View the Show Notes For This Episode
Mike Feldstein discusses Air Quality with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
Improving Indoor Air Quality for Better Health with Mike Feldstein In this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast, Dr. Ben Weitz discusses indoor air quality with Mike Feldstein, founder of Jaspr. Mike shares his journey from wildfire and mold restoration to developing a high-quality, quiet air scrubber designed for home use. They explore the impact of poor indoor air quality on health, the limitations of standard air purifiers, and practical tips for improving air quality at home. Mike highlights the importance of clean air, particularly in bedrooms, and offers insights into air filtration, mold detection, and the prevalence of microplastics. The episode emphasizes the need for greater air awareness in the wellness space and introduces Jaspr’s advanced air scrubber as a comprehensive solution. 00:00 Introduction to the Rational Wellness Podcast 00:26 Meet Mike Feldstein: Air Quality Expert 01:37 The Importance of Air Quality 06:09 Challenges in Indoor Air Quality 08:17 Wildfire Impact on Air Quality 14:17 Mold and Indoor Air Quality 24:02 Healthy Homes and Air Filtration 26:46 Cooking and Air Quality 27:30 Wildfire Smoke and Indoor Air Quality 28:11 Range Hood Efficiency Test 29:07 HVAC Systems and Air Circulation 31:33 Microplastics in Indoor Air 34:17 Sources of Microplastics 37:49 Impact of Pets on Indoor Air Quality 39:48 Optimizing Bedroom Air Quality 43:06 Jaspr Air Purifier Features 48:32 Special Offer and Conclusion __________________________________________________________________
Mike Feldstein is the founder of Jaspr, a high quality air scrubber, and an air quality expert. With a background in wildfire restoration, air quality consulting, and home remediation during some of the biggest natural disasters, Mike started Jaspr to innovate in air science and technology. His goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air quality science. You can learn more by going to Jaspr.co. The cost of Jaspr is normally $1199, but if you use the discount code WEITZ for the next 2 weeks it will only be $799.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure. Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.
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Podcast Transcript
Air Quality with Mike Felstein: Rational Wellness Podcast 422
Dr. Weitz: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, dr whites.com.
Thanks for joining me, and let's jump into the podcast. Hello, rational Wellness podcasters. Today I am excited to be having a discussion about indoor air quality with Mike Feldstein. I believe this is the first detailed discussion we've had on this podcast about indoor air quality. Mike Feldstein is the founder of Jasper.
Which is a high quality air scrubber, and Mike is an air quality expert. He has a background in wildfire restoration, which is especially significant to those of us living in Los Angeles in [00:01:00] 2025. And he was also involved with air quality consult consulting, home remediation during some of the world's biggest natural disasters.
Mike started Jasper. To innovate in air science and technology. And his goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air quality science. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to talk all things air with you. So I guess you're an airhead.
Air snob, a snob. There you go. Perhaps you can tell us what you were doing for a living and how you became interested in air
Mike: quality. Yeah, so it's kind of twofold. The big one was, my background was in wildfire flood and mold restoration. So we weren't doing it locally, we were traveling. So anywhere where the biggest disaster was in North America, that's where we were going.
So California wildfires, [00:02:00] hurricane Harvey Canadian wildfires, floods, hailstorms, all that kind of stuff. So it was like really disaster response restoration. And the main thing that you do when you're remediating anything is you have to clean the surfaces and the air. People think about mold removal, but visually you only think mold remediation has like removing the mold.
But that's not the case when you remove mold. You're isolating the environment, you're removing the physical materials and you're scrubbing the air inside and outside. So a lot of restoration and environmental cleanup, it's equal parts air as it is surface cleaning. And we would use these big machines called air scrubbers.
They were huge, loud, they kind it like, like this, like big subwoofer looking things. Very loud, very industrial, but they clean the air incredibly well and. When I started comparing that to air purifiers that you would find out like a big what Walmart Best Buy, home Depot. What people [00:03:00] imagine when they think about an air purifier are the scrubber specs versus the purifier specs was almost like 20 to one, and I'm like.
This doesn't really make much sense because people are buying air purifiers for wildfire smoke all the time, and it's way too small to get the job done. An analogy I like to use for people is it's like trying to heat your bathtub with a kettle, using a little air purifier to try to clean your air. It's tea.
A kettle is fantastic if you're trying to make a pot of tea, but you cannot heat your bathtub with a kettle because it's gonna be cooling down faster than you can possibly heat it up. So the. I, and it was frustrating because we would remediate a home after wildfire or smoke, detox it, clean it three weeks later, it would be contaminated again, because often the ambient outdoor environments after a disaster would stay bad for months.
So I'm like, okay, where can I find a. Beautiful air scrubber, a quiet air scrubber that people could leave in their homes [00:04:00] regularly, that wouldn't sound like a truck, and they didn't exist. So that's when I realized that, okay, there's lots of remediation and restoration companies, but how can there possibly be no product that works like a scrubber, but that is also quiet and beautiful?
So that kind of changed my path from all things restoration to just completely focusing on air. And then the other side of that was when we would, in between disasters, we would do air consulting. So if somebody was sick at home and they didn't know why, we would come to their home and test everything to figure out if something might be lingering in their environment that's keeping them sick.
