Mike Feldstein: The 5 Hidden Air Pollutants in Your Home
67m 7s
The podcast discusses the critical importance of indoor air quality for overall health, with the host Gary Brekka interviewing Michael, an expert who shifted from disaster remediation to designing residential air purifiers. Michael explains that modern homes are built to be energy-efficient and airtight, but this traps pollutants, off-gassing materials, and CO2, leading to poor indoor air that can harm health. His "aha moment" came during wildfire cleanup, where homes were recontaminated months later, and cheap residential purifiers failed to match industrial scrubbers' effectiveness. He developed a balanced approach using HEPA filters for particulates (like mold and dust) and activated carbon for gases and VOCs, noting that carbon filters lose efficiency after about six months and that airflow matters more than square footage. Practical tips include opening windows, allowing new furniture to off-gas before bringing it indoors, and ventilating during parties to reduce CO2 levels. For those with resources, installing ERVs or HRVs can bring fresh air while maintaining thermal efficiency. The conversation concludes by framing air quality as a passive biohack—once you invest in filtration and ventilation, it works continuously without adding time to your day, transforming a home from a source of illness into a healing sanctuary.
We've optimized for our heating and cooling bill at a huge expense to our health. The way that we build homes now, they're very efficient for heating and cooling and UVA UVB radiation coming through the windows. But I imagine that that impacts air quality. But indoor air is a really big problem because of how tight homes are built. Let your home breathe. Your home needs to breathe just like you do. Air, water, and lighting are things I think. People don't realize the impact on our physiology. You know, you can't heal in the place that made you sick. When a fish gets sick, we clean the tank. When humans get sick, we never think about the tank that they're in. Your home can really be a place for you to detox and heal. They can go from the place that makes you sick to your healing sanctuary. Let's give them some tips for things that they could do if they don't have the word with all to invest in a filter until I can prove their air quality. The thing is the greatest air filter of all time is called. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Human Biologist Gary Brekka where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today is going to be one of those incredible podcasts. Because this is an area of real interest of mine. And I saw this guest on skinny confidential. I don't know if it was first appearance or a second appearance. And it just blew my mind because I really love the biohacks that you implement in your life and then you can just ignore. They don't add one single minute to your day. So today is all about air quality, the importance of air quality, how to get a better air quality, tips and tricks on how to do it for nothing, and tips and tricks on how to do it if you have some money to invest, to be disposable and come to invest in your air quality. So welcome to the podcast, Michael. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. I'm super excited to have you. I was watching the you on skinny confidential. And I found your background as fascinating as what you're doing now. Because you used to be in disaster remediation. So talk a little bit about the transition from disaster mediation to how you got into the air quality business. Yeah. So it started. I was doing flood, fire, hurricane cleanup. So I was kind of like a and huge, huge, huge toxic mold, which lately is, but must have been very good business. First of all, it's good business in Florida. It was good business, but I call it sad money. Yeah. It was sad money because, you know, let's just say California, people just look at the homes that were burnt down and they don't realize all the homes that weren't burnt down are actually in a worst position. Yeah. Because insurance often does nothing for them. They tell them to go back home. And their homes are deeply, deeply contaminated. So my specialty, we were doing floods. We were doing big hotels and apartments and homes from huge mold events like built entire buildings and neighborhoods. Wow. But the wildfire smoke was kind of my an area of expertise because I was living in Canada at the time. The biggest fire in Canadian history was in 2016, the Fort McMurray wildfire, okay, which was also where there's oil sands. So the air was already horrible there. And so yeah, in Fort McMurray, that was the the air aha moment for me. That was like, this is a really big problem. So when you go to clean up a home after wildfire smoke, you know, you clean the surfaces and you clean the air. Right. And a lot of people are cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, scrubbing surfaces all the time, kind of like your fishbowl analogy. But instead of the the drug, the fish, they're like, it's like you have a swimming pool. You don't scrub the sides of the pool. You filter the water. Right. So the the air is the water for you. Well, water is to fish. Air is to people. Right. And so we go into homes, often almost always they would be evacuated from the home. So Fort McMurray was this big moment where I realized, whoa, what what are we doing here guys? We'd go into home. First thing you do is you set up the air scrubbers. Then you you start to rip out carpets, insulation, furniture, anything that's porous, you're getting rid of hard sealed surfaces, depending on the value we would clean them or store them. We're removing insulation. We're painting entire homes. We're encapsulating everything like top to bottom remodels. And there was one family in particular that was there was a lot of families like this, but we'd we'd fully remediate their home. Then we would test the air quality. And then we'd given the thumbs up. You're safe to call the insurance company. Air is clean. Yes. Clean homes good. You're ready to move back home. Well, starting to happen is we got we'd get a call. Hey, our babies in the hospital. It's been a week, babies in the hospital. We go back to the house, test the air. It's contaminated again heavily. So what we now know is after big regional wildfires, the air quality can be contaminated for six to 12 months after the fire. Sometimes more. It's in the soil. It's in the water. And then when your neighbors are doing their demolition and their construction, they're constantly kicking that back up. Yeah. So they're contaminating the home. And I'm like, I called the insurance company. Like, Hey guys, we have a problem. Tanya and her family, they got this baby, babies in the hospital. They need to move back out to a hotel. They need to get out of town. And we need to wait till the ambient air is clean and insurance basically said no way, Jose. Yeah, yeah. We paid the check. Chats on the way. They signed the liability waiver. Like not happening. Yeah. And I'm like, whoa, we have a problem here because we have a responsibility to this family to keep this home clean and safe. And we were getting more and more calls like this. They were coming home. They were getting rashes. They were getting skin stuff. You know, babies on nebulizers like their health was not doing good. So what are we going to do about this? We came back and we put four air scrubbers in the home. And then we waited three hours. We retested the air and the air was fine. So I'm like, okay, we can't insurance is not going to let them come back. But let's at least put the scrubbers in the home and wait a couple months until the let so they can live noise is reasonable. You know, the city is still very contaminated. Let's scrub the air until the ambient air outside is good. Then we can pull the scrubbers out. This kept happening. Well, now we had no equipment to do more jobs. So I'm like, let's what if we go to Best Buy Walmart? I just buy six or seven air purifiers. Yeah. Put them in the home and let them keep them because we need the scrubbers for work. Right. We put the air purifiers in. We're monitoring the air four hours later. The air is horrible again. Wow. And this was my big moment. I knew nothing at the time. This is 2016. I knew nothing about residential air purifiers. I only knew about scrubbers. Scrubber basically is a big industrial air purifier designed for mold smoke asbestos lead crime scene cleanup. Heavy duty, but they're loud in their ugly. So great for restoration, but not appropriate for residential application. Right. Now you have noise pollution and that's not going to work. So I'm like, oh, wow, this is a really big problem. These air purifiers on the shelves are making big claims. So I was like, wait, when this restoration, when this fire is done, I'm like, we need to create an air scrubber that is actually quiet and it's beautiful because I remember I was at another lady's home Angela. We left the scrubbers there. Her baby was having challenges too. I went back to test the air after a week and she unplugged two of them. I'm like Angela. She was like the two ugly. They're too loud. They're too ugly. I friends over. I can't leave these in my house. Yeah. So I was like, this is a big problem. People are having to make a choice between ineffective or really effective and loud and ugly. So after about 10 years doing air testing, air consulting, mold cleanup, fires, flood, I'm like, this is sad money because we're cleaning up homes. And then the next time there's a fire, they're being re-contaminated. And I'll mention that when I got home, I started using all my fancy gadgets. Same ones I used here, by the way. Gary has great air. I had