You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert, Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. I am truly blown away by this episode today. After 22 years of working in the field of health and fitness, I've been enlightened to something that is more important than our nutrition, than our exercise, than our sleep.

As a matter of fact, it impacts all of those things. And it's really hiding in plain sight. And it's something that can uplift us and make us better. In every aspect of our lives, or it can be degrading everything. And there were numerous times during this conversation with our special guest, if the camera was on me, it would see my jaw was on the floor.

Just blown away, truly, with what I was learning. And also just seeing the impact that it's had on my life in learning just how much our air quality especially in our homes, especially in our bedrooms, is impacting our sleep quality, is impacting our cognitive function, is impacting the health of our skin, our immune system.
 

The list goes on and on. There are so many stories with people struggling with various aspects of their health that have no idea that their air quality, what's happening in the environment, that invisible force that's giving life, whether we understand it or not, and also understanding that it can be integrated with so many different things that are invisible that can harm our health.

Once they get that dialed in, once they get their air quality dialed in, seeing a resolution of their symptoms. And so truly, again, this is one of those episodes that's a game changer. Life is simply not going to be the same after learning about this today. Now, before we get to our special guest, you should know that I'm a big fan of making sure that everyone is getting the best sleep possible.
 

But as today we have a culture that's looking for a pill for every ill. What can I take? What can I take to help me to sleep better? And so prescription medications for sleep and also over the counter stuff as well. Sales have skyrocketed, absolutely skyrocketed in recent years. And what people are experiencing now, we have a huge wave of pseudo-sleep where people are successfully finding things to knock them out, but they're not going through their sleep cycles efficiently and they're waking up feeling tired and dragging through the day. Yes. We want to check the boxes on our sleep hygiene, on our environment. on making sure we're doing things while we're awake that can help us to sleep at night.
 

But also, there are things that have been utilized for centuries that can give us that extra support through our nutrition when it comes to our sleep, instead of hitting ourselves over the head with a blunt instrument in the form of these very strong narcotics prescription, over the counter, whatever the case might be.
 

Let's not jump to that stuff immediately. Let's do something that's more gentle and actually far more effective. A recent study published in the journal BMC Microbiology sought to uncover why Reishi medicinal mushroom appears to improve sleep quality, even for individuals with insomnia, but without all of the well documented side effects seen with conventional sleep medications.
 

The study was titled exploration of the anti insomnia mechanisms. of Reishi, looked at how Reishi impacts changes at the genetic level to bring about improved sleep quality. After their analysis, the researcher stated, quote, Reishi mainly affects target genes in the pineal body, amygdala nucleus, prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and other regions, which regulate rhythm related physiological processes, unquote.
 

It's literally affecting our genes, functioning as an epigenetic influence. So we're expressing genes that lead to better sleep quality. We're expressing genes that help our brain and nervous system go through the stages of sleep. So Reishi is affirmed to improve our REM sleep, non REM sleep, improve our overall sleep time and improve sleep latency, meaning that people fall asleep faster.
 

And this is one of those things where you do not just jump the gun and go get any random Reishi. There is one Reishi that is dual extracted, meaning you're getting all of these nutritive qualities and it's all organic and it's coming from a reputable source. I'm talking about the Reishi from Four Sigmatic.
 

Go to foursigmatic.com/model and you're going to get 10 percent off of their Reishi tea Which is a Reishi elixir. They've got a Reishi hot cocoa as well. They've also got Reishi supplements So you don't necessarily have to have the tea. They've got a great Reishi supplement. It's called their calm formula as well So their calm formula, but I'm someone that loves my practices and Winding down in the evening and having a cup of this Reishi tea is something I do on a regular basis.
 

I love doing that. And by the way, no one said that Reishi is delicious. So of course you can add a little something to it. This is why the Reishi hot cocoa is such a big hit. But, you can add a little bit of ghee. A couple drops of some maybe English toffee stevia or something like that. Make it taste nice.
 

But whatever process makes you feel good and makes you enjoy the process. of getting great sleep and winding down in the evening. That's what it's all about. So head over there, check them out is foursigmatic.com/model. That's F O U R S I G M A T I C. com forward slash model for 10 percent off all of their organic dual extracted reishi products and just overall storewide.

Again, it's foursigmatic.com/model. Now let's get to the Apple podcast review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five-star review titled Humble Expert by Lauren Cowell. Shawn is the best. He is what I refer to as a humble expert. He's incredibly knowledgeable, but is also humble. It's incredibly refreshing. The content he produces is so helpful for my own health as well as the health of the others I reach in the health and fitness space. If listening to his podcast gave me continuing education credits, I'd have a thousand hours.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's amazing. That's what it's all about. Thank you so much for sharing your heart over on Apple Podcasts. And listen, if you haven't, please leave a review over on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. If you could rate and review The Model Health Show, it really does mean a lot. And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day. 

Mike Feldstein is an air quality expert with a background in wildfire restoration, air quality consulting, and home remediation during some of the biggest natural disasters.
 

Mike founded Jaspr to innovate in air science and technology. His goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air quality science. Let's dive into this conversation with the one and only Mike Feldstein. 
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I can't even tell you how excited I am to talk to you. 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Great.  Feelings are mutual.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Coming here to LA from the Midwest about five years ago, I had no idea what I was in for. As of this recording, we just experienced a huge issue with wildfires here in Los Angeles. Many friends and colleagues lost their homes and air quality is happening on multiple sides was definitely a huge issue for a lot of people.
 

And to have you here right now, again, even though this is weeks later, most people are under the assumption that the air quality is okay now. But there are some insights that we all need to know. So what do people need to know about the air quality right now after being exposed to these wildfires? 
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: On that note I got to thank you because you were the kick in the ass I needed to be here right now. So originally I think we were looking at scheduling like a month or something out and they got an email. It's like, how soon can we go? And I'm like, maybe Feb 21. And then I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago and I was like, yo, that's way too long. That's way too long. How about the best day is ASAP.
 

So we locked the day in and then because we were locked in for today, I flew here five days ago and I put out an Instagram post. The day before I came saying, people of Los Angeles, I'm coming, Feb 8 to 18, and I'm going to be doing free air testing. So we got hundreds of people who applied to have me come to their home and inspect their house to see what's going on, test the air, give them a plan of action.
 

So that's what I've been doing the whole time the last few days. And I will say that I've had a guy, a cameraman with me, so we're going to be putting all that out there. But, yo, there's a lot to be concerned about actually. So the top questions that I've been getting here are, First of all, I met someone yesterday, her dog's in New York City.
 

She sent her dog there because when they were going for walks, her dog was having breathing issues. Somebody else, her name's Kayla Barnes, actually. She's into big in the longevity space. So she gets her blood work every month, because she's really on top of that health optimization. Her blood work since the fire is off the charts. Her chemicals, her heavy metals, her mycotoxins. So she shared it with me yesterday. So now I'm working with her. And everything that's elevated in her blood, I'm going to start testing the air for. But there's some significant signs. And I'm in the wellness space too. So people who are more aware and attuned to the situation, and they're like, Hey should I be moving from LA?
 

This is coming up. People are like, I don't know if I should stay here. So if you break it down, The disaster spectrum ranges from your home is completely burnt down, to you were 20 miles from the fire, it was smoky, you saw some flames, and you think it's okay right now. That's the range. Coming one step in from your house was lost is Your neighbor's house burnt down.
 

So you were in extremely close proximity to fires. Then there's the people who are a mile or two. So they're in the smoke damage crowd of varying amounts. So what I'm seeing so far, so an average outdoor day, if I measure the air quality, there's in LA, it's a little bit higher. So let's say five to 600, 000 particles floating in the air in the last few days when I've been testing it. This is everything. Pollution, rubber from the tires, cooking, pet dander, all the stuff that's in our air. It's been about 2. 25 million since I've been here and that's not even accounting for, that's not even looking at chemicals and gases.

