Well with Arielle Lorre - 342: How Air Quality Impacts Our Health & How to Make Swaps to Improve Our Exposure with Mike Feldstein

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Mike feldstein is a former disaster relief worker, air quality expert and founder of Jasper. He joins the show to discuss why we should care about the air we breathe, how to measure its quality and what systems in the body the air we breathe affects. We talk about the role air has in beauty and longevity, what we should not be using in our homes, how to improve air quality and much more. Subscribe to Patreon for exclusive weekly content: patreon.com/ArielleLorreThis episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.Visit jaspr.co and use BLONDE for 10% off your first purchase.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So, would auto-hue without your reis-adviseur or sunnycars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Welcome to the Blonde Files

I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits. I know there's so much information out there, so I'm bringing on expert guests and sharing my own experiences to help you sift through all the wellness stuff without the BS. Enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I have a truly fascinating episode for you today. because we are talking about air quality. And something that we talk about at the top of the episode is how we're so cognizant about things like the food that we're eating, the products that we're putting on our bodies, the water that

we're drinking, even the water that we're bathing in. But when it comes to air, we just have this big blind spot. So I'm talking to Mike Feldstein. He's the founder and CEO of Jasper. It's an air science and technology company. He's really an unconventional entrepreneur who basically sees challenges as opportunities. He's constantly finding solutions to problems that others see as insurmountable. And Jasper, his latest venture is the culmination of Mike's diverse background in air quality and disaster restoration and entrepreneurship.

So his mission is to protect air quality and improve human health through innovative products and education. And he really is like the air guy. He's so knowledgeable when it comes to. to indoor air, outdoor air pollutants, things like that. So I learned so much in this episode and learned just really how much the air that we're breathing can affect our health in so many ways. I have a Jasper in my home. I got one months ago. And it is my favorite because it has a reader on it. So we talk about this in the episode. And it's really crazy to me to see how the air quality in my home is affected by things like when I'm cooking. I really think it's interesting.

that when I come home from the hair salon, if I get my hair colored, and then I blow dry my hair at home, the measurement of the air quality goes off the charts. It turns red, which is just proof that I have all of these chemicals in my hair, and then they're flying around my house. So I really love it because I can see how things are impacting the air that I'm breathing when I'm burning candles, when I spray perfume, things like that. So I definitely recommend that to everybody. And he does have a code for you guys. You can use blonde at checkout for 10% off your first purchase of a Jasper. Just visit jaspr.com and use the code blonde for 10% off your first purchase. I think you're going to learn so much from this episode. He has a really interesting perspective on mold toxicity as well, which is very big in the wellness world. So I think you guys are

going to find that really valuable. So please enjoy Mike Feldstein. Welcome, Mike. Thanks for having me. I've never had somebody on who's talked about air quality. And it seems so intuitive to care about the air that we're breathing. And yet I feel like it's kind of furthest down on the hierarchy of importance with a lot of people when it comes to their health and wellness. So can you give us a little bit of your background and how you got into what you do today? Sure. And I'll start by that. It's the lowest on the totem pole.

Meanwhile, we can go three weeks without food, three days without water. only three minutes without air. So it's funny that it's like literally the thing that we could survive the least long without. And I actually think that's why we don't pay attention to it because it's the only thing our body can do subconsciously and consciously. You know, most of our internal functions are subconscious. We don't have much control over it.

Or eating and drinking is entirely conscious. But breathing, we can do it very consciously or do it in our sleep or in a coma. First thing we do and we're born. Last thing we do when we die. And like if you go into a house that smells after a few minutes, you can't smell it anymore. So it's just like our human bodies are so good at adapting that. And I think because of that, we kind of take it all for granted. The other funny thing is nobody really talks about eating.

We talk about food. No one talks about, you know, drinking has, I mean, with water, we talk about the water we drink. But literally breathwork is more popular right now than the actual air that we're breathing. And like people are sitting there like, doing their like doing their like. like breathwork stuff without even considering the fuel that they're using for their breathwork. That's why I like to do conversations like this. Just to, if we can increase air awareness, just a little bit, it's obvious, like much like water quality and food quality didn't used to be things that people paid attention to.