great air. You that was so happy when he tested my air. He's like, you have really good air here. Top five air and no sense. Top five air. And I've tested thousands and thousands of homes. Thank you. And so yeah, it really was a really natural progression. But originally I thought we were just going to create a machine specifically for wildfires because I'm like, when California's on fire, it's like when there's a power outage, the generators are sold out in five minutes. So I'm like, what if we just focused on fires? So originally I was like, we need something really solid for wildfires. And COVID happened first. I was living in Ontario, Canada. And they mandated every dentist in Ontario needed an air purifier in every room to go back to business. And based on the airflow, would determine the time between patients. It's a British term called "Follow Time," which is the minutes between patients for a dentist to see the next patient. So if they had a little air purifier, they were 45 minutes between patients. If they had a jasper, they were eight minutes between patients. Because we had the airflow that they were required. It's the volume of air that this thing would move. Yeah. So you take the ceiling, people think air filtration is about square footage. It's not. It's about cubic volume. Because if you have eight foot ceilings versus 16 foot ceilings, the volume is dramatically different. So restoration was where I was starting. But I felt helpless. And I felt like we could only restore 10, 20 homes in a season. Yeah. This is a way bigger problem. I started testing friends and families homes. And I'm realizing everyone's VOCs are high. Everyone's mold spores are high, except for mine, except for yours. Okay. Everyone being a rule, but there are exceptions to the rule. But generally, people's indoor air is bad. People's water is bad. We've realized that you can't just drink tap water. You got to do something about it. So I just if you told me 15 years ago, I was going to be in the air space. I would have been shocked. But yeah, it was it was the heavy duty restoration, seeing the most critical stuff that made me realize this big problem. And I learned a lot doing it kind of relates to your stuff, how you were in insurance. Yeah. And you realize what's going on. And you're like, wait, maybe I can move to the optimal and the abundant and the optimistic side in trying to help people be their healthiest self. Instead of just predicting death. But you know, I was the wildfires, the recent wildfires in California. I took a great interest in because I was following like some of those air quality indexes, which is the outdoor air. But also reading some of the studies that were coming out of these indoor air quality tests. And I think
what a lot of people didn't realize is when home burns, everything in that home is burning. So I mean, it's plastic, it's fabrics, it's carpets, paint. And even if you don't have, let's say, lead-based paints or spests that's going up, if you wanna take a compound, any compound, and turn it into a bio-weapon, you vaporize. I mean, that's what we do. I mean, arsenic, sitting on the table is harmless. You vaporize it and it's a deadly poison. And so these, it's the same with municipal water when you're in a steam room. You take the municipal water in, it's got fluoride and it's got chlorine, but then you have fluoride gas and chlorine gas. And so it was some of the most toxic air in the world. I mean, I think there are a lot of poor air quality cities, like the Middle East is known for poor air quality, not because of pollution, but because of the particular matter from like sandstone and whatnot. So do these filters address those, those VOCs and those polyfluorocals and all of those other contaminants that are in the air that are not particular? They do, that's what the activated carbons for. And it's really a dance. A lot of people think more carbons better than they're competing on more carbon, but you need to find the sweet spot. We found about one pound to be the sweet spot because if you go higher on the filter efficiency and the carbon, what happens is the airflow drops. So then it's like would you rather have 99% of a dollar or 95% of five dollars? So you really want to balance that airflow. So the HEPA, the media, that's grabbing your particulates, your molds, your dust. - That's my chronesize. - Yep, yeah, particularly. - Okay. - And then the activated carbon absorbs the gases and the odors as they're coming through. - Now does that have a life cycle too? 'Cause I use activated charcoal a lot in my detox protocols. - Big time. - For like molds, mycotoxine thing. So that activated charcoal has a lifespan for how much it can absorb. - Yeah, so with HEPA, the filter actually, after about a month, performance better than the first day, 'cause a little bit of particulate on there is actually better. It's plugging up a little bit of the spores. Pores giving the more resistance, which is effective. But then you hit a point of diminishing returns where the airflow is dropping. The carbon drops off like a cliff. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine, it's not existent. - Wow. - Yeah, if people are having like in a new home, brand new homes where the VOCs are super high, new home smell, really a big problem. But about six months is when we find that the carbon is dropping off like a cliff. - So you replace the filter of your six months, you get a Jasper and then you put a new carbon filter. - And we're gonna be upgrading to coconut carbon this year and hoping that we can actually extend the filter life, spend a little bit. - So what is that coconut shell? - Yeah, they take the coconut shell and then they process it and they, okay, it's using old shells. And if we can use old recycled shells from Mexico and Costa Rica, because they're being, they're not being really effectively recycled right now. So yeah, it'd be the coconut shell, which is way better. The cost is a little bit higher for us, but if the lifespan is better, it's better than using wood and charcoal and carbon. Coconut is definitely the way to go. So we're moving in that direction. - You know, I sort of classify biohacking into two categories. There's like active biohacking and passive biohacking. So passive, I would put, you know, water filtration, mattress, the mattress that you're sleeping on, air filtration, lighting, lighting, these things that once you invest in them, and then usually the investments over, there's some minimal investment there after, but that doesn't add a minute to your day. You know, if you buy hyperbariac, you gotta find 60 to 90 minutes in your day, you gotta find a hole. If you have a red light bed, you gotta find 20 minutes for that. You gotta find 20 minutes for a sauna. So eventually, you just don't have the time to do that, but air, water, and lighting are things, I think people don't realize the impact on our physiology, and once you install those things in your home, and I realize that there's a cost to that, but once you install those things in your home, it's not something that you have to find time to do. And, you know, it sounds like fear-mongering, but I think what we're all trying to do is just get people around the current system. You know, I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but you know, the way that we build homes now for our factor, you know, they're very efficient for heating and cooling and for our factor and UVA, UVB radiation coming through the windows, but I imagine that data impacts air quality. Yeah, your home is like a Tupperware container right now. So since the 1970s, energy crisis started to happen, and they started, you know, prices were going up at the pumps, and they said, "Hey, let's make homes as thermally efficient as possible." Right. This way we can keep, you know, keep it cool in the summer, keep it warm in the winter. We got to make these homes as tight as possible. Somehow they slept on air, right? They slept on air. And then they weren't looking at the materials that were being used, so they're using all kinds of installations and off-gassing materials. And if people don't realize this, supply chains are very efficient. So when you're building a new home and you're getting a new couch and a new rug, that was manufactured six weeks ago. Right. And the day that it was done, it was wrapped up, put in a box, shipped to a distribution center, and then it was at your house a week later. It wasn't sitting, they don't off-gass it. Yeah. So the actual off-gassing happens in your home, which by the way, I'll keep talking about the homes, but if anyone does buy a new furniture, and they have an opportunity to put it in the garage or put it on a patio or put it outside or open the windows in that room and let it breathe for a week or so before you put it in your home, that would be really helpful. Yeah. So yeah, homes are built really, really tight, and they completely were neglecting the air quality. So, you know, 400 to 500 is kind of your ambient outdoor carbon dioxide. Has it gets over a thousand dish? That's when we start to have a little bit of diminishing returns. Mm. I've seen a lot of CO2 in homes when you have 10% dinner parties hit 2,000, 3,000 plus. No. Oh yeah. 