So let's just say regular fire and smoke is already very harmful for us. And if you've ever been by a campfire, playing some music, eating some s'mores. One of you throws a little, the marshmallow bag on the fire, the Ziploc bag, even that thing when a little bit of plastic is burning in front of you, you feel that toxic smell.
 

You're like, yo, that was not good. Don't do that again. Now let's think about this. So we had 12, 000 homes burned. At least 12, 000 cars burned. A lot of those cars were EVs and Tesla with multiple several thousand pound batteries. So when I was in Altadena yesterday, the EPA and these environmental hazardous cleanup crews are everywhere getting the batteries off the lots and all the hazardous materials before anyone can even re enter those sites.

So yeah, you got it. So if the home was burning, think about the contents of a home. Every can of paint, WD 40, Lysol, Windex, every chemical that's in that house, vegetable oils, it all got cooked up into the fire, right? Like every contents of that home, the drywall, the furniture, the fire retardants, the computers, the car, the fuel.
 

So this is not a regular wildfire situation. When you have a situation where a lot of structures are burnt and the contents of those structures, this is a new game. Yeah, so for most of the people here, insurance companies and restoration contractors, they've never dealt with something like this before. There's no playbook. So even the people who's, they're treating it like smoke damage. That's the playbook that they're rolling out. It's just smoke. It is not just smoke. So you need to not just be testing for ash and soot. You need to be testing for hexavalent chromium, for PAH, polysilic aromatic hydrocarbons.
 

You need to be testing for, it's not a, it's more of a chemical fire in the LA region than it is just a regular wildfire smoke situation.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's mind blowing. Again, we don't think about that. If it's a wildfire that denotes wild, right? So we've got trees and the forestation, that's getting burnt.

But now we're talking about these chemical complexes. And how long does this stuff stay in the air?

MIKE FELDSTEIN: There's no black to give a definitive answer, I would be, I'd be full of s h*t because it, there's a lot of factors at play. For example the fire that I dealt with in Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016, biggest fire in Canadian history, 2, 500 homes were totally burnt.

But it was a very, it was inland and it was a valley. So even a month after you could barely not see anything. The interesting thing here is you're so close to the coast. So there's a lot more air flow happening. It's also a really big spread out city. Also the composition of the ground and the plants.
 

So there's too many factors. The only way to know is doing random soil testing, random dust testing and random air testing. This is the kind of thing to monitor. But definitely months, because even if the ambient smoke has moved on, Like I said, those homes are just sitting there. I showed you guys the pictures that I was seeing yesterday, the molten aluminum.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And, talk about that, the molten aluminum was crazy to see that. And you just went, you just used your phone and recorded it, I'd never seen anything like that. 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yeah, there's some it is a sight to be seen when honestly like I can't recommend it enough to anyone who lives in LA Go to Altadena and just drive through the neighborhood.

You can go to the Palisades, but Altadena is a more relatable neighborhood Just seeing the situation there the disparity and five minutes away from that neighborhood, you wouldn't even know there was a fire. It looks normal. There's the mall. There's the gas station. And then all of a sudden you enter that zone, and you could just see burnt homes, hundreds of them in a row.
 

So the molten aluminum was from a cargo van that literally I took pictures inside the van too. There's nothing left. There's just like the frame of the car, but it looks like these metal rivers Because when the car the aluminum has a melting point of about 1200 degrees fahrenheit. Typically a house fire is 1800 to 2000 degrees fahrenheit. That's the home that's the temperature that a house burns at so that means the metals got liquefied. So you literally see these metal rivers where there was cars and parts of homes just like flowing through the streets And it doesn't all turn into a solid metal, that means there's a lot of airborne metals as well that you cannot see.

So this is an unprecedented type of fire. You're, a lot of people are quoting like 9 11 in 2001, all the people who got chronically sick because they lived in proximity to 9 11 years after that, all kinds of health issues. So are we currently living through one of those right now? We don't it's and I'm not here to be alarmist because it's not certain that we are. That's why I'm here. I wanted to get my boots on the ground. And say what's going on here? And then do some additional testing. Do some random testing. And I'm in a fortunate position that I know how to test air. And test soil. And test water. So I'm gonna be running a lot of tests this week. And just publishing it.
 

To not just be guessing. But, the answer is a while. And because those piles of ash are sitting there every time, so what you really should be doing, what the city should be doing, is using water trucks. And every day, driving by all the burnt homes, although there's no water around here, driving by the burnt homes with a water truck and hydrating the ash.
 

Luckily, today it rained. Pray for rain, and it's a nice light rain, so it's not going to give us any mudslide problems, but it's hydrating those piles of ash, which is, it's doing, nature is the world, the best filter of all time is nature, the sun, the wind, the trees, the ocean the, yeah, the UV light the more rain and the more wind, the filtration will naturally happen, but yeah, I'm pretty concerned, and I'm not just concerned for the people who lost their homes, I'm concerned for really everybody what needs to happen now is varying levels of a smoke detox.

And it's not that difficult to do but yeah, anyone who lives in LA has some level of detoxing to do in their home.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Thank you for sharing this because again, we tend to see just the superficial outcomes of these things. And especially when it comes to air, it's something that's largely invisible for us and getting that feedback. For example, you mentioned Kayla and her blood work and people who are monitoring. What's going on in their bodies and seeing all of these dangerous chemicals on the rise in her system. Like we're all experiencing that and Again, just getting more awareness about it and thinking about what we can do and also for us and understanding this is likely not the last time that maybe not of this magnitude, but wildfires would take place here and some of the things that we can do The first day that I was able to get back in the studio because our studio the area was closed and I brought my Jaspr air filter along and I can't even tell you I've got some stories to share about my experience so far. If you could can you share what got you into focusing on air quality in the first place. And in particular you mentioned your experience being around the ramifications of wildfires in Canada. So what were some of the things that you saw and why was air quality something you focused on?
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yeah. So what got me into air and it's. I would have never thought 10 years ago that I would be the air guy.

It is quite surprising. I wasn't even like a science kid growing up or anything like that. But before this, I got into the disaster removal business, disaster cleanup. So think toxic mold situations, flood, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, things of that nature. What I learned when I was in these wildfire and flood situations, mold situations, is that when you go to do a mold removal job, you test the air before, you test the air at the end.
 

It's called a clearance test. Let's make sure the mold's actually gone. Same thing with floods, same things with fires. And what I very quickly learned was, even when we would do our clearance test at the end of a job after restoring a hotel or a home or a building, that what we were considering clear and good to go, wasn't very good.
 

To tie this to something that would be really relatable for your audience and for you, would be like food stuff. When you go get your blood work done, if you're just going to a regular doctor, we'll do your routine blood work, they're like, we'll call you if you're dying. Other than that, people are like, I got my blood tested.
 

For what? I don't know, they just tested my blood. I'm like, you know there's not just the blood test? But what they're considering Good and normal, their normal ranges keep going up. Normal is supposed to mean average. To me, normal should mean somewhere closer to optimal. But that's not the way that it works with blood testing, with food, and with any of that stuff, and it's frustrating.

So the same standards are applying to people's air in their home. What they're considering a building or a home having good, safe air, no, that's normal air. But, indoor air is bad. The average indoor air is five to ten times dirtier than outdoor air. What should be considered good should be outdoor air in a non polluted environment.

That's just air. And when you're like, inside I need to go outside and get a breath of fresh air, because it feels stuffy inside. You go outside, it's that is not even that clean, but just getting outside. Makes you feel so much better because the carbon dioxide is decreased because the way we're building homes right now is quite unacceptable with the materials we're using and things like that.
 

So for me, it really started from mold, fire, flood, cleaning up the worst air possible, my own personal health. I got psoriasis developed when i was 26, living in a hazardous fire zone for seven months. And yeah, so what really got me into it was being in those bad environments and then just, it opened my eyes cause I wasn't even thinking about air.

