Realfoodology - The Secret to Healthier Kids: Clean Air and Better Schools! | Mike Feldstein of Jaspr

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

254: Mike Feldstein returns to share a groundbreaking project that reimagines how schools can truly support children’s health and development. As the founder of Jaspr, he’s now applying his air quality expertise to create an environment-first model for education that prioritizes clean air, nature, and wellness. This episode explores how traditional school systems may be harming kids and what can be done to fix it—from circadian rhythm-aligned schedules to values-based learning.  Jaspr | Get $400 off with code REALFOODOLOGY and link is jaspr.co/realfoodology Topics Discussed:  How does indoor air quality impact children’s health and learning in schools? What is an air scrubber and how is it different from a regular air purifier? Can improving classroom environments reduce absenteeism and illness in kids? How do circadian rhythms affect children's cognitive development and school performance? What are the benefits of nature-based education and wellness-focused school models? Sponsored By: Jaspr | Get $400 off with code REALFOODOLOGY and link is jaspr.co/realfoodology Timestamps:  00:00:00 - Introduction  00:02:01 - Microplastics & air filter effectiveness 00:06:30 - What is sick building syndrome? 00:09:15 - School & home air quality inspections 00:14:41 - How poor air spreads illness in schools 00:18:32 - Air purifiers & student absenteeism 00:20:31 - Rethinking school design for health 00:23:40 - Testing students for values alignment 00:28:05 - Teaching methods & nutrition  00:32:44 - What school reform should look like 00:34:08 - Circadian rhythms & kids’ sleep 00:36:56 - Prioritizing quality time with kids 00:41:22 - Why Jaspr outperforms competitors 00:46:01 - Jaspr’s benefits for snoring & sleep 00:47:21 - Jaspr customer service and support 00:47:58 - Courtney’s personal Jaspr experience 00:50:05 - Jaspr’s lifetime warranty offer Further Listening:  Mold Toxicity In Your Home + Easy Tips To Purify Your Air | Mike Feldstein, CEO of Jaspr Check Out Jaspr:  Jaspr | Get $400 off with code REALFOODOLOGY and link is jaspr.co/realfoodology https://kindling.academy/ Check Out Courntey  LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Produced By: Drake Peterson

on today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. We're on a mission to create the healthiest school in America. So what does that really mean? Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. As always, I am your host, Courtney Swan, and today's episode, I sat down with Mike Feldstein again. He is the founder of Jasper Air Filters,

otherwise known as an air scrubber, which if you wait until the very, very end of the episode, he describes what an air scrubber Which if you wait until the very very end of the episode He describes what an air scrubber is and so you'll learn more about that, but this episode I am so pumped about y'all He built a school and he is Revamping what a school will look like for children Addressing things like the environment the air that they're breathing getting them into nature It is everything that I wish that I had as a kid. And it's everything that as I've gotten more into health and wellness that I've

been dialing in for myself and have been concerned about when I have kids, how am I going to address this with my kiddos? And now there's a school that exists. And what's really cool is that he's going to put his blueprint for how he does this online so that other schools across the nation can also copy it. So this is how we get healthier children. This is how we make America healthy again.

We start with the children. I love this episode. I hope that you love it as much as I do. Wait till the very end because we are giving an amazing epic discount on Jasper Air Filters. And I hope that you love the episode. If you could take a moment to rate and review it, it means so much to the show. It really, really does help. So if you want to tag me at Real Foodology and you want to post about this on Instagram, I try to get back to all your messages. I try to post them as much as I can. And it means so much to me. I truly, truly am so

grateful for the support. So thank you so much for listening and supporting and I love you guys so much. I hope that you love the episode Mike thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I'm so happy to have you here Thanks for having me round two round two baby. Let's go We're talking all about clean air and also you bought a school and so we're gonna talk about that too Which I'm very excited to talk to you about that. I'm excited to tell you So you were just telling you right before recording that you just did a study on microplastics and your Jasper air filters. Tell us about that. Yeah so there was a study I think it came out since last time out I was on the pod with you in the UK in London. If anyone wants to read it just type in like BBC microplastic study on Google and you can

read all about it but in the 48 homes that they tested a hundred percent of them had microplastics in the air. Indoor air had like five times more microplastics than outside. They also did biopsies of people's lungs. And basically everybody whose lungs that had a biopsy had microplastics in them. Wow. And if you think about it, everything that decays over time,

the plastic water bottles take a long time to be gone, but where do you think they go in the meantime? Or the rubber from the tires, where does that go? Everything that gets aerosolized, a lot of plastics basically are getting aerosolized all day long. They get into your home, they get trapped in your home, and then you start breathing them in.

So, a lot of people are concerned about microplastics in your water, but the amount of microplastics, the evidence is early, but it's mounting very quickly, that we likely breathe way more microplastics than we drink So many of the things we're worried about getting in through our water if we drink two or three liters of water a day But we breathe 17,000 liters of air per day is just a lot more volume Yeah, so we contacted our lab and we said hey considering everybody's air has microplastics in it How can we create a study to see if Jasper is effective at removing microplastics? They said we can't exactly run a microplastics test, but what we can do is use aerosolized latex beads that are the same particle size as microplastics.

So that was the best test that they could put together because if it's the same particle size then we can be very confident that Jasper captures it and filters it. So yeah we are gonna publish it very soon but we remove 99% of airborne plastic beads that were the same, I don't want to misspeak, but of the plastic beads that we put in the air, we remove 99% in one hour. Wow, that's pretty epic. Okay, that makes me feel better that I have two jaspers in my house.

It's like water filtration. Everybody's water has like bacteria and chlorine and a lot of other stuff, but if you have a good water filter, they work really well. So yeah, that's the newest study to hit the docket. We're doing one right now on wildfire smoke. We've done a lot on mold. We've done a lot on sleep. So if you ever have any ideas, we love just doing outside the box studies and kind of

creating more information because this industry is mostly based on most air purifier studies that you see. They take the filter out of the machine, they put it in a very controlled environment with a very low airflow and have these big claims about like, we remove 99.9999% of stuff. The only type of studies we like to do is real world studies, like how much better do you sleep? How much better do you feel?

