2985: Indoor Air Pollution: How It Affects Your Sleep, Health and Longevity | Michael Feldstein

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MindPump. MindPump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the number one health, fitness, and entertainment podcast ever, approaching half a billion downloads. This is MindPump. Today's episode, we talk about indoor air pollution. It's affecting your health, your sleep, and longevity. And today on the show, we had Michael Feldstein on the podcast. He's the founder of Jasper. Jasper Air Cleaners. These are the best you'll find in the industry. They scrub the air in your home and make the air that you breathe clean. By the way, by the way, he's offering our listeners a massive discount on a Jasper Air Cleaning System. So if you go to jasper.co slash mindpump, that's J-A-S-P-R dot C-O slash mindpump, you'll get $350 off. It's the biggest discount they've ever given. You have to use the code mindpump for that. 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Hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, I enjoyed talking with you when we met and I'd love for you to just share your background a little bit because I think it's important to your story and why you're so concerned about air quality and your expertise around that. All right. So yeah, my background was I was a disaster restoration guy. So think Hurricane Harvey, California wildfires, floods, big mold removal situations, but we weren't like your everyday, we weren't the guys you'd call if you had a kitchen leak or a little flood. We would go to catastrophes and disasters specifically. So the biggest fire in Canadian history was in a place called Fort McMurray, Alberta, and in an entire 100,000 person town, all got evacuated for a month. Wow. And only three or 4,000 homes burnt down, but everyone's homes was so smoke contaminated that they deemed them all basically unlivable. Which, you know, in LA that doesn't happen because there's too many homes. So when it's in a smaller town, it was approached a little bit differently. And the people there were very mentally aware because there's oil, oil sands are nearby. So what happened there is basically doing all the mold remediation and the wildfire smoke. We would test the air quality in a home. Like when you're going to do mold removal, you test the air before you test the air during, and then you test the air after to make sure it's safe and clear for the families to move back home. What are you testing when you do that? Like what are you? Well, when it's mold, airborne mold spores. Okay. When it's wildfire smoke, we're testing something called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Okay. So, and hexavalent chromium. And it's different. If it's just a regular fire and trees burnt, that's different than if homes and cars burnt. So like with an LA and Alberta, when homes and cars are burning, all the chemicals in your garage, your paints, your WD-40, it's a different kind of smoke than a regular situation. But with mold in particular, that's what really got me started. The best air ever was after we would finish a mold removal job and you'd go into the home and you're like, whoa. And we would test it. Cause when you test the average home, the average indoor home has air that's about five to 10 times worse than the outdoor air. So indoor environments, that's why you go outside and you're like, ah, that feels good. Is it just because it's contained? Yes. Okay. It just can't breathe. And just think about all the stuff in your indoor environment. Cause like logically you wouldn't think that you think like cars and exhaust outside and all this other pollution that that would be worse, but it's because we're containing it in a box. But the, the indoor air all comes from outside, but outside we have the sun, the wind, the rain, the trees, God's air purifier. Yeah. That's naturally purifying things inside. We don't have any of those things. So my favorite analogy for that is if you think about a stream or a river flowing, that water is generally quite clean. But if you think about a stagnant pond, that's when you get the bacteria and the algae. So outside the wind is like the river and our homes and our buildings are like the pond. But basically when I was doing restoration, the floods and the mold cleanup, how do you clean mold? You isolate that area. You remove the mold and you scrub the air. We would use these machines called air scrubbers, big industrial air cleaning machines. Then when you compare that to like a little air purifier that you buy at like a home Depot or a Walmart or Amazon, I'm like, whoa, there's a huge Delta in how these things work. So that what inspired Jasper was if you think about like a, like a Honda civic is a car and a pickup truck is a car, but they're very different vehicles designed for very different things. So it was dawned on me that we need an air scrubber for our homes that is not so loud and industrial. So I'm like, huh, how do we take what we learned with, with restoration and environmental cleanup and make something inspired by that, but for home use. So take me back to the, the home Depot version. You analogy just gave like, what is that then? What are those things? My favorite analogy for that is it's like a kettle. You know, if you think about a kettle and a water heater for your home and a pool heater, they're all the same water goes in, it gets hot and it comes out. But if you try to heat your bathtub with a, with a kettle, you can't do it because the water's gonna cool down faster than that half a gallon or liter or two of water. So most of those little air purifiers you see, they're good for a little small space for a closet for a dorm room, but they're not designed to actually clean a large volume of air. So I think about Jasper, like the SUV. So, you know, the SUV only came into the market in the early nineties. Yeah. They said, how do we take a military grade truck and make that for the modern American family now, over 50% of cars sold our SUVs. So my kind of vision ahead was like, we all filter our water. We know that now, but why aren't we filtering our air? So I'm here to, to bang the drum and raise air awareness until we are thinking about it the same way we think about our water. Wow. So when you were doing this with them, at what point were you like, we need this in regular homes specifically, specifically, I was in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Um, there was a lady who had, we went, so there's a lady named Tanya. We cleaned her home, disinfect completely. We pulled out the carpets insulation, basically like completely restored it throughout all the furniture, the bedding, everything was toxically contaminated. She moves back in. I get a call the next week later. Hey, Michael, my baby's in the hospital. I'm like, oh shit. What happened? We go back to Tanya's home. We test the house contaminated again. Well, turns out after a really big wildfire, the air quality can stay bad for six months or more. It's in the soil. It's in the water. Your neighbor's home. That's all. Um, you know, they're doing their construction every time the wind blows and the ash kicks up. So I called the insurance company and I was like, Hey, I think Tanya and her family should move back an hour or two out of town, stay in a hotel. We wait till the ambient air clears up. Then she should move back. We'll retest the air. And then she moved home. Insurance basically said this was my big eye opening moment. Insurance basically said so sad, too bad. Like the checks on the way they already signed off. Like our work here is done. And I'm like, uh, I don't know about this. This doesn't feel good. So what we did is we grabbed three of our big air scrubbers. We put them in her home. We tested the air again, a few hours later, all good. This kept happening. This kept happening more and more. The customers whose homes we clean were getting recontaminated. So we'd leave all of our machinery behind. It was loud. It was ugly, but they, at least they could safely live there. So I'm like, let's leave the machines there for a month or so. And then, We'll remove them once the ambient air is cleared. And this kept happening. And I'm like, we need our equipment for jobs. So I figured, let's go to the Walmart. Let's go to Home Depot. Why don't I just buy them a bunch of air purifiers, put them in our home, let them keep it. So we did that. We went and grabbed four or five, six air purifiers, put them in the home, tested the air again a few years later, contaminated again. And I'm like, damn, I knew nothing about air purifiers at the time. Nothing. I was just an old man using my scrubber. I knew nothing about these things. I just, we tried them. You assume like I assume. When you said the Home Depot thing, I'm like, why wouldn't that just work? It says a thousand square feet on the box. I thought it would work. Yeah. Didn't work. And then, you know, I take out the filter and the filter's like a quarter pound little sheet of paper. Our scrubber filters were like industrial grade, heavy duty equipment. So that moment happened. And then I remember going to another lady's home, Angela, and her kid was, she had a baby. And I went there to just, check on things. And the air scrubber was unplugged in the closet. I'm like, Angela, what are you doing? Like, this is like very toxic air in here. And Angela says, she's like, yeah, I know Mike, but it's really loud and it's really ugly. And then I'm like, oh shit. Like people do care about their health, but they also care about aesthetic. And they also care about convenience. If things are ugly, if things are loud, if they're visually not attractive, they're going away. And I brought my air scrubbers home. And my wife is like, when are you going to get that thing out of here? Meanwhile, people would come to my home and be like, whoa, why do you have like mountain? It's also kind of why we named Jasper's a mountain in Canada. They're like, why do you, the air in here feels like you're in the mountains. And I'm like, okay. So I'm like, it was just dawned on me. I'm a mold guy. I want really clean scrubbed air at home. My wife wants it to be quiet and pretty. So thus