And then I'm like, Oh damn, this really is in fact, is it impacting me? And then when I lived in a house, we called it the flood house where all of like the restoration guys would live together and we had big air scrubbers in our home and that was our clean air sanctuary. And then I remember I came back home to Toronto at the time and I had different family members who had health issues.
 

And I was buying them air purifiers for their bedrooms and consistently they were sleeping better. Their allergies were going down. I'm like, okay. So that's what kind of woke me up to my air journey and then I spent about nine years going down the rabbit hole of consulting people on their air. So I would go into people's homes if they were sick at home and didn't know why.
 

They're doing the supplements. They've done the, they're doing the stuff. They're eating right. They're exercising. They're drinking filtered water, but they just don't feel good. Then one day they go on a vacation. They go camping. They feel great. I'm solved. They go back home. They feel sick again. Then they're like, oh shit. Is my home making me sick? Then I was the guy that you would call if you had that moment where we would come in and do a deep dive. What's in your air? What's in your water? What's hiding behind the walls? How about your carpet? How about your bedding? What are you breathing? And then giving people plans to optimize their indoor environments.

I like the saying, You cannot heal in the place that made you sick or you cannot detox your body if you don't detox your home first. If you're in a sick environment, you can take all the pills and sun as you want, but it's just going in one side and out the other. And then I'm like, okay, I could dedicate the next 20 years of my life to raising hair awareness, however, wherever this may take me.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You mentioned this term, air scrubbers. Can you talk about what that is versus the run of the mill air purifier you might pick up at a typical store?
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yeah, so air scrubbers is what we would use to remediate a toxic building. So let's say we're doing, whether it's a mold removal job or a big smoke damage cleanup, air scrubbers are the heavy duty air purifiers.

What's good about them? They are amazing at cleaning the air. Like one of those is like 30 small air purifiers, just to put it into like simple relatable terms. The downside is they're incredibly loud, big, and ugly. If you just had a mold, for mold, very practical. But there's no way you could live with that in your home.
 

It would literally sound like there's a truck in your living room. And then if you look at the other side of the spectrum, the small little air purifiers that you'd get at a big box store, Amazon, Walmart, something like that, they're affordable, they're cute, they go in the corner, but they don't do anything.
 

So it was really clear to me, as a restoration guy, I'm like, whoa. We, and I remember there was a lady named Angela in Fort McMurray, Alberta. She had a sick baby. We left an air scrubber in her house. And I went to her house to check on things and it was unplugged. I'm like, Angela, what are you doing? She had a sick baby and horrible air.
 

And she's I know Mike. I'm sorry. I'm like, don't say sorry to me. But she's it's so loud. It's so loud. I just couldn't take it. So we cleaned the air pollution, but we created the noise pollution, which is another significant, it's like light pollution. Noise pollution is a problem too.

So I was like, okay, what we really need and the whole idea for Jaspr was to create an air purifier specifically for wildfire smoke. So I'm like, That's all I thought I was focusing on. I'm like, we need something that is, can handle the job of a big fire or a big flood, but it has to be quiet, it has to be beautiful, and it has to be made out of steel.

None of this plastic stuff. So basically like industrial grade, but with the aesthetic that you'd be proud to put it in your home. Because if it's not beautiful in your home, it's gonna hide in the closet. And you're going to unplug it when people come over and that's not an answer. It not, it needed to be beautiful.
 

So yeah, that, that's how one thing led to the next. And now here we are.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And people wouldn't even realize this, but Jaspr is running right here in the studio right now. And it's doing a fantastic job. The difference between the Jaspr air purifier versus anything else. We're not going to even drop any names that shall remain nameless.

My Jaspr is in my bedroom, which that was one of my gripes with the previous. Before I found out about you was that number one light, light pollution, right? So it's got all these bright buttons and things that are just illuminating my bedroom. So I got to try to tape it and find different ways to cover that up.
 

And also of course the sound can be an issue in situations like this. And so it's got a great dimmer on there, number one. And also having it in my bedroom. My wife was downstairs even today cooking downstairs and Jaspr picks it up. That she's downstairs cooking and it can pick up what's happening in the air and give you Instantaneous feedback.

So let's talk about some of the features with Jaspr and what makes it so exceptional?

MIKE FELDSTEIN: And like what you're saying is really important because people don't realize that your home is a shared environment. So you have you could have a newborn baby up in its crib 4, 000 square foot house Baby's in the crib sleeping upstairs and you're cooking some bacon or lighting some incense in the main room. You don't realize that if there's a Jaspr or an air if you're measuring the air in baby's bedroom when you're cooking or when there's incense burning or some candles Jaspr's going red in your baby's room, too, so you don't realize when there's these polluting events either in your home Or even your neighbor across the streets using balance sheets in their dryer. Now those chemicals are outside Now that's coming in your home, and that's going in every room of the house So that's why first of all we are we were originally creating a whole home purifier that goes into your furnace I figured the most beautiful would be out of site out of mind completely, but we spend a few years on it.

We tested them all and it was just very ineffective. It needed to be more like a Sono situation. Like we learned that the answer is not a huge speaker in your living room with the bass bumping where it's like the only, you'd have to turn it up. It's either too loud in this room where I can't hear it in that room.
 

We learned the right system is something like a Sonos, where we can have just the right volume in every room. So the optimal air system has to be decentralized. So you can clean the air's area, you can clean the air in the areas that need it most. It had to be set, what was important to me when I wanted to create it was, it had to have no annoying lights, it had to be made out of steel, because if we use plastic, It's going to only last a couple years.

That's why most companies have a one-year warranty. Has to be steel, like it should last 25 years. And if we're using plastic, which has been a short life cycle and then polluting a lot, okay, great, you're cleaning your bedroom at what cost? So if everybody bought a plastic air purifier, the rate in which we're polluting the outside would still be a net negative.

So it had to be here to stand the test of time and be infinitely recyclable. So if those break, we take them back as just a steel tube. That steel tube is going to be around for decades. So then it had to be powerful. So size matters. It had to have a certain size because it needed to be able to move enough air.
 

On its silent mode. So usually if you have a little air purifier, almost any of them, they'll work. They'll do a job in the bedroom, but they have to be full speed all the time anything less than full speed They're not doing anything So I wanted something that was really effective even at the low speed and then we put in really high end commercial grade sensors so if we went back like 10 years ago those sensors would have could have costed me like a couple grand but the sensor tech has gotten so much more affordable that we put the same quality sensors on there and That I'm using on my air quality, like when I was doing air quality consulting with my fancy commercial probes.

We have that level of sensor on there. And I believe that air purifiers are great, but air awareness is way more important. And air education. So a lot of people realize, oh, whoa. When I use my hairspray Jaspr gets angry. Wait, what's in my hairspray? Then they go down that rabbit hole. Maybe it's time for a lower-tox hairspray. Maybe no hairspray. Oh, whoa. When my, when I shower my Jaspr goes crazy. Oh, whoa. There's chlorine in my water when we heat it up with a high level, when it aerosolizes. That's a problem. Crack my windows open. Whoa, it's a polluted day today. You start cooking certain foods. Hey, my ventilation is not working.
 

So it acts as this two crazy stories. One guy named Jason was lying in his bedroom, ready to go to bed with his wife, and the Jaspr turned red. They hadn't turned off the light yet for the night. It was still on smart mode, and he knows enough to trust Jaspr that if Jaspr's going red, Why is it going red? So he walked around his house, and he had left his stove on. Wow. He had left his stone on and a protein fire was just starting to kick up. It wasn't enough yet for him to smell it, but there was enough particulate being put in the air that it was detected in another lady named Megan. Same situation.
 

Jaspr's going red. Start to look around. And her dryer. This is a very common source of house fire, is if you don't clean out the lint in your dryer vent. We can have a vent fire. So her dryer was starting to smolder and she, she was a, both of them were able to prevent house fires because Jaspr knows before your nose knows.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow. I love that so much. And you're right. Because when it was kicking on kicking up to a higher level of work, what I did was, of course, Jaspr can do his thing and things are work themselves out, but I just opened the bathroom window up for a little bit. Because Jaspr told me, hey, there's something going on here in the air.