Or let's fill the room with dust, mold, smoke, microplastics, et cetera, and how fast do we actually clean the air? Because that's what really matters. Yeah. Yeah, and if anybody's interested in learning more about some of those specifics, I know we talked about it on the last episode, so I would highly encourage everybody to go back. That was a wildly popular episode. That was a great episode. We talked all about... Oh yeah, good call. So the first episode was basically like Air Quality 101?

Yes. That was the fundamentals, that was the basics, that was like intro to Air. So if you haven't heard that, pause now because a lot of this episode is going to build on that foundation. So if you haven't heard that last episode, hit pause, go back and listen to that one first. It's a good one. I mean, it sold me.

It's why I have two Jaspers in my home now and I love them. Thank you. Yeah. Actually, when I was telling you this before we started recording, last time I was here in Austin, you sent me one. So I'm so grateful for this. I was staying at my godmother's house and she has kept it since then. And one of the first things she said to me when I walked in the door was, I love this

Jasper. She's like, it's so cool. She was going on and on about how whenever she's cooking and it turns on red and she loves it, it cleans out the air when she's cooking, especially when she's doing like steaks and stuff like that. She loves it. Sweet cleans out the air when she's cooking, especially when she's doing like steaks and stuff like that. She loves it. Sweet, happy to help.

Yeah, it was really cool. Okay, so you have been telling me about something called sick building syndrome. And I wanna know what is sick building syndrome and how did you first discover this, it's hidden impact? It's actually strange that sick building syndrome seems to be talked about less now than it was 10 years ago. Yeah. Maybe because people are working in offices less, but sick building syndrome

is well known and well studied. And it's the idea that, and normally when we were talking about sick building syndrome, we were looking at larger buildings, apartments, condos, office buildings, things like that, because big companies realized that if their indoor environment was sick, absenteeism rates were going up, sick employees, decrease of focus, productivity. So it was very expensive for companies to have buildings that were making their team sick. So a whole industry kind of emerged. And there's a group called like LEED certified. You ever heard of them? So they would go around and certify buildings for energy efficiency. So everything that they were doing was to make the building as energy efficient as possible,

aka as tight as possible. So they were basically, you know, you want to keep the cool in the summer and the warm air in the winter and keep your energy bills down. But now we're realizing that the cost of a super efficient building is a very environmentally sick building because we're trapping everything inside. So these big buildings are like wrapped in saran wrap. They're like giant Tupperware boxes.

Oh yeah. You know, when you leave the sandwich in the Tupperware, that's when you get the mold. And our buildings are basically like giant Tupperware containers that can't breathe. So sick building syndrome is now being talked about in the home setting, like sick home syndrome. Yeah.

So, this could mean a bunch of stuff. So a sick building could be a moldy building. It could be a building that has really high carbon dioxide so people don't have enough oxygen to breathe. And. Probably toxic paints too, I would think. All of it. Yeah, the off gassing of the furniture. dioxide so people don't have enough oxygen to breathe and probably toxic paints too I would think all of it yeah the off gassing of the furniture carpets furniture paint etc yeah and then when they have like leaks and things like

that the building usually has a property manager and everything is centered around cost because it's no one's home when you're dealing with a big business nobody treats it like a home so everybody kind of neglects it like a workspace. Meanwhile, there could be thousands of people working in these buildings, eight hours a day. It's basically like everybody's home, but it's treated like it's nobody's home. No one's taking it seriously. No one's prioritizing it. Well, the same things that happen with the buildings are happening with people's homes. Wow. Yeah, that's so interesting.

So these could be acting like invisible stressors in our lives without even people realizing it. They are. Yeah. And yeah, like, so we can get right into the school. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the school because... I'm very excited about this.

So my daughter, Aria, when she's just turned five, but when she was like two and a half-ish, three, she went to her first school daycare place. And as soon as we started sending her there, she was sick constantly, chronically, like completely congested, coughs all the time, having some skin issues, like her heels were cracking. She's two, she's supposed to have perfect skin. Yeah. So she was always sick. And then obviously you're going to like kiss your baby all the time and be really close to your kid.

So when one kid gets sick, then the parents get sick, then the colleagues get sick, all the kids in school pass it all around and the doctor's reaction was basically like this is normal. Between the ages of like two and six, your kid's gonna be sick all the time because they're getting exposed to sicknesses for the first time. So I'm like, okay, that's the story we've been told for a long time. But how come right before school, like she wasn't getting sick? She wasn't a hermit. We were traveling, we were going to events, we were in dinners, we were in restaurants.

It's not like she's been a bubble wrap baby. That's a great point. So how come in school, in particular, she's getting sick all the time? So I pick her up from school and I'm starting to like assess the environment there. And every day I'd go to the school and I'd unplug their like air fresheners and their scents. And then every morning they'd have it plugged back in. And every day I'd like unplug it and put it somewhere like a little bit more out of the

way. And every day they'd plug it back in which by the way if you're if anyone out there is buying a home and when you go to do your home inspection there's air fresheners and scents what I recommend you immediately do is you unplug all of them and you schedule another home inspection because typically when you see a lot of air fresheners it's to cover mold oh wow and the way air scents and air fresheners, it's to cover mold. Oh wow, that's good. And the way AirSense and air fresheners work is they hijack the pathways that allow you to smell,

so you can't smell anything else. That's why when there's an air freshener going on, it's not like you smell the other thing and the freshener, it hijacks your ability to smell the other stuff, that's what those chemicals do, probably why they're so harmful. So often a lot of people buy very moldy homes, but it just smells so clean and fresh on home inspection day. So yeah, if it smells, you want to train your brain that if you smell sense to ask

questions. Yeah, well I've never thought about that. That's such a good tip. And in a home, I'll go back to the school, but to me it's unbelievable that a home is like the most expensive thing you buy in your life You're ready to start your family get this big mortgage start that that phase of your life You hire a home inspector five six seven eight hundred dollars. They spend the day there by the way I got certified as a home inspector just to see what home inspector meant. I Always learned it was an always an online course. It took a few days Wow It was like online course that took a few days. Wow. It was like, it was nothing. It was a little online course. And the template contract that they gave us to send people said, like, we don't go on

roofs and we look for nothing environmental. So what are they looking for? They're looking for something that's going to put a hole in your wallet. They're looking for something that... The age of the roof. Like a crack in the foundation. How old is your water heater? Is there a foundation crack?