And people generally, water and air and EMF and everything, it's the normal is not good. So I kind of just. I realized that a lot of people are quite water aware, they're diet aware, they're movement aware, but air awareness relative to all these other big health inputs was completely un. You know, it wasn't getting the time and attention that it needs.
And I started [00:05:00] seeing people have a huge be health benefits by improving their air. So I went all in.
Dr. Weitz: It's definitely the case that those of us in the wellness community are really focused on the food we eat, the what we drink, the water, the pure purity of that. And we focus much less on the air, but yet we breathe a lot more air than we eat food or drink water.
Mike: Yeah. So, to put it into perspective for people. The average person, let's say, eats two pounds of food a day, two or three pounds of food, drinks a gallon or so of water. But you can, you breathe up to 17,000 liters of air. You can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and only three minutes without air. Air is the first thing breathing. It's funny with food, we talk more about the food that than we eat than how we eat it. We talk about the water, not how we drink it, but breath work and breathing gets a lot more conversation. This breath and breathing [00:06:00] gets a lot of attention while we're ignoring the actual air that we're breathing. The air is the fuel that you're breathing and people are completely ignoring their fuel source.
Dr. Weitz: So what are some of the biggest issues with indoor air quality? And I say this here in Santa Monica, California, right next to Pacific Palisades where we had these horrific fires. And I imagine the stuff being spewed into the air is probably not over.
'cause first you got the fires, then you got, they're quite, in a way, they're digging out the soil. And then we're gonna have all this massive construction happening soon here.
Mike: So the big picture, the issue is. Roughly since the seventies, homes have been optimized to be airtight boxes, so they're incredibly tight.
They're built to be energy efficient, keep the cool in, in the summer, keep the warm air, and in the winter. Now, if you think about a pond, if you think about a moving [00:07:00] stream or a current or a river, generally moving water. Clean water. Right? But when a stagnant pond, that's where you get algae, bacteria, mosquitoes.
If you can imagine all the things that you see growing when water is stagnant. So outdoor air is free flowing. It's like the lakes, it's like the oceans. But we've built our homes. Basically our homes are little stagnant ponds. So because there's no air movement in our homes, this is where everything starts to grow and starts to fester.
Plus, we spend like 95% of our times indoors on average. So there's a reason why you don't walk down the street and have mold problems, or have dust problems, or have VOC problems. These are indoor problems. Our homes are incredibly tight, and the greatest air purifier of all time is nature. The UV light from the sun, wind, rain trees, but we've trapped all that outside.
We've trapped ourselves inside, and then we have thousands of chemicals in our homes from the paints to the flooring, the adhesives, the fire retardants, cooking [00:08:00] pets, and it just can't breathe. It has no airflow. So generally speaking, the problem is with how we build homes and how we live in a modern society.
That is causing all of these problems, especially like, and then in a wildfire setting, you are absolutely right. So you ha like people ha, when you test the air quality and water quality and soil quality, it can stay bad for a very long time after a fire. And the recent LA fires in January are unique, like one I've never seen before because I've never seen that many homes burnt in that concentration.
But also. That many electric cars. So I'm very curious like what happens when you burn four, 5,000 lithium batteries? We know, and everyone's been at a campfire where someone throws the bag of marshmallows in and they're like, that even looks and feels very toxic. So now imagine scaling that up to like a billion x when you have everything in every home that burnt every can of paint.
The [00:09:00] walls, the floors, the furniture, the chemicals, the cleaning products, the cars, their batteries. So it's a very toxic soup. And then, yeah, so you have all that, of course, that gets in the soil and it gets in the water, and then every time that the wind blows, the ash kicks up more and more.
And then, yeah, then you'll have your rebuild phase. It's a pretty big deal.
Dr. Weitz: I know every day I would go out to my car after the fires and it would just be covered in soot and then you just think, oh my God, how much of that is getting into my lungs?
Mike: A lot. And it's a tough situation because, and like a lot of people in LA, because the city is so vast, a lot of homes, it was unclear the amount of damage because.
A lot of you go into your home, and if you don't. See piles of ash everywhere. You just figure, my home's fine. Its smelled smoky a couple weeks ago. It's all good now, but it doesn't really work that [00:10:00] way. Be if you test anybody who didn't detox their home in la now if you test their carpets, their couches, their bedding for hexavalent chromium, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or heavy metals.
If you don't detox it and pull it out, just think about our bodies, how many years we can hold heavy metals and things if we don't detox it out. So every porous material in your home is the exact same, and a lot of people don't remediate and detox their homes because they don't realize that they need to.
Dr. Weitz: Can you even detox that stuff out? Do you have to just throw out everything that's porous? The poor stuff is pretty hard to deal with. You're talking about mattresses and carpets and furniture and stuff, so it depends like
Mike: which way the wind was blowing your proximity to the fire. So that's why TE testing can be a decent idea for people.
Also, depends if people had good air filtration in their homes beforehand. So. If somebody had significant air filtration in their home, [00:11:00] then likely most of those particulates were being captured before they had a chance to settle on surfaces. But typically, all of the hard surfaces can be cleaned up, but the soft surfaces would be replaced.
But it's not black and white at all. Actually created on YouTube. Oh, yeah we put it on YouTube recently. If people look on our YouTube and type in like Jasper Smoke course it used to be. Like an email thing, but now it's just totally free and it's on YouTube. So after the fire is up, I was chatting with everybody like an hour, several hours a night about their unique situation and 99% of those conversations was, were the exact same.