And then they realized for health and wellness and beauty and whatever priorities one has, how much it matters, air is like the next frontier. And I'm trying to move that ball forward faster. My background was actually, I was a disaster chaser. So floods, fires, hurricanes, hailstorms, things like that, I would go into cities that have got ravaged by natural disasters and rebuild and clean homes and make them safe for families to move back. And it was then in the biggest fire in Canadian history was in a place called Fort McMurray,

which was an oil town five hours from the nearest city, like way up there where like it's almost like Alaska, like the sun's bright to like four in the morning. and 100,000 people got evacuated. And what happened is the, you think about wildfire smoke when you see it coming through has just like tree smoke like a campfire, but it's not that because when thousands of homes in cars burn, every chemical and every product, every bottle, every plastic, every piece of furniture, everything in that home is now part of that like toxic smoke plume. So it was in Alberta when I saw firsthand just like house.

sick people were after wildfire smoke. And we were the guys who would come in after disaster and make a house clean and safe for the family to come back. And the biggest moment for me was a family. The mom's name was Tanya. And the baby was on, they were all good. They moved into the house. And then a week later, the baby was on a back in the hospital on like a ventilator.

And it's because the air in their home was good when we finished. But a week later, it was toxic again. because you can clean the home, but if the outdoor air is polluted, that comes right back inside. So we would leave like our giant industrial machines that we would use for mold and fire and flood there. And within three hours, that made the air quality good again. And then this kept happening. And I'm like, this is not very sustainable to keep bringing all these like massive machines into people's homes. So I went to Best Buy and Home Depot and bought a bunch of cheap smaller machines, left it in their house.

And then a few hours later, the air was bad again. and the best analogy I have for this is I basically got to see firsthand that like most little air purifiers were basically like a kettle trying to heat a bathtub and a kettle is awesome at heating water for tea. But if you try to fill your bathtub with a kettle, the water is going to cool down faster than you could heat it up. And that's what most little air purifiers are. People just can't tell, but they're like a bunch of little space heaters and you're trying to heat your house and they're just not getting the job done. And so the vision was to create something that could solve the wildfire smoke problem. I never in a million years would think it would have got into sleep and longevity and allergies and all that. So yeah, basically disaster chaser turned air guy.

Didn't see this one coming. You are the air guy. And I want to just tell everybody how we started this interview. So you came in, you have this little device. I'm looking at it now. Now it says 835. So what does that mean? And what is this device that you have?

It's a CO2 detector. By the way, I used my, like, big machine and I tested the air out there too. And it's pretty good. It's pretty good for indoor air. That's carbon dioxide. And 835 is not bad. So outside is 400. Okay.

Like literally exactly 400. The lowest I've ever seen is, like, in the rainforest, I've seen, like, 390. But the outdoor carbon dioxide level is 400. And has normally inside is, like, 600 to 900. once you get over 1,000 is when brain fog, fatigue, that kind of stuff starts kicking in. The way a human would describe it would be, it's stuffy in here. It feels stuffy. And you're like, I need to go outside for some fresh air.

A thousand's kind of the beginning of that. But it's not uncommon to be in a classroom or in an office or in a home or in a car. And that number gets over 3,000. Often people are exhausted on road trips because they have that little recirculate mode on. Or in the sauna. I recently did a video in Denver and we were in a sauna and it got to 6,000. Wow. So a lot of the time, people go out and they just can't take the sauna anymore and it's not the heat.

It's the carbon dioxide is literally like choking you out. So yeah, that's 835. That's carbon dioxide. That's not something that you can purify. The only way to keep that number in check is by either opening windows, doors or like vents and fans and things like that. So that if you think about like air purifiers clean the air, that's the amount. went to fresh air. So this building is solid. So it would be neat to see. Hopefully that stays in the 8,900 range. We'll keep our eye on it. That's so interesting though.

That's why I do my sauna blanket and not in enclosed sauna because it's not sustainable. And that's so funny because I recently picked up a new car in San Jose and then we drove it down. And I was so tired. And I was like, why? I mean, I just assumed that it was kind of the monotony of driving even though we broke it up but I did have that recirculation mode on so if you have a sunroof yes does it have that little button where you can angle yeah yeah so that's the best okay you actually can exchange more air with that little vent than even the whole sunroof open and you don't have like all the loudness and the annoyingness oh I always have that up because I like how it looks oh yeah from the outside okay well it's a good idea fact maybe you like how it looks because like

deep inside, you know it's good for you. Yes, it's that intuition. So air that can be purified. What are the most common, I don't know what you would call them pollutants, whether it's in our homes or offices? And what are some ways that the air that we breathe affects our overall health and well-being? So because you have like, your listeners are already health conscious and so are you, it makes the explanation a lot easier. the air is very similar to the food you eat or the water you drink. So it's like the ways that good stuff and bad stuff gets in us is either we eat it, we drink it, we breathe it, inhale it. It absorbs through our skin with products and stuff. Those are the four ways.