Do all the plugs work? But in this entire process, there's no part of the home. The crack in the foundation. How old is your water heater? Is there a foundation crack? Do all the plugs work? But in this entire process, there's no part of the home inspection that's looking to see if this home is going to make you and your baby sick. Yeah, that's a great point. So people should also hire a mold inspector. I think it's a slow moving trend that home inspectors are getting into more environmental stuff. But yeah, I would want to have an environmental assessment done

looking for mold and toxins and water quality and things like that. Like, yeah, I want to know if my roof is cracked and like if there's a leak in my roof. But I just as much want to know if this is a safe place for me to raise my family. How many people do we know now that are ripping their whole homes apart because of mold? And when they bought that home, they just assumed the home inspector was, it's like back in the day when you were getting blood work, you're like, I got my blood tested. For what? I don't know. They tested for everything. And then you realize like that's not how testing works. So when you get a home inspection done, they're just going through a very simple checklist,

and none of that is health related. COLLEEN O'BRIEN That's so interesting. I've been seeing a new trend of these mold sniffing dogs. Actually, my friend Alex Clark, I think, was one I just saw in her stories, that she had a dog sniffing through. I love the concept. I'm kind of worried about the health for the dogs. I know this is kind of off topic,

but is that a bad thing for dogs? Do you know? I don't know. I can't say that it is or isn't. I can say that living in a moldy environment is when we really have problems. We're pretty adept. We can handle some allergens. We can handle some mold. It's when we're 24 hours a day beat down that we have problems like when we're sleeping in that environment, when we're living it, when we're working in it. I mean if the mold dog is in these environments all the time, but

so I would say mold dogs are definitely like the most amazing by far. There's no lab equipment and mold testing equipment that comes even close to the effectiveness of a dog. Really? But myself, like I can smell molds from a mile away too. I mean, I can only imagine how good a dog is. I am trained because if you've been in hundreds of homes and then you've tested for mold and all of them, you start calibrating your own senses to detect mold. Like Ryan Blazer from Test My Home, me and him, we've done home assessments together.

And we joke that you're there all day, but you know in the first five minutes what's going on. The rest of the day is just giving the data for the homeowner, but you know exactly what's going on. Okay. I'm really excited about this school concept because this is actually something that I had never thought about. And it's so interesting that you brought that point up. So I have a really good girlfriend, my friend Celeste,

who has been telling me exactly what you just said. She has a baby that's in daycare now, or a child, she's a toddler now. And she has been talking about how they get sick all the time now, ever since that their baby started going to daycare. She's like, we get sick nonstop. And she's like, this is just how it goes. And I remember kind of thinking like, well one, I don't want to go through that. Like I have, you know,

I have to show up for my podcasts and once I know I want to have a baby and hopefully we'll have help and maybe send them to daycare. And I mean, how do we avoid that? Do we have to buy a school? So the crazy thing is a lot of people who are working from home, you may not realize this if you have a team that's working from home, but when the kid is sick the kid's at home. Yeah. So now not only does everybody get sick, but now nobody gets work done. There's no getting work done when your three-year old is at home that day. Yeah that's true too. So like I think it should start at what's the true cost of a sick child on society. Yeah. The way it spreads and

ripples through you know thousands of people that are just like, you know, trips get canceled, work gets canceled, kids are home from school, they're not learning. It's a big deal. Like it was really substantially decreasing the quality of our life having our daughter sick all the time. And then she would pass it to the infant. Oh, yeah. So I was like, wait a second. This does not seem right. I don't think she's supposed to be sick all the time

so, you know, I'm plugging all my air fresheners and then I put a Jasper in the class and then all of a sudden she Almost stopped getting sick because if you think about it, how are the kids getting sick? Everything is pretty much you're getting sick in two ways. It's either like contact, droplets, surfaces, et cetera. Like a kid touches their nose, they touch their butt, they touch that toy, you touch that toy, you put it in your mouth, you get sick. Everything else is by breathing. So when all these kids are coughing and sneezing all the time, if you can deal with it at the air level, then you're not, everyone's sharing air.

So if you're sharing air, dirty, sick air in a classroom environment, of course, everything's spreading rapidly. We learned during COVID, dental offices, schools, buildings, like you use air filtration to stop infections. So we put the Jasper in her class, her sickness went way, way, way, way down. Wow. And probably for her classmates too, I sickness went way, way, way, way down. Wow. And probably for her classmates too, I'd assume then, right? I assume so too.

Yeah. So Finland, this is what really got us fired up. And we tried like three or four different schools in the Austin area. Pretty much you either have a school that's like, and we did, we actually tried an outdoor nature-based school and she wasn't getting sick there at all. But we found that you're either in like these nature-based schools where, speaking broadly, it's awesome. They're playing outside. It's like summer camp.

It's great. But she wasn't learning anything. She wasn't really learning how to read or do math or any of the basics, things that she loves. So the trade-off of a healthy outdoor school is pretty much no learning. And then it swings the other way. A lot of classes, they have a 15-minute a day recess. And so I look at the school, I'm like, okay, so the air quality is really bad. They don't have water filtration. It's riddled with toxic cleaning chemicals. The chemicals that they're

using are very, very harsh. Horrible lighting, either like fluorescent or LED lights. I mean, they're kind of like prisons. They're kind of like prisons. Yeah. They're kind of like prisons. So the light is the same all throughout the day and it's bright and there's very little windows and the windows don't open. So we take our young children, we put them in these little kid prisons in small environments with a bunch of sick kids with no airflow, dirty air, toxic cleaning chemicals, and bright lights.