begun a three-year journey. And also that machine, the way you see it, it just came to me in a vision. I'm like, it has to be steel. It has to be big. It has to vent up. Like I knew it. And then it took me about three, three years of sourcing machines all over the world. But the main thing is it's big. So yeah, what dawned on me though, was really, it was, it was that story. Those two women realizing that these purifiers don't work. So we just had a gap in the market. We had small, cost-effective, cheap, cute, don't work. And we had big, loud, ugly, effective. We need the SUV. What was the, what was the greatest hurdle from going from what you knew was powerful, loud and effective to making sleek, not annoying, you know what I'm saying? Like, what was the biggest hurdle of that? There was no hurdle. It was just patience. It just took, it took me about three years. I ordered. That's a long time. It did. It took me three years. Admittedly, it wasn't like a full-time thing. I wasn't even sure if I was ever going to launch this company. I was so worn down after the floods, the mold, the fires, these disasters. I was like beat down. I didn't know if I had like another business in me. I was like 27 or 28. I was just getting ready to get married and have kids. I'm like, I think I just want to do the job. The dad thing and the family thing for a few years. Like I don't think I have business in me. And I had 50 of those machines sitting in my garage. Not sure if I was going to launch. And the vision for the company was just specifically to sell during the summer to wildfire smoke. I just thought, Hey, when there's a big, like anytime there's a power outage, all the generators are gone. When there's a flood, all the dehumidifiers are gone. When there's wildfire smoke, all the purifiers are gone. So I'm like, instead of going into these like war zone-esque disaster zones, hiring a hundred guys and doing, doing construction, I'm like, they, they need clean air just as much. There is no clean air. So I thought Jasper was just going to be specifically for wildfire smoke. COVID happened first. So I was getting ready to launch summer 2020, and I still wasn't totally sure. COVID hits first. I was living in Ontario, Canada at the time, and they mandated it legally that every dentist in Ontario legally needed an air purifier to open the doors for business. Wow. And perfect timing, perfect timing and the way it worked is. There was a, it was called, there's a term called fallow time. It's how many minutes between patients and it was all about the airflow. So the dentist had to basically length times width times height. That gives you the cubic volume of a room. If they had like a Dyson or a small air purifier, they were 45 minutes to an hour between patients. If they had a Jasper, they were eight minutes between patients. So from a dentist perspective, they're like, I need this. It will pay for itself in two days. Wow. So our first thousand, we were, and we launched. Uh, we launched as Jasper medical because I'm like the doctors and the dentist need it. So we put, we put it up and, um, it was just instantly like all 50 were gone in like an hour. And then I'm like, life was just like, you're getting back into business. Now do, do, does it reduce things like viral pathogens and stuff as well? Or is that, it also does. Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. So that's why we were like the dentist needed it for COVID at the time. Um, and then, so if you think about like, by the way, HEPA, HEPA, all it means is that the filter it's, it filters down to a particle size of 0.03, 99.97%. Um, so that's what HEPA, when you hear, see HEPA filter, it's that it's that, but it's kind of bullshit, honestly, really HEPA is kind of bullshit. Why? Because there's no regulatory body of a standard of how to test for HEPA. So what a lot of companies do, they send their, like when you call these third party labs, they send their, like when you call these third party labs, they send their, like when you call these third party labs, they send their, like when you call these third party labs, they send their, like when you call these third party labs, they send their, like that's why whenever I, whenever someone's marketing claim is third party tested, that can't be it. I want to see like real world before and after type of studies and, and examples. And I, and I like stuff that I can feel like, you know, I don't need a third party test to tell me how a sauna or a cold plunge or lifting weights feels. Right. I can tell you, I trust myself with some supplements. You just really don't know some stuff you really do know. So with these third party labs for air filters, you call them and a sales guy answered the phone and he's like, so what marketing claims are you trying to make? So we can reverse engineer a study to help you achieve them. Like that's how this works. Um, so with HEPA, there's no legal requirement of the airflow that they run the testing. So instead of putting like the way we do art studies, if you see our mold study online, the lab fills the room with mold spores. They take a 500 square foot room with eight foot ceilings. They fill the room with millions of mold spores. They test the air and then they test the air every 10 minutes while they run the Jasper. I could, I could wrap my head around that. We're testing the air. That's real world results. That's what I need. Um, the way that a lot of HEPA standards are hit is they take the filter, they put it into an isolated little box. And then let's say that the fan speed is called CFM cubic feet per minute. Let's say full speed is 400 CFM and the minimum speed is a hundred CFM. They'll go and run the fan at four CFM for the lab test. So if you think about like a Kleenex, if you blow gently enough, anything could be HEPA. It just means it's filtering, but it should, in my opinion, it should have to pass the test at the real world fan speed. This would be like testing the zero to 60 on your car lifted off the road instead of having the rubber on the pavement. So that's why you, it was just like mind opening to me. You know, I wasn't, I never made a product before I was in restoration and construction. And in that world, when you're testing like families and people's homes, we test it like it's rigorous insurance companies are intense. So our standards were very, very high. I didn't have to be a scientist to be like, I don't like it. I don't like the way that these companies are doing their tests. So, yeah, that's why that's fascinating. Yeah, so, yeah, so I think people can understand the danger of breathing toxic air from something like a forest fire or a house fire or like mold contamination. But then you have everyday indoor air quality. That's not that great. You said five times, 10 times. Is there any data that shows that, you know, that that may make a difference that cleaning just regular indoor air, do we have any data that shows like an improvement in someone's, let's say, outcomes or health or performance? We have a lot. And first, let me just like level set on like the air 101, because there's a lot of things that people can do at home today for free to make a huge noticeable difference. And if you think about it, so first of all, like what's the problem in your indoor air anyway? What are you breathing? If we go and collect a liter of air right now in an average bedroom in America and we send it to the lab, what are we going to find in there? So, yes, there'll be mold spores. There'll be dust. There'll be pollen. There'll be algae. There'll be allergens. There'll be cat litter. There'll be dog pet dander. There'll be hair cells. There'll be skin cells, general pollution, break dust, the rubber from your tire, insect parts. Like we can't see it because we're in it. Just like what water is to fish, air is to people. So we're so, you know, the first thing you do when you're born, you take a breath. The last thing you do before you die, you take a breath. It's the only, you know, food, water and air. When you're hungry, you go eat. When you're thirsty, you get a drink. But we live in air. The fact that we could do it in our sleep. Is why I think we just pay no attention to it. I think we take it for granted. So how do you pollute your indoor air? First of all, it's the way the home is built. It's the materials that are used. Go drive by a subdivision and you'll see all the wood there getting rained on. And then it gets sealed up. Of course it gets moldy. Such a good point. Then it gets sealed. Since the 70s energy efficiency crisis, they changed all the codes to make homes tighter and tighter and tighter. Forgetting what about the person who lives in the home? Another example. If you think about a swimming pool. You have a pump and you have a filter. When your pool water is dirty, you know, maybe you shock it, but you have a water filter. You don't jump in the pool and scrub the sides of the pool. Meanwhile, we have homes and we're dusting and we're vacuuming and we're mopping and we're wiping counters. But the air is the actual stuff that we're living in and we're breathing. So shoes, indoor shoes is one of the number one ways to pollute air. When they test shoes. That's why you're barefoot. I am. And you know, we shower like once or twice a day. So feet get cleaned a lot more than shoes. The average shoe size is about two feet. When they test shoes, 95% of shoes test positive for fecal matter fancy way of saying poop i assume the glyphosate numbers are probably very similar so you got that then when you cook inside even if you're eating grass-fed grass finished organic steak avocado oil all the stuff when you have high heat and protein that creates pah that gets absorbed into the carpets into the bedding into the furniture so like cooking indoors is relatively a new thing then we got cleaning products perfumes colognes hair sprays it's just you know there's so much stuff so much stuff just in our homes furniture whenever i buy furniture so tip number tip number one is if you're buying a new piece of furniture if you can open your garage let it let it off gas like when you open that new bed or that new furniture ideally you let that off gassing process happen outside um