden the public schools and the private schools will realize this is actually financially beneficial for them.

 Public schools are funded on attendance. So yeah, I'm really excited. So it's called Kindling Academy. It's only a small school. It's a not-for-profit but if anyone is interested, we're gonna open source everything we do. We're gonna publish everything online. The mission is not for us to make a lot of schools, but it's for hopefully people to look at what we're doing and take bits and pieces that would be beneficial for their schools.

And anyone out there, public schools are impossible to work with, but if you're in a private school in the Austin area, or really anywhere in Texas, reach out to us, and we'd be happy to donate scrubbers to your class and get your school- your kid's school part of the clean air study for next year.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Where can they reach out?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Uh, jaspr.co, J-A-S-P-R dot C-O, or DM us on Instagram. But if they go to the contact on our website or DM us, we'll get them into the process.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so now what about for our personal use? Where can we get our hands on a Jaspr?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: All right. So last time I was on the show several hundred people, almost 1,000 people from your listeners in the community, you know, raised their hand and accepted our offer, and we got a lot of, we got a lot of great feedback from that episode, and we've got really heartwarming responses about people sleeping better, breathing better, less allergies.

So, you know, we're not really a brand that runs a lot of discounts or promotions. We let the quality and the product speak for itself. The only time we really do make special offers is Black Friday. But I'll tell you, I learned when I look at my own buying behavior and my own psychology, half the things I bought that were expensive was when they were on sale.

So I like to incentivize taking action at a time that speaks to you. So, you know, they're just... we've been listened to, thank you for listening, for maybe an hour or so, and at the bottom line, if you feel, you know, open your windows, pay attention to the air that you're breathing but if you feel called to invest in clean air in your home, normally Jaspr is $1,199, so it's $1,199.

But today it's June 8th, so for the next 10 days between June 8th and June 18th, code MODEL, or if you go jaspr.co/model, either of those options will work great but if you go there, the Jaspr will be $300 off for the next 10 days, and then for perpetuity forever after that, it will always be $200 off.

And something we started doing in the last few months because Jaspr works so good, we're able to put our money where our mouth is. You should know within the first week if Jaspr's changing your life or not. If Jaspr is not changing your life, $1 is too much. If Jaspr is making you sleep 20, 30% better and helping your family feel better, then this is very cheap.

So, you know, once you have your Jaspr, then you get the filters twice a year. You have a lifetime warranty. But we put our money where our mouth is. So if in the first 30 days Jaspr's not changing your life, we will buy the Jaspr back off you for full price. We will also send you a shipping label, 'cause it frustrates me when I wanna return something, but then there's the shipping and I gotta go to the store.

None of that. If Jaspr's not changing your life, we'll refund you 100% of your money and give you a prepaid shipping label so the costs are on us to take it back. So this way we've de-risked it for you entirely, and I would recommend if you want more than one, great but starting with one Putting it in your bedroom on fan speed three with dark mode.

Get the undeniable life-changing sleep. If you cook a lot, one in the living room on smart mode so it's silent but will adapt to your cooking in real time. So if you feel called, if you trust me, if you trust Shawn, this is a good opportunity for you guys to try Jaspr, and I hope y'all learned something today.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Man, thank you so much. That's so generous. My pleasure, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I've got, I've got a extra question for you that just came up because again, this environment is somewhere that we can, again, control and create a healthy microenvironment for ourselves and for our families but when you think about how much time we're spending indoors as we kicked this episode off with, like around approximately 90% for the average American-

which could be upwards of 99 but then even for those that are at the 90% mark, another six percent statistically is time spent in sealed  automobiles. So I wanna ask you about this because, and the reason it's coming up is last time you were here, we'd recently experienced terrible wildfires here, and as you helped to reframe the chemical fires and all the debris and all the building materials that were burned, the Tesla batteries.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes, sir.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so that got me thinking along those lines and so what about when we're in our cars? Do our cars have air filters because we got LA traffic here like, what do you do? I know you're, you know, like, you think about this kind of stuff. I do. Like, you know. You

got any advice for us?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: I was thinking about it this morning in bed before I got up. I was working on designs for a car air purifier this morning.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Come on.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Um, I swear to God, I'll show you the render in a minute.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Man, you're on that Tony Stark stuff, man. I love it.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: So I'll tell you, the Teslas, speaking of Teslas, they have incredible air filters. If you look at a Tesla air filter, it's like 20 times the size of a regular car's air filter.

It's like what a scrubber is, what a Jaspr is to a regular air purifier. The Tesla filters are that good. They are massive. They have HEPA, they have carbon, they are incredibly good filters. So the Tesla does filter the air really well. General cars, no. They have this teeny little carbon filter that you change every so often that doesn't do very much.

You can go on Amazon, and you can actually get an upgraded cabin filter that will work a little bit better. It's leveraging the HVAC in your car, so that incrementally helps. You can buy one with some carbon, and it's good. The reason why we haven't created a car filter yet is to me, if it's not beautiful and it's not elegant, then we're not gonna do it.

You know, if you need some giant plug and it sits on your dash or it sits on your car seat, we're not gonna do it. I'm optimistic that battery technology is gonna improve a lot over the next couple years, and I'm hoping that what we basically wanna design is, you know, where those air fresheners are sitting on the vents.

Mm. If we can leverage some of the airflow coming through the vents and then subsidize it a little bit with just a small fan, 'cause we don't want cords and plugs, but it will look like a little mini Jaspr. It will have the green, yellow, red light just like Jaspr. So that'll be taking care of pollution.