So Finland did a study that was really eye-opening for me, and they put air purifiers, and not even great ones, but obviously good enough. They put air purifiers in 50% of the classes across three schools. And in the classrooms that had air purifiers, absenteeism dropped by 30 to 50%. That's a big difference. Wow. Huge. Yeah.

So, and that was just a very simple, just an air purifier, absenteeism dropped a ton. And it felt horrible, like dropping off our kids at school every day, like, welcome to your cesspool. And then they would bring it back home. So it was horribly frustrating to either have a situation where our kids are going to learn nothing or be sick all the time or both. And an opportunity came up to buy the school in our neighborhood and reinvent it. And it just, you know, as an entrepreneur does,

when you see that when the world doesn't have something you need, solve your own problem and find people who have the same problem as you. So we're on a mission to create the healthiest school in America. So what does that really mean? That means air filters in every class. That means, you know, whole building water filtration system. That means a non-LED lights, but we're found a lighting system. We're still picking between our final two contractors and systems.

But it matches the frequency of the sun throughout the day. So the lighting at 11 a.m. versus 2 p.m. versus 3 p.m. is actually changing to match the sun. So I think the whole point of our indoor environment, we want thermal comfort. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. But we want our indoor environment to most closely mimic nature, not be this like, either sterile, stuffy box. And then we're, the school is rooted in Montessori philosophies. But the issues that we had with Montessori is it's not very collaborative, it's very independent, and the kids learn well and they have fun doing so,

but it's not entrepreneurial and it's not collaborative. So we're basically building a school for people, basically training, not training, creating an environment for young entrepreneurs in the healthiest place possible. So we'll have the lighting, the clean air, an organic chef who sources all the food hyper local, and then the chef will have a program. So not only does your kid get a healthy lunch at school,

but the parents can actually pick up a really healthy dinner to bring home because that sucks. The time between pick up dinner and bed is like this mad dash that you can't get anything figured out and then you go to pack the lunch the next day. So these were all our pain points as a family. And then we're bringing in a lot of mentors from the community. So, you know, people to come in and talk about healthy food or to talk about building or to talk about, you know, cooking and things of that nature. So, and everything we're doing at the school is going to be 100% transparent. So we're going to be benchmarking our absenteeism rates, our symptoms and comparing them against

the state, against the state and against the rest of the country. Because we want to show that we'll have the lowest absenteeism rates in the country. And we're also putting all of our finances on the website as well, because for a lot of people, it's very overwhelming to start a school. But we want to show that we're going to create a template, a framework that people can basically copy for free. And the reason it's called Kindling Academy is our belief is that every child already has a spark. They have a fire within. So we're not here to craft your child.

We're just here to add a little bit of kindling and a little bit of wind to the spark that they already have. And then ideally we can show that there's a better, healthier way to build schools. And I love when you can have a good initiative that also can be for profit for others. So in Texas, and I think basically every state works this way,

the schools get paid based on attendance. Really? So they make no money on a sick child. That's interesting. There's truancy laws. So if the kid misses like two weeks of school, you have like a hearing. It's a big deal.

You can't just miss school in public school. So schools typically never want to invest in health. But if they can buy air filters, water filters, and get higher quality food and decrease absenteeism, they're going to get a lot more revenue from the state. So it's nice when someone could do a healthy initiative that also will profit them because now we don't need to sell to the... It's very hard to sell to a corporation, health. It's very easy to sell them dollars on a discount. Yeah.

So when you can sell money at a discount, it's a good deal that even if the health impact doesn't matter to them. So our point is if we can show with concrete evidence the drop in absenteeism, maybe we can get the public school system to pick up on it as well. Yeah, it's basically incentivizing them to have a healthier school population.

Okay, this is blowing my mind. Also, can I put in our non-existent child in line for that now? Because we're moving to Austin and I'm already like, yes. Oh my gosh, I want to put our kid in. And there's a little thing that we took from India. Some of the schools there do this. So when you apply for the school, they put mom and dad in two separate rooms and they give them a values alignment test.

Because if the parents aren't aligned on values, then it's going to be really hard for them to integrate into the community of the school. And when we went to all these different schools, one of them, it was amazing. The community was so, so strong. So we're going to try to bring a lot of those aspects in. So this school had like five or six camping trips a year. So we want people who at least want to go on one or two of them. And they want to be involved in the school.

If they have something to teach, come in once a month and be a part of it. So we're also going to have saunas and cold plunges at the school. Oh my God, this is such a dream. When you drop off your kid, you can take a sauna, take a cold plunge, take a shower. And that's how you'll get to meet all the other parents. Wow. You know, when you're a kid, friendship is kind of like built into it. You just have built in friends.

And then you get into like adult life and it can be really difficult to make friends. And I feel like when you have young children, it's that last attempt at making lifelong friends Yeah, I agree because when you have kids your friends who don't have kids don't really want to hang out with you much anymore So you're just like you the best thing ever is if you have a bunch of friends who have kids that are the same age And everybody can hang out together So by having the saunas and the coal plunges and stuff like that, when you go to pick up your kid at the end of the day, come like half an hour early, sauna, do your thing, then pick up your kid.

And it feels really comforting when you know your kids, friends, parents. Yeah, of course. Well, and also you're basically building a little community in that. And then you were saying that if people are taking these tests in order to get in and their values are aligning, then chances are you're probably going to be in alignment with a lot of the parents that are, that whose kids are at the school. The idea is the school is supposed to be for the whole family, not just for the child. And is this going to be like K through eight?

Is it going to be all the way through high school? So the first year will be, there'll be a three to six program and a seven to nine program. But then within the next, a bunch of the adjacent lots are also gonna be for sale. So we're gonna add, where the goal is over the next four or five years, we'll scale it all the way up to high school. Our oldest child is five. So we want to keep it at least three or four years ahead of her. Cool.