and like i said indoor air is five to ten times dirtier than outdoor air so even though you have all the pollution outside especially in california where the weather is quite beautiful like opening your windows is a great idea especially when you're cooking uh bathroom fans that's not for poop smell that's for the humidity from your shower so go to home depot if you can buy one of those timers for the humidifier the the um the fan that lasts for one or two hours when you shower just hit that button because you're think about how much water your towel can soak up it soaks up a ton of water so if you just shut the door and that's not exhausting out of your home all that moisture is just dumping into your home so there's like these little things and the good thing is this is not like we shouldn't be afraid of air but with a little bit of awareness we can be empowered so the vent over your kitchen stove use it turn it on here's another little test take a tissue take a kleenex hold it up to the range hood or the vent above your stove step more than 50 don't work so first make sure it pulls the tissue up and then make sure that thing vents outside often it's just venting in the cabin and above it's venting behind the wall bathroom fans are just going to be just venting in your attic and then you're like why do i have attic mold well all of your shower moisture is just dumping into your attic so like there's a lot of these like little things that people can pay attention to and then you asked about what's the meaningful health differences yeah like what do we see what's actually the benefit exactly so i'll share a few things um number one is sleep sleep is the big one by far sleep is number one we did a smaller community-led sleep study almost two years ago now and we did a really good one and we did a really now we're going to do a huge one in the spring with over a thousand people but we did one a year and a half ago we gave 150 people jaspers who were using whoops and auras we said here's a jasper for free for a month we want one month of sleep data first week jasper off week two and three jasper on in your bedroom on fan speed three week four no jasper then we got all the sleep data back so the average person who was filtering their air slept 25 minutes more per night wow 18 deeper sleep and they fell asleep five minutes faster wow the reason i brought two jaspers here today wasn't just because i'm the clean air jasper claws it's because i needed them for my hotel room last night like i bring them with me i had my first uh dirty air sleep a month ago in scottsdale and i got sick so for your sleep it's a huge advantage wow okay crazy i saw a study on uh kids and their attention uh and like they clean the air and kids had better attention tell me about that yeah so in finland they did a study a couple years ago in helsinki and they put air purifiers in 50 of the classrooms and we just started a school i'll tell you guys about that after uh this is partly what inspired it they put air purifiers in 50 of the classrooms and the difference was they reduced absentee rates by about 30 in teachers and students so people weren't getting sick nearly as much three fun studies and carbon dioxide is another big thing that's just like you know there's clean air and there's fresh air co2 is carbon dioxide so there's three real cool studies number one was umpires in baseball so they took a huge amount of data and they looked at the air quality specifically co2 and they looked at the balls and strikes and how accurate were the calls of the umpires and it was directly correlated to the co2 so that was one cool study number two they took chess masters and they had they they played with the air quality with the chess masters to see how game theory optimal was their moves and then they took the air quality and they took the huge correlation um and number three was sat scores so that would tie to attention and focus sat scores with better air quality were dramatically impacted as well so if you think about it at night the only thing keeping you alive is air right now like we don't have to eat and drink but if we all stop breathing this podcast is not going to last much longer so you know i call my air healing and sleeping fuel at night and thinking fuel during the day it's like why if you get tired when the carbon dioxide's high you go outside like i took when i got here i took a lap around i'm like let me take some deep breaths outside and get some fresh air in my lungs and get some oxygen going like your car runs on air and fuel people don't realize like your engine runs on oxygen and fuel our bodies same thing you know you need the oxygen and you need the food and of course you need the water so it's just it's the stuff that we run on so it's like i call this like to me it's all about duh marketing yeah like once you see it and once you feel it you can't really unsee it going back to all the things that are probably hovering around in most people's houses i mean i'm sure you're probably aware too of like the you know hormone levels testosterone levels in men and declining over decades decades do you think there's a correlation there do you think that there's a connection to what how the way these houses are being built all the points that you're making right now and that and we're because we're always speculating that like i don't think it's one silver bullet i think it's not yeah i think it's i think there's a lot of things that are happening and i think it's a lot of things that are happening i think we move less i don't think we you know i'm saying like less laborious jobs there's a lot of things i think that could play a role but do you think this is uh a major contributor i think it's similar to just thinking about your food and your water like if i eat uh you know go to mcdonald's and get a burger today because i eat clean i'm going to feel it but if you're used to eating that all the time you won't really notice a big difference so like you know for a lot of people like the first thing they pay attention to is what's up with my what am i eating and then the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go to a restaurant and i'm going to like i think about air very similar to the way i think about nutrition very similar to the way i think about water quality it's like and i like passive health other than working out i don't like a thousand routines that i have to do and a million other activities you know like some of the sickest people i know are the most neurotic about their health sure so i like the i like lazy health and then go and work out but clean water clean clean air good lighting i think about those things similarly so um you know there's so much studies about microplastics i'm saying this because you mentioned testosterone yes i've heard a lot of studies about microplastics and how the and and forever chemicals and you're shrinking tape are your filters do they get rid of microplastics as well yes okay can you test before and after for that like you would with mold yeah so there was another study and like if anyone types in uk bbc microplastics air study they did a big study a few years ago they went into london and they tested about 50 homes and they did a big study and a hundred percent of homes tested positive for microplastics 98 of all samples tested positive for microplastics in the air they even did a sample in like antarctica and like tested positive it's just in the environment so and then they partnered up with a lab who was doing biopsies on people's lungs and there's their big headline there was that the humans are breathing an average of one credit card worth of microplastics each week so it's like like it's so easy to pay attention to water and you know like you saw me with my coffee cup here i pay a lot of money for my coffee cup here i pay a lot of attention to the microplastics and the water i'm not going to heat up food and tupperwares and things like that i used to um air is the same so the study i contacted some labs and i said hey who can do a real world study on microplastics they said we don't exactly have a microplastic study but they said what we can do is the most common sizes of microplastics we can use these little airborne latex beads that's the same size to simulate a they did that same thing fill the rooms with the latex beads and we removed 98.1 of them in an hour wow and filters are good are just advantages we move a lot of air i was just going to say what's the big difference the big difference sounds like it's just the amount of air that it can move it is like you could get one jasper you could get five little air purifiers and probably get to the same result it's it's a size thing but you'd have to fill up your whole house with a bunch of small ones and replace all those filters you know i'm thinking so the inner skeptic in me right is like we didn't need this kind of stuff when my grandparents but you know back in those days uh they didn't have um central ac some houses had heating but you always had the windows open and leaking your homes they weren't built so tight yeah so and it's interesting now everything's sealed and nobody opens the windows too because we're constantly we're constantly controlling the temperature of our homes and you're saying that that's making our indoor air quality worse because one of the best things you do is just let the air flow through your house yeah for sure also back in the day like your granddad would build his own home with his friends now homes are manufactured homes they're all the same like they don't even use that you know they're using like compressed wood and a lot of mdm mdf yeah it used to be like real wood real logs they used to know homes are supposed to breathe not supposed to use all these adhesives and really tightly built homes and manufactured products so we're like living in very manufactured buildings now and i'm feeling the groundswell coming back the other way and it doesn't have to necessarily be very expensive you just have to be thoughtful like i the hvac system is the lungs of your home this is the thing that pulls the air in it cools it and that's all like the the hvac when i say hvac it's heating ventilation