Aren't our lungs the quickest way for things to get into our bloodstream? I believe so. Because I remember I'm sober, but I remember every time I went to rehab years ago, we would learn that it was like lungs first and that's why people smoke things. or maybe injecting directly. I mean, that's a different conversation, but the lungs are such an efficient way for things to get into our bodies. When you go out for surgery, they gas mask you, and you're out of like, yeah, like seconds.

Yeah. Whereas if it was like a drink or food, it would take a while to like metabolize. So yeah, the lungs are a fast way. But like it's nice because the last thing people need is a whole another scary rabbit hole and a whole new black box of things to learn.

And if you're already sort of somewhere on your clean food, clean skin care products, cleaning products, water journey, then this just kind of like layers onto that. It's not this whole new world. Like you would never go to a pond at the side of the road. Fill it up, fill a glass of water in a pond, see that it's clear and drink it. Because you know that water is dirty. Or like eating off of a dirty countertop.

Like you know the bathroom has germs on the counter, but you don't see them with your eyes because we've learned that like surfaces can be dirty. water can be bad. So it's like food can put good things in our body and bad things. Same with water. And air is the same. So like pure air in its purest form is ideal. And then some of the things that can be in that air.

So if we test the air in an average bedroom, there'd be about 800,000 total particles floating around. And that would be between a little bit fancy, but 0.3 and 10 microns. And a micron is 1,000th of a millimeter. So it's so small, you can't even see it. And if we, like, right now had a little pump and we collected the air and looked it under a microscope, you're going to ski skin cells, duds, you know, hair, plant matter, mold spores, pollen, insect parts.

Insect parts are a big one. Lovely. There's no air without insect parts. Really? Well, they're so tiny. And then, you know, they get evaporated and they blow, like when they die, their parts are very small. And, like, think about the bugs we see, you know, there's more bugs that we can't see. So when you actually look at air under a microscope, there's a lot of stuff going on in there.

Gross. So it is a little gross. It is a little gross. Luckily, it's a controllable situation. Outside, the best air purifier is just being outdoors. The UV light from the sun, the wind, the trees. Unfortunately, in the Western world, we built our homes so tight that we left all that stuff outside. So we bring the like particles in, but then we trap them in our homes.

So the common culprits are usually mold, which is not always bad, but it's not great if you're not controlling it. Pollin, dust mites, pet dander, just all the fiber stuff. And then, yeah, the way that impacts, this is also like similar. So if someone has like autoimmune stuff, it's going to make their skin much worse. It's going to make respiratory asthma allergies. Sleep. Sleep is a huge thing. Like once you kind of get your air dialed in, like I'm here and out.

Ali for a few days, I brought my Jasper here and flying with it was very annoying. Wow. And I was in Omaha first. I flew with it there. I brought the Jasper there and thank God because we were in a beautiful Airbnb, but it was an old home and super moldy and nothing but five-star reviews. People commented on how it was clean, how the beds were comfortable and hiding in plain sight, this place stunk like mold. People just so are really aren't aware to this. And it was fun. I shot a little video. First thing I do when I get to Airbnb is run around and unplug all the air fresheners. And I recently used the term air makeup. And it's really resonated with a lot of people because if you look at the Google search trends, air freshener is like 20 times more search than like air purification or air cleaning. And that's

just air makeup, air cover up. When you smell those scents, air fresheners, there's no freshening going on. All you're doing is adding more chemicals to the air to mask things. So like it's all those little steps. If you smell those fragrances, get that thing unplugged right away so you can actually let your senses smell what's really there and not be fooled by this cover up stuff. But we have been taught to cover up and freshen, which is just so silly. Is there any safe air freshener? Like what about an essential oil diffuser or non-toxic candles or those little sticks that you put in? I mean, are those things better than, you know, traditional air fresheners? Yeah. There's definitely good things that you can do. Like if you if someone has like a lavender garden or a mint

garden and then if you have clean water, usually the diffusers and the humidifiers are problems because you aerosolize the water, that water that had minerals and chlorine and whatever else, you now vaporize it. So if you have clean water and like a good source of of mint, like the best things are usually annoying, right? Like if you had like simmering water with mint, or lavender and good quality water, but like not super practical. I think you could probably have wood sticks if there was like a really high quality oil. And your Jasper actually works as like a tester for it because some people, their skin products, their shampoos, their hairsprays, there, if you use like lysol or chlorox,

Jasper is going to get real angry. But if you use like branch basics or something, it won't pick it up at all. So you can kind of use it as like a toxic particle. It works as like an educating tool. to see what is potentially harmful. Like a clean candle, no problem. A bad candle that's going to spike it. And like sometimes these things smell good.