So I just created a bunch of videos on how to assess your own home, do you, should you go with insurance, how to vet your contractors, how to detox your own home. All that kind of stuff. So people want, if anyone wants to dive deeper into smoke detox, it's all available on YouTube.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting. And then and then I guess after all that, then detox your body as well [00:12:00] that I don't
Mike: have experience in, but that's absolutely a good idea.
You, you'd be the guy for that. Yeah. And if you think about it, like when a lot of people are sick at home, the their aha air moment. Often occurs when they go on a trip or they go camping and then they feel great and then they come home and they're sick again. And they have this moment, is my home making me sick?
So if you're not optimizing for the, like your home, that's your fish tank. And if you think about how would you clean a swimming pool, you use a water filter. You don't jump in the pool and use a sponge and scrub the sides. You need to filter the water constantly, right? And. In a home, people are spending a lot of time and energy and money on mopping and vacuuming and wiping counters, and that's all great.
But if you don't, if you don't also have a strategy in place to filter your air, you're just that. You're just in the swimming pool, scrubbing the sides and not filtering the water. And [00:13:00] guess what happens if you don't filter that pool of water? It turns green real fast, so people's indoor air, you cannot see it.
Most of the time, but wow. When we test air, it's usually off the charts. Typically, we see indoor air that's five to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air.
Dr. Weitz: So how do you find somebody, what's the best way to test the inside of your house? You have to have an expert come in and test it. Do they? How do you know?
Mike: You know, so I used to be, that's what I used to do. Okay. And I can't tell you a time when I'd ever go into a home where if I tested someone's air or water, that it was good. Like it just isn't. Okay. Indoor air is pretty much always bad, so the practical way to test, there's a few things to look for, but a pr a practical thing, like you could go and pay $1,500 or more for an expert to come into your home, but, and I was that guy, but I did not feel good because the 80 20 like.
They would've been better [00:14:00] off just getting the solutions.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Mike: Because, you know, just assume your home is toxic. If you want to verify it. And depending on people's budgets and everything, like if you test your home for mold, indoor and outdoor, there's always mold. I always tell people, if you ever wanna break a lease, call me.
I'll come over and I'll find the mold. Well,
Dr. Weitz: you need to talk about that a little more because mold's a big topic in the functional medicine world and we talk a lot about testing. You're home for mold testing, the body for mold, and there's a lot of controversy. Oh no, this test is not accurate. It's showing mold and maybe you don't really have mold, but I've heard you say before, and you just said here, that pretty much everybody has some degree of mold in their home.
Mike: And in their body, like when have you ever done a test and seen zeros? That's not how it works. It's,
Dr. Weitz: well, you know, it's interesting. I think that makes sense because mold is an important constituent of the environment. In fact, it's in the soil, you know, just like bacteria are. And the goal is not to [00:15:00] rid ourselves of all bacteria and all fungi.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People know what happens if you take too much antibiotics, like you kill your immune system, right? So yeah, it's, people got this idea that like mold is the big enemy. The problem is you're, if you think about that piece, that sandwich. Out on the counter, not so bad. You put it in the Tupperware, it starts growing mold, and your home is essentially a big Tupperware box.
So you have mold issues because if you live in a airtight home with no ventilation and no filtration, that's the real problem here. So typically when you do test for mold indoors, you always want to test outside and you want to test inside. And if you don't test outside, the test is completely useless.
Because that's your control sample. So if it rained there, could the spore count is gonna be incredibly high inside and outside. Your indoor air comes from outside. So [00:16:00] if people have a noticeable odor in their home, it smells musty. Or if they've had water damage, if they've had leaks. Like if you have visible mold in your home, that is a time when you want to get restoration and remediation done.
If it smells really strong of must and mold, that's when you may want to go and look for it. But I've seen a lot of people who, I call it whacka mold because they're just looking all over, you know, they're dealing with a little leak here and a little thing there, and they're cutting open this wall.
Next thing you know, it's like investigative surgery of your home. And then, you know, next thing you know, you're living in another home for six months or 12 months and you're displaced and it costs a fortune. And a lot of people like it's not a black and white situation. And when I hear people talking about it, it's like, I've got the mold like.
If you take a thousand people and you test everybody's home and bodies for mold, everybody has some amount of mold. It's more about like what concentration, what species, and technically you're not even supposed to [00:17:00] test for mold if it's rained within two or three days. I can't remember if it's 48 or 72 hours.
Nobody, no mold testing company in the world that I've ever encountered upholds that standard. How could you imagine on a it, it drizzles that morning you canceled the job. You still have to pay your employees. The customer's not gonna want to pay you to not come, right? So nobody does that. You just take your control sample inside and outside, but it can dramatically skew results.
But more or less, if you're living in a really tight home, the VOCs from your furnitures and the paints and the off gassing and the cooking and the mold is a big problem. So it's not that mo mold does make a lot of people sick, but you could have five people living in a home. Two are sick. One is moderately sick and two are completely fine because people you know, they detox differently and they ha have different severities of allergies to things.
I honestly treat mold not so differently than pollen. Like someone could have their life. [00:18:00] Wrecked havoc from excessive pollen and someone else won't notice a thing. And I find mold to be very much like that, where for some people it's a big problem. For others it's not. But to me, like I preferred filtered water.