And I love that. I didn't think about that as just an air educator. That's always there and letting you know what's going on.
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: That's why you put the number there. Not just the light. People need to know. And then probably important for people who are new on this journey is like who, who cares about air in the first place?

Like why does it even really matter? And just a couple power statistics that really made it clear that this was the journey for me was we drink. Three meals a day. We have eight Eight cups of water if we're a good drinker. So said another way, we eat two or three pounds of food in a day. We drink two liters of water, but we breathe 17, 000 liters of air.
 

You can go three weeks without food, only three days without water, only three minutes without air. Air is all night long. The only thing keeping you alive when you're sleeping is air. I call it sleep fuel. There's nothing else sustaining your existence throughout the entire night. It's the first thing you do when you're born is take a breath.
 

The last thing you do before you die is take a breath. And I believe that because it's so fundamental to our existence, it's the only thing that we do consciously and subconsciously. Even if you have a coma, you could keep breathing. You breathe in your sleep. That is why we take it for granted. So we if you're hungry, you get hungry, you go eat.

If you're thirsty, you go get water. With air it's like, it's automatic for you. So I think that is a lot of the reason why we're just totally ignorant to it. If you think about it, What water is to fish, air is to people. And Casey and Callie use the fishbowl analogy a lot. Do you drug the fish or do you clean the bowl?

But really, if you're thinking about the fishbowl, , it's air, it's do you, if you have a fishbowl and it's getting murky on it, do you think it's okay to just clean the perimeter of your fishbowl every day? Or do you need to filter the water and change the water? No, your fish are gonna die if you don't filter and change the water. But our air is like the water. And if we don't filter this air. It's gonna make us really sick, so I just like to like level set of hey guys You haven't been paying attention to this thing the whole time because you've been breathing at 24 hours a day So I just really want to start from that first principles place.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah it's the most important thing It's the primary nutrient, but like you said A fish doesn't know that it's in water. It's just where it lives. Yes. The same thing with us and air and the quality of that air matters more than anything truly because especially right now in these circumstances, our air is filled with all kinds of trouble.

Newly invented chemicals and all kinds of things that we know are a detriment to our bodies. And so my next question is what can. An air purifier do for us in search in situations like that, when we do have all these different chemicals that we're dealing with.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: So there's two things there. I'll just say on I'll start from the critical situation. Cause we're talking about wildfires and this situation. What there's two, two important layers of filtration. One is the HEPA filter and one is the carbon filter. So HEPA is going to take care of particles, things floating in the air, whether that's bacteria or that's mold or that's dust or ash or soot.
 

Things you could see under a microscope. Then the carbon filter, uses absorption, that filters out things like gases and odors. So they work in tandem. The last couple days I've been getting to go into people's homes that are of various levels of destroyed. That one photo I was showing you, where the whole street is destroyed, what you didn't see is right behind me there was one home left standing.
 

So that's the folks I was dealing with, and I'm actually helping advocate for them to get their house knocked down. Because everybody's house burnt down, that's sometimes easier. They're caught in this grey zone where insurance is saying, move home. They cannot move back into that house. So insurance is trying to say, just clean it. Are you kidding? That house is not livable anymore. The heat, the stress on the structure. The, that home, think about your home like a sponge, you have insulation, you have drywalls, you have flooring, you have bedding, you have couches, it's all absorbing all of those materials, you can't get it out, and then four years later, the whole street's gonna be these brand new homes, and they're gonna be this odd old toxic duckling with an unsellable home.
 

So really, first of all you asked about air, but with a lot of the times here, sometimes when you're that close to the fire, the answer is You really should be knocking that house down. As far as air is concerned, when most people are going in their homes to document things, their eyes are burning, they're getting headaches, they're getting dizzy a lot of asthmatics.

Even just I was talking to the dude this morning at the hotel, he was, and he's ten miles from the fire, he had to go to his respirologist to upgrade his puffer to a higher dose of steroids because he's having trouble breathing at night. And he actually didn't know the fire was impacting him at all. He's Oh man, I didn't realize. I just leveled up my puffer a couple weeks ago. Because I've been having way more asthma attacks. It's of course you've been having more asthma attacks. The air is worse than it was and will continue to be so for some amount of time. So the air purification is a really elegant way to deal with It's not gonna deal with the outdoor air.
 

But the real problem with air is humans are so resilient. We're so resilient. We can handle a little mold exposure. We can take some pollen. We can take some dust. We can even take some chemicals y smells. It's the 24-hour-a-day beatdown that hurts people. That that really chronically beats you down. The most amazing thing I made these things for wildfire smoke. I didn't think we'd be in the sleep and wellness business. I did not see this coming, but I'm glad that it happened. And a lot of people's seasonal allergies are gone. Because, they would been the average bedroom we test has a million particles in it.
 

Dust, pets, dander, mold, all of it. Hair cells, skins, skin particles, skin fragments, insect parts. All the stuff that's just in the air. When you actually was showing the people at the hotel, when you put a Jaspr in a bedroom within about 30 or 40 minutes, the air is about 95 percent cleaner. So now, think about two scenarios of sleep. Sleep number one, your body's breathing in tons of mold all night, all these hazardous particles. So you're getting through the night, but your body's playing defense, hardcore, dealing with all these foreign invaders. Scenario two, your bedroom is a clean air sanctuary. You're breathing pure air. You're not breathing all that stuff, so now your body can go parasympathetic.
 

It can rest, it can recover, memories can consolidate, you breathe better. So not only do people sleep better, but their seasonal allergies are often bad. Gone, because if there, if you have a cup, that's like a stress bucket filling, overflowing, if we can drain that bucket every night, we're good during the day. And we did a study in August with 150 people with aura rings. So we gifted a hundred Jasprs in exchange for one month of sleep data. A lot of them were doctors and naturopaths and influencers. Cause I'm like, I'm sick of the studies. Everybody goes on and they quote study, but no one gets to see the study.

I'm like, can't we do studies? In the public eye, so I said in exchange for the free Jaspr, I need one month of sleep data and when we publish it, I gotta be able to put your Instagram handle and your name on the study, so people can say, here's the people who did it, and the average person slept 25 minutes more per night, 18 percent more deep sleep, and 5 minutes shortened sleep latency, so they fell asleep 5 minutes faster, and it's not it's a silver bullet, it's like you went from breathing mold and pollen and drywall dust, To not, so it's a massive opportunity for addition by subtraction.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh wow so powerful. So obviously we have this very evolved and intelligent sensor right on our face called a nose, but can you talk about becoming nose blind and how this unawareness can be fooling us?
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: It's one of my favorite things. So the term nose blind, I learned about it. Doing wildfires because so let's say you know Jaspr has a five on it right now. That's good When there would be wildfire smoke outside is four or five hundred So then you know recess is canceled kids stay home. What you don't realize is the average person's indoor environment still 200 . So everyone's staying inside thinking they're sheltered But it's still really bad and you'd go outside and it would smell smoke you'd come inside and it wouldn't because relatively It would be a little cleaner, a little less smoky inside, so you have no ability with contents, the only way to know if someone's shirt from a fire smells smoky is you have to drive two hours, you leave town, you breathe, you put your shirt in a bag, You drive two hours, or your couch, or your carpet, or whatever, you leave it sealed, you breathe the ambient air for a day or two, so it cycles through your system, and then you smell the shirt, and sometimes you don't realize, like literally, you could smell, it's possible, all your stuff stinks.
 