and air conditioning that's your furnace guy your ac guy right when you're building a home when homes are built even custom home builders the last thing they think about is like let's just like run the plumbing and run the pipe and cover it up when i'm building a home which i'm about to start doing actually and we're going to document the whole process of building a really healthy home and in a way where we're going to prove that it doesn't have to be more expensive you would think that like what the core thing you want to do in a home is sleep and breathe and like hang out with your family and homes are so unintentionally built you know everyone's trying to get their kids off their phone but then we have a giant ipad on the wall that we call a tv and like family time is like we all stare at the big screen together that's not screen time anymore and it's just like it's this duh kind of stuff so most hvac systems they're not considering air filtration they're not considering you know they're not filtering wildfire smoke they're not filtering pollen there's the little tiny filter furnace filter that's designed for like a giant chunk of like dog hair and like a nail that falls in the vent to protect the the motor from getting um you know contaminated by whatever debris falls in there but most homes you by the way i don't have a problem with building a tight home i actually think you could build a really amazing tight home we like thermal comfort we're allowed to like hot food and and warm showers and like it's 2026 we should enjoy the modern convenience and we're allowed to like hot food and and warm showers and like it's 2026 we should enjoy the modern convenience and all that but if you're doing it you want to do it thoughtfully so for example if you live in a place that has humidity issues you should get a dehumidifier in your hvac system which you can get they're about 2500 so if the humidity goes over 60 percent it will start pulling more moisture out of the air you can also get a humidifier for your hvac system got to be careful because the cheap ones is just a wick with a little drip drip drip drip on it they always grow mold but you can get one that works more like a kettle it's a steam based humidifier so like if you're an air arizona or in a place where in the northeast where you have cold winters and it's dry it can humidify as well um it's a park city house you know which one i think we have the uh the good one actually okay i hope so you're talking about this right now i'm like i know we have one in the park city house i'm like oh it's a good one so i think building a uh and then there's something called an erv or an hrv heat recovery ventilator or energy recovery ventilator in a few provinces in canada it's code you can't build a home without one it's like buildings if you build a commercial building you always have a fresh air intake based on the amount of occupants in a room otherwise you go and put like 10 people in a boardroom and you'd all suffocate but in residential homes no one's really considering the fresh air intake so you can have a nice modern tightly built home an extra five grand and a little bit of thoughtfulness it's just like homes don't even have water filtration systems you have to like go and get that aftermarket yourself yeah yeah you know people are spending a million dollars on a home and then fifteen hundred dollars on a formaldehyde bed and then yeah so it's just like you know i'm a huge fan of enjoy your money but like make it work for you sure up and if you can optimize your sleep and optimize your environment let your environment like tell you how to feel our copper pipes like your best option for that because you know pvc obviously you're gonna get into the mic same thing i prefer that okay you uh how much space uh so with a typical jasper how much space are we covering for for cleaning the air so i and like this is why we don't run really many ads and like we don't do that kind of stuff because it takes a podcast and a little bit of time to explain some nuanced concepts yeah so when you a jasper for me to say you know when you when you read those little labels at the home depot and all those big stores and it says covers 1500 square feet what it doesn't say is what does covers mean if it was a space heater you would know what covers means it means i need to be warm yeah but air purifiers are designed to incrementally clean the air they're not scrubbing the air they're not getting it that clean so i want to be able to clean the air and i want to be able to be careful because if you walk down those stores walmart whatever and it says like 1500 square feet what first of all it's air what was the ceiling height in that room because if it's a 16 foot ceiling versus an 8 foot ceiling that's twice the volume of air so how could you even make a claim on square footage and then is that on full speed or is that on the lowest speed um is it a is it a contained room or is it part of a h so it's like it's a very blanket way of saying covers 1500 does covers mean the air gets 95 percent cleaner or five percent cleaner so that's what's happening out there okay how do i think about covers for me covers has to be based on silent smart mode when you can't hear it because that's the way it's going to be running in everyday use most of the time right and for me covers means we're going to get the air 80 percent cleaner on the silent setting so for a thousand square feet with eight foot ceilings in an average home we can get the air 80 percent cleaner on the silent setting so for a thousand square feet with eight foot ceilings in an average home we can get the air 80 percent cleaner on the silent setting so for a thousand square feet with eight foot ceilings in an average home we can get the air 80 percent cleaner on the quietest setting an 80 percent cleaner another way of saying that is five times cleaner and and if we if we just to compare apples to apples if we went by the same metrics that those other guys were we would be able to say 7 000 square feet but that's just ridiculous you can maybe the air is going to be 10 percent cleaner yeah um but what's awesome about jasper that i love about mine is that even it runs obviously like it is right now in this room where it's using the iron skillet in the kitchen or something i mean it it turns itself it turns itself it automatically turns itself on and i hear you know run at that full high speed and then it takes probably i don't know 10 minutes or so and then it drops right back down so even though you you i like that you guys use that as a metric you still will it'll end up kicking up and going faster and and clean well and in my bedroom i use mine fan speed three on dark mode door shut that's when you're going to get the air 20 or 30 times cleaner that's how we did it for the sleep study also 91% of our customers prefer a little bit of white noise or pink noise now yeah especially people who live in cities versus like pure silence okay and i do want to tell people also by the way you can make a damn good air filter for yourself diy for under 150 bucks what it's really important for people people to know that too the last thing i want to do is be like we have this amazing solution and you got to buy it and it's expensive no that's not true for about 150 dollars so there's something one of the good models is called a coursey rosenthal box c-o-r-s-i rosenthal box we'll auto correct you you can figure it out um diy air filters what i don't like to see happen is someone goes to the store and they go and buy one for 199 and their kids suffering from allergies or suffering from asthma and they put in the room like it wasn't the air it likely was it likely you just bought a machine that doesn't work so the diy ones are very good 150 in parts you can do it just like that box fan filter not the one on the top left but those easy to assemble you know 150 those work awesome oh so it's just a bunch of filters on each side with the fan on top yeah they're ugly they're loud they don't have the sensor and all that's interesting but they work good that is really really interesting that you could do that so if someone like is like hey it's wildfire smoke you have to say emergency reasons that makes a lot of my kid my kid moved into a dorm coverage we're just suffering from allergies we don't want to spend a thousand dollars on an on on a pretty thing you know like you could how can you heat water like you can get the you know there's the 19 kettle that's that cheap plastic one and you put it away when you're done using it and then there's the 99 kettle that's glass or it's matte black and you keep it out and it looks good or that but you can also just use your pot and boil water i've seen studies that connect uh things like dementia risk and alzheimer's risk huge uh air pollution so you talk about that a little bit yeah i'm like for anybody out there who hasn't really been paying attention to your air whether you want to punch in punch in air quality studies and then fertility then alzheimer's then dementia you can punch it in on on on on skin on wrinkles on you know 70 of the detox in your body happens in your lungs so anytime you can just like your body heals itself at night and anytime you can take the load off of your body and just like let it do what it's intending to do and not be fending off all this crap it's going to heal itself a lot more effectively so yeah all the alzheimer's the dementia there's a lot of research um gabrielle lion and max lugavere always are sending me articles about it i'll send you guys some of the studies and you can throw them in the show notes but there's a lot of stuff about um alzheimer's and dementia tell me a little bit about the school that you're because last time i talked to you you you kind of briefly mentioned the school that you're kind of building or working on i'm excited about this yeah so what is this what was the inspiration tell us about it so obviously the inspiration was the studies that you it was it was the studies but it was also my own kids so my daughter aria she's six now when she was two she went to her first school week later she comes home fully congested okay you call doctors like yo