But yeah, it's really the most amazing way that we can think of to have a strong impact and invest in community. And then every child, as soon as they sign up, the child gets a free Jasper for their bedroom. Wow. Because when they're at school, they're going to have a really clean environment. So we're going to have like a lot of talks for the parents too. So imagine you could come in and give a talk to all of the parents on like food education and nutrition

So then not only can we provide them with clean food at school But ideally we can teach them a better way to live outside of the classroom bring that into their home Wow, I mean this is incredible and there's so much talk to about our education system here in the United States and how You know reading is faint like all these kids don't know how to read anymore. Their numbers are just failing across the board in schools. And this is a great way to hopefully reform that and encourage, because once you get this off the ground and running and it's successful, then other schools will see how you're doing it and be able to model that.

And hopefully this will cause a whole revolution across the US, which I'm hoping for. I think we really can. This would be the US, which I'm hoping for. I think we really can. This would be amazing. And like I'm 35, my wife's 33. Since we were 18 and 19, we've been working on curriculums as a hobby. We never even knew that we would get into education, but she was a labor and delivery nurse who went into nursing because there was no teaching jobs in Canada 15 years ago.

So she's like a pure teacher at heart. So now and So will she be teaching at school? She'll be the director. Oh cool okay. So she's the one who's bringing all the entrepreneurial type entrepreneurial and a really robust educational program and my role is the chief wellness officer. So things have flipped. She's here to make it an incredible learning and community environment and then I'm here to make it the healthiest school and use all the brands and the relationships that I have that I've been able to form with Jasper to influence this one school because if we create a model for how to do this and

make it really easy for people to just steal bits and pieces then I think we could do a lot of good here. Yeah and all I keep thinking about is how you're creating an amazing foundation for these kiddos growing up and you're because you're addressing the air their environment that they're breathing in you're also addressing the food and I'm hoping that you probably would do nutrition classes for sure and get them in on that early. Something that I've talked about a lot of the podcasts I would love to start seeing in schools especially starting in like kindergarten is the school having a garden and having the kids be involved in it. Because I've talked to so many parents

and so many of them say that when their kiddos are actually involved in the whole process of everything, then they want to eat healthier. Like for example, if you have them help you in the kitchen with chopping the veggies and getting dinner ready, they're way more inclined to eat those veggies because they had a purpose and a part playing in it. So they want to be able to taste what they made.

We do that now. You do? Okay. There's nothing better you could do on a weekend than taking your kid to a nursery, buying a plant together. And then even if it's an herb, like even if it's mint, the easiest thing to grow ever. And then in the evening when you want to make tea, let your child go outside, snip that mint, put it in there with the hot water, fill their cup, put in a little bit, squeeze

a lemon in, and just realize like, oh, whoa, that plant flavored that thing. And there's this idea that some people think learning's not that important. And honestly, I kind of did too, like reading and stuff. Yeah. I thought, like, let kids be kids, play, collaborate. They can figure out reading and writing and learning later. There's AI now, who cares? But then Rachel started to teach Aria how to write because her school, how to read and write.

She was teaching her 15 minutes twice a week. And in that little bit of time, she was learning fast. And then all of a sudden, she was like reading books and ordering off the menu at the restaurant for herself and reading signs at the airport. So it wasn't just about books. It was her ability to like navigate life and build confidence. But it only took such a small amount of time.

And it's such a gift now that she's able to like, she reads us bedtime stories now. So was it the idea that like, it's gonna be this big burden and you have to be in this classroom six hours a day to learn stuff? So that was gonna be my other question is, I know that there is a lot of conversation now because you know, we talked about earlier,

a lot of parents are concerned that the schools are kinda like prisons and they're stuck in there for eight hours a day, they're not getting sunlight, they're barely getting exercise. So is there going to be part of the program an encouragement to be outside, be in nature, like run around? Okay.

So the perimeter of the school, every classroom has very big screened in porches. Cool. So the idea is they can be, it's kind of an indoor outdoor environment. So basically it's default outside. We should only be inside if it's too hot, too cold, or maybe too buggy or rainy or something. Yeah. So there's a massive outdoor playground with all these big oak trees and we're using these tree weaves that basically make tree houses out of ropes so like the kids can like play in the trees. But yeah, we'll be default outside. So the classrooms will be in these screened-in porches. Oh cool.

Yeah, so they'll be an inside. Yeah. Basically like in these screened-in porches. Oh cool. Yeah, so they'll be in inside. Yeah. Basically like inside, screened-in porch, outside. And most of the time should either be in those screened-in porches or outside, and then we'll be inside when we want to. But also in Austin, the only time that you'd really want to be inside is the heat of summer in July and August. Otherwise we can be outdoors like all the time. Oh my gosh, this is so cool. On so many different levels. Getting them out more in nature, teaching

them about nutrition, feeding them organic food. I mean, you're truly setting these kids up for a real foundation and giving them like a real shot at life. And I feel like too, I would be curious to see a comparison of how their learning and their levels look as far as like testing and their cognitive function. We're going to benchmark all of it. Yeah, because I would guarantee that they're probably going to be ranking at higher numbers in all of that too. And it's also like a two minute golf cart ride from the Jasper office.

You literally walk back and forth. Awesome. So as we're building out Jasper and recruiting people to come move to Austin, a lot of the Jasper team will have their kids in the school. Oh, cool. So it's just like a really cool community builder when everybody sort of works at the same place and has the healthy kids. And it just creates for this really nice synergy between Jasper and the school. And it allows Jasper to like fund the school to get it started.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm pumped. I'm so excited about this. This makes me really excited about moving to Austin too because now bring you on a little tour Yeah, we'd love that and I want to apply like stat Get on the waiting list exactly Hector we're gonna have to take that alignment test good thing. We're in we're in alignment on many things Guys will be fine. What else are they doing in schools that you want to reform? I think that's the main thing right now. Okay. Is like, let's get

the kids healthy. Yeah. First, healthy and with the circadian rhythm lighting and then bringing that. So for example, I'll bring back it to Ryan Blazer. So he, you know, he's a building biologist. So we're going to use all my health and wellness friends network to be on the advisory board of the school. So for example, once our school is a healthy building, we're going to give the families all a tour of what makes this a healthy building. So then they can go implement that in their homes, change out their light bulbs, change out their water filters, add air filters. So the school really just becomes this amazing, it's going to be this basically a content machine, but also a learning machine to teach families kind of the things that we've learned

that feel like they're just, yeah, like life. When you change your environment, I think changing your environment is the best way to upgrade your life. Yeah. Because like if you don't have a good bedroom, you're not going to have a good night's sleep. If you don't have sleep, you're not going to have a good night's sleep. If you don't have sleep, you're not going to have a good life. So now that we optimized our sleep environment, how do we optimize our day environment to support the whole experience?