And no one can tell, because everyone's in LA right now. It's possible I'll fly back to Austin tomorrow or the next day, and my stuff will smell smoky. Because we're in that, it's like the fish don't leave the radioactive part of the ocean. They don't leave, they just stay because they're not even aware. Yeah, that is a big one.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, it just reminds me how we get used to a certain smell in the environment. Like your brain basically down regulates that smell that awareness of the smell, whether it's perfume…
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: wet dog, cooking, you go to someone's house, it smells for a bit, then you're used to it.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: A family member with a lot of flatulence. You adapt and that's, again it can fool us into thinking that the air It's not a problem just because we can't smell it.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Because humans are good at adopting Imagine how annoying the experience would be like if you lived in a place with bad air and you smelt it all the time. You maybe you'd actually do something about it, but it would be really uncomfortable But speaking of the amazing sensors that we have, you know when we grow up They teach us about the five senses our eyes our nose our mouth our ears and our ability to touch Those they call that the five senses, but I think this is a very limited perspective I don't like that they call the fifth one, Touch.

I think it should be called feel. In its totality. For example, if we, I love doing this, you take five people where everybody's outside and we all say, hey, write on a piece of paper. What temperature do you think it is outside? You'll be shocked. Sometimes everybody says the same number or within one. How do we do that?

Nobody says 90 degrees and the other guy says 60. That simply doesn't happen. Guess what? You've got temperature sensors in your skin. You have the ability to feel temperature. If you're in a dry sauna, or in the desert, versus a rainforest or a steam sauna, you feel humidity. If you're ever in the winter somewhere, It's dry.
 

I can feel it in my throat, my hair, my skin, you know it. It's dry in here. Whoa. You have a relative humidity sensor in your skin. If I blindfolded you right now, and there was a pile of garbage in the corner, you would be able to find that garbage with your eyes closed, blindfolded with your hands behind your back.
 

So we're all really impressed by the shark or the bear who can smell the blood miles away, but it's like we have those superpowers too. So if you say it's stuffy in a room, that means the carbon dioxide is high. So I've calibrated my CO2 sensor. So it's like a fun party trick. That's why I carry that thing with me.
 

I could be anywhere and I could tell you roughly what the CO2 is and the humidity as well. So this is a very powerful thing because with my, I have a mold sensor, I could do all the lab testing in the world, but anyone who's tested mold for a living, when you go into a house in the first five minutes, if there's mold, the lab data is just for documentation for the homeowner, you could tell right away. So it's really amazing that when your air awareness is enhanced, it's like when you grew up, you just, water was water. You would just drink from the tap. And then you're like, that was plasticky. And now you're big on your filtered water journey.
 

So now if I give you a a mountain Valley glass, spring water or tap water at a restaurant or a plasticky bottle, and I close your eyes. You can tell exactly the difference that same amount of taste is available for air. So I'll walk in the lobby of a hotel, be like mold, VOCs, high CO2, the same way you can detect the water, the same thing is available for air.
 

And it just we just have to get to a place where we are in touch with those senses and we trust our instincts because we know what's going on. If we just listen to ourselves, absolutely.

SHAWN STEVENSON: With all this data that we've already received from you, I want to know, again, there's a spectrum of air purifiers and I just think about even the filter that is with my air conditioning, for example, at my house. What sets Jaspr apart from everything else?

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yeah there's two things there. First of all, notice that it's a furnace filter. It's called a furnace filter for a reason. They don't call it an air filter. Because the only thing that your furnace filter is doing, it's a furnace for the filter. Not for your body.

So the whole purpose of the furnace filter is to keep large chunks of pet hair, drywall dust, things that would clog up the motor, possibly start a fire, and break your filter. That's what the furnace filter is for. That's why when your furnace comes with an original filter, it's actually a very low grade filter.

And that's actually what's best. A lot of people started to try to use their furnace filters as air filters. So they put in a big MERV 13, 14, I've upgraded my filter. Big mistake. What this does is it reduces your airflow. It makes heating and cooling less effective. You're trying to use something as a tool that it's not meant for.

It can blow out the motor. And it still doesn't make your air very clean. If anybody would actually No one does that and then tests the air. You won't see really any difference at all. So speaking of the testing, by the way,

SHAWN STEVENSON: when you came in here, I felt like the ghostbusters were coming in here all this equipment and stuff and started reading things.

And I felt like I was in here with Venkman and Spangler and it was awesome. I'm like, do all the things, man. Tell me what's going on with the air.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: The air was pretty good in here. I'm shocked. We're in an office building in Los Angeles of all places. The CO2 is in check. It's 614. That's pretty good.

The relative humidity is mid 40s. It's in the optimal zone. For a health podcast, you guys are it's even cleaner now because we have Jaspr in the room, but It's pretty good. I've tested 12 homes. I've checked the hotel and your air is the cleanest indoor environment I've checked so far.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I receive that, give thanks everybody. I'm so grateful for that.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Me too. So Yeah, why is Jaspr different? It's because probably the way I was approaching it from the first place has like a mold flood fire guy I'm like, I wanted to make something commercial. It's not the way most people are like, oh we want to How do we make the perfect air purifier? It's let's make it cheap, small and cute and have a wifi app. I'm like, let's do the opposite. No wifi, no Bluetooth, no EMF, no remote control. Last thing I want to do as a guy who recently went three years without a cell phone is. make people use a cell phone to control an air purifier. That is nonsense.

So simplicity is at its core. It's supposed to not be another gadget to control. The big difference is though it's the combination of performance. And beauty and a bulls t free experience. So the filter is very large. It's more of what you would find in like heavy duty commercial machines. It's not what you're, our filter inside is bigger than most air purifiers whole machine. One Jaspr is equivalent to about five small air purifiers. So you could have five little ones in your room or you could just have one large one. And then we made it like a condo building. So even though it's large in size it, we build up, not out.
 

So it's actual footprint doesn't take up much floor space at all. Another big thing is it has a 360 degree intake. So a lot of air purifiers, they only take in air on one or two sides. So that means it needs to sit like in the middle of the room because if you put it against a wall or in a corner, it's really restricting the airflow so it's not able to pull in the particles.
 

It vents up. You don't want anything that vents forward, because all that does is kicks up dust during COVID. That was a big problem. It was aerosolizing droplets. So you want something that vents up into the breathing zone, not blowing on you when you're walking by. And then the sensor. And then of course the fact that it's dark at night.
 

There's no bright lights. But it's just the, when I read the, not just the reviews, but when someone buys a Jaspr, we, it says, why did you choose Jaspr over everything else? And there's three common things. Design. Quality and the two words actually works. So there's my favorite review is I've owned four or five air purifiers.

I was done with them. I never thought I'd get another one again. This is the first time that I've invested in one that I wasn't wondering, does this thing even work? I saw it work and I felt it work. Yeah. So at its core, that's what's simplest and marketers are marketers. So they really messed it up.
 

When people ask the question, how many square feet does it cover? Cause that's usually how people talk about air purifiers. If you go to the store and cover 1700 square feet extra large. It's nonsense. First of all, are those eight foot ceilings or those 16 foot ceilings? Because if it's double the height, it's double the QTV volume. It's not a Roomba. Air purifiers don't care about square feet. They care about volume of air. So be wary of square footage stuff. They also don't tell you when it says covers X square feet. Does it make the air 10 percent cleaner or 90 percent cleaner? They don't tell you that either. What does covers even mean? 

And then they just, they say filters 99. 97%. So you hear two numbers, a lot of square feet and 99. 97%. And you check your box. I've gone to some people's homes that are. worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they have a 99 air purifier. It was not a financial decision. It was just a box that they were checking. They didn't even really realize the difference. So that's why we approached it from a completely different perspective of let's just make the best thing. It doesn't have to be the cheapest, cutest thing that market is, and we only make one product, right? So a lot of companies, they make water filters, they make diffusers, they're making shower things, they're making five models of air purifiers.
 

I'm like, let's just make the ultimate air purifier, just one. It's hard enough to innovate one product when a company is trying to do 20 things good. What needs to happen is I need the thing that dominates my shower thoughts or my sleep thoughts to be singularly focused. Between health and family and friends and business, I only have so many thoughts that I can contribute in a day.
 