My water budget is huge. We get glass bottles of water delivered every couple weeks, like. For me, air and water were like my first two. 'cause those are the two things that I need to survive the most. Right? If I can only live three minutes without air, clearly it's quite important to me. If I can only live a few days without water, also important.
So where a lot of people are starting from supplements and then food, and then water, and then air. I've kind of flipped it a little bit where I'm dealing with the thing that I consume the most of and then branching up from that place.
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Mike: It's tough too. So there's multiple different tests and some skew positive and some skew negative. I mean, there's the Petri dishes.
Dr. Weitz: We have the IMI test. Is there? Is there? You got the
Mike: aerosols? Yeah. IMI basically is restoration. Companies love IMI because it's designed to be generally quite alarmist. So with an imi, it's testing your dust, right?
There was obviously mold at some point in your air, so even if there's not mold. Today, a lot of it, there was some mold that passed through. So [00:21:00] you test take a dust sample and it's generally like a, it's designed to be a fairly alarming test, even the way that the report is kind of designed. It's a perfect thing for restoration companies.
I'm just looking at financial incentives for restoration. Companies love it because it's always gonna get the insurance company to approve a reclean. So if Derby's not the best test, what is the best test? Well, it's not that. It's, the thing is it's a good tool also. Okay. Okay. So if, so, and like, it's not that it's a ba and aerosols can also skew negative 'cause they're just looking at the exact moment of time.
Right. So,
Dr. Weitz: you know, the, so use the army test, but don't exaggerate the results. The best test
Mike: of all is like the best. If we're going from best to worst, it's the, it's like a mold dog. A mold sniffing dog, you'll find exactly where the mold is. You can't beat that. But like once I had tested hundreds of homes for mold, for example.
I, I didn't really need to do testing anymore [00:22:00] because you can feel it, you can feel it in your lungs immediately. You could between smell, difficulty of breathing in my lungs, I could go into a home. Most people who do indoor environmental testing, they know in the first two or three minutes just 'cause their body tells them what's going on.
And then the data is just to quantify that for the homeowner or for the patient, like. Your body really knows if, but I mean, mine is more calibrated because I've tested a lot before, but I still I like the aerosol test. I also like the imi. It's a tough one. It's really, it really depends also if someone has cancer and money.
Just saying like they, they have a severe health issue and a large budget. I would definitely bring in a company to do testing, but that's not the, so you kind of need to find the balance. Like anything with health, like health isn't free, so it's a little bit nuanced to, to give blanket advice is a little bit difficult.
Is
Dr. Weitz: there any benefit to the Petri dishes? [00:23:00]
Mike: If so, when I used to do the Petri dishes, we were supposed to. Get the p like we would do the Petri dish and then instantly give it to the lab and they would culture it in the lab environment. If you kind of let it sit in your home environment pretty much always grows mold mo unless you're filtering your air.
So like that, like, and that's really like, or really good ventilation, so that's why older homes often. Can be good because they're leaky or new homes are incredibly tight. So people, when I was doing air testing, almost half of the testing work that we were doing was people who just moved into a brand new home because the, it was so tight that it would have humidity issues and off gassing and VOC issues basically right away.
And the problem is. Like the architect and the builder aren't typically sitting around saying, how do we make the healthiest home for people? Like, [00:24:00] you know, you buy a home. Why?
Dr. Weitz: Why isn't somebody doing that? Why isn't somebody saying, we, here's a design that allows a home to breathe and this is gonna be healthier for you.
So
Mike: on the custom home level, they exist. So if you Google Healthy Home Builder, there's a handful per city and it's a growing trend that I believe strongly in using better materials, using better hvac, you know, mold resistant, no off-gassing low VOC, a good ERV system, which basically is a fresh air intake so your home can actually breathe better.
While maintaining its energy efficiency, but if you think about it, when someone typically buys a home, they'll go get a home inspection and all that home inspection is looking for is there anything in the home that is gonna cost me money? How's the roof age? How old's the water heater? Is there cracks in the foundation?
Typically, there's no prior to that process that says, is this a healthy home for my family to live in? And that's why, that's [00:25:00] where the air awareness is more important than any product anybody can create. Because once you start asking the questions, you're able to kind of navigate and advocate for yourself.
But I'm really. Expecting to see a trend here where we see healthy homes and going beyond custom homes to the developer level. Unfortunately now, the, it used to be clean living and now the term wellness has really got hijacked. Wellness now means like often very edge case biohacking tools, whereas it used to mean like.
Go clean water, clean air, clean diet, go for a walk after your meals, get some sunshine. Go for like, it used to be about healthy living. And then on top of that, how do we layer in our exer, our exercise, our strength training, our supplement, it's literally called supplements. It's supposed to be the extra thing to balance you out, but it's become the.
Pill like people have started to lean on pills, has the primary thing [00:26:00] as opposed to a supplementary thing, and unfortunately until the homeowner and the consumer is made aware, there is no value actually put on. A healthy home, right? The consumer's not valuing it yet, so therefore neither is the builder, neither is the architect.
It's, they just wanna say, how fast can we build a home? How many square feet? How cheap do we have? A two garages, you know, if people are looking for a whirlpool and things like that, they're looking for features, right? Instead of just a home that has great air, great water, really good lighting, right? I feel the movement coming in this direction it just, it takes one breath and one conversation at a time.