I mean, this is just going to be a game changer across the board. This is so cool. And it's wild to me, like so many of these other things in this whole wellness world, that it's taken us so long as humans to figure all this out, you know, because this is a great way to start an amazing foundation for these kiddos. And you said something else about circadian rhythm that reminded me of there's another criticism that I see a lot in the standard school system that, you know, kids need a lot of sleep, especially when they're younger.

Oh, yeah. And they're forcing them to go to school. Like they have to be there sometimes at like 7 a.m. Do you know how much sleep kids need? How much? Tell me. Like a five-year-old? What do you think? I mean, I would assume like 12 hours Yeah, like 12 13 for a five-year-old when they're younger. It's like 13 14 Yeah, well, then they're having them show up at school like 6 30 or 7 a.m. So that's I'm glad you brought that up Because there's some pretty great public schools around here. But like the bus has picked the kid up at 6 45 So let's think about that.

We're getting up now like 545, 5, or 6 o'clock, and then you put your child to bed at like 6 p.m. and they get out of school at 320. Like what is their life? So they wake up to you grabbing them out of bed, basically force feeding them and then you can't feed them healthy food because that's like- Because you don't have time. Cereal and yogurt wins when you only have 15 minutes.

And then here's your salami, your processed salami and your cheese sticks and out the door. And then they're done school like 3.30 or 4. You're rushing them home frantically for a dinner. And I believe homework was actually, I think a lot of the purpose of school was daycare, like to like watch kids so adults could work. And I think a lot of the purpose of homework is so you can either keep working or so you can cook dinner. Yeah.

Like there's no reason why a kid needs to go to school eight hours and then do more school when they get home. It's actually a great point. You're telling me I give you 40 hours a week and you still couldn't teach my kid? So I think homework, there's just no place for it. So there won't be homework at your school? No. And what time do you think they'll be going to school every day?

Great question. Yeah. So when I talked about this on Skinny and it was funny, Lauren took the words right out of my mouth. She hates this morning thing too. because some of the best time that you could spend with your child is that morning time. Yeah. By the end of the day, like you're tired, they're tired. You're giving like each other like the worst of that you have for each other.

The morning can be great. So drop offs by nine o'clock. Oh, this is so epic. And then a lot like the school that they're at now, it's three. And then there's after school programs all the way to six. So a lot of people, if they're at now that it's three and then there's after-school programs all the way to six So a lot of people if they're working nine to fives and like honestly the school is not free before working nine to fives Yeah, it won't work. It's just not who it's for other people can steal the healthy model and change the hours and all that but drop off will be between 830 and 9 and Then the first you know 30 45 minutes

It's gonna be just play like just get there there and let's start it off with outdoor, having fun outside. Let's start with that. And then pick up will be three. So it's people who want to spend time with their children in the afternoon. And, but yeah, I think those early mornings and those early buses, and then all of a sudden,

you can't do anything with your kids in the evening. You can't do anything on Sunday. Then you cram it all in and went on. And then on the weekend sudden, like you can't do anything with your kids in the evening. You can't do anything on Sunday. And you cram it all in and went on. And then on the weekend, you try to like have these action packed weekends and your kids are like, yo, we just need a rest. We're just happy to be at home. We haven't seen our house all week. That's so true.

I think the timing is a big deal. And then the other thing is really encouraging travel. So you know, with these true entry laws, you can't travel. So I take my daughter Aria on podcast trips all the time. And she loves it. We fly, we go to meetings together. I bring her to podcasts. She's there as a live audience.

She learns a ton. She has so much fun. I love bringing her because you feel guilty traveling when you have a young kid. Leaving your spouse like meh, like I have that muscle built, but leaving like your like toddler is the saddest thing ever. So when I can bring her along and then Rachel gets a vacation at home, it's the greatest thing ever. And then to be told by your school, you cannot, like you'll have a board hearing.

It's insane. You can't take your kid out of school. So what you want to do is basically, entrepreneurs like to travel. Let's encourage that and not try to stop that, allow that flow to happen. So let's say you're going to go to like Italy in the summer or you're taking your kid on a podcast trip. It's like, let's flesh out, okay, where are you going? What do you intend to learn?

I think you're going to learn more in the real world than you will at school anyway. And then we're going to create these little passport books for the whole class. So whenever someone travels, they come back and they put a little sticker and everyone's passport So everybody gets a part of where all their classmates went that year and then the kid can present on like where they what they did You know take a few photos take a little few videos even arranging like a FaceTime while they're at a cool place So if we know they're gonna be somewhere cool at two like let's do a FaceTime and like put them on the big screen and everyone can like see their classmate while they travel and just kind of like make it fun

and encourage it instead of stifling it. Mike, this is so amazing. You are just touching on so many things that either personally affect me. Like I was one of those kids growing up that, yeah, I'd have to get up at like 5.36 in the morning. And I remember back then like just dragging ass in the morning. And so I've always been really concerned about that, just thinking forward for my kiddos,

because I want them to be able to get enough sleep. Like, my dream world is that they can sleep till like 7.30 or something, you know, so they get adequate amount of sleep. And then the travel thing, I mean, this is, you know, how Hector and I first started having or talks about having kids, because I hope he doesn't I mean, this is, you know, how Hector and I first started having, or talks about having kids, because I hope he doesn't mind me saying this publicly, but he was a little concerned at first about having kids because he wants to have that freedom,

he loves to travel, and I'm the same way, and I kept having those conversations with him and just telling him, look, I plan to be the type of mother that I wanna travel with my kids a lot. Like, I plan on bringing them to podcasts with me, I plan on any time I get an amazing work opportunity, I wanna be able to travel and bring them with me, because I have other friends that are already doing this and they're modeling it