Now if I have 20 different products, it basically means I can't think about them at all. I'm just thinking about other stuff. Simplicity, and then a bullshit free experience. So I'm proud of the product we made. I'm even more proud of our support. So let's say your Jaspr breaks. Hopefully you don't find out, but if you do, you'll be impressed. If it breaks, we ship you a new one the next day. You take the new one out of the box. You put the old one back in the box, prepaid shipping label from UPS. And then we schedule UPS to come to your front porch at 9am and pick it up. Cause how much does it suck?

Your thing breaks, you got the extended warranty. Do you have the receipt? Do you have the odd shaped box that it came in? Do you have a printer to print a label? Can you please package it up and go to FedEx? You're like, that's a half a day. I'd only got so many days in my life. It's cheaper for me to just throw this thing out. So that, that kind of treat people the way you want to be treated thing, I think really applies to business too. So give the customers the experience you would want if you were the customer. Because without the customers, no business. So that kind of stuff.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I'm so grateful For you, man. I was just even off the record was sharing with you just how excited I am, honestly, to talk with you because in 12 years of doing this show, I've been in this field for about 22 years. This is the first time I'm really getting educated about the air quality and it wasn't until something hit me right in the face and being presented with the fires going on the wildfires and the consistent pattern it's been almost every year It's been some fallout from wildfires here and it got me making decisions and I would ask, you know Trusted advisors people that I know wait, what do you got?

What do you got? And it wasn't until I was direct to you that I really dug in start to get myself educated and you said it perfectly Jaspr is helping to educate me. And that was the thing that I didn't expect. And it's something that, again, now it's in my bedroom all the time. And it was sitting there, honestly, in a box for quite some time.
 

And it wasn't until this recent incident took place that I was like, I gotta get this thing out and start using it. And to see, and the fact that you ran that study and to get that data back, that it makes a difference in your sleep quality, it's going to make a, and what that says is, it's just making a difference in your health.
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: It's the laziest way to be healthy. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. Something that you don't have to change what you're doing. It's just changing the environment for you. And this is something I talk about a lot is that we are a representation of our environment. We can't not be humans are a product of our environment, and especially when it comes to our health, but we're also a creator of our environment.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yes.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's what makes us so unique. And so doing something like this, stacking conditions, I'm a huge advocate for this right now, especially in times like this, but just in general, for everybody, especially if you're not in a place where you can keep the window open in your bedroom at night, and you got great air quality in the environment that you're in, you need an air filter.
 

You need an air purifier in your bedroom, primarily. Now, of course, you could put these in different places, put in your kitchen. For us, we're going to have having it at the studio. But, I'm a huge advocate for this, and your team reached out to me. They hooked up everybody with $400 off as of this recording.
 

Now, listen. And we're going really hard on the discount now because of the wildfire. It will apply to the whole country, but this is the season to make it as affordable as possible for people. But with that said, because of what you guys put into this is a limited time thing. So $400 off through the end of the month as of the release of this episode. Today, February 19th. All right, so go to jaspr.co/model. That's J A S P R okay? It's spelt JASPR.CO/MODEL. All right, not. com. co. Use the code MODEL at checkout for $400 off again, through the end of the month. Now, if you're listening to this in the future, all right, which thousands of people listen to previous episodes every week, you're still going to get a deep discount. You're not going to get anywhere else. It's going to be $200 off moving forward, but right now it's $400 off. I highly recommend pop over right now again, jaspr.co/model. Use the code MODEL at checkout.  

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Said

SHAWN STEVENSON: Next question.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Why do you feel that everyone should have a Jaspr in their bedroom? 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: I'll start with the, you say everybody. But to me the reason I came out to LA, above all else, is for the kids, man. I got a two year old, a four year old, and a baby boy in the oven. And The kids are trusting us to dial in their environments for them. They don't have the awareness. They don't have the money.  You said we get to control environments. That's not really true for kids. Especially young kids. They have no say over it. And the amount of kids who are sleeping in an environment right now, whether it's the parents, if the parents have no air awareness, then that kid is in a you bring your baby home on day one and you put them in a nursery and people get a diaper pail and they put it in the nursery. So literally we're all worried about baby proofing our homes and plugs and this and that. And the first thing we do is we have a newborn baby that's sleeping 18 hours a day and we shut the door and we put. pile of diapers in the room. You smell poo. If you smell poo, it is poo. If it smells, if it is poo, it's bacteria.
 

So day one, baby's born out of the womb, we take them home and we put them in a bacteria box for the first year of their life. And it's if we were doing that, what else are we not aware of? We have all the toys, the VOCs, the paint, the cribs, it's all about aesthetic. And we're forgetting the most foundational reason that you have a home is to have a healthy abode.

That should be your one environment. Where it's your clean, your healthy sanctuary where you can dial in your lighting and your water and your air. So start, your question to conclude with the bedroom is I believe in investing in a high quality bed and sheets and in order to have a high quality sleep, we need a comfortable bed, good sheets, good pillow, a cool temperature, no annoying lights or sounds, and we need clean air.
 

So the fact that you can spend a little, once you own a Jaspr or another air filter, a little over a dollar a day to have clean air for life while you sleep all night long, to me is just the most obvious table stakes thing that one can do for their health is have clean sleep fuel all night for the rest of your life.
 

That's why I travel with this thing. So yeah, if you want to, if you want to be better and live better, you need more energy. And you can't have a good day without a good night, and you can't have a good night without clean air. Amazing.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Because of you, I've been looking into the things that our air quality can impact as far as our health. Very practical things. One of those things is our cognitive function. Now, of course, on the surface, it's Captain Obvious that if the air quality starts to be reduced, my cognitive function isn't going to be That's good. But there's actually a study that was done and this was conducted by some researchers at MIT and it was looking at air quality on chest performance.

Can you talk a little bit about that?
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Yeah, that's a cool one and like for anybody out there's no point in us quoting, but we'll talk about this one study, but you can type in on Google or DeepMind or whatever researching tool you like to use. Air quality, space, whatever. Whether it's dementia, Alzheimer's, fertility, absenteeism, thyroid, skin, sleep, there are it's not about this air purifier or that, but the amount of like hard evidence on the impact of air on people is wild.

So when you look at the chess study in particular, they measured the air quality CO2 in this case, for chess players, and they would basically, They would measure the performance of the chess, not just regular chess players. These were grandmasters. So they would take the highest quality chess players in the world.
 

And it's when you make a perfect move in chess, it's called game theory optimal. So that's like playing perfect as close to perfect as you can. And the higher the carbon dioxide got, the lower quality their moves were. So their cognitive performance, their function, their ability to make their ability to make if life isn't just about making high quality decisions, I don't know what is.
 

So these chess masters are excellent decision makers and their ability to make good decisions was dramatically impeded by bad air. The same thing was true for a very similar study with SAT scores. So a bunch of students taking SAT scores, air quality up and down, clear correlation, the worse the air was, the worse the SAT scores were. Same thing with absenteeism, all kinds of, like pretty much everything.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, I can see you having a vision of making sure that, There's clean air in all these environments. And that's why your heart is so big and you could hear it in your voice. You could see it in your energy. When you came in here, like the ghostbusters is to get this awareness out there, but also to make sure that there's an actual effective resource for making purer air, cleaner air in these environments where again, kids are studying where our babies are resting, where we're doing work and just wanting to be great, where we're exercising, the list goes on and on. So I want to ask you about cooking. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but whether, and I just want to ask for some practical stuff too, because yeah, that's the best.
 

This is the stuff that I can ask somebody like you, but let's just say, Stuff people could do today for free. Exactly. Yes. So obviously there's electric stoves, but then there's gas stoves. Is that going to make a difference if we're using a gas stove, for example, in the environment?