it's normal she's supposed to be like this and she's like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my like it'll take three or four years she just needs to get every single sickness first i'm like this just doesn't feel true to me because the last two years she wasn't in bubble wrap we were traveling we were doing things she wasn't getting sick all the time and then she would get sick and then you know then mama's sick and then everybody's sick and then i'm like whoa the cost of a sick child is significant and then all the kids in the class are sick and then their parents are sick then they're missing work i'm like whoa one sick kid is not just one sick kid um and i went to the school i said hey guys why don't we put there's this finland study why don't we put jaspers and you have two or three campuses let's put jaspers either in one of the schools or in half the classes and monitor the sick rates and the absenteeism they wanted no part of that because the kids were getting sick a lot by the way i'd go in every day when i would pick her up from school and i would unplug the glade plug in the synthetic fragrance air freshener and then every morning the next day they would plug it back in and every time i'd unplug it i'd hide it a little more and then they somehow their protocol all suck, but they were damn good at plugging that air freshener in. and um so aria being sick was a big problem also funny enough i didn't realize at the time but i named my kid aria which means air oh wow didn't even know that yeah um it was meant to be it was so she was getting sick that was frustrating and then we tried a bunch of different schools one had good vibes nature-based it was outside but they weren't really teaching or anything and it was like a half an hour drive then another school was good academics but she was inside all the time and no community also i i hate commutes specific i mean if you're your own self and you're driving along the freeway or a beautiful drive and you're listening to a podcast that's not a bad commute but a kid and their siblings having an hour 30 minutes each way and think about if you have a 30 minute commute that's an hour for the kid every day yeah that's two hours for the parent 10 hours a week 40 hours a month 480 hours a year you're talking about like a month of life commuting in a horrible posture yeah not a fan so you know we had that we had the finland study we had a sick child and um the school two minutes from my home that's been there for 25 years the the building went up for sale and it was going to be sold to a developer who's going to knock it down and build like four cookie cutter homes on it i'm like this is a sign but at first we were just going to buy the building and lease it back to her and then she met me and my wife my wife rachel since we are 19 we were already jamming on like curriculum and like how would we teach our kids in the future so we've been thinking about this for a long time and we were kind of frustrated about the schooling options and just like outsourcing and if you drop your kids off at a school that you're not excited and proud of and if your kids aren't as excited for monday as they are for saturday it's hard for that family unit to be thriving if you're not stoked about where your kids are every day like it's running in the back of your mind you're like my kids are in a little prison all day sitting indoors for eight hours and i don't know how to feel good about this is there something we could do about this um so we had a sick kid we had that study in finland and i'm like hey and i learned because i'm from canada i moved to austin four years ago and i found out because i heard about these things called truancy laws so if you take your kid out of school for vacation for three weeks like you get in trouble yeah like you're not allowed to take your kids traveling like huh what's this all about um well turns out schools are funded based on attendance that's right so huh this is interesting i don't know if you're this is interesting now you get an entry point here because i love you know it's hard like there's a lot of not-for-profits doing good work but when your message is like please give me money for the good work that vehicle doesn't have a great chance but when you can align financial incentives with good things that's when things can really get a lot of momentum so i was like okay the public the public schools are financially motivated by attendance but they have these incredibly sick buildings so i said what if we set out on a journey and we're not going to be able to get out on a journey to create the healthiest school in america so how does kindling academy work so we have two jaspers in every class it's just our first year so there's there's one class um but the school has the capacity for about 60 kids and we're going to keep expanding it so we have two jaspers in a bunch of different areas we have whole building water we have water filtration for the kids we put in circadian rhythm lighting we put in skylight so i'm like if we give these kids clean air clean water good natural lighting a lot of time outside and in year two organic food and non-toxic cleaning products how is the attendance going to be what's the secret it's going to be like and then you know the data set would have been too small so what we're doing now is we're giving jaspers to a bunch of other schools within a 10 mile radius so now if we have 10 or 15 schools a thousand kids we're going to have like a real we're bringing on some doctors and scientists like i'm a mold man you know i don't know how to do third publishable studies what i know what happens when you put an air filter in a classroom so now we're really proving out that concept so by starting with jasper and the local schools around but now all of a sudden you're like hey you know when people started putting jaspers in their kids beds i'm like hey my kid's not having asthma attacks anymore hey my kid's not having seasonal allergies anymore so what's really interesting about the school schools are a horrible business like i don't believe in making money off of kids or off of like a restaurant like food i think those are two things that if we could if you could just break even on a school or on a restaurant and feed people great food life is going to reward you in other ways so the school is very much a mission but i'm like if we can make this a no-brainer for people and create this amazing healthy school then we can create a framework and a template so the reason it's called kindling academy kindling is like you know this if you have a big log and a lighter you still can't start a fire you need those little sticks to build a small fire before we can take bigger and bigger pieces of wood so the concept for kindling is everything we are going to do we're open sourcing it all online so every time we do a podcast like tons of people are like we're going to do a podcast and we're going to do a podcast and we're going to do a podcast we'll open a kindling in my city and we're like no but we're going to publish everything we're doing including what we pay our teachers what it costs to maintain the building everything's going to be transparent because there's a lot of teachers with a few parents could leave a couple teachers could leave and start these really good you know 40 to 60 kid micro schools more of like a community-based school so kindling is just jasper putting our money where our mouth is to try to create a really healthy school and see how that goes bro so far so good this is so this is so cool what are you seeing right now what are you already seeing are you seeing anything yet um yeah the most exciting thing by far my kids are excited to go to school this is a big deal yeah even just like you know just like the sick kid if you wake up in the morning you're trying to rush your kid yeah to to eat hate it eat shove them in the car it's like and that sucks and then the other side of the day you pick them up like where does 2 p.m to 10 p.m even go you're like you you know the last hour you got to pick them up then you bring them home you're like go do your stuff while we cook and then you're cleaning and then you're rushing them to bedtime like this can't be what life is all about so our we just bought an office building five minute drive from the school wasn't part of the plan but it came with a commercial kitchen so now we're getting a chef so the chef is going to cook meals for the jasper team for the kids and the teachers at school so dope so then when you're when the maybe it'll be like ten dollars a meal i i'm obsessed over what's the true cost to like if you have a high quality burger and a grill and a guy you got a restaurant right if you got a you know a coffee machine if you got a gal and a coffee machine and a blender you got an acai bowl smoothie restaurant what is the whole building and the staff and the whole establishment even required so i'm like good beef guy grill what does it actually cost looking like four or five bucks wow and then if you can feed people amazing burgers for five bucks be like what's going on here who's doing this i'm like i'm not doing this the jasper guys what's jasper air filter what's that let me try one so like doing all these things that have nothing to do with jasper is actually what's growing the business that's so cool so you know no nobody really wants to talk to the air purifier guy air is kind of a boring subject it really is uh especially air filters it doesn't get much more boring than that when you can connect it to sleep and performance that changes it but trying to make the healthiest school in america that's a little more interesting so when you're doing something like that and and we're in austin so it's like who do you think supplying to get their kids into the school you know a lot of them yeah big podcasters athletes health and wellness people we want our kids in there how can we help how can we share so by doing that the school will lose money but then if you you know i i say if you have a product that's amazing you can't afford not to give it away yeah so so that's what's happening now and the fact that everyone's kids are stoked to and like