For me and I knew that that's the type of life that I wanted and then I hear that Oh, it's so hard wait till you have kids and wait till they're in school You're not gonna travel anymore. Yeah, and I'm like, sorry, but I'm not I'm not claiming that for my life So that yeah, like I keep a little I secret. I told you so folder yeah, the man of people who told us like once you have kids your life is over and You'll never sleep again all this stuff Like literally not one of the things has been true Because if you if you it's even like a lot of friends who who have built big businesses and they're quite wealthy now and their

Main obsession is not fucking up their kids I'm like if you obsess over not fucking up your kids, you're gonna get what you focus on Like this doesn't make any sense to me. So yeah, make schools healthy again. Yes make schools healthy again. Oh my gosh This was healthy again. So it's called kindling Academy So if anybody whether you live in Austin or not, we're going to be putting everything online. So just kindlingacademy on Instagram. And the website is actually kindling.academy.

Okay. Yeah,.academy is a thing. So it's not.com. It's kindling.academy. And we have a little stay in the loop thing. So we'll have like a monthly newsletter of like what we're doing, what we're learning, how are the health stats. So if anybody just wants to kind of like follow along on the journey, then please join us.

Oh, this is so cool. Well, I'm immediately putting in our names for that school. I'm so excited about this. Okay, so before we go, since you created this amazing air filter, let's just give maybe like a little five or 10 minute like 101 on why Jasper is a superior air filter. I could tell you I love it, but I want people to hear it from you. I'll go first and then tell me why you love it. Okay.

So really Jasper at its heart is not an air purifier. It's an air scrubber. So it's a really important differentiation. So as a recap, my background was in wildfire restoration, floods, hurricane cleanup, and toxic mold remediation. We would use machines called air scrubbers. They were large industrial air cleaning machines. They looked somewhere between a photocopier and a subwoofer. So they were incredibly effective, but loud and ugly. And if you think about how does a mold remediation project work you isolate the environment you remove the

Affected material you double bag the mold you wipe the surfaces and you run an air scrubber in that environment and outside So a lot of mold remediation is actually scrubbing the air So I'm like whoa air scrubbers super effective these little air purifiers and air filters that you see at Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, these were designed by huge companies. A lot of them make thousands of products. So they don't like, they're not focusing on one thing. So I really, I would keep an air scrubber, when I would go to these disaster zones, like fires in California or hurricanes in Houston, the homes that we would live in for the month

or two that I was there, we'd keep a couple air scrubbers in our home to keep the environment safe. I come back home, I put the air scrubber in our basement. People would enter our home be like, whoa! It would literally be like mountain fresh crisp air. Wow. But it was this big loud ugly machine, which is just not practical. Yeah. So you unplug it. It's just it's in a nuisance. So the mission for Jasper was to create the world's first air scrubber designed for your home. Cool. So at its core, it's an industrial machine that looks beautiful and is quiet.

So that's why it's made from steel, no plastic. It has the commercial grade sensors on it. So as soon as you're cooking, cleaning, incense, candles, if your neighbor's using the barbecue, it's quiet all the time, but then it's always patrolling and it's detecting a spike in air quality and then responding and bringing it down. And you can see it working in real time. Huge filter. Our filter's four and a half pounds.

Most air purifiers filters are half a pound. It's nine times more filter. So everything about it was designed by me creating like an industrial mold removing machine but pretty quiet and smart. Like my wife is really big into interior design so it had to be nice enough that for me has a remediation guy and her has like an interior designer mind. For us to want it in our home was kind of the bar that we set. So I wasn't doing any market research. I knew exactly what I wanted and I spent a few years to create Jasper. And yeah, so really where it's different is it was designed to tackle

wildfire smoke, mold, heavy metals, microplastics. It wasn't designed to be like a little box that sits in your corner that cleans your dust a little bit Yeah, and if you see dust in your home That's the symptom of an air quality problem and you know the biggest air filter in a home is actually your carpets and your couches and when people get their carpets steam cleaned the water is black and 50% of all the stuff that makes your carpet black is coming from the air So if you think about like a swimming pool, how do you clean a swimming pool?

Do you get in the pool and like scrub the sides of the pool with a sponge? No, you don't you have a water filter and with our homes everybody's busy like mopping vacuuming and wiping surfaces But forgetting to actually clean the air which is the main thing that our home is, you know comprised of yeah Yeah air, which is the main thing that our home is, you know, comprised of. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think finally now people are starting to wake up to this, but so many people weren't even paying attention to the air and even thinking about it, right? Candles, when you're cooking, all the off-gassing from your furniture, like there's so many things that we never thought about. A couple massive winds we've been having lately.

So now that there's like, you know, well over 10,000 jaspers in the wild, we get incredible feedback because people share their health wins. So if anyone looks at the reviews on our website, like this stuff could make me cry. It's insane. So I actually met someone at a coffee shop in Austin like two weeks ago that bumped into me. I was wearing my shirt and they recognized me and her husband, they were both there. He would go like a hundred times a day. Yeah. They put one Jasper in their home in Palm Springs and he hasn't done one since.

A lot of people who snore, probably my favorite feedback, it's definitely when people are sleeping better and not having any allergy symptoms anymore. But the amount of people who have not snored since they got their Jasper. So how cool is this? You have a husband and wife, let's just say that they're 50 years old, they haven't shared a bedroom in 10 years. Jasper enters their life. The snoring is immediately over and now they're sharing a bed again.

I mean, it's life changing. I did not think when I was creating Jasper, I was reuniting husbands and wives in their beds again. People who had chronic nosebleeds, no more nosebleeds. Oh. Often having asthma attacks, gone. People who use Oura Ring or Whoop or track their sleep, their HRV scores are improving, their deep scores, their deep sleep is improving.