'Cause even though they are circulating and circulating the gas, it's not replacing the gas. It's just circulating the air, changing the temperature of the air. Exactly. So, and then, like I remember, my parents had a dinner party, maybe 20 people at their home, 3500 square foot home, the CO2 stayed high for four days. Wow. People ask me health questions every single day about their labs, their sleep, their supplements, their genetics. I want to help every single one of them, and that's why I built just Ascari. It's an AI trained on everything I know, including my protocols, my research and my methodology. You ask the question, you get my answer. Any time of the day, go to theultimatehuman.com/ai and check it out. Now, let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. So anytime, if you're ever like at a place, if you're a, if you're a host in a party and you see people are leaving early, crack the windows in the door and people will stay, people don't even know why they're leaving. They just feel anxious, uncomfortable, they need to go. And like if you pay attention, when you go from indoor to outside, that first breath that you take. Oh. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And it's like, guys, that's not magic air. That's the regular air. Maybe partially polluted. Right. So yeah, we really looked for energy efficiency now. There's a way to build, this is what I'm trying to make a big difference and you can build a really great energy efficient home that also has very clean air and keeps your CO2 down. So there's products called HRVs and ERVs. HRVs and ERVs. Energy recovery ventilator and a heat recovery ventilator. And these bolt on to your HVAC system. They do. And you can, the best of all is you have a really tight home, but you have an ERV or an HRV. So it acts like a fresh air intake, but it has a ceramic, like a ceramic coil in there. So while it's bringing in the outdoor and indoor air, it's getting, it's a heat exchanger. So you're not losing the heat in the cool. So you're not having an energy efficiency drop by your home still breathing. And then you can filter at the point of intake. So when your home's the way, that way, 'cause where's the air coming in now? It's coming in through your doors, your windows, your addicts, the cracks, the walls, all that stuff. But yeah, that's why people think old homes are moldy homes. Yeah. When I was doing air quality testing, about a third of our business was people who moved into brand new builder grade homes and they were sick immediately. Wow. Because all the VOCs from the off-gassing, whereas the older homes were actually breathing. They were leaking. Yeah, 'cause they were less efficient, but they had more air circulation. Yeah, so we've optimized for our heating and cooling bill at a huge expense to our health. Yeah, it's a problem here. Miami is, I think Dr. Minkoff told me, that's the mold capital of the world. I believe that because we had a functional medicine clinic here for years and we sell tons of molds and molding microtox and fungal poisoning. And the thing about mold is you will never remediate the mold in the body unless you remediate the mold in the home. And I think a lot of people are expecting that really strong, sort of damp, mold smell, but very often you don't smell it. I mean, you can smell it, but usually when you smell it, there's a live spores. Yeah. And that's when it's probably really, really bad. But I mean, can sit back there on the drywall in that vapor barrier and can support you late for years. And, you know, in a lot of people, it doesn't cause the kind of symptoms that drive you to the ER and make you go to the emergency room, or to the urgent care. It's like brain fog, poor focus, poor concentration, just lack of energy, you know, it's a little bit of mood and numbness. Things that people would attribute to their environment other than their air quality. It's like, well, I'm just stressed out. And you know, the kid's schedule is so busy or you know, I've got a lot going on at work. And the truth is very often it's just related to the air quality in your home. So like when I was testing mold, do you tell me,
- Yes, inside and you test outside. The outdoor samples called the control sample. You always test the outdoor air when you're testing the indoor air. After a rainy day, the mold spores are in the millions for a few days and you're actually not supposed to test indoor air if it's rained within 48 hours. I've never heard of an air testing company who actually follows that. - I've never heard that before. - The customer's not gonna pay you to not come. You've scheduled it, you're paying your guys. But a lot of times people are, and now, because of what they called, they started to call it a mold rush in 2010, but now it's really the mold rush. (laughing) - Really. - It's really is, but it's a renewable resource. And what happened is a lot of contractors realized it's $1,000 to remove drywall, and it's 10,000 if there's an inch of mold. So let's do mold remediation instead. So you've got this huge influx people, and then a lot of functional medicine, actually our phones are blowing up off the hooks. People wanna do mold detox. So they take a two day course, who's teaching the course, the mold guy, who's taking leads. And it's a really big problem, because first of all, when it's a humid day, the thing is the greatest air filter of all time is called nature. - Yeah. - God's air purifier. - Oh yeah. - This sun, wind, rain. - It's probably why I feel so good in Colorado, man. I talk about it all the time, but you do. Like, I have this little about a three and a half or four mile loop outside of our place in the mountains, and it's just through the woods. Nothing makes me feel better than putting on a rock sack and going for this hike in the mountains. My red light bet, nothing. All the fancy equipment that I have here in Miami, nothing makes me feel better than, you know, in Chinese medicine, they call it forest bathing. And they actually just prescribe, I think they still do, forest bathing. And, you know, so going out and just getting in the fresh air. - Also, the negative ions are super high. And I actually have tested the carbon dioxide on Vancouver Island in the rainforest, and it was 360. - Oh my gosh, so outdoor ambient CO2, it's like, can you get it lower if you're in the middle of the rainforest? Yeah, it's lower. So you got that, you got clean air, you got the negative ions, you got the sun. And mold, like if we go outside right now, we test, there's mold everywhere outside, but it's not a problem outside. Mold doesn't grow outside. The problem is, it's like, the little sandwich, there's only mold only grows on the bread when you put it in the Tupperware. - Right. - When you have the sun shining on it, and with good airflow, mold is not a problem. So when people's indoor environments are sealed tight, and they have no sun exposure, what happens to people when they don't have sun? And I think what happens is the mold is pretty pissed off. It was doing fine outside. And then you trapped it indoors, and it's just trying to survive. So it's replicating, it's multiplying, it's sending out its microtoxins to try to grow and your body ends up becoming the host. So because of the way we built, and we trap ourselves inside, and going back to mold testing, almost every type of mold test is either designed for a false positive or a false negative. Which most people don't realize. So you go to the functional medicine doc, they say, take a year and test, you're like, ah, I've got the mold. - Right. - Unless you're like detoxing a lot, everybody's got levels of heavy metals and mold. - Right. - That's true. So it's the perfect storm. And you go to the functional medicine doc, they took a two day course on mold, which by the way, mold remediation course is also a two day course. - Right. - So you're trusted mold technician, it's a two day course often. - Wow. - Two day course. I think they want to school or anything for this. So Hazard is clean up, but to become a mold remediation tech is two days. - Wow. - And you learn nothing there. It's all like ancient stuff. You learn as much as a doctor learns about nutrition. - Mm-hmm. - Oh man. So you have people that are certified, they know nothing. They come in and like the restoration guys love the false positives. And the insurance company loves the false negatives. But in the natural past, don't realize, but they're usually like, ermies for example. If you're, ermie is like historical. So you're looking at the dust often in the HVAC system or like taking a dust sample. So it's almost always false positive. It doesn't mean that's what's in the air today. It means it rained last week and there was mold at some point. So it's collected in your dust. - Right. - And then that test is designed to be very alarmist. So this is where it's really nuanced because when you have a mold rush, it's like all the crypto guys, when there's a big opportunity, a lot of experts come in really fast. And then you have, so the best thing is to do, you know, you want to test, there's three or four different mold tests you want to do. But ultimately, everyone I know who's done mold consulting for a while, you know on a home in your first two minutes, if it's moldy or not. The test only confirms what you already know. It's helpful for the homeowner to get the baseline and the before and the after. And like you said, you know, you can't heal in the place that made you sick. - Yeah, that's so true. And that's the number one rule of moldy talks is to get out the environment. - And people are doing supplements, but they're still sleeping and they're doing this, huge detox protocol in the moldy bedroom. And like, guys, what are we doing here? - Yeah, yeah, you're detoxing, detoxing, detoxing, detoxing. And, you know, so if you're in that environment, that's the number one thing is to get yourself out of that environment. So the whole reason why I don't want to turn this into commercial for my mattress is, but it's why I launched the ultimate snooze because I realized we're spending a third of our life on our mattress. And, you know, when I did one of these detox challenges, I saw so many urine samples that had these, like