Right. And that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do here.
Dr. Weitz: So how does cooking affect air quality? And I heard you speak about some of the issues even with the range hoods.
Mike: That's perfect. So we'll talk cooking and I'll talk just like I like giving people a bag of tricks, [00:27:00] free tips that they can implement immediately that doesn't require buying anything at all.
So, but to cooking is a big problem because the way your home is. Built so tight. When you cook, a few things happen. And it doesn't matter if you're just, if you're cooking bacon, you could be making grass fed steak with organic oil and no seed oils and still be heavily polluting your air. So when you take high heat and protein, that creates something called polycyclic air magic aromatic hydrocarbons.
And that's a cancer causing. Compound that we would test for after wildfire smoke. That was one of the most common things that we would test for. So high heat and protein gonna be a big problem. The particulate themselves, the actual PM 2.5 that gets off gassed is another issue. Then obviously a lot of people also have, gas ranges and most range hoods don't work. So if the ventilation is working good, we have no problem. Commercial kitchens [00:28:00] tend to have really good range hoods in a in a home environment. There's a few problems. Number one, they're typically too high, they're not powerful enough, and they're not vented properly.
So, this is the one thing that everybody should do. Take your take a tissue. Hold it up to your range hood and put it on fan speed, one or two and make sure it's actually sucking it up and pulling it up. 50 50. It doesn't, so if it's not even pulling up a tissue, it's not even bring, it's not intaking any air.
So that's the first thing. Then two, check where it's venting. So a lot of the time it's venting up into the cabinet. Just above, it's not going outside. And the whole point of ventilation is to vent outside. So you want to, you want a range hood that can hold up a tissue. You want a range hood that vents outside.
And then ideally, if you can, if you're like boiling or simmering use the back burners [00:29:00] instead of the front burner, because the back burner captures a lot more particulate than the front burner. And what happens when you cook. It's not just a localized issue. For example, if you take a 3000 square foot home and you know, Jasper can detect the air in real time.
So if I have a Jasper in my baby's bedroom and I'm
Dr. Weitz: so, so just for everybody, Jasper is the air purifier that you developed and it also gives you some reading as to the quality of the air, correct?
Mike: Yeah, so it's reading the particulates in real time. And adjusting its fan speed accordingly. So even if Jasper is in your baby's bedroom and you're cooking in the kitchen on the opposite side of the house, within a minute or two, Jasper's gonna be detecting the poor air quality in the bedroom in every room because you have an HVAC system that's designed to circulate and mix the air.
So you think of the, like when you walk into someone's home who's cooking, you [00:30:00] smell it right away and you smell it because it's everywhere. And then just like the wildfire smoke we were talking about before, it gets absorbed into the couches, into the chairs, into the clothing, into the all the poorest materials.
So if people have a rangehood that's not working and the weather permits regardless, like I open my windows big time when I'm cooking. Because you really just don't want to be offgassing heavily in your home. And then on top of that, I would do the same tissue test in your bathroom. So make sure your bathroom fans can also hold up a Kleenex or a paper towel or something like that.
And then you should check to make sure your bathroom fans are venting outside. A lot of people's bathroom fans vent directly in the attic. And then of course they have moldy attics because they, if you have a family of four, taking four showers a day, you're dumping gallons of water into your attic. And of course you're gonna have mold for sure.
And then, yeah, filtration really helps too. So the way Jasper works is it's gonna automatically [00:31:00] respond to any cooking in any particulates, so that way it's silent. You'll have your green light on, you'll see a low number, like a four or five. Which is, and we're looking at PM 2.5, and those are the particles that are small enough to enter your lungs and your bloodstream.
So if we measure the air in a home with no filtration and we cook, the air quality can stay elevated for three or four days, and by that point it's been absorbed in all your materials. If you have a jas, a couple Jaspers in the home, within 20 minutes, we're back down to baseline. So it's a huge difference between filtering your air and not filtering your air.
Right.
Dr. Weitz: What about microplastics? Because there's been a lot of talk about microplastics and we know that they end up in our brains, but they're also in our lungs.
Mike: Yeah. So there was a study done in London where they tested a hundred homes and 98% of all samples contained microplastics in them and indoor environments had up to 40 times more microplastics than [00:32:00] outside.
Wow. So. And then they started to work with a lab that was doing biopsies on people's lung tissue, and almost a hundred, I think a hundred percent of all the lungs that were tested had microplastics in them. Wow. So they say that the humans that live in cities on average are breathing one credit card worth of microplastics per week.
That's insane. And how does this happen? So you have things like plastic manufacturing, just general plastic breakdown when things decompose over time. They decompose often into the air. If you think about a car, you have to change your tires every few years. The rubber wears thin, like where do you think the rubber goes?
All this stuff goes airborne. And then inhalation is the primary exposure route for microplastics. So it's kind of interesting that people are thinking about the microplastics in their water. But there's a very good argument to be made that you could be breathing way more plastics microplastics than you are drinking them.
[00:33:00] So we did a study about two months ago. We contacted the lab and we said, Hey, can we do a microplastic study to show how Jasper, is Jasper effective for microplastics? If so, how effective? And they said, there's not an exactly a microplastics test because, they're all different sizes. So they said we can do a latex bead test where they have these microscopic latex beads that they aerosolize that are the size of some of the most common microplastics, and we removed 98% of all of them in one hour.