same i wanted to finish on that meal concept because it's really important if you pick your kids up for school at four o'clock by the way we got a 16 person wood fired barrel sauna we're going to put it beside the school soon so imagine you pick your kids up you go a little early take a sauna take a cold plunge bring home a little glass thing of food go home you have your meal so eat or eat there before you go home with the kids so now all of a sudden family's done their dinner at five they had good food they didn't have to think about it they didn't have to cook they didn't have to clean go to the park go to the lake go on a hike enjoy your evening with your family that dinner time pick up drop off morning that like the before and after part of the school to us is just as important as what happens in the school but the most exciting thing now is my kids aren't getting sick almost nobody's getting sick i mean i'm not going to call it a claim yet it's a small amount of sample size so we're not publishing the study quite yet but we will um how many kids there 10 10 so far yeah well i mean honestly like we had almost 100 people apply the thing is though we want the it's like a company if you start a company and you just hire the first 30 every family we do it's as intentional as hiring the teachers it's as intentional as seeking investment because you want their buy-in too you want the family to come in who wants to be a part they want to go on the camping trip they they align not just your daycare you happen to be two minutes away so if they're not interested in being a part of a community and you know when you're a kid in school friends are baked in if you get a job friends are kind of like baked in and they're in but then when you become an adult which i'm starting to do you know it's interesting where's that next like cohort of your lifelong friends and i think the best people to be friends with ideally if your kids are friends too we can do a lot we can travel together we can do all this great stuff together so the school encourages people to travel you know zoom in from wherever you are we'll put you up on the projector in the classroom create a little passport book share the cultural learnings maybe we can do school field trips to other countries and stuff so the intention of starting small it's coming back to that kindling metaphor if we start with like a wildfire It's going to be, we want a controlled fire. So start with the right families, the right teachers. Even though there's 10 kids though, we have three teachers and we run it like we have 100 kids. Everything from the security to the food to the cleaning. We want our curriculum to be dialed in and everything is Montessori and project-based learning. So Montessori, Maria Montessori started like 100 years ago. It was the environment is the teacher. But by environment, she meant like low chairs, low tables. She didn't mean the air and the water and the lighting and the food. But you're adding that part. So this is the modern reinvention innovation of Montessori. And then my wife has been obsessed over this. So with Montessori, they train you on the skills. So let's say there's like a spindle wheel or these sticks or whatever activity they do. It's all about mastery of the activity. But Rachel's like, wait, wait, who cares about that activity? It's to learn decimals. It's to learn numbers. It's a skill that you're actually trying to achieve. So if they're not doing good with this, what other activity can we bring in? And then the project-based learning is also really cool. So right now there's a playground outside. So the kids are now saying they're working to design the playground and what materials and they're learning how to use like a saw. And then it's like, hey guys, if we want the materials, we're going to get them. Where are we going to get them? The Facebook free section? Or are we going to do a fundraiser? Or hey, is the school profitable? How much are we paying the teachers? How much are you guys? Can we afford it? Can we use AI now to take a picture and do a render? It doesn't have to take over the whole curriculum, but hey, to visualize a park, let's all think about that. Or like if we're going to build gardens, the kids can build a garden, but then it's how much soil do you need? How many pounds of soil? So what's neat is when you can link the academic lessons to real world projects and then as they get older, infuse more entrepreneurial concepts. So like, yo, it just lights me up, man. It sticks like that. Going back to air quality, what are the main things that we need to like clean the air of? Like what are the big things that we need to clean the air of? What are the big ones that tend to cause issues? I'm sure mold is at the top. I would say VOCs is volatile organic compounds. That just means all the chemical off-gassing stuff. The mold, allergens, general pollution, but allergies is a big one. By the way, 30% of people, another non-study, but that's just roughly what we've seen from our community-led experiments. About 30% of men who snore stop snoring. Whoa. And of the other 70%, like half of them have dramatically reduced snoring. We started to get these emails being like, thank you, thank you, thank you. Me and my husband have been sleep divorced for years. We got a Jasper. He stopped snoring. We're sharing a bedroom again. Our relationship is thriving. We didn't realize it. Or people got, you know, as soon as you turn 60, they're like, you need a CPAP machine. A CPAP machine just shoves air down your throat. The filter is like the size of a quarter. It's just for like, same like your furnace filter to keep large, large things from getting in. You would think if someone needs a machine to pump air down their throat, you would want to also have really clean air for them. Nope. They don't think about that. So allergens, dust, dust, dust mites. So dust attract dust mites. That's a big allergen. Also a lot of people, man, their seasonal allergies go away because you can handle mold. You can handle pollen two, three hours a day. No problem. You can walk by, you know, asphalt being paved onto the road. It smells you leave. You're okay. The problem is with the allergens, you're breathing at 24 hours a day. So you think you're in your bedroom, you're in your safe Haven. You're not. When we test beds and pillows, there's often more pollen in your bedroom than there is outside. Wow. So, cause it comes in size and it gets trapped in there. It's like a sponge. So when you can turn your bedroom from this like toxic environment to a clean air sanctuary and turn your bedroom into like this healing suite, it's remarkable what happens, but it's, it's all, it's a little bit of everything. Right. What, what are some of the like cleanest, uh, air, that you've encountered and worst airs? I'm sure you you've gone around the country. Are some areas just worse than others? Yeah. Um, so good air is typically when you're surrounded by trees, you know, so that seems obvious to go outside in nature. You, we could, we could tell we breathe that you could tell the lake Tahoe's. Oh yeah. Calls got good air, good water too. Yeah. Unless when there's wildfire smoke, but that's different. But the air there is amazing. You know, um, yeah, like, or the, um, Northwest has great air. Generally. Um, where is the worst air? You know, LA doesn't have great air. Miami is very moldy. Um, oddly the desert is not good either. Like Arizona and Nevada is very dry, but it's too dry. So once it gets too dry, that's when you have the bacteria and the dust and the ozone, uh, and then they have no like immunity to moisture. So you get one little leak and mold chaos. You, some of the functional medicine doctors in Arizona are the biggest mold clinics in the country. Yup. Oh wow. Yeah. A lot of people move there when they're, they're sensitive to mold cause they're like, it's dry here. Yeah. Uh, like, uh, McKayla Peterson, that's why she moved there. Yup. It was because of that. So, wow. It's not an easy fix. A little off subject. Uh, we have a mutual friend, Ben Greenfield. You just got back from his place. Uh, I haven't been to his new place. Super curious, uh, to all the things that he's done on his property and house that you love, that you like that you would do and anything that you would do different. Well, it's interesting, you know, he's in Idaho and it's quite rural there. And I was at an Airbnb five minutes from his place down the, down the mountain a little bit. And you would think tree nature remote, the air would be good. It was not good at all. It was bad. It's stunk. Ben has like a Jaspers. His home is pretty dialed in. I'll talk to you about his house too, from what I could see. But, um, you think rural equals good. Yeah. The amount of stuff though, that they spray on the crops. That's right. They're constantly spraying. They still have a wastewater treatment plate. There's a place called Lewiston there where there's a paper mill and the paper mill absolutely stinks. And pollutes. So, you know, if you go to West Virginia, there'd be beautiful mountains, but there's coal. So anytime there's like heavy duty manufacturing, but the rural areas are sometimes the worst. There was a study on that makes sense because a lot of those places, those manufacturing places choose those places because land is cheap. And so that, there was a study on Parkinson's where it was like, I don't know how many times more, uh, common Parkinson's was when people lived near, uh, like agricultural areas. It was like a, it was considerable. What was it? Iowa, Iowa, Iowa, some of the, the highest cancer rates in the country. And it's like, it's not because of the big cities. It's not because their homes are built any worse, but it's the manufacturing and the, all the, all the glyphosate stuff. And then, you know, before winter, forget the name of it, such as the a, but before the winter, they spray all this other stuff to like protect the ground. And you know, they're kicking up all the dust. So you would think that the air was great. You know, I took a video that they were under these big trees and I'm like, I bet you think the air here is good. I have my particle counter here too. I'll test the air before I go. Oh, great. Thanks. So yeah, Ben's doing everything though. Yeah. And it was very intentional. He was already doing it at the last house. So I can only imagine building this one from ground up. He like, he's got the whole home HVAC. He's got Jasper. He's got his water filters. He's got his red light probably everywhere. Great circadian rhythm lighting. And they're outside all the time and they're working out all the time. So even though his the outdoor air, it's not that it's any worse than anywhere else, but it'd be easy to think Arizona equals no more. Mold or rural equals good air. Sure. Yeah. Not necessarily the case. Wow. What about big cities? What are some of the worst cities you've been to? Actually, Ben, and one more thing on Ben, you know, it's, you know, he, he recommends those no strips. Yeah. And it's funny how many people are putting no strips on to increase their air take their air. That's the air intake on your car. And it works. Yeah. Mouth taping and nose case made a big difference. Mouth taping, no strips, you know, that's, that's intake stuff. Yeah. But with your, if you want to, if you want to get your car to really perform, you want to increase the, you want to improve the intake and then also use cleaner fuel. Sure. So when you, if you can stack the no strips with the clean air, that is an incredible protocol. Some of the worst air I've seen, Mexico city is really bad. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I haven't been to Delhi, but they have some of the worst air in the world. It's like a lot of areas where they're burning crops every year. Or is, or, or is like ocean air. I always hear people like, Oh, I love the smell of the ocean. Is that clean air? Because in the ocean, you just don't have a lot of air. You don't have a lot of agriculture. You don't have a lot of, in other words. it's pretty amazing. Okay. Okay. That would probably be some of the best. I'd be near. I haven't gone to the Amazon yet, but I really want to. Yeah. Like just being around those like ancient forests and those massive trees. Yeah. I would think, I would think Pacific Northwest near the coast has to be some of the best air. I lived on a boat actually in March for nine days with James Nestor swimming with whales. Okay. That was cool. Oh wow. And you know, the air was amazing. And even the water, they called it the water maker. And it was just a desalinator. But like that water, your hair and your skin and the way you feel just being in the middle of the ocean, no trees, but like no pollution and like pure air, pure water. Also, how cool is this? They, they say air and water is about 200 million years old. So how remarkable that also there's no net new air or water being created. The same amount of water on the planet and air. There's no more water being made. It's just everything. There's nothing on earth that can be destroyed. It can only change. It can only change when it forms. So you're, you're you know, water turns to ice turns to moisture turns to rain. Hurricanes are also some of the most incredible air and water filters. That process is like the greatest HEPA of all time, that amount of humidity and moisture and pressure. And then, you know, when things get hot and they get polluted, you get storms. So the ocean has an incredible way of, of filtering things. Does rain clean the air? Like it takes pollen out of the air. I've heard people say that where they're like, yeah, it does. It washes everything down. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. it can also kick up mold spores temporarily okay but not to be afraid like you shouldn't afraid of mold by the way yeah it's not like mold equals bad it's like if we test ourselves mold is like fungi like it's everywhere it's everywhere heavy like the heavy metals and other stuff but like pollen is not bad like the problem is when you live indoors it's a problem mold like you don't go outside you know dust and mold you see it inside you don't go outside and see mold on the side of a building or dust that's not an outdoor problem it's and you don't see the mold on the sandwich until you put it in the tupperware wow so we live kind of near moss landing how concerned do i need to be there's uh basically there's like a an ev battery kind of dump off place that like went up and fires the second time this has happened no way yeah so we've had like battery fires there and it's near like farmland and all that so anyways i know it's not good but like in terms of that getting into the food and the soil and then like how long do you think that all takes to clear out i don't know yeah i would say that um we've also noticed he's gotten increasingly dumber over the last like four years yeah yeah he's got i'm slowly transforming into something i don't know what it is yet so well i think um i think you know not not dumber no but i actually think some of the most like so when i it's it's actually pretty funny i did a test and they said i don't have adhd i'm like are you sure are you sure i don't trust you yeah you do we all do and they told me that my memory was in the first percentile like like no memory and i i'm like come on you're crazy you forgot the rest though i was a big basketball fan i could remember like every player every stat my mom used to open up the nba encyclopedia i had like perfect recall for that stuff but in the memory test the lady told me a story and then she's like it's probably a boring story that's probably why worst story ever yeah that's why she's like i don't know recount every fact about the story as much as you can i'm like there was a girl and a store she's like i'm like can we do a retest i wasn't paying attention yeah she's like no but i say this because um my my long-term memory i can't tell you what happened in movies lyrics scripts nothing like that but for whatever reason when it comes to like how names faces how people made me feel i'm like dialed in yeah but like what we talked about last week no idea i don't know so i thought this was like a a weakness and then i'm like i'm it actually just means i'm incredibly present so hopefully you're like that too yeah you seem like a relaxed present vibe yeah i would say that he's somewhere else right now is it the batteries no yeah well you just what you just explained was neurodivergence on the same way if i'm into something i will remember it to the team if i'm not engaged it's like because if the default state is like you you can't remember most of the things you ever did so our brains are really good at not remembering the things they don't have to and i'm just really good at not remembering any of that stuff yeah i mean this is what makes great a great entrepreneur in my opinion because the things that you do need to focus on or you want to you're hyper focused obsessed and remember and the things that aren't that important you can focus on schools air water sunlight friends and trees yeah kids and trees yeah good stuff my main two things good stuff so how uh so how long have you been in business now and how many customers you guys now serving because you started by serving these dentists so yeah that was back in 2020 our first thousand were dentists yep and um our first thousand were dentists and it was super boring i was like i did not want to go down the path i'm like oh i could feel twitches in my shoulders just thinking about it i'm like am i accidentally building a dental air filter company where yuck and the dentists were not buying them because they cared about health it was for marketing for money so they could make money fast enough it was the most like it was the most money thing ever but then they what they would do though is they would brag to mom that they have the cleanest air in town and that this was during covid it's like come back in come back in our air is cleaner than your home and then mom's like hey you know do they have these things for the home my kid has allergies my kid has asthma and by the way this is cool so we launched in um may of 2020 and until january of 2023 we had no e-commerce you know i was like a home services guy so the only way you could buy a jasper was on our website it said free consultation that was it and you'd fill out a form old school and i would call you no way yeah that's it i would call people and it was just in toronto closer i would deliver the units i would speak to them for 40 minutes and it was running it like my mold business like hey like what's up what's great symptoms how's your kids i love that so our first thousand customers was me on a phone either hand delivering them it was me and my wife and our au pair with a baby strapped to her that was jasper for the first couple years wow but thank god and then because the dentist legally needed them to operate when they would break the dentist called me freaking out like i don't know what to do with them i don't know what to do with them i don't know i'm shut i need another one so we would courier them one same day and then we'd get the old one back and figure it out so that was the that was like you know like the diamonds built under pressure like you could never have we created the company under such unique circumstances that we were like built so different with the industrial nature and covid and it was for wildfire smoke that were built very educational so we were built very different so our first thousand customers doctors and dentists and things like that some personal trainers would also use them and then the patients the clients would come in and be like the air is really good here so then they would call and then i'm talking to mom and i'd give mom a discount because like it's mom and her kid i don't want to charge her as much as the dentist and then she's like michael my kid's not having asthma attacks anymore my kid's not having allergies anymore i'm like this feels good i could do this um and then in january we went to i moved to austin in 2022 january 2023 we turned i'm like no one's gonna buy it online they need to talk to me and it was funny because in the first minute we turned on e-commerce one minute later we got a sale which is funny because for the next year we were only selling like four a week but it was just