MIKE FELDSTEIN: And I will just tell people also one of the best air purifiers that you can possibly get. It's a DIY. It's actually called the Corsi Rosenthal box. Literally, it's a DIY air purifier. You can make it for about 100 at home. You basically take a handful of high grade furnace filters and a box fan, a million YouTube tutorials and stuff. You just type in DIY air purifier, and it's called the Corsi Rosenthal box.
 

It's pretty good. It's way better than most of those air purifiers you'll get. Downsized, doesn't have sensors, it's a little ugly, it's a little loud, but for a critical situation, way better than nothing. We're for the people who want it to be easy and beautiful and all that, but there, there's the DIY models you can make are pretty good -- Cooking, gas stoves. I've never tested the air quality in a house that had a gas stove and not saw at least 0. 5 parts per million of carbon monoxide throughout the whole home. And they talk about safe levels of carbon monoxide. I'm personally of the mindset that I would rather have no carbon monoxide in my house.
 

And I just got a house recently that does have a gas stove. We didn't rip it out right away. It's not sound the alarm situation, but if I'm building a home from scratch, I would either, I would not do a gas stove. And if I was going to, I would invest in really good ventilation. If someone's like a pro chef, live your life, but be aware that it is putting carbon monoxide into the air with cooking, we're seeing clean oils, clean food is definitely. better, but even still, even if you have a grass fed organic grass finished steak with avocado oil or however you cook it with butter even though those ingredients are clean and pure, it will still really pollute your air. That's why you smell cooking because you're heating food. So you're aerosolizing it. There's chemical reactions that happen between the heat and the protein. that creates other compounds like PAH which can be cancer causing. So just because you can eat something, it doesn't mean you necessarily can put it in your lungs, which is when if the air is good outside, open your doors and windows.
 

Use your range hood. So some practical stuff people can do. If you're cooking and the weather permits, Opening windows, two windows ideally on different sides of the house, so you get a cross breeze and good ventilation. Opening one window doesn't do that much. You need two windows, so you can get that cross breeze.
 

Another thing, actually use your range hood. They're a little bit loud and annoying, and not just for baking. Use it when you're cooking. That's why Jaspr's nice, because it gives you that awareness of, oh, basically all cooking impacts my air. When you're cooking, especially if you're boiling or simmering, use the back burner because the range hood picks up way more of the particulate from the back burner than from the front burner Another big one is make sure your vent when I'll by the way when I'm saying range hood Or cooking vent. These are synonymous, they mean the same thing. So the range hood is just a vent above the stove. Now, if you use that thing, first make sure it works. So I call it the tissue test. Take a paper towel, or a napkin, or a Kleenex. Turn your vent on. Hold it up, and make sure it's pulling it. Over 50 percent of the time it doesn't even work.
 

So let's make sure that vent that's supposed to be exhausting the cooking particles out of your house, make sure A, it's pulling the tissue up. It should grab it a few inches away, and it should hold it there solid. And then two, where is it actually venting? So a lot of the time it's venting into behind the drywall, in your attic, into some other part of the home.

It should be venting directly outside. If it's not this is a very easy fix. This is like 200 for a handyman to make sure it's vending outside Same thing with bathroom fans Because you take a shower. Those fans in the bathroom are not for poop smell. They're for humidity So you take a shower think about it think about how much water your towel can soak up So you're done showering there's water, you know a little bit on the floor a little bit in the bath or the shower Your towel is holding several liters gallons.
 

Where do you think that water goes? It's in a trapped environment, so it increases your humidity and gives you a lot of mold problems. So that bathroom fan is supposed to get that humidity out of your house. Often it's just venting right in the attic, which is why so many people have attic mold. So what you want to make sure is, same tissue test.

Take a tissue, make sure that bathroom fan is actually pulling it, and then make sure that's going outside. You don't want to keep all that humidity. These are like easy wins. And when you're done a shower, you should really be running that thing for a couple of hours. Cause if you turn it off after the shower that's when you need it. The water is all still sitting there. So you can get a, an upgraded bathroom light switch. Some of the bathroom fans have timers on them. If you can get one that has like a two hour timer, it makes your life easy. It's like 15. You can switch it yourself that way when you're done the shower or before you take a shower, hit the two hour button.
 

Don't think about it, and it's going to exhaust that out of your house. The other big one is just less toxins in the first place. So using cleaner soaps and dishwashing detergent. Branch Basics is a very good brand, but there's others. Using water and vinegar. If you smell heavy fragrance, let this be a indicator to you that it's not good. Cleaner, less toxic cleaning products, laundry products. You'll notice when you use your dishwasher at home, your house stinks. That is one of the only appliances that has chemical gas that doesn't vent outside. So your dryer vents outside, your dishwasher doesn't. You see that steam coming out of it? So you have that little chemical cleaning pouch and it just gasses your house.
 

So that's opening your windows if you don't have air filtration when you're running your dishwasher. No shoes in the house. And I moved to Texas a few years ago. It's always shoes in the house. 95 percent of shoes tested have fecal matter. How could they not? You walk outside with them. Also, they have glyphosate from the front yard.
 

You got your shoes on outside, it's got glyphosate, all the crap from the streets, it's got the poop. You come home, you're walking on your carpets, you're walking on your floor, and now that's on your surface, now that's kicking up into your air. The best thing you can do is not bring in more unnecessary pollutants in the first place. Those are definitely like a few easy, low-hanging fruit wins. Opening windows, making sure vents are running, use less toxic stuff.

SHAWN STEVENSON: This is awesome man. Okay. I gotta ask you this. I don't want to freak people out too much, but let's talk about carpets. You just mentioned, again, walking in the house with shoes on. With carpets, I think a lot of stuff in the environment is going to settle into the carpet, isn't it?
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: So the number one thing I've been telling people whose homes I've been inspecting from the smoke is either removing your carpets or getting them HEPA vacuumed and steam cleaned. Carpets are absolutely disgusting. Actually, we could, I have a little demo to show you this carpet. We can pause after and I can show you or I'll show you after, but it'd be really polarizing. Actually, let's pause for 30 seconds. I want to do something and then I still make more sense. Okay. Check this out. And this is not even like a shaggy nasty carpet. This is like a low pile situation. Watch this. All right. So right now the total particles in the room are about 28, 000. The PM 2. 5 is the most harmful particle. It's about 1, 500. We have about 30, PM 2. 5 is the particles that are small enough to enter your lungs and your bloodstream. So those, that's the same thing Jaspr's reporting on.
 

Now I'm gonna do what's called the disturbed sample. I'm gonna take the same test above the carpet while I'm tapping on it. And this is a clean office carpet, it's not in the house, there's no pets in here. But watch this. So 1, 500. Watch this. Prepare to be mind-blown.

Dude, check this out. We went from 30, 000 total particles to 262, 000. What? That's a 9x. And the most harmful particles? That was 1500, the one I was showing you. 135,000. So what's that? A? An 80 x. So often people don't realize, look, PM 2.5 guys, I don't know if you got that on, but it's too close.
 

Anyway, it's 140,000 instead of 1500. So it went up by, yeah, 70 times. So just want to preface the carpet thing with that. So when. The audio is still obviously going right? Yeah, so yeah, that's called a disturbed sample. So when I was going to people's homes who had wildfire stuff or pets we test their air But then you do a disturbed sample now That is indicative of every time You walk on the floor it kicks up your HVAC the air is hitting It kicks up your pets running around it kicks up.
 

So don't think it's don't think that what it stays in the carpet That's a sponge that's constantly You know, exhausting into your home. So it is just the most fibrous thing in your home. That is just like a absolute bacteria, allergy, poop sponge. When you do carpet cleaning, the water comes out black and most of the stuff you can't even see.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: The word that describes how I'm feeling is bothered. I am bothered right now because like you said, this is a very tiny carpet. It's clean in here, but again, we obviously cannot see what's actually in the air, and so to think about the carpets and the places that I've been and just this is blowing my mind, man.