So the good news here is your indoor, it's like a good news, bad news. Your indoor air is way worse. Then your outdoor air across the board when it comes to microplastics, mold, dust, even pollen, we get way more pollen inside our homes than outside because it gets trapped in there and it can't get out. The good news is if you filter your air, it's not a problem anymore.
So you can turn like, you know, you can't heal in the place that made you sick, and you can turn this negative that's making [00:34:00] you sick into a clean air sanctuary. So instead of saying, let me go outside and get a breath of fresh air, how about let me go inside and get a breath of clean air so you can really turn this around very cost
Dr. Weitz: effectively.
Where are all these microplastics in our home actually coming from?
Mike: So, like I said, it's the plastic manufacturer. It's out, it's mostly outdoor sources. Oh, okay. Because our indoor air comes from the outdoor air. So it's, right. It's like, it's the rubber from the tires, it's the factories. It's all that stuff.
It's the plastic products in your home are slowly decaying and decomposing over time. Also a reason why you don't wanna live near a freeway. It's a good idea. I actually, when I have tested air by highways, it's always been less bad than I expected it to be, huh? When it is bad is during Russia like bumper to bumper traffic.
Freeways are bad, like highly congested. Freeways are bad, but freeways that don't have a lot of traffic that are constantly flowing are much less bad. Okay, because you [00:35:00] don't have like thousands of cars in one small area constantly running their fumes. So. And there's also even debates now that plastic kettles could be released.
Like, like things that heat up water in your home could also be aerosolizing like, to me, that makes sense. I can't say I've seen a test on it, but if you think about a plastic kettle with boiling water against plastic, if you can get microplastic we know that we can get microplastics in our food and in our water.
In our water bottles and our Tupperware. So if you think about anything that, that has high heat and plastics and the sun is constantly breaking things down, and then when it breaks down, they go airborne. I
Dr. Weitz: was just reading an article about how a lot of black plastic utensils like you use you know, in the kitchen because they're made from recycled plastic, that plastic has toxic material from computers or whatever else that gets into it.
And so then that breaks [00:36:00] down.
Mike: Yeah, it makes sense. Like if that, and also if that plastic is touching the high heat, right? Like when you look at that spatula over time, it's like, it's smaller. It's that edge kind of comes down a little bit. It's like where did it go? So the interesting thing was in London, 100% of homes tested and they would test the dust sample and every single dust sample had microplastics in it.
'cause dust is a collection of things. It's not just one thing. And a good way to know if you have an indoor air problem. The best way is do you have dust? If you have, does everybody have dust? No.
Dr. Weitz: No. I have no dust that's just because you dust every day or you'd seen dust ever accumulate No where?
Mike: Well,
Dr. Weitz: think about this
Mike: if you have dust on a coffee table, okay? Did the dust come emerging from the coffee table or did it come from your air? Right? So you're saying
Dr. Weitz: if your air is clean, you won't have dust.
Mike: Yeah, of course not. If you filter the air, if you filter the dust from the air, then it [00:37:00] doesn't land on surfaces because you capture it before it actually lands.
I thought dust,
Dr. Weitz: it was coming off your skin and your pets and everything else, and it just lands there.
Mike: Well, think about it. It can even, it can be on the dustiest place could often be your, the door cells your doorframes and your window sills, places that are actually above your body. So it's not like it's just falling off of you on the floor.
I see. The stuff that falls off you is very light, so it gets mixed into your air system very quickly. I see. So it's all about the air. It dust is. Yeah, like it, it is, dust can be pollen. It's mold, it's allergens, it's the pollution, it's the VOCs. It's a combination of all of the things.
And then dust creates a really good vessel for mold spores to hit your ride around your home. Great.
Dr. Weitz: What about pets? I've heard you talk about pets not being great for indoor air.
Mike: Pets are also a problem. Yeah. Well, think about this, especially like everybody I know who has a dog [00:38:00] also sleeps with their dog.
So if you think about it, could you ever imagine taking a blanket, going outside with it, rubbing it along? Your neighbor's glyphosate filled lawn, maybe on some other dog butts, rubbing it on some trees across the road. Then bring it inside and shake it out in your bed. It seems like a crazy idea, but that's literally most people's experience every day when you have a dog.
Plus of course you have the pet dander. So yeah, you get all that stuff coming from outside. The pet dander itself. Dogs do contribute to humidity as well. And then cats have two, two issues. They also have allergens, but cat litter can also create a huge problem. If you look at what's in cat litter, it is not good at all.
And so it, it's all kind of cumulative, right? Like no. One of the things that we talked about here is gonna be a make or break, but it's when you have an airtight home with no [00:39:00] ventilation, no filtration, it has cooking, it has pets, it has the allergens. That is a perfect storm for poor health.
Most people nowadays, we're not ventilating our homes and we're not filtering our air. So it's just a constant accumulation over time. People and a lot of people wear their shoes inside, so that brings everything from outside as well. So the pets are definitely an issue, especially if people are allergic to pets.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I think I heard you say that there's like 99% likelihood you're gonna have fecal matter on your shoes.
Mike: 95% of all shoes tested at fecal matter on them. Wow, because like you go outside and dog shit outside, like it's not surprising. But the cool, the coolest thing is where to, you know, make it tangible and practical.