like a sign as soon as we turned e-commerce on we got an order i'm like it was the coolest thing i've ever seen that like someone bought a thing online without talking to me i thought it was all me you know i thought i was irreplaceable um so now fast forward a few years we shut down the whole b2b side of the business businesses do buy them usually we give them away though we give them to doctor we give them to gyms and we give them to the hospital we give them to the hospital we wellness places and if you have healthy food like if a business has our values we give it we give it to them it's free advertising too exactly like we give them to schools we give them to gyms we give them to people um and then people feel it and see it and like that's kind of how the machine works that's how you got us that's how we're here that's how he's here send me this like yo you got to try it first you don't believe in it we did and that's how we got sold awesome um you know if it didn't work you'd be like we would never talk to you so now um about 60 000 jaspers are in the wild wow jaspers in the wild uh the average person buys about 1.7 jaspers up front and then they own about 2.3 and now people think about jasper like sonos it's really like a decentralized whole home system so people now realize and honestly like if jazz if it's so so we've been in business six years i took me three years to get it started six years since we've been in business um located by the way in austin people don't know this unless they're in austin um if you buy a jasper in the austin area you get a text or a video or a voice note from someone on the team we deliver the jasper to your home we test the air quality at your house first we set up the jasper we retest it they see it's five or ten times cleaner and like that's just what we do that's like we'd love to do it across the country maybe one day we do but i'm like i was like a blue i need that in me when i was first like shopify no real people i'm not touching the product it wasn't feeling good so now our warehouse is local remote employees everybody works together we just hosted a jiu-jitsu event two weeks ago the jasper jiu-jitsu invitational 32 competitors all over the country cash prizes like we love to do community events like we're like a very brick and mortar irl type of business like we're not an e-commerce d2c brand we happen to use the internet to reach people we happen to use ups and shopify but like we're very much like an in-person type of business um so yeah there's about 60 000 in the jiu-jitsu industry and we're very much like an in-person type of business like we're not an e-commerce d2c brand we happen to use ups and shopify but we're very much like an in-person type of business like we're not an explain the like the filter because i mean i only have one right now and i want them in every room so that's you know that's the question right like by the way i hate subscriptions too i hate subscriptions all of a sudden you check your credit card bill you're like what the heck everything's hitting me all the time but some subscriptions make sense it makes sense for your toothbrush head to come every three months and your water filter to come every six months what's that oh i said dog food too for there's certain things that like just make sense and like changing your air filter happen to be one of them so what we did is we like to put our money where our mouth is in the line incentives so has that's why most people sign up for our auto ship filter program online so you get the two filters a year every six months it ships to your door as soon as it comes you change it but what we did is we tied that to our lifetime warranty so we could have made the filter a little bit cheaper and then had an extra warranty that's not who our customers are they want something that looks beautiful that has world-class service so let's say your jasper breaks and sometimes they do eventually they will all break we ship you a brand new one to your door you take the new one out of the box brand new one not a refurb you put the old one back in the box we give you a prepaid shipping label to cover the return tipping to take it back from your home because sometimes you have warranties but you got to get the box and a hundred dollars shipping they make you send videos and jump through hoops you're like you're making me feel like i'm a scam artist to replace the thing that you sold me so that's the way our warranty works so we just like we blended that all together and then same deal like you know a thousand dollar air filter if it doesn't work a dollar is too expensive if it changes your life and you sleep way better it's cheap and i don't think about jasper has the machine that you see i think about jasper has the filter inside so that filter is four and a half pounds most filters are half a pound the new filter that's coming out is coconut carbon we're getting away from coal and activated carbon but we use how crazy is this activated carbon comes from trees our logo is a tree and when i dug into our supply chain we were contributing to cutting down a thousand trees a year to make jaspers so now it's costing us a little more price won't change for the customer but we're moving to using recycled coconut husks and coconut carbon and the voc absorption is better and the formaldehyde is better and we'll never change the design and we'll never change the shape so customers who have been with us for five years they've had seven different filters constantly you'll see every time you get a new filter every couple times it looks different we're always innovating on the filter tech and even if we change our sensor or a screen we're always innovating on the filter tech and even if we change our sensor or a screen we'll send you a little suction cup and you'll swap the top so we made it to be infinitely upgradable and infinitely recyclable that's why it's made out of steel and not plastic so yeah if they break you know your people are paying that 199 twice a year a little over a dollar a day but that's our clean air for life guarantee i think about us has it like an air quality investment firm like you're trusting us that that clean air is like we will if you see it ever sold out on our website we'll still have a thousand jaspers in our back pocket in case they break we have to fulfill our warranty claims we'll still have a thousand jaspers in our back pocket we always have three or four months of filters on hand because and like if we can't sell to a new customer no problem but taking care of our existing members our customers that's like that's our bloodline so we built ourselves like we like ah what if you go out of business i'm like we won't like we we we we are running ourselves like a uh an investment firm and you're investing you're you're trusting us that for that little over a dollar a day you got that clean air for life and that's how we built the company great great so good thank you so much for coming on the show man awesome you guys do a great job november 7th 8th oh hey talk about that yeah that's a big deal guys yeah no talk about that a little bit you guys have because you know two years ago at black friday we were sold out for four months yeah you wanted something crazy when we were when we were back ordered for 12 weeks our sales didn't go down the customers were willing to wait three months wow and that was really touching um last year we sold out by about a month and this year it's gonna happen again so what we're doing this podcast comes out a few weeks before black friday what's the standard code yeah mind pump so it's called mind pump it's jasper.com forward slash mind.co sorry.co so jaspr.co jaspr.co starting today november 7th or 8th yeah code mind pump will be 350 dollars 350 350 so even if there's another offer or something on the website still use code mind pump and it will go up to 350 and that's per machine also if it doesn't change your for sure we will buy it back off you for full price and we will cover the return shipping wow so you put it in your bedroom my my request for you if you're buying one put it in your bedroom fan speed three or four dark mode and this shouldn't be if you use an aura or a whoop or something watch your sleep score it will go up a lot and either that and that like trust your body you will sleep way better you will feel way better if you don't that's on us so that's why it's very expensive for us to make a claim like this because if people were returning them we wouldn't be here but we want like the best way is to try it it's kind of like giving it away so try it if it's not a no-brainer there's a reason that there's no bad reviews about us online because if you're not a fan you get we'll give you back every penny no restocking fees and rehandling fees and all that stuff so jaspr.co jasper.co code mind pump it'll be 350 dollars off for the next till the end of november and then forever after that code mind pump will always be 200 off also if this doesn't feel like the day in the moment but if you have been thinking about filtering your air this is your sign today is a risk-free time to try i know i often wait and make my expensive purchases when there's a discount and my guarantee to everyone here is you will never see a bigger discount on any platform on any website ever 350 off is bigger than our black friday offer um and i want to give you know thank you i appreciate that and if not make a diy one those are good too no i think we'll stick with that i think we'll stick with that i think we'll stick with jasper thanks mike thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mindpumpmedia.com the rgb super bundle includes maps anabolic maps performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by sal adam and justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the rgb super bundle is like having sal adam and justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the rgb super bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com if you enjoy this show please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on itunes and by introducing mind pump to your friends and family we thank you for your support and until next time this is mind pump