silicon glues and flame retardants and these accelerants, including my wife's urine and my urine, which really freaked me out. - That's another passive bio-check, if you think about it. - Yeah, I'm not sure if you'll get my urine. I was like, that's weird. - I mean, what's got Jeff fuel in it that I'm drinking or breathing? But, you know, the mold remediation is important, but, you know, I've heard you also talk about how, you know, your air filtration system is only gonna get you so far, because number one, it's not constantly recirculating the air. - You mean like HVAC? - HVAC-wise, you know, so it's not, it's not constant on. And then secondly, it's recirculating the same air and some of these filters are not specific to getting down to mold spores and smaller, particularly matter. And it has a demotionative impact, not just on how you sleep, but your cognitive function, you know, overall, you know, whether or not, you know, your level of brain fog, your processing speed, short-term recall. When the stats I found fascinating that you quoted, not only a misquote it, was putting air filtration into public schools and seeing the attendance rates. - Yeah. - Go up by 30%. - And, you know, I want to be-- - Where the absentee rates go down by 30%. - Yes. - Here we go. - I guess that's the same. - Okay. - So yeah. - It's the same. - I guess it is. And if they were optimizing for carbon dioxide, it would have been even better. So like a few baseline studies when you talk about cognitive performance, they have taken air quality, whether it's CO2, particularly, and they do it in, I've seen it with chest players, grandmasters and chests, and they see how much is their next move game theory optimal? And the air quality was directly correlated to the quality of their move. - Wow. - So even with high performance, like brain athletes, another big one is SAT scores. So the test score is completely correlated to the air quality. It makes sense. - Wow. - Well, think about it. - Think about what you just don't-- - It does, but you know, it's like playing as a nose on your face kind of thing, where you, you know, when you say it, it makes sense. - Air quality is like getting paid in the head by a two by four. When you realize it, it's a duh moment. - Yeah. - So with the school, the study was done in Finland. They put air purifiers, and I don't even think super impressive ones, but decent ones, into 50% of the classes across a handful of schools. And the absentee rates dropped by 20 to 30% depending on where. - Yeah, right. - They crushed it. - Yeah. - So, yeah, that, whether it's the SAT scores or the chess players, and the list goes on and on and on. Another one was like based on the level of PM 2.5 and the inflammation in your body and your airways. A small amount, but when your airways are more inflamed, you get less oxygen. You're not running as efficiently. - Yeah. - You know, I noticed it sometimes when I travel, I'm gonna stay in certain hotels. I will get Flemmey and slightly congested. I don't feel terrible. Sleep scores are still good, but I can tell that something in the air quality, and hotels are infamous, like we were talking about earlier, for shutting off THVAC and the rooms between guests. So, yeah, you save a few pennies, but you're tripping your whole hotel for mold and you're knocking them down. - Exactly. So now, you know, the room, and you can tell those rooms where you walk in and the AC's been off for days, and they just turn the AC on, and the air actually feels, but you can feel the moisture in the air. Sometimes you can even smell the mold in the air, and you turn the AC unit on, and then that smell kind of goes away, and the T-Miles are off to them, or maybe it's just 'cause you're getting used to it. You know, so I think it's a bigger problem than, than most of us realize. And again, it's one of those aha moments, I always talk about when a fish gets sick, we clean the tank, when humans get sick, we never think about the tank that they're in. You know, we really don't treat the environment, and physicians don't ever ask you about the environment that you're in, you know, as a mold in your home, kind of what are you drinking, kind of mattresses you sleep on, they don't think about these, this constant toxic load, and it may not just be the air quality. I mean, there's a whole thing. - You're toxic bucket, just as getting filled up with, you know, and different assailants, and then eventually something happens, how do I immune, be it sick, get repeated viral attacks, get repeated sore throats, whatever it is, and a lot of these repeated sore throats are directly attributable to mold, especially in children. We found this in our own daughter. We have, so I have three kids, and I have one that I share with my wife Sage, my youngest, Talina, and she,
When she was 16, 15, 16, she just started getting all of a sudden out of nowhere, just repeated sore throats, like three, four strep infections a year. And I was very anti-wiping it out with antibiotics every time because I knew we were just going to buy a problem for ourselves down the road. And what I realized, and I would really give this message to parents that are listening, was the vast majority of these kids have mold toxicity. That's perfectly, it just lays back there in the adenoids. It dormant sometimes, it spoilates. If there's any strep to coccobacteria, it pisses that bacteria off and it flames up. Especially if when they have a stressful event, it seems like it really triggers it. Yep. Like I would be testing people's homes, there's family of five. One doesn't notice it. One is completely itchy skin and red eyes and trouble breathing and two of them are mildly impacted. Yeah. I feel like mold is really an allergen and people are more allergic to it. And then the amount of stress that you're going through really kicks it up. And like I think the hotel probably doesn't impact you as much as others because of all the stuff you're doing all the time. Whereas for enough people of that stress, Bucket was already almost full. A couple nights in that big exposure puts them over the edge. So back to the Jasper filter for a minute. So in an ideal situation for the best air quality, is this something that you would put one in the biggest area of your home or would you put them in kids rooms, your bedroom and one in the biggest area of your home? How much air do you use one of these things move? So by far the most important place to put it is your bedroom. Yeah. And that is 30 year life in there. So bedroom for sure. Get the good bed, get good sheets, get a good pillow and sleep is funny because sleep is only as good as the weakest link. You know, if you have the greatest bed ever, but it's hot, you're in sleep and if it's loud, you're not sleeping like with you. When it comes to your, I call the bedroom the sleep sanctuary. Yeah. And the average person nowadays has a million dollar home and a thousand dollar bed. I know. Maybe get a 30 year life, get a nine hundred and fifty thousand dollar home and spend fifty thousand dollars optimizing all your bedrooms. What's the point of a home guys? So yeah, it should heal you. You know, your home can really be a place for you to detox and heal. It can go from the place that makes you sick to your healing sanctuary. Yeah. So if you think about it, the first one needs to go in your bedroom for sure. Yeah. If you, the number one way you pollute your home though is cooking by far. So if someone's cooking frequently, having one in the main room is also a no brainer. Yeah. But bedroom first, because if we can dial in that third of our life, yeah, it's going to pay dividends and compound like incredibly. Right. So then you move into the, then you move into the kitchen and living room area also depends where you spend your time. You know, someone has a home office and they're spending a third of their life there. And that's another really good place to optimize for everybody. Gather's in the kitchen. And I think, you know, we think that ventilation over the stove is, is, is enough, but probably not for those that particular matter. And when you're, and when you're cooking, you're creating a lot of these VOCs too. Right. So I've been working out with my son lately trying to keep up with him and his high rocks competitive athletes. And I've been starting to use this perfect amino pre workout. I really like it. BH4 improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash. There's no stimulants. So no caffeine, no malone, nothing that gives you that kind of ampt feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout. Like you have better blood flow. So if you're the market for a pre workout, check out the perfect amino pre workout. It's my favorite now. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. And well, the interesting thing about cooking. So more than 50% of range heads do almost nothing. So well, we've some free tips in here because this is what it's all about. Yeah, yeah. Let's give them some tips for things that they could do if they didn't, if they don't have the wherewithal to invest in it filter. And even if you do, you want to do it all. Okay. But the free stuff that you could do tonight is a really big deal. So if you cook a lot or if you cook it all at home, number one, let's make sure your range hood's working. And I'll use the word range hood and vent interchangeably. It's the thing above your stove that's supposed to evacuate the air from your house. Right. So number one, take a clean. Paper towel, turn it on and make sure it's actually sucking it up. Okay. Often you'll see it's blowing it down or it's not pulling it all. Wow. If it's not pulling it from your hand and holding it there, it's not working. It's been a few years before you, if you, since you've cleaned that thing too, you would imagine the amount of grease that stuck up in those. Yeah. Clean that thing regularly, like at least once a year. Then if we know that it's pulling air, let's find out where it's venting to. You'd be shocked how often it's just venting into the cabinet right above. Right above. You open that little cabinet above. It's just there. Why open it? So your GC just ran it into there. Yeah, especially apartments. Often it's venting into your attic. Yeah. So imagine you're steaming and boiling your veggies and you're cooking and you're vaporizing water and then you're just dumping it into your attic. Why do you think you get molding your attic? Yeah. Especially when the attic doesn't breathe. So ideally that range hood should be pulling air. It should be venting it outside. Okay. There's a lot of particular stuff but it also creates pH, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. When I would test homes after wildfires, pH, hexavalent chromium are two of the main things that we would test for. And until those were not nonexistent, a home wasn't cleared. And those are christenogens and those are byproducts of like coming in contact with very high heat. That's that's that's denaturization from very high heat. So you could have the best pan and the best oils and high quality butters and a great grass fed grass for the steak but you're still going to create the pH. So you need to be venting that out of your home. And if you go into a home and it smells like food everywhere, it dissipates. Where do they get really is going? It goes into your carpets, into your clothes, into your walls, into your bedding. So that pH is getting absorbed into your pillow and then you're sleeping on it. The good news is this is an easy thing. This is a low hanging fruit. Get that range hood working. There's also an area that's very worth investing in. Yeah. Eventually I'd like to make a new bedder range hood. It'll be a while. How silly that your range hood still has to be manually turned on and off. But why is there not a sensor? And then when you have these great vents, if your CO2 is high, let's use all the existing fans in the home to help the home breathe and exhaust. Yeah. Just a no-brainer. So cooking, let's get that range hood going. Number two, bathroom fans. Everything I said about the range hood applies the exact same to the bathroom fan. Get the tissue, hold it up. You might be surprised. It's not working. If it's caked in dust, clean it, open it, clean it, check where it vents. So you're taking that shower and if you look how much water your towel can absorb, it's a lot. It can be a gallon of water plus the water pooled up in the shower. And then it's going, even if your bathroom fan's running, it's going into the attic, which often is not ventilating. So you really want to make sure those bathroom fans are vending outside. If they're going into the attic, then you want to make sure that the attic is breathing properly. Otherwise, you're taking the cooking particulate, the steam, the showers, you're dumping in the attic, then you get a whole bunch of moldy oil in there, which is the least bad place to have mold. But it's still back drafts and it can still create a problem and it can still grow downwards. So we need those bathroom fans working and people think bathroom fans are for the poop particles. They're for the shower. They're for the moisture. They're for the humidity. So if you have a family of five and there's five showers happening a day, you're talking gallons and gallons of water just dumping into your home every day, potentially unfilled water. So you want to be getting that stuff out of the home. Obviously minimal carpets, minimal rugs. If you are using carpets, getting a really good hape of vacuum, then I don't mean like the Dyson, for example, there's a real, the mold vacuum that I used to use for molding asbestos. It was called the GD930. It sounds serious. It's serious, serious. Yeah. There only sounds like a fun end loader. There only five, six hundred dollars now. Really? And they're on Amazon. And what is the difference? Is it the suction power? It did. It's a real mechanical filter with a big heppa bag. Even in mold restoration, this would last us months for residential use. You'll probably never have to change the filter ever. Wow. And this should be your, it's not your daily driver, but you can't get these things out like Walmart or Target. Amazon has them now. Amazon has them. You're only clean. No, what is it called? GD930. GD930. So that is like your deep clean vacuum. Okay. And I really recommend that every family part of your news year is resolution and you're, you're getting ready for the holidays, having a family wide detox deep clean party. One day, that sounds like something my family would do for sure. Put on good music. Take the dishes out. Take the move the dresser. Move the bed. Have some fit like rotate it out. Once a year, a deep clean, this is a good time to get your ducks cleaned, get your carpets steamed cleaned. I do a deep clean of your house. Do the range hood, do the bathroom fans. Once a year is fine. So big deep clean party. Why not? Yeah. It's just a love. Love that. You know, because last thing we want to do is create daily, weekly or monthly habits. Yeah. When you pull that bed out from the wall too, there's some nasty business going on back there. I mean, as clean as my house is too. We just recently renovated and put new furniture in the house. And, you know, I'm a psycho about the, you tested my air quality about the air, the cleaning products we use in here, everything. The one place where the cleaning is happening. Yeah. It was pretty, pretty bad. So those are big ones. Obviously, you know, you want to mitigate the source. So using better cleaning products and using better oils and all that could stuff. But really getting the ventilation dialed in. And then as much as there is outdoor pollution, outdoor air is typically, indoor air is typically 5 to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air. I've heard that from so many sources. It's very consistent. Yeah. It's very, not here. though. And if you think about it, your indoor air, like people think of their home air has like this insulated thing. When I test 99% of homes, there's more pollen in your bed than there is outside, even on a high pollen day. Because your home is not, it's not, where do you think the air inside's coming from? Come from outside. Right. So that pollen is just staying inside and getting trapped. So open, if you're cooking, this is a great time to open your windows. So if your range hood isn't working good, and your bathroom fan isn't working good, let your home breathe. Yeah. And you know, the loud range hood vent can be quite annoying, but opening a couple windows, get that cross ventilation going. You always feel so much better when that happens to. Of course. You know, one of the nice things about Miami, we have dinner party sometimes in the winter, and I'm always, I open the whole one side of the home. And it's just a different environment when you do that and let the pressure in. So fresh air, range hood, bathroom fans, once a year, family cleaning party, you know, keep the shoes outside, or have a separate pair of indoor shoes and slippers. I got a pair of my, if 95% of shoes have fecal matter on them, AKA poop. We're good here. Okay. So, and then what do you think it is for glyphosate? It's going to be the same. Yeah. You're walking around on just because you're not using ground up. You're walking around on public grounds all the time. Yeah. Dog poop, dog poop and glyphosate is on your shoes. Then you come inside, you're walking on your carpets, you're walking on your floor, then babies crawling around, and then it's constantly getting aerosolized. So you want to, you want to be cleaning your air, but you want to stop things at the source level if you can. Yeah. And like water is an obvious thing if people realize it only in the last 10 years, did drinking filtered water become like kind of a thing. Table stakes. Everybody grew up, you know, drinking from the hose. Yeah. And you think I did too. We do. We do. We do. Yeah. They probably still are. God only knows what was in the municipal water in the 80s when I was drinking it out of my well, we lived on farm. So at least we had well water. So. And if you drink the hose water, you're like, time to kind of taste it a little plasticky. It did. It tasted right now. Just thinking about it. Yeah. You got that memory. Tasted super metallic. Like I can actually taste copper. Or like the school or the park water fountains. Yeah. Occasionally I go around and test water fountains at park. And like the leds off the charts. Really off the charts because of the pipes. Yep. Yeah. So like we all realize that once you start drinking filtered water, now you learn to trust your senses more. And you can taste what topwater tastes like. So true versus filtered water. So the cool thing is what's really exciting here is ignorance is not bliss. What happens is I always tell people there's the worst part. There's one bad thing about really cleaning your air. You may become an air snub. All of a sudden you go to people's homes. Yeah. And you're like, this is, this is, you know, everybody. I'm some mean hotels, man. I can smell the lack of air quality. Even in really good hotels. Well, no, well, no, that my work has been valuable. If by 2030, when you go on Airbnb, there's a scent free option on the filter. Well, when you go on Uber, there's a scent free option. Yeah. If we can get that awareness going enough. Yeah. With those fragrances. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you're big on the fragrances. Or a big on the anti-fragment. Yeah. Anti-fragment. Yeah. You're big on fragrance awareness. I guess while we're talking about the free tips, no glade plugins, no for breeze, no air fresheners. Oh, too. I have a driver in Las Vegas. And I went out to for the fights this weekend with the family. And we got into his, um, suburban. And he actually had this little, um, thing that created sense in the cup holder. And it was, he just smoke. Yeah. So I guess what it was doing was taking the, uh, the, the little gel filter and vaporizing it. And I got into the car. You could just feel it. It's like, you know, when somebody just has way too much perfume on and you get on an elevator with them or something, it felt like that. And there he was like, don't you love it, man? I, you know, I bought this thing. It's electric. It's a car. All he smells good. I'm like, shut that thing off. Open the doors. I'm making a, uh, beautiful card that we're going to send to all of our customers. Yeah. With their jaspers and we'll send it out to as many people as we can where it'll be a beautiful card in English and Spanish with a little QR code that you give to the Uber driver that explains to them what that Christmas tree of death is doing to them. Yeah. Because like people, we need help. And I, I have a lot of videos where I actually would talk to the Uber driver of why they have it there. Yeah. They think it's increasing the ambiance. Yeah. And you know what's interesting? You can't trick human biology when it comes to temperature. Are thermal sensors or were so you can't trick the body. Cold feels cold. Hot feels hot, but you really can manipulate smell and you can really manipulate taste. So, companies have taken a lot of advantage manipulating our food and manipulating our air in a really big way. That's a whole server podcast. I could definitely go down that road with you. But, um, yeah, this part of my whole maha presence is, you know, trying to fix food quality, especially in the public school system. And I mean, the public school system serving 30 million meals twice a day. You know, so 60 million meals a day to our most vulnerable, which are children in their most vulnerable stages, their previous best in years. And, you know, it's no one to 42% of kids have one chronic disease. So, I'm curious. Actually, what you think about something? Because what I've, what my research showed and what I believe to be true is when you think about, I learned don't eat unless I'm salivating. And I've noticed this to be deeply impactful. So, even if I'm like out in public, my, my prayer for food is take putting it close and smelling it very slowly. And I smell each thing on the plate. And I feel my mouth instantly filled with saliva. It's amazing. Yeah. And then the body is like, that's like the perhaps all this dog, you know, experiment, but the, um, the body is amazing at starting creating cravings around what it needs. And I think what's happened with highly processed foods is it's perverted that sense, right? I mean, we, if you're nutritionally deprived, you will actually crave the very things that make that situation where so, you know, like GLP one is a hormone we secrete in our gut. And I mean, there's a trillion dollar industry crept up around GLP ones, but we secrete GLP one in response to nutrient density. So when you chemically circumvent the GLP one response, the body doesn't realize that it's the amount of calories it's taking in. It's, it's, it's reading the nutrients. That's why you can eat four boxes of Oreos, but you can't eat four avocados. Oh, it's got room for dessert. Yeah. I'm always have room for dessert, right? Because four avocados is two nutrient dense, you know, you can, you can eat, you can eat a whole box of Oreos because they're chemically designed to circumvent that response. And, you know, again, when we get back to like biohacking, you know, I, I just tell people, look, there's no secret to dogmatic dieting, secret to living a long healthy life from a food perspective is just the absence of processed foods. But, you know, again, these things like air quality, water quality, light quality, even though these are expenses, you know, if you're on that journey of wellness, longevity, anti-aging, whatever you want to call it, I mean, making your home this sanctuary of healing, sleep, relaxation, this should be where you go to detox, not sort of re-tox. And I think so many of our homes are making us sick and not the least of which is, you know, mold and indoor air quality. And five years ago, I would bet more than half of all primary care physicians would have just told you that mold is made up, you know, it's focus, focus. We all have mold mold everywhere. You don't need to worry about mold. I can patently tell you that that is false, you know, from from having our clinic treat, tens of thousands of patients and remediate mold. By the way, I have a free mold detox on my on my website at theultimatehuman.com. It's completely free. So if you find the mold in your urine or you do a test and you find mold, there's an eight-week detox in there for mold and another one for heavy metals because I'm such a believer that as the, you know, we we slowly sort of micropoise in ourselves the death and air is one of those things. So back to the filtration. What kinds of things is this taking out of the air and what direct impact does that have on our physiology? And I'll say when we talk about when I say PM 2.5, what that means is particulate matter 2.5 microns in size and the reason why is that an issue? Estimate of what that is. Dust. It's a lot smaller than dust. It can be dust and smoke and like, well, 0.3 to 10 microns is what I was testing for before. Okay. PM 2.5 in particular and you know, a lot of things have like ranges of particle sizes, but the reason PM 2.5 is the one that you see reported and talked about the most is because it's small enough to get into your lungs and bloodstream and too big to get out. So when things are 0.03.1 microns and tiny, tiny, tiny, they come in and you breathe them back out. Yeah. They don't get virus. Yeah. That PM 2.5, it comes in and it stays in, which is why that's like the number that we always see reported on. And it's it's big and air quality indexes. And then VOCs is this catch all term for volatile organic compounds. You know, there's naturally occurring VOCs, but when we're talking about it in an indoor environment, we're talking about what the fragrance is creating and the off gas is basically airborne chemicals. Right. It's the there's the simple way of thinking about it. So when we test air in a home, average bedroom, when I go and test it, you know, there's a million particles floating around between 0.3 and 10 microns inside. What's that? You're talking smoke, pollen, rubber from the tires of the cars. Yeah, you got mold spores, you got allergens, you got all the general pollutions. You know, you may not be using lint dryer vents, but your neighbor is. So everybody's polluting this air that we share, your home is pulling it in. And then that's in your bedroom. Yeah. So typically in the average bedroom, when you start cleaning the air in about half an hour, we can get it about 95 to 99% cleaner. Really, really, really quickly. It's just
Just like water filters work. They're filters work. - In half an hour. - Half an hour. - Wow. - When we did a test at the Ritz here, we got a 10 times cleaner in 20 minutes in the room of your staying room. - Thank you. - You just walked right in there with a Jasper and set it right in your room. - I trouble it everywhere I go. - That's awesome. - Everywhere I go, I drag that thing with me. - If you know me, you know I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career. Different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works on my own body. NED was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found symbiotic as liposomal NED, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it, I felt it, and it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. - So it's like, it's kind of like what you're talking about before where it's like, it's your body. And I, for myself, I rebranded sleep to healing time. - So sure. - Because sleep felt like a dormant word. I didn't want to go to sleep. It felt like I was turning off and I love being on and vibrant and awake. But like when I'm sick, I'm like, I'm going to do my healing time now. And in eight hours, I'm going to find out if I'm feeling better the next day or not. It feels like all the healing happens in that state. So when I talk, when I view it instead of sleep in a bedroom, I'm like, it's my healing room. And I want to optimize my healing facility, my sleep sanctuary. So if I get that dialed in, so when the air is now in, it's not filled with pollen and it's not filled with mold and it's not filled with dust mites. And it's not just the dust. When there's dust, there's dust mites, which most people are fairly allergic to, then your body can heal itself. - So true. - Man, there's nothing more powerful than our God-given immune system. - But it's something that's distracted. - Just get out of its way. And babies, this is a really crazy one too. - This is huge. - So you got your baby, comes home, born in a hospital, which already usually is typically horrible air. - Yeah. - And then you bring your baby home, and you just painted, and you got a new crib, and a new little mattress, and little toys filled with mold. And then you put your baby in there 18 hours a day and you shut the doors and you shut the window and you close the blinds. - Baby sick all the time. - Yeah. - And the worst is you get these little diaper pales. You're supposed to be airtight. But you go into a diaper genie or whatever it's called. - Yeah. - That's one of the big brands. And it stinks like poop in there. (laughing) New slash, trust your nose. If it smells like poop, it is poop. And if it's poop, it's incredibly high levels of bacteria. So I'd love to say Jasper's the solution for this. It helps, but the right is like, if there's like one message that I'm a huge proponent of, it's getting those diaper pales out of baby's room. And there's actually a pretty small one. It's like a $70 Amazon one. It's very small and it works like a trash shoot. And it's small enough that you're dumping it out every single day. 'Cause the diaper genie and others, they have a weak capacity. So you're holding five sick day old diapers in a bedroom. And you go in there like, "Ugh." So remember this was 2020. I was living in Colonial British Columbia. And I'm going into my first daughter's room and it stinks like poop and I'm like, "Rach, I don't know about this." My spidey senses say this is not okay. But she was really holding it down first baby. I said, "Can we please not put the diapers in the pale, like let's commit to taking them outside right away." And she's like, "Ah, you know, there's a lot of stuff." Like this is really convenient. I said, "Fine." Right of passage, mom and dad, right of passage. For tonight, let's put the diaper pale in our bedroom and see what it feels like to sleep with a poop can in our room. PS, I'm going to sleep in the other room tonight. Yeah. And she's like, "Ugh, no, I'm not doing that." You're like, "God, I got you." I don't have to say anything else. Yeah. Because then it clicked for her. She's like, "Wait a second. If I wouldn't sleep in it, but our baby who can't talk is, this is a big problem." Yeah. So, you know, you're talking about the mattress before. Like, so tips for inspecting parents is, you know, you want to make the pretty nursery, I get it. If you're going to paint, do it six months before. Do it four months before. Open those windows as much as you can. Let that work off. Yeah. So, please don't put those little enclets, those EMF enclets on your baby either. We don't need that. If you are going to have a camera in a monitor, if you can put it eight feet away, that seems to be the sweet spot EMF wise. Yeah. I agree with that. The, the crib's, everybody loves new furniture, but if you can get a secondhand dresser and a crib, so the off-gassing has already been complete before you put that into your nursery, that would be great. And if not, get the baby stuff four or five, get it as early as you can, put it outside, put it in the garage, open the windows, let that stuff off-guess, 'cause adults, fun facts. This probably should have been the first thing I said. Adults are breathing on average 15,000 to 17,000 times a day. Pallars are 50 to 60,000 times infants. 50 is 60,000. Thousand breasts a day. Wow. Infants can be 80 to 100,000 breasts per day. Wow. The average person drinks half a gallon, this is probably a good water drinker, half a gallon of water per day, but you breathe three, three thousand gallons of air per day. They say about 70% of all your detox happens in your lungs. So if you're taking in this amount of air relative to this, so much water, so you're breathing, you know, you have two pounds of food coming in a day, half a gallon of water, and three thousand gallons of air. It's by far the thing that we take in the most. It's also the breathing is the only thing that we do passively and actively. So when you're sleeping, you're not eating, you're not drinking. The only thing keeping you alive all night long is your air quality, is the air that you're breathing. It's the first thing you do when you're born, it's the last thing you do before you die. And I think that's why we're sleeping on air, no pun intended, is because it's so core to our existence, that if we were so distracted by air, you know, we're really good at adopting to things. Yeah. So I think that's why air is just like this dumb moment because of how much air we take in. And if you look at the Google search volume, air quality is like, man, flat, type in breath work, and it's like hockey stick growth. Wow. So the fact that we're, we don't talk, I mean, we should, but we're talking about what we eat more than how we chew. And we're talking about water quality, more than how we drink. But breath work is talked about way more, breathing is clearly understood and growing. But what are we even breathing? Yeah. It's just, it's just hiding in so much. I try to do it outside every day. I mean, and it is such a game changer, you know, it's, it's more of the free advice things that I talk about that really help move the needle. Those habitual things, like just getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning within first 30, 60 minutes of the day, delaying your coffee intake, maybe 60 minutes after you wake up. Love that one. Getting a little sunlight onto your skin, you know, doing a few rounds of, of, of breath work, and which was really hard for me learning to sit in silence. You know, I always growing up until just very recently had a real issue with silence. I mean, it's when my brain would just start to ricochet and think about everything, but quieting my mind was a really hard thing. To tuning into my breath allowed me to quiet my mind. And it's sort of that transition from waking into the day and it's free and it's portable, and you can do it anywhere. I do it on commercial flights. I mean, when I do those-- - In 15 hour flights to-- - Breath is your connection to like everything. - Everything. - And if the air field is polluted and distorted, your connection to the everything, there's too much noise in that, in the air. And people are like, we're talking through the air. EMF moves through the air. We're not just talking about particulates in VOCs, but air is the vehicle in which we couldn't be talking underwater right now. This is like the medium of life. So keeping that channel super clear and super dialed in. And there's two fun studies, 'cause mold is everywhere that I forgot to mention to tell you. So all of our studies, 'cause I was a restoration guy. I wasn't a scientist or an engineer. I was a mold man. So I was testing the air before cleaning it, testing it after. It was like very simple, layman kind of thing. I was just looking at before and afters. And so all of the labs tests that we do are real world stuff. Most studies that you look at, when you look at water filters, air filters, cleaning products, it's these in these controlled environments. So all our mold studies, we removed 97.1% of the mold spores in a 500 square foot room with eight foot ceilings in one hour. And two hours is 99.9, and 98.1, and three hours is 100%. Because we're scrubbing the air in the room. So all of our studies, and when you go to our website, we put all of our lab data right there. - So people can look at it. - Jasper.co. - Jasper.co. - How many of you get the com? - Okay. (laughs) Yeah, now that they know you have a big company, they're gonna hold it for you. - And so everything should be real world examples. We did a sleep study about a year and a half ago, where we shipped 150 people, Jaspers. They were using Aura and Woop and a few other sleep tracking devices, a lot of Woop. And what happened was they, these were people who were not filtering their air. So we said, "We'll give you guys a Jasper in exchange for 30 days of sleep data, four weeks." We said, "The first week, keep your Jasper off, weeks two and three, Jasper on in your bedroom, fan speed three, dark mode, week four, turn your Jasper off." The average person got 25 minutes more sleep per night, 18% more deep sleep, and they fell asleep five minutes faster. And this was dramatically pulled up by the people who were sleeping, the people who were sleeping four hours a night were sleeping like six. You know, people who were really dialed in and optimized still got solid benefit, but people who were really struggling, anyone who had mold or pollen or allergies or VOCs or they were cooking a lot. And then the white noise also helped a lot of people quiet their minds as well. So this is just like, when I got to see that, 30, this is still, and by the way, all of this is a community study. That was an anecdotal study that we did with the general public. A lot of people were sleeping,
of them were influencers and doctors, but this was not an official sleep study. This was our own community led sleep study off of basically aura and wound tracking data and stuff like that. And to me, that kind of study is very relatable. And when I realized that, also about 30% of people who were snoring stopped snoring. And we historically look at snoring as you know, weight and structural issues. For a lot of people, especially people, they have CPAP machines to force air down your throat. It should be like the lot, like table stakes that if you need to see back, you have to clean the air. Yeah. Because you got this moldy, pollen full there that you're just driving deep down your airways. Come on guys. Another duh moment. So, um, HEPA, I'm kind of on a, we're going to change our language soon because you know, we're calling our HEPA filter. HEPA is bullshit. It is. Why is it just particular size? So, you know, you often hear that it filters down to, you know, 99.97% or at 0.03 microns. What they don't tell you, that's the MPPS, which is the most penetratable particle size. So we actually are more effective at smaller particle sizes. That's, they say down 2.03. It's not true. If you look at the lab data, at 0.02 and 0.01, we're more effective than 0.03. That's like the PM2.5. That's the sneaky size that gets through. And that's the most damaging. That's the most damaging. But also, HEPA, so you go to these third party labs. And if you dig deep, when you ask these companies and you look at their lab data, what happens is, so Jasper's you'd asked about airflow. At the lowest fan speed, we move about 100 to 120 cubic feet per minute. At the highest speed, it's about 400 to 430 CFM. Okay. A lot of times you'll see the lab data. People are testing their filters at 4CFM. So a Kleenex. If you could blow gently enough, could be HEPA. So there's no standard in the right, HEPA is a standard, but they're not mandating that the airflow is at a certain fan speed. So you'll notice when you look at our lab data, we put the CFM on the lab data, because we're testing it at the actual fan speed that Jasper's running. If we tested it at once CFM, it's going to be off the charts. But it's not a real, it's like testing your zero to 60 on your car if the car was off the pavement. That's it. It's 0.1. Yeah. So the pavement, that's how we test this thing. So a lot of the marketing claims that you see if you really look in a layer deeper and coming from the restoration standpoint, it was like eyes wide open, what's going on here. So really looking, and when people are talking about how many square foot does your air purifier do? Well, on what? Typically they have these big claims. Then you look at the five print, it's like seven foot ceilings in an isolated chamber on full speed. Most people are running their air filter at the lowest speed all the time. So you want to have real world data. I see what that says. Real world data. Yeah. Let's test the pollen in the room. Let's run the machine and let's test it again. Yeah. So I really love, has a restoration guide before, during and after testing in a real environment. That's the real stuff. Michael, I think this is just such an important topic for people to really get their arms around. That's a great topic for people to also understand that is, you know, as they're on this wellness journey and longevity journey, you know, as they get some disposable income, you know, where are the best places to point it? And I think air, water, and lighting are great places to start in your home because once you make these investments, you don't remake the investment or there's minimal investment thereafter and they don't add any time to your day. And I think that if we just focused on those three things, air, water, and lighting in our homes made it to sanctuary, to improve our sleep, to optimize our health, to not retoxify us. You know, we're more resilient when we're outside of the home, going through the rest of our daily tasks. So I think my audience is going to really love this. And I just to comment on that one thing there, you know, the 80/20 being the air, water, lighting, like what's the 80/20 of the 80/20? I think it's drinking water. There's a lot you could do in the shower. There's a lot you could do in all your taps and you're bathing and all that, but drinking water, dial in drinking water, dial in your sleeping air. So you know, drinking water and sleeping air and then having a nice lamp in your common area and a nice dimmed, diffused lamp in the bedroom, if we can just deal with your lighting after sunset, you're sleeping in your bedroom. Slept your sleeping air and your drinking water. Now we're talking about like really realistic stuff. I just want to mention one more thing too. Well, you talked about the study for the school. Yeah. Something that we're going to be very much open sourcing is we bought a school in Austin. He's only got that. I just think it's important for people to know about this. So we're putting in clean air, clean water, good lighting, non-toxic cleaning products, very outdoor based, you know, we'll have big screened in porches. And we want to say, if in Finland they got the air quality, the absentee rates down by 30%. Wow. I believe if we can get the absentee rates down like 50%, that's our target. Wow. Talk to you later actually about ways that we can measure it and make it scientifically valid. I love to do that. Because if we can, the public schools, the reason that they have all these true and sea laws and they force you to be a high attendance and all that is because they get paid based on attendance rates. So if we can prove out that we can get the absentee rates down, it's going to be profitable for the schools to build healthy buildings, clean air, clean water, good lighting, healthier food. If they know that can get the attendance rates up 30, 40, 50%. If you can align to the business incentives, 50% is a major move on the, well, 30 which is there. Yeah. So I want to make sure that we're scientifically accurate, you know, testing monitoring, the six symptoms, the attendance rates. Schools are already monitoring attendance really well, but you know, coughs and runny noses and stuff like that. Like, we want to make this undeniable proof. We want to, we want to open source it. And then, you know, our school is going to be quite small in Austin, but everything we do, every product we use, the data we're going to open source it all on the website. So ideally as many schools as possible. And if people are, if you, if your, if your kid goes to a private school, I wish we could help public schools. They're very difficult to work with. Yeah. If you email us, we give several hundred jaspers every couple months away to schools to put into your kids classrooms. Oh, that's great. Because we found once the kids, once, once people's kids start getting, stop getting sick, yeah, it becomes undeniable. And then we, we help the school teach about air quality to the parents and everything. That's right. Our big initiative is getting clean air into schools. So if this resonates with you, great. If not, open your windows. Don't wear your shoes inside. Get your range head going. Get your bathroom thing going. Tell your Uber driver to take out the Christmas tree. And I'll put the blade plugins wherever you go. We're looking to build a, a clean air ambassador army. So, you know, thank you so much for, for listening. And I hope this helps you guys out. I'm a huge, huge fan of these kinds of bio hacks that don't add another minute to your life. And for the rest of you guys, I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Until next time, that's just science.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Indoor air quality is a major health issue due to tightly sealed, energy-efficient homes that trap pollutants and off-gassing materials.
The guest, Michael, transitioned from disaster remediation (flood, fire, mold cleanup) to creating residential air purifiers after witnessing recontamination and health issues in homes post-wildfire.
Air filtration should focus on cubic volume (not square footage) and balance HEPA filters for particulates with activated carbon for gases and VOCs; carbon filters degrade significantly after about six months.
Simple, low-cost tips include opening windows, letting new furniture off-gas outside or in a garage, and improving ventilation during gatherings to reduce CO2 buildup.
Advanced solutions include energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) or heat recovery ventilators (HRVs) to maintain fresh air intake without losing energy efficiency.
The host emphasizes passive biohacking—investing in air, water, and lighting—as effortless health improvements that don't require daily time commitments.
Summary:
The podcast discusses the critical importance of indoor air quality for overall health, with the host Gary Brekka interviewing Michael, an expert who shifted from disaster remediation to designing residential air purifiers. Michael explains that modern homes are built to be energy-efficient and airtight, but this traps pollutants, off-gassing materials, and CO2, leading to poor indoor air that can harm health. His "aha moment" came during wildfire cleanup, where homes were recontaminated months later, and cheap residential purifiers failed to match industrial scrubbers' effectiveness.
He developed a balanced approach using HEPA filters for particulates (like mold and dust) and activated carbon for gases and VOCs, noting that carbon filters lose efficiency after about six months and that airflow matters more than square footage. Practical tips include opening windows, allowing new furniture to off-gas before bringing it indoors, and ventilating during parties to reduce CO2 levels. For those with resources, installing ERVs or HRVs can bring fresh air while maintaining thermal efficiency.
The conversation concludes by framing air quality as a passive biohack—once you invest in filtration and ventilation, it works continuously without adding time to your day, transforming a home from a source of illness into a healing sanctuary.
FAQs
Modern homes are built very tightly for energy efficiency, which traps indoor pollutants like VOCs from off-gassing materials, leading to poor air quality that can impact health.
When a fish gets sick, you clean the tank, but when humans get sick, we often ignore the home environment. Your home can either make you sick or become a healing sanctuary.
Open windows and doors to let your home breathe, especially during gatherings, and let new furniture off-gas in a garage or outside before bringing it inside.
Activated carbon absorbs gases, odors, and VOCs, but its effectiveness drops off like a cliff after about six months, so filters need regular replacement.
HEPA filters capture particulates like mold and dust, while activated carbon absorbs gases and odors, balancing filter efficiency with airflow for optimal performance.
HRVs (heat recovery ventilators) and ERVs (energy recovery ventilators) bring in fresh outdoor air while exchanging heat, maintaining energy efficiency and improving indoor air quality.
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