That was crazy. All you do is just tap on the carpet for a little bit. Yeah.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Same thing to a lesser extent, but the chair. The bedding, so when an insurance company is telling someone to keep their beds or carpets that's crazy. Rugs are comfortable, they're cozy, and this and that the it's a tough balance.
 

But if someone has carpets, getting them steam cleaned twice a year, getting your ducts cleaned, the ducts are the lungs of your home. And people will go five, six years without cleaning them. An annual duct cleaning and a carpet cleaning these are not the areas that I'm looking to save money.
 

My air at home duct cleaning, to have high quality air filters, several of them, get annual steam cleaning and duct cleaning, we're talking maybe 1, 200 a year, for a whole family, for a whole house. So we're like, 4 a day. And we're like pretty dialed in and you get to keep your carpets. So yeah, generally I like a house without carpets I prefer rugs over carpets.

They can be shaken out. They can be cleaned better. But yeah, those like super shaggy carpets Oh, man What's real crazy is what we just did I can actually do another thing not with that But we collect a sample and we send it to the lab And then they do a zoomed a it's like AI with 3d imaging and it shows you the pictures of the particles you'll see all the different bugs and It will be it'll be like a living zoo of all the different things that are on that carpet And that's where we lie down.
 

That's where our kids play. That's where our pets roll around and guess what? Nothing on that carpet came from the carpet when you see dust on a counter at home. Do you think the dust, let's say like you have a TV media unit, and there's dust on it. Do you think it magically emerged from the media unit? Or do you think it came from the air? We don't, we think dust, but how did the dust get there? Dust is just a symptom of bad air. Dust is not even one thing. Dust is a collection of things. So it's not a singular thing. So yeah when you see, there's no dust outside. Unless it's like sand or desert or something like that.

There's no dust on your yard, dust on the sidewalk. Dust is an indoor problem because the world's best air filter is nature. But unfortunately we trapped that shit outside. And then this happens.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You have just blown my mind truly and I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for having the courage and the willpower to, to do something like this for us and to educate us, because this is one of those things, again, it's just hiding in plain sight. 

We're, we don't know that we're existing in this environment where our air quality can deeply determine how we feel in our health outcomes. And so I appreciate that so much, man. I can't even stress that enough. And I feel again, I feel a little bit bothered now just seeing what happened just with this carpet.
 

Ignorance is not bliss. Exactly. Exactly. And so we can't act like this. It isn't happening. And so you just provided us with a checklist of basic things for us to do. And so I implore everybody to make sure that you're checking those boxes, especially if you have carpets to, to emphasize what I just experienced. And also again, if you want to make a great investment in your health, make sure to get yourself. A Jaspr at least one, but get a Jaspr or maybe if you're looking at getting them in multiple bedrooms, maybe one in your kitchen, whatever works for you, maybe in your office space.
 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: My Promise is to people is that whether it's black fried or anything, it will never be cheaper than this.

That is my commitment. If this is the week to invest in air purification, the price will never be lower than this. So it is a good time for those who want to take advantage of the situation. Yeah the one thing that I wanted to touch on is When there's disaster and destruction, there's always a silver lining and in this case, Twelve hundred twelve thousand people lost their homes another hundred thousand people have a smoke damaged home But when there is destruction there is an opportunity to do things better the next time so what would be a Travesty is to not use this for an opportunity to build homes that are better Build, better building materials.
 

Yeah. It does not cost much more money, or any more money, to build a home with good air, good water, good lighting, and a better layout. Week one, our kid's off the iPads and the iPhones, but our living room is just two or three couches pointed at a TV with just a giant iPad for the whole family. It's a wonderful opportunity to say, Hey. We get to rebuild our house again now. How do we actually spend our time? How do we want to spend our time? What exists? Google healthy home construction, healthy home builder, healthy home architect. It does not cost any more money to dial the stuff in. Jaspr is it's a great band aid solution because you can plug and purify right away and long term my biggest vision that the thing that I'm here on planet Earth to do is to teach people how to build better homes and better communities and the folks in LA, if no one's, if not them, then who?

To start pioneering this Tesla came out with a super roadster first and then got it down to 15 years later, it's like 25, 000 model threes. So it's a great opportunity. You can build a house that's smoke proof, allergy proof. Don't just focus on the beautiful finishes and energy efficiency.
 

Cause I added. Face value energy efficiency is in direct odds with environmental health because you're making your home this trapped little box where the air can't come and go and your home's not breathing. So when you're working with your architect and you're working with your builder, ask questions. You can go to chat GPT and say how do I build a healthy home with good air? What would I do to make a smokeproof house, an allergy proof home? And make sure you're working with builders and designers who are speaking this language. Because you have an amazing opportunity now to build your home that's actually not when a home's built. There's no time when the architects and builders are saying they want to build a home cheap, fast, and effective.

Especially a big box builder who's building a thousand homes. They're not sitting around and saying how do we build this healthy abode for this family to raise their children? And that's not part of the conversation. So people are, they talk about, oh, America has a housing crisis. We're short four million units. I'm like, When you call them units, of course, we're not putting love into these things. These are people's homes. So on the supply side, we need builders and architects and developers. To start building healthier buildings, but us as the fam as the head of families who have children that are counting on us to deal with this. You can build a house that's mold proof, fire proof, smoke proof, clean air, clean water, clean lighting, etc. Good ventilation, maybe a smaller living room and a bigger screened in porch. Use this as an opportunity to build a healthier home and share it. Everybody's got these social media accounts, so maybe one less Dancing supplement discount picture and more showing people taking them through the journey of how you're building a healthier home Like this is an amazing opportunity for someone to nerd out and turn this negative situation into a positive one and share that so That's important.
 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Thank you for that because awareness is that first domino and there are a lot of people who are decision makers and powerful who listened to this show who could start to push this message forward. So thank you for that so much. And again, especially where you spend most of your time. We spend about a third of our lives in our bedroom about a third of our lives in our workspace and and then the other third kind of everywhere else. But get yourself the very best air purifier right now. I mentioned earlier. Limited time till the end of the month. $400 off. Go to Jaspr.co/model. That's JASPR.CO/MODEL use the code MODEL at checkout. $400 off through the end of the month. After that, if you're listening later, you're still going to get $200 off.
 

I appreciate you so much for getting it in ghereand getting here because I know, again, I felt listen, there's this situation is going on right now. I don't want to wait. We can't wait. And so I appreciate that very much because you really did make some moves happen to get here and to share this with us and to share your heart.

MIKE FELDSTEIN: You made it count. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I'm better because of it. My family is better because of it, because of you. And so I appreciate you so much. 

MIKE FELDSTEIN: Likewise, man. Feelings are mutual. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. Mike Feldstein, everybody.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. For me, this was mind blowing. I was sitting back in awe multiple times during this interview and just taking in and really listening to what Mike was sharing and just thinking about all the different areas of my life that this impacts, that has been impacting. And I had no idea about it. And it just made me an even bigger advocate to help to get this information out so that Places where our children are spending time, for example, whether it's schools, as he mentioned, the study with the SATs, just knowing how our air quality can impact our cognitive function.
 

This is one of those things that can be automatic. This can be normalized. This is something that can be how homes are built moving forward. And a solution in the interim for all of us is to utilize Jaspr. So again, I highly recommend as of the release of this episode. We've got through the end of the month to get $400 off.
 

It's very gracious. And also just to see, I'm telling you, spending time with him and see how giving he is. And he's been so helpful and insightful and giving and thoughtful. He's just a really good guy. And I truly appreciate the mission that he's on. And so investing in yourself, investing in your health, head over to jaspr.co/model again, that's JASPR.CO/MODEL $400 off through the end of the month. If you're listening to this sometime in the future, no worries, take action. You still get $200 off, get Jaspr in your home for you and your family. I appreciate you so much for tuning in to the show today.

We've got some amazing masterclasses an amazing guest coming your way very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much. And take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life.

Thanks for tuning in.