That way if there's smoke outside, it'll go red and kick up. So this is probably not something you're gonna see from us anytime soon. If we can make it, and it's we won't make it if it's a gimmick. It has to be effective. It has to be battle tested, so maybe three years or so out but in the meantime- changing your cabin filter.

It's actually... I'm the least handy guy of all time, but usually it's in your glove box. It's pretty easy. So if you go on Amazon and you type in, like, upgraded cabin filter, they're, like, 11 or 12 bucks. Do it every two months, every three months. Check it out. They'll usually be really dirty. So, and then also, your air conditioner and your heater in your car, if you're ever like, "Hey, it's not working that good," it's probably 'cause your cabin filter is saturated with dust and smoke, and in the car, you're also right behind those fumes.

So yeah, cars are a problem, but the best option for your car is open the sunroof or the windows. Nature's right there.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. That's great advice and also, when you feel that stuffy feeling, right, whether it's in our homes or also in our cars, it's the CO2 levels, right? That's what it is. So d- again, cracking the window-

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes

SHAWN STEVENSON: like you just mentioned, open a sunroof, and same thing for our homes. Open a window.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Once you feel it, you can't un-feel it. The feeling of high CO2.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, that part. Yeah, my family has definitely turned up their antennas on, like, feeling stuffy in the house. Like- Good ... it was actually, it was this week. My son came downstairs and he sat on the couch and, you know, within a couple of minutes he went and opened a window up and i'm just like- good man ... "that's interesting." he's never done that before. And it's just like he felt like it was stuffy in the room, you know?

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: He's paying attention now. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So, yeah, man. It's because of this education, right? And that's one of the great things about Jaspr as well, is that it also provides you with an education and a resource to tell you what's going on with your air quality.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: We're really an education company- Yeah ... that happened to sell the world's best air scrubber, but at our core, we're here to teach. That's why a school is just a natural progression for us, but education and awareness is the main thing, and then people can go out, use their awareness, invent new products. That's all good. That's why we don't have any competitors, only collaborators. Yeah. So education's what really matters.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Boom, boom. So again, jaspr.co/model. That's J-A-S-P-R.C-O/model and/or use the code model.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Yes, sir.

SHAWN STEVENSON: 10 days starting right now- June, June 8th ... as of the release of this episode, June 8th, 2026, $300 off. Take advantage. I appreciate you so much, man.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Thank you so much for having me, man.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: It really means a lot.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Tony Stark, man. You're the Tony Stark of air.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: I'll take it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's go, let's go. The one and only Michael Feldstein, everybody.

MICHAEL FELDSTEIN: Peace, man.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this.

I love things that can improve my health and my wellbeing in a passive way, things that I could set and forget, automate, just to make life a little bit better. And obviously, again, we might have aspirations, I know that I did for a time, of moving to an environment to where, you know, our accessibility to cleaner air, less light pollution, and all of this kind of tech noise that's constantly buzzing in the background was something that I aspired towards, and I spent some time in that, and it does make being healthy easier.

But it can also disconnect us in other ways. And so it's us finding what really works for us and for me being here in this city that I live in today and the closer proximity with people, all the electrical noise and, you know, the, the light pollution outside. Yes, I need my blackout curtains. Yes, I need to put some more intention into my air quality.

Yes, I need to stack conditions in my day-to-day life to make it a little bit easier for myself to be as healthy as I can possibly be. And I didn't do these things overnight. I added a piece at a time because I also come from conditions to where I felt like I didn't have any control over any of this stuff and I just started to take steps in the direction of the life that I wanted to live, of the health that I wanted to create for myself and for my family.

And so this is about stacking conditions and if anything, this should encourage us to at least once a day crack the window All right. Open up the blinds, let the sun shine in, let, let some fresh air into our homes at least for a certain amount of time each day because again, even in the most polluted cities, the indoor air quality is often five to 10 times worse and sometimes in some studies upwards of 100% worse indoors.

And Michael today helped to illuminate some of the reasons why. Again, just keeping in mind our cooking habits are running the dishwasher. These frequent habits that we don't really even think about dramatically change the air that we're breathing in our homes, not to mention all the off-gassing materials the home is built with, the furnitures, carpets, and all the things.

And so this is not to live in fear. This is to stack conditions in our favor. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to this. So many aspects of our health and our longevity depend on our air quality. So we can improve our sleep, we can improve the energy and cognition that we have each and every day. We can improve our recovery, putting a little bit more intention into this, and again, stacking conditions in our favor.

And I'm gonna tell you right now, for the average home, especially in the context of a city, any air purifier is better than none. But as Mike mentioned, we can get a 10%, 20% improvement with the standard run-of-the-mill stuff. A true air scrubber is something that he has helped to facilitate and to make accessible for more and more people and businesses, and it's really a game changer.

And if you wanna take advantage, again, as of the release of this episode, $300 off right now when you go to jaspr.co/model. That's J-A-S-P-R.C-O/M-O-D-E-L. Got about 10 days to take advantage of that. He also added on, even after that time outside of the 300, he's still gonna keep it to be $200 off if you're listening to this sometime in the future.

In the year 2000. Shout out to Conan O'Brien. All right. I appreciate you so much for tuning into this episode today. We've got some incredible master classes and world-leading experts coming your way very, very soon, so make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon.