Your Home’s Air Is 5 to 10 Times Dirtier Than Outside: Here’s What to Do | Mind Pump 2985

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Product services, prices, and hours of operation may vary. See store for details. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the number one health, fitness, and entertainment podcast ever. Approaching half a billion downloads. This is Mind Pump. 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. Now this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Rho Nutrition. So Rho Nutrition specializes in liposomal technology. What does that mean? That means all of their supplements are encased in liposomes to ensure bioavailability, absorption. In other words, if you take glutathione and you take it in normal form, you absorb almost none of it. If you take it with Rho Nutrition's liposomal technology, you absorb a great deal of it. Even vitamin C, you guys, vitamin C, which you can absorb normally anyway, in liposomal form, you'll absorb 150% more. They also have creatine. Creatine, some people have gastro distress when they take creatine. Not the case with Rho Nutrition's liposomal creatine. So go check them out and get 20% off everything. Go to rhonutrition.com slash discount slash mindpump. That's R-H-O nutrition.com slash discount slash mindpump. The code mindpump gets 20% off. Also, it's the biggest sale of the year here at mindpump. All workout programs, all bundles, everything is 60% off because of Black Friday. Also, every purchase enters you into a contest to win things like a vacation or a red light panel or a squat rack. So here's what you do. You go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. Use the code Black Friday. That gets you 60% off. Plus you get entries to win. By the way, on the 9th at 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Instagram, we're going to give away two tubs of Organifi protein, a case of Elements sparkling water, and a PRX Profile Pro squat rack. So if you buy anything at mapsfitnessproducts.com and you get it for 60% off with the code Black Friday, you get entries. Check our Instagram daily. We're giving things away. And every entry you get enters you into every single contest for the entire month. All right, here comes the show. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now, 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 3,000 or 4,000 homes burnt down, but everyone's homes was so smoke contaminated that they deemed them all basically unlivable, which 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 environmentally aware because there's oil sands 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. 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? Well, when it's mold, airborne mold spores, when it's wildfire smoke, we're testing something called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons 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 within 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. Because 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. Because 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 indoor air all comes from outside, but outside we have the sun, the wind, the rain, the trees, God's air purifier. 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 a little air purifier that you buy at a Home Depot or a Walmart or Amazon, I'm like, whoa, there's a huge delta in how these things work. So what inspired Jasper was if you think about 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 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 restoration and environmental cleanup and make something inspired by that, but for home use? So take me back to the Home Depot version analogy you just gave. What is that then? What are those things? My favorite analogy for that is it's like a kettle. 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 kettle, you can't do it because the water is going to 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 the SUV only came into the market in the early 90s. They said, how do we take a military grade truck and make that for the modern American family? Now over 50% of cars sold are 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 bang the drum and raise air awareness until we are thinking about it the same way we think about our water. So when you were doing this with them, at what point were you like, we need this in regular homes? Specifically, I was in Fort McMurray, Alberta. There was a lady who had, we went, so there's a lady named Tanya. We cleaned her home completely. We pulled out the carpets, insulation, basically completely restored it throughout all the furniture, the bedding, everything. It 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, it 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, 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 until the ambient air clears up, then she should move back. We'll retest the air and then she moves home. Insurance this was my big eye-opening moment. Insurance basically said, so sad, too bad. The check's on the way, they already signed off, our work here is done. And I'm like, 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 of 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 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. 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 her 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 it again. And I'm like, damn, I knew nothing about air purifiers at the time, nothing. I was just a mold 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 1,000 square feet on the box, I thought it would work. It didn't work. And then 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? This is very toxic air in here. And Angela said, she's like, yeah, I know Mike, but it's really loud and it's really ugly. And then I'm like, oh shit, 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 Jaspers a mountain in Canada. They're like, 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 an old 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. I knew it. And then it took me about three years of sourcing machines all over the world. But the main thing is it's big. So yeah, what dawned on me though, 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 greatest hurdle from going from what you knew was powerful, loud, and effective to making sleek, not annoying? What was the biggest hurdle of that? There was no hurdle. It was just patience. It took me about three years. I ordered- That's a long time. It did. It took me three years. Admittedly, it wasn't 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 beat down. I didn't know if I had another business in me. I was 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 dad thing and the family thing for a few years. I don't think I have business in me. I had 50 of those machines sitting in my garage, not sure if I was going to launch. 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... 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. I'm like, instead of going into these war zone-esque disaster zones, hiring a hundred guys and doing construction, I'm like, they need clean air just as much. There is no clean air. I thought Jasper was just going to be specifically for wildfire smoke. COVID happened first. 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. They mandated it legally that every dentist in Ontario legally needed an air purifier to open the doors for business. Wow. Perfect timing. Perfect timing. The way it worked is there was a... 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's perspective, they're like, I need this. It will pay for itself in two days. So our first thousand, and we launched. We launched as Jasper Medical. Cause I'm like, the doctors and the dentists need it. So we put it up and 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, does it reduce things like viral pathogens and stuff as well? Or is that, it also does that? Oh, totally. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. The dentist needed it for COVID at the time. And then, so if you think about like, by the way, HEPA, all it means is that the filter, it filters down to a particle size of 0.03, 99.97%. So that's what HEPA, when you see HEPA filter, it's that. It's that, but it's kind of bullshit, honestly. Really? HEPA's 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 to get, that's why whenever someone's marketing claim is third-party tested, that can't be it. I wanna see like real world before and after type of studies and examples. 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. 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 it? I'm like, that's how this works? So with HEPA, there's no legal requirement of the airflow that they run the test in. So instead of putting, like the way we do our 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 wrap my head around that. We're testing the air. That's real-world results. That's what I need. 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 100 CFM. They'll go and run the fan at 4 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 never made a product before. I was in restoration and construction, and in that world, when you're testing families and people's homes, we test, 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 the way that these companies are doing their tests. So yeah, that's why. That's fascinating. 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, like 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, 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 gonna find in there? So yes, there'll be mold spores, there'll be dust, there'll be pollen, 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, brake 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 can 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 moist. 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's 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. Can't sweat your bare foot. I am, and you know, we shower like once or twice a day, so feet get cleaned a lot more than shoes. The average, 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, hairsprays. 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 one is if you're buying a new piece of furniture, if you can, open your garage, let it off gas. Like when you open that new bed or that new furniture, and whoosh, ideally you let that off-gassing process happen outside. And like I said, indoor air is five to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air. So even though you have all the pollution outside, especially in California where the weather's quite beautiful, like opening your windows is a great idea, especially when you're cooking. 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 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. There'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 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 there's a lot of these little things that people can pay attention to. And then you asked about, what's the meaningful health difference? Yeah, like what do we see? What's actually the benefit? Exactly. So I'll share a few things. 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. We're gonna do a huge one in the spring with over 1,000 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 Claus. It's because I needed them for my hotel room last night. Like, I bring them with me. I had my first 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 kids and their attention. 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. 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. Wow. 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 played with the air quality with the chess masters to see how game theory optimal was their moves. Huge correlation. 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 gonna 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 a, 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, to me, it's all about duh marketing. 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'm sure you're probably aware, too, of the hormone levels, testosterone levels in men and declining over decades, decades. Do you think there is a correlation there? Do you think that there's a connection to how the way these houses are being built, all the points that you're making right now, and we're, because we're always speculating that. Like, I don't think it's one silver bullet. I think it's. Yeah, I think it's, I think there's a lot of things that are happening. I think we move less. I don't think we, you know what 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 a major contributor? I think it's similar to just thinking about your food and your water. Like, if I eat, you know, go to McDonald's and get a burger today, because I eat clean, I'm gonna 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 is, like, I think about air very similar to the way I think about nutrition, very similar to the way I think about water quality. 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. So, I like lazy health, and then go and work out. But clean water, clean air, good lighting. I think about those things very, very similarly. So, you know, there's so much studies about microplastics. I'm saying this because you mentioned testosterone. I've heard a lot of studies about microplastics and how the, and forever chemicals, and you're shrinking tape. Are your filters, do they get rid of microplastics as well? Yes. Okay, and 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 100% 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 was 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, 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 attention to the microplastics, and the water. I'm not gonna heat up food in Tupperwares and things like that. I used to. 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 microplastic study. So, 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. Our just advantage is we move a lot of air. I was just gonna 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 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, oh, we didn't need this kind of stuff when my grandparents. Back in those days, they didn't have. Central AC some houses had heating, but you always had the windows open and leaky your homes. They weren't built so tight. Yeah. So it's interesting now everything's sealed and nobody opens windows 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 airflow through your house. Yeah, for sure. Also back in the day, like your granddaddy 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 MDF. 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 the HVAC system is the lungs of your home. This is the thing that pulls the air in, heats it, cools it, and that's all. Like the HVAC, when I say HVAC, it's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. That's your furnace guy, your AC guy. 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, 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, if we all stare at the big screen together, that's not screen time anymore. And it 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 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 motor from getting, 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 warm showers and like it's 2026. We should enjoy the modern conveniences 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 there about $2,500. So if the humidity goes over 60%, it will start pulling more moisture out of there. 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 in Arizona or in a place where in the Northeast, where you have cold winters and it's dry, it can humidify as well. Um, but yeah, 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, this is a good one. So I think building it, 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 $1,500 on a formaldehyde bed. 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. 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. Cause you know, PVC, obviously you're going to get into the mic. Same thing. I prefer that. Okay. You know, 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 big 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 careful because if you walk down those stores, Walmart, whatever, and it says like 1500 square feet, what, what, first of all, it's air. What was the ceiling height in that room? Cause if it's a 16 foot ceiling versus an eight 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? 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 square feet. Also, does covers mean the air gets 95% cleaner or 5% 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 an everyday use. Most of the time, right. And for me, covers means we're going to get the air 80% 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% cleaner on the quietest setting and 80% 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% cleaner. Yeah. Um, but what's awesome about Jasper that I love about mine is that even it's runs obviously like it is right now in this room where it's quiet and silent. Uh, soon as I start using the iron skillet in the kitchen or something, I mean, it, 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 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, especially people who live in cities versus like pure silence. 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'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. So there's something, one of the good models is called a Corsi Rosenthal box, C O R S I Rosenthal box. Google will 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, $50. 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. Oh, 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 gotta say emergency reasons. That makes a lot of sense. My kid, my kid moved into a dorm, 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 can, 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. We're that, but you can also just use your pot and boil water. I've seen studies that connect things like dementia risk and Alzheimer's risk to 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 Lyon 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, cause 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 were, 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. Oh, okay. You called doctors like, yo, it's normal. She's supposed to be like this. 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 and 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 in 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'd somehow their protocols 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. Didn't even know that 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 it. If you have a 30 minute commute, that's an hour for the kid every day. 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, 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, the building went up for sale and it was going to be sold to a developer who was 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 curriculums 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 harder 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 feel good about this. Is there something we could do about this? So we had a sick kid, we had that study in Finland and I'm like, Hey, and I learned cause I'm from Canada. I moved to Austin four years ago and I found out cause 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, like you're not allowed to take your kids traveling, like, huh, what's this all about? Well, it turns out schools are funded based on attendance. That's right. So, huh, 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 schools are financially motivated by attendance, but they have these incredibly sick buildings. So I said, what if we set 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 one class, 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's the attendance going to be? What's the sick rates going to be like? And then 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 a real, and we're bringing on some doctors and scientists, like I'm a mold man, I don't know how to do publishable studies, but 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 kids not having asthma attacks anymore Hey, my kids 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 gonna 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 gonna Do we're open sourcing it all online so every time we do a podcast like tons of people are like We'll open a kindling in my city, and we're like no, but we're gonna publish everything We're doing including what we pay our teachers. What it costs to maintain the building Everything's gonna 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 So far so good What are you seeing right now? What are you already seeing are you seeing anything yet? We 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 to say kid if you wake up in the morning You're trying to rush your kid to 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 know the last hour you got to pick them up, then you bring them home 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 are we just bought an office building Five and a 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 gonna cook meals for the Jasper team for the kids and the teachers at school So don't so then when you're when the maybe it'll be like $10 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? 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 like what's going on here? Who's 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 Nobody really wants to talk to the air purifier guy air is kind of a boring subject. It really is Especially air filters it doesn't get much more boring than that when you can connect it to sleep and performance that changes it We're 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 big podcasters athletes show them 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 unlike same I want 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 gonna put it beside the school soon So imagine you pick your kids up you go a little Lily 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 enough 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 does 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 gonna 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 How many kids there 10 10 so far? Yeah. Well, I mean honestly like we had almost a hundred people apply the thing is though We want the fact 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 is as intentional as get seeking investment because You want their buy-in to you want the family to come in? Who wants to be a part they want to go on the camping trip? They they a lot 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 but then when you become an adult which I'm Starting to do, you know, it's interesting Where is 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 Yeah, 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 gonna be we want a controlled fire So start with the right families the right teachers, even though there's ten kids though We have three teachers and we run it like we have a hundred kids Everything from the security to the food to the 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 a hundred years ago. It was the environment is the teacher but by environment she meant like low chairs Yeah, low tables. She didn't mean the air and the water and the lighting and the food, but you're adding up 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 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 us the materials we're gonna get them The Facebook free section or are we gonna do a fundraiser or hey, is the school 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 doesn't have to take over the whole curriculum But hey to to visualize a park Let's all think about that or like if we're gonna 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 and fuse more entrepreneurial concepts So like, you know, it just lights me up man. It sticks for 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 ones? That tend to cause issues. Mmm. I'm sure mold is at the top. I would say VOC's 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 have got You know as soon as you turn 60, they're like you need a CPAP machine What a CPAP machine just shoves air down your throat the filters like the size of a quarter It's just for like same like your furnace filter to keep 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 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 because 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. What are some of the like cleanest airs 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 so Good air is typically when you're surrounded by trees, you know, that seems obvious to go outside in nature You could we could tell we breathe that you could tell you filter. Yeah, the Lake Tahoe's. Oh, yeah It's 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 Yeah, like or the Northwest has great air generally Where is the worst air, you know, LA doesn't have great air. Yeah, Miami's very moldy 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 ozone And then they have no Like immunity to moisture So you get one little leak and mold kills you some of the functional medicine doctors in Arizona are the biggest mold clinics in the country Yeah, a lot of people move there when they're sensitive to mold because they're like it's dry here. Yeah, like Michaela Peterson That's why she moved there. Yeah was because of that. So wow, it's not Fix a little off-subject We have a mutual friend Ben Greenfield. You just got back from his place I haven't been to his new place super curious 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 no study on that makes sense because a lot of those places those manufacturing places Choose those places because land is cheap And so that that says you guys there was a study on Parkinson's where like it was like I don't know how many times more Common Parkinson's was when people lived near Like agricultural areas. It was like it was considerable. Was it, Iowa, Iowa Iowa some of the highest cancer rates in the country. Yeah, 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 And then you know before winter forget the name of it such as 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 So, yeah Ben's doing everything though. Yeah, it was very intentional He was already doing it 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 Jaspers. 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 mold or rural equals good air. Yeah No necessarily case Wow. What about big cities? What are some of the worst cities you've been to actually bet on one more thing on Ben, you know, it's you know, he Recommends those no strips. Yeah, and it's funny how many people are putting no strips on to increase their air take? Yeah, they're air. That's the air intake on your car And it works. Yeah, no taping and it made a big difference mouth taping no strips, you know, that's that's intake stuff Yeah But with your if you want to get your car to really perform you want to increase the air 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's 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 a lot of areas where they're burning crops every year or is or is like ocean always people I love the smell of the ocean. Is that clean air because in the ocean you just don't have a lot of agriculture You don't have a it's pretty amazing. Okay, that would probably be some of the best Having gone to the Amazon yet, but I really want to yeah, just being around those like ancient forests and those massive trees Yeah, I would think I would think Pacific Northwest near the coast. It has to be some of the best air I lived on a boat actually in March for nine days James Nestor swimming with whales Okay, that was cool Oh, 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 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 forms. So 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 when things get hot, and they get polluted, you get storms. So the ocean has an incredible way of filtering things. Does rain clean the air, like it takes pollen out of the air? I've heard people say that. Yeah, it does. It washes everything down. It can also kick up mold spores temporarily, but not to be afraid. You shouldn't be afraid of mold, by the way. It's not like mold equals bad. It's like if we test ourselves, mold is like fungi. It's everywhere. It's everywhere, like the heavy metals and other stuff. But pollen is not bad. The problem is when you live indoors, it's a problem. Mold, you don't go outside, 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. 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 that there's, basically there's like an EV battery kind of dump off place that like went up in fire. This is 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 like how long do you think that all takes to clear out? I don't know. Yeah. I would say that. We've also noticed he's gotten increasingly dumber over the last like four years too. Yeah, he's gotten, he's started pretty low. I'm slowly transforming into something. I don't know what it is yet, so. Well, I think, I think, you know, not dumber. But. We're joking about it. No, but I actually think some of the most, like so when I, it's actually pretty funny. I did a test when I was, I don't know, 11 or 12. I did the ADHD test, and they said I don't have ADHD. I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure? I don't trust your test. Yeah, you do. We all do. And they told me that my memory was in the first percentile. Like, no memory. And 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, a lady told me a story, and then she's like. It's probably a boring story. That's probably why. She's like, recount every fact about the story as much as you can. I'm like, there was a girl and a store. She's like, come on, can we do a retest? I wasn't paying attention. She's like, no. But I say this because 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 names, faces, how people made me feel, I'm like dialed in. But like what we talked about last week, no idea. So I thought this was like a weakness. And then I'm like, it actually just means I'm incredibly present. So hopefully you're like that too. You seem like a relaxed, present vibe. Yeah, I would say that. He's somewhere else right now. Is it the battery? No, somewhere better. Yeah, what you just explained was neurodivergence on the same way. If I'm into something, I will remember it to the T. But if I'm not engaged, it's like. Because if the default state is like, 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. This is what makes 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. I'll focus on schools, air, water, sunlight, friends, and trees. Kids and trees. That's kind of my main two things. Good stuff. So how long have you been in business now and how many customers are you guys now serving? Because you started by serving these dentists. So that was back in 2020. Our first thousand were dentists. And 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, ugh, I could feel twitches in my shoulders just thinking about it. I'm like, am I accidentally building a dental air filter company? 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 money thing ever. But then what they would do though is they would brag to mom that they have the cleanest air in town. And 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, 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 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 and I would call you. No way. Yeah, that's it. I would call people and it was just in Toronto. I would deliver the units. I would speak to them for 40 minutes and it was running it like my mold business. Like, hey, tell me what's up, what are your 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 of 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'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 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 in Toronto. 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. And then in January, we went to, I moved to Austin in 2022. January, 2023, we turned, I'm like, no one's going to 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. I thought I was irreplaceable. 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 gyms and wellness places. If you have healthy food, like if a business has our values, 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. 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. Yo, you got to try it first. You don't believe in it. We did and that's how we got sold. Awesome. You know, if it didn't work, you'd be like, we would never talk to you. So now about 60,000 Jaspers are in the wild. Wow. We call them Jaspers in the wild. 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 Jasper, if it's, so we've been in business six years. It took me three years to get it started. Six years since we've been in business. Located, by the way, in Austin, people don't know this unless they're in Austin. 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 10 times cleaner. And I'm like, that's just what we do. 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, no remote employees. Everybody works together. We just hosted a jujitsu event two weeks ago. The Jasper jujitsu invitational. 32 competitors all over the country, cash prizes. We love to do community events. We're like a very brick and mortar IRL type of business. We're not an e-commerce DTC brand. We happen to use the internet to reach people. We happen to use UPS and Shopify, but we're very much like an in-person type of business. So yeah, there's about 60,000 in the wild. And thank God we did this. This was the luck part. So we tied, as long as you're changing your filters twice a year, you get a lifetime warranty. I was just going to ask you about that. Explain the filter, because I mean, I only have one right now and I want them in every room. So that's like- And 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 us. There's certain things that like just make sense and like changing your air filter happened 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 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 works great, 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 shipping to take it back from their home because sometimes you have warranties, but you gotta get the box and $100 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, $1,000 air filter, if it doesn't work, $1 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 Jasper's. 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. 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 of times it looks different. 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, 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 as 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 always have three or four months of filters on hand. Cause, 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 are running ourselves like an investment firm and you're investing, 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 a 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, you guys have two years ago at black Friday, we were sold out for four months. Yeah. You want to do 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. Last year we sold out by about a month and this year it's going to happen again. So what we're doing, this podcast comes out a few weeks before black Friday. So what's the standard code? Yeah. Mind pump. So it's code mind pump. It's jasper.com forward slash mind pump. Dot CO. Sorry. Dot CO. Yeah. So JASPR.CO, JASPR.CO. Starting today, November 7th or 8th. Yep. Code mind pump will be $350 off. 350. 350. Yeah. 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 life, 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 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, 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 $352 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 And I want to give you know, thank you And if not make a DIY one those are good too 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 mind pump media 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 mind pump media Calm 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