If you think about it, like, so the average bedroom has about a million particles floating around and when we put a Jasper in the room within about 20 minutes, the air is about 20 times cleaner. So just think about it, like, you know, if you believe that the food you eat matters, the water you drink matters, you're consuming thousands of times more air than water and food and when you can have clean, pure sleep fuel all night long, the impacts are insane. And because at Jasper, we obsess over only making one product, the Jasper, when you do

like, we're like the taco truck of air purifiers or air scrubbers. You know, it's really hard to do like 50 things good, but to do one thing great, we can do. That's why our that's why we can do a lifetime warranty. That's why we can have incredible service and support. That's why in Austin we can hand deliver people's Jaspers and sometimes even the replacement filters. And that's why we can do things like the school. Yeah.

To increase air awareness and go further with our education. A lot of brands now are so obsessed with new products all the time, but like markets are so big. If you just obsess over being the best at one thing and don't get shiny object about 50 other things, you can make one thing so great. And that's just like what we're ruthlessly focused on. That's so cool. Well, I mean, I've told you this so many times, but for the listeners, so they know how much

I love my Jasper. So I have two of them. Jasper's. Jasper's. We have one in our bedroom and actually I got this tip from you, but we turn the light off and then we take off the, I took off the smart feature and we have it at either a two or three. And I love it because it kind of acts like a noise machine a little bit. And then our, our room just feels like. Two or three. Perfect. Yes. It feels like a cozy dark den in there. And I

just like it, I love that our house just smells so clean and pure. Like there's no like smell to it. No sense. Yeah, like no sense. Like it's just like clean and pure. And I love the, it's kind of acts like a dual like white noise machine kind of in our bedroom.

Like people use white noise machines, which are literally speakers with EMFs pretending to sound like air. Why not just have clean air being the white noise machines, which are literally speakers with EMFs pretending to sound like air. Why not just have clean air being the white noise? Some people like to sleep with silence. Most people who live in a city, that's not an option anyway, but if anyone's ever gone camping in the woods, nature is not quiet.

Not at all. Bugs chirping and all those things. Wind and trees and animals and all that stuff. Coyotes, yeah. So yeah, the best place to put a jasper by far is in your bedroom, fan speed two or three on dark mode. But more and more now people are putting like three or four in their home. And you know, like it's for sure an investment.

But when you have a few in your home, now your whole home has 95% cleaner air. So you have like a clean air sanctuary. Like what is the cost? The average family that's focusing on their health can easily be spending $3,000 a month on groceries for organic food. You could spend $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a year on water. You don't pay attention. All those mountain valleys are adding up.

That airport water, your water bill, changing your whole home water filtration system. So people spend like $30,000, $40,000 a year on food, like $5,000, $10,000 on water, your water bill, like changing your whole home water filtration system. So people spend like 30, 40 grand a year on food, like five, 10,000 on water, and then they have zero air budget. Whereas for like $2,500, you can have a whole home air filtration system. And then for life, for a few dollars a day, you're breathing clean air all the time. So that I say the only bad thing about getting a Jasper is you may become an air snob. All of a sudden when you go to people's homes or hotels or Ubers, you will notice scents more and more.

So that's a big deal. But yeah, the for life thing is also a huge deal. So the way it works, if anybody buys a Jasper, they get a lifetime warranty. So the way that works is let's say Jasper breaks and it's kind of like the school and the Jasper. I love business because it allows you to take out your frustrations as being a customer and actually do something about it Yeah, so if Jasper breaks we ship you a brand new one You take the new one out of the box you put the old one in the box

we give you a prepaid shipping label and Then we send you PS to your front porch to pick it up Because I hate when I buy a product and I need to like get a weird box and get a receipt and do all this stuff and go to FedEx and I just lost half a day. So you end up not even using the warranty. So we just, yeah, I believe that, you know, treat people like you want to be treated. And if you have a business, treat your customers how you would want to be treated if you were the customer.

And I think all the business outcomes will just kind of follow that line of thinking. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I love what you've done. And they're so sexy. They look beautiful in our home because I, like your wife, very much care about an aesthetic, and I just love that. So before we go, do we have a code for the listeners? We do. I believe this is coming. This pod drops June 10th. June 10th. So yes, as always, you know, we're not in Walmart. Best Buy, Amazon,

Home Depot, you can't find us anywhere. And that's for two reasons. That's because number one, we want to pass the best possible price to a health conscience audience. So people who are already like obsessed with eating better and getting healthier, which is why we're here. Like if you care about your food and water, then obviously you should care about your air. And the other reason is if we sold through any of those big stores, there's nothing worse than like being unhappy with a product and having to get in line at Target to go to a return. We want to treat all of our customers like gold. So we can do that because we control that. So we sell directly to customers,

we support everybody directly, we do the warranties, we do the filters, like that's all us. So yes, as always, code REALFOODOLOGY, starting today, June 10th, until June 20th, will be $400 off. That's huge. So basically, like that would be the deal

that we would do at Black Friday. But last year at Black Friday, we got four months back ordered So remember that and it will probably happen again. So between June 10th and June 20th It's basically a mini Black Friday for real food ology listeners so code real food ology between June 10th and June 20th will be $400 off and If you actually add more if you buy more than one, Real Foodology stacks with the code. So if they buy two, three or four, the discounts actually get bigger and bigger. So instead of Jasper being $1,199, it can be like $600, $700 when they stack the two discounts together. So code realfoodology at jasper.co,

J-A-S-P-R, no E,.co, and realfoodology will be $400 off between June 10th and June 20th. So for anyone out there who's like, yes, I do want to invest in clean air and I do care about the aesthetic and I want an air scrubber in my home, well, today's a good day.

Yeah, today's the day. Go get them while you can, before they sell out. Thank you so much, Mike. This good day. Yeah, today's the day. Go get them while you can before they sell out. Thank you so much, Mike. This was epic. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Theme song is by Georgie.

You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to WellnessLoud.com. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship.

I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first. If you struggle with bloating, gas, constipation, digestive issues, yeast overgrowth, well, you may already know about Digest This. It's the podcast hosted by me, Bethany Cameron, also known as LittleSipper on Instagram. I dive into gut health, nutrition, the food industry, and drawing from my own experience. I break down what's good, what's bad, and what's the best for your gut, your skin, and so much more. I even offer gut-friendly recipes. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday produced by Wellness Loud.