The number one place to optimize for by far is your bedroom. Like if you spend one third of your life where you sleep, one third of your life [00:40:00] where you work, and kind of one third miscellaneous out and about taking care of those two thirds. Is very practical and that doesn't require, you know, it's very easy with health stuff to get super overwhelmed and you feel like it's impossible and it's this big rabbit hole, but it doesn't have to be that way.
So like I, I just put sleep above everything else. And then what are the ingredients for a good night's sleep? You need a good bed. Cool clean air. So everybody, thermal comfort is like humans optimize for thermal comfort over everything else. So the cool air is really important, even if that's moldy, dusty, pollen filled air, a lot of people don't even notice that.
Fun fact, we did a sleep study last year where we gave 150 people, Jaspers, who were using Ora rings to track their sleep, and the average person slept 25 minutes more per night and 18% deeper sleep. Wow, that's amazing. So when I go into a bedroom and I use my par, my [00:41:00] particle, like my commercial grade particle counter, let's say there's typically a million particles floating around of all sizes.
When we put Jasper in someone's bedroom within 20, 30 minutes, it's 95% cleaner. Wow. And then it's great. So I live in Austin and Jasper's based in Austin. So whenever anyone buys a Jasper in Austin, we actually deliver it to their home and we test their air. So we go to their home, we go typically first.
Jasper's gotta be in your bedroom. We do our particle counter, we turn the Jasper on, we talk for five or six minutes. By the time we, we leave their bedroom and to go into their main home, their first breath outside of their bedroom they find that it feels very heavy. Harder to breathe because it's like if you were drinking tap water your whole life growing up it was just water.
You weren't paying attention to it. And then if you start drinking filtered water, all of a sudden tap water tastes very chlorinated. You can taste the tap water now. It's a big difference. That's why I said I'm more of an air snob because once you start [00:42:00] breathing clean air, it becomes very annoying and difficult.
You go to, all of a sudden the sense and the heaviness is everywhere, but like. In a bedroom, good bed, good sheets, cool air, and clean air. If you sleep in air like that is the thing that you live inside of. So naturally, by cleaning up the environment, it has a profound impact on your sleep. And then when your sleep is good, sleep to me is synonymous with recovery.
So. A lot of people who struggle from seasonal allergies, they go from a lot of allergy attacks to none. People who snore, we're doing a snore study in a couple months. A lot like my favorite, my, my sister here, literally like, we get this every week, but my sister, her husband's John, he's been snoring for five or six years.
Once they put Jasper in their bedroom, he stopped snoring. Now they're not sleep divorced anymore. You know, John's back in the bedroom. So it's [00:43:00] really profound, honestly, the impacts that cleaning up your air in your bedroom can have on one's life.
Dr. Weitz: How does Jasper work? What makes it better than other air purifiers?
Mike: So the big thing is the size, like. Most air purifiers that you see are made by billion dollar companies that make thousands of products. They make everything under the sun, so it was kind of just another box for them to check in the market, to throw it on Amazon and throw it at Walmart and call it good like.
Think, how crazy is it that the air people Google Air freshener more than air purifier? Everybody's got an air freshener and all an air freshener is shooting chemicals out to hijack your ability to smell so you don't smell the garbage anymore instead of just cleaning the air in Allers are toxic. Yeah, so like PE ins, it's, instead of dealing with the problem, which is dirty air, they're like, let's just throw some more chemicals in there.
And that'd be a great way to solve the problem. Last week actually we just got back from our [00:44:00] first hotel trip in Miami. There's a hotel there called the Caron Hotel, and they're the first clean air hotel in the country. So they have a Jasper in every single guest suite and Oh wow. All 30 massage therapy rooms as well.
Huh. So if anyone's in Miami and wants a good night's sleep, I highly recommend that place. Back to your question though, about what makes it different, so. It's really designed to be industrial, so it's like what makes a pickup truck different from a sedan? You know, they both have four wheels, doors, a roof, an engine, but one can like pull a lot of stuff.
It can haul your boat, it can haul your trailer, and one's just designed to. Haul, take a few people around town. So in, in its nature, Jasper is a lot larger. So it's moving about five times the air of a traditional air purifier. Our filter is four and a half pounds. Most filters are about half a pound.
So our filter's about nine to 10 times heavier 'cause we just have more filter media in there a lot. There's the hepa, there's the carbon. [00:45:00] So the filter's just much, much bigger. When you look at most air purifiers, their filter looks like a tissue. It's not much more than a piece of paper. Ours is like super heavy duty.
We make it outta steel instead of plastic. Going back to microplastics, PLAs polluting plastic. Is horrible for the environment. So to buy a machine that's supposed to clean your air, that pollutes the environment, seems counterproductive to me. And then also, like the lifespan. So Jasper's designed to last about 25 years.
Every component in there was designed by my restoration brain saying, how do we make like a restoration grade machine that I would use for mold removal, floods and hurricanes, but with the aesthetic and the design that people would want in their home. So when it's more powerful. That means it's more because it's bigger, it's very on, its lowest fan speed.
It's virtually silent in a bedroom setting. You can turn it onto dark mode. It has no wifi, no Bluetooth, no EMF. So if you, the simplest way to think about Jasper is for [00:46:00] every one Jasper, you would need four or five small little machines, and it'd be very unpractical to put four or five little machines in each bedroom of your home.
So we just consolidated it and made, it's like if there was. Big trucks and sedans, but no SUVs. We kind of have like the only SUV, and that's why we call it an air scrubber because it's really designed to be heavy duty, but also designed to be beautiful.
Dr. Weitz: It's really amazing that it's designed to last 25 years.
There's not too many products that are designed to last 25 years. Your car is not designed to last 25 years.
Mike: Dude, I hate planned obsolescence, and I hate, and I hate planned obsolescence and I hate inflation. You'd think as we get more efficient and more productive and more technology, that prices would go down and we would build things to last longer.
But I think a lot of companies, you know, big public companies like. Quarterly revenue. They wanna sell more stuff every three months. Whereas I believe that if you just make a really great product that people can basically keep for a lifetime, [00:47:00] they'll buy more of them. They'll tell their friends. So the way our lifetime warranty works is if Jasper breaks.
We ship you a brand new one. You take the new one outta the box, you put the old one back in the box. We give you a prepaid shipping label that we email to you, and then we pay to send UPS to your front porch to pick it up off your doorstep because I can't tell you how many times I had like a warranty on a product.
They wanted me to send photos, videos, original receipt, get an obscure shape box, go to FedEx and pay a hundred dollars to ship it back. And I just think that's bullshit. I think if Jasper breaks, that's Jasper's problem. That's Jasper's fault, and I think it. It. I think companies should really put their money where their mouth is.
Like we don't even have a sales department here. Everyone here who engages with customers was a former air quality expert, you know, been in thousands of homes. It's the same people that are going to people's homes every day. So we just view, we truly view Jasper as an air education company that happened to also make the world's only air scrubber.[00:48:00]
Designed for your home. But that's why 90% of what we're doing is going to functional. Like right after this, in an hour from now, I'm going to a functional medicine clinic to teach them all about air and set them up with Jaspers because they're detoxing people that are living in moldy, pollen filled environments.
So they're doing great stuff, but they're completely missing the most foundational part. So 90% of our time as a company is in education. And then because we only make one. Product it, it allows us to just offer a really good quality of service.
Dr. Weitz: So in order to order Jasper, is it jasper.com? Is that the website?
Mike: I wish it's jasper.co.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Mike: Dot co. And Jasper's spelled JSPR.co. And ibel I'm seeing my,
Dr. Weitz: yeah I believe there's a discount code that if our listeners and viewers put in code WEITZ, my last name, W-E-I-T-Z, they'll get $400 off. [00:49:00]
Mike: Correct. So Jasper's normally 1199 with your, with Code WEITZ, it'll be $799.
And what we're gonna do is, so starting today, the day that the podcast came out. For two weeks, it'll be valid for $400 off. After that, we'll leave the code live forever, but it'll be $200 off. I just know myself as a consumer, I typically only buy things when there's an opportunity to get a good deal.
So if. That's also why we don't sell on Amazon Best Buy or any of these big stores because they would take all the margin and we wouldn't be able to give big discounts. So our whole philosophy is go speak to health conscious people, educate them as much as we can in an hour or so, give them the best price possible.
And so, yeah, so for the first two weeks, starting today, code WEITZ at JASPR.co is $400 off. And then after two weeks from now, it'll be $200 off forever. So, but if you feel so [00:50:00] called and you want to invest in your air, now's a good time to do it now, one. You can only get one your bedroom a hundred percent, a thousand percent, take care of your clean air and the one in your bedroom.
You should really use fan speed two or fan speed three on dark mode, so you hit the light button so there'd be no ambient light. And it'll be at a higher fan speed. So it'll be a gentle white noise scrubbing your air constantly. And then if you're putting one in your living room, you put that one on smart mode.
So it's silent all the time, and that's the one that will automatically adapt to any cooking and cleaning that you're doing.
Dr. Weitz: So if you were gonna get two of 'em. Bedroom first. Yeah. Second would be the living room or would it be the kitchen?
Mike: So typically most homes, the living room and the kitchen are very close to each other.
Okay. Even though the polluting, polluting happens in the kitchen, it spreads throughout the whole home. So Jasper in your living room is gonna detect it in the kitchen like right away. Anyways, so the idea is you want to have the air [00:51:00] cleaning where you spend the most time. Right. So. That's why a, a bedroom or a home office or a living space where the whole family's hanging out in the evening, those are the places that you really want to take care of.
First and foremost.
Dr. Weitz: That's great. We're recording this podcast, but it's gonna get it's gonna get put up in about six weeks, so
Mike: Well, for everyone's because we don't know the exact day. That's why I'm just saying today,
Dr. Weitz: right. From your perspective.
Mike: The podcast came out today. So yeah, I hope that resonates with someone.
And also, like I said, we don't have a sales department. Everyone here is an air expert. So if you have any questions, Jasper or know Jasper about your indoor air, your environment, anything, hit us up on Instagram, send us an email. We are here to help. That's great. Thank you so much, Mike. My pleasure, man.
Thanks for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it if you could go [00:52:00] to Apple Podcast or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review.
As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition and want to prevent chronic problems and wanna promote longevity, please call my Santa Monica White Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 3 1 0 3 9 5 3 1 1 1 and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine and I will talk to everybody next week.