You have to kind of balance everything. Like we cook inside. It's convenient. Obviously from an air quality perspective, cooking indoors not so good. So it's nice that you live in L.A. where the climate is very forgiving. You can keep doors and windows open a lot

and bring a lot of like fresh air into your life. Whereas if it's like super hot or super cold, you want to seal up your house. Cooking. Yeah, cooking, cleaning. The big culprits are basically the cooking, the cleaning, the pets. Those are kind of the big three. Okay.

I was going to ask you, are there certain rooms in the house that are more offensive when it comes to air quality? It sounds like maybe your kitchen, if you're doing a lot of cooking inside and there's not good ventilation. And to your point here in L.A., it's great. You can just open all the doors and windows. And then maybe bathrooms, if you're using a lot of products. and hairsprays and things like that. What is kind of the order of worst quality to best quality? Worst quality is usually babies, nurseries.

Why is that? Because people use this. This is just a brand, but like diaper genie is a name of a thing. It's like a poop box. So it's supposed to be this airtight box. So airtight. Why does the baby's room stink like poop? Uh-huh.

So it was funny when my kid was a baby. she's four now and it stunk like poo every time I go into her room. So I asked Rachel, my wife, I was like, hey, can we maybe take these diapers directly outside? Don't know if this is good. And she was like, easy for you to say, you know, it's a lot of work and super annoying. So I was like, fine. Then tonight, let's put the diaper genie in our bedroom so we see what it feels like to sleep with that poop box in our room. She was like, no way.

I'm not sleeping with that thing in our room. I was like, got you. And then she realized like, oh, whoa. like, oops. I didn't really, we didn't really connect that dot. And it's like, if it smells like poo, it's because you're breathing it in. So it's really funny. People are trying to do all this like baby proof and stuff.

Meanwhile, little baby sleeping in a poop room. So baby's bedrooms usually have the worst air in the house. Bathrooms bad, cooking bad. Areas where there's cat litter boxes would be really bad. And then, like, if there's like, yeah, pets and poop. Pets poop and cooking. are sort of the big three for harmful things that we don't really want in our lungs and in our life. So how does that affect things like brain fog, just all of the health things?

Yeah, so from a longevity, and longevity and beauty very much are kind of one in the same, because if you do a bad job taking care of yourself, you age faster. So whether that's eating bad food or drinking bad water or just like putting bad products on your skin or not taking care of your skin, you're going to look older faster. And if you're looking older faster, what do you think is happening on the inside? So it's less about like air purifiers being some anti-aging tool. However, if you breathe less mold and less chemicals, so the way it can impact you is twofold. Polluted air accelerates wrinkles and because your skin is an organ, it can absorb things.

So if it's absorbing toxic air all day, it's creating unnecessary stress to your skin. So that's kind of the like the wrinkle visual side of things. And then the other side of that equation is just by making your body play defense, especially at nighttime. Third of your life is in bed. And the most unexpected thing was seeing how many people's seasonal allergies just vanish when they take care of their air. And it's because there's usually more pollen and allergens inside than outside.

So if you think about it, like you normally, you're under attack like 24 hours a day because you're going to bed at night and you're still breathing all that harmful particles. So it's so hard for your body to enter like the rest and recovery state, consolidate memories, process stress, recover physically because it's still playing defense. It's still breathing the mold, the dander, the pollen, all that stuff. So when you can dial in your sleep sanctuary and have super clean air in your bedroom and clean air in your home, your body gets this chance to rest and recover. I actually stopped using the word sleep as much as possible and I just call it healing.

time because like sleep it's like I like being awake a lot so I feel like I'm missing out on life when I go to sleep it's like a docile term but when I call it healing time it just makes it feel more aspirational for me like I'll just go do eight hours of healing time and then you know I'll get to work and do some more stressful things again tomorrow but yeah by by dialing in that situation it's like your body knows how to heal by itself if you let it and if you're giving it comically water and polluted air and bad food. We age faster because we're making ourselves sick. Yeah. I mean, when you talk about it, it seems so obvious. And yet, like we were saying in the beginning, it's just probably, I think it's something that people don't really think about. And even like

the water conversation, everyone's talking about like the water that you bathe in, not just the water that you drink and how your skin is an organ and how you need to filter the water you bathe in not only for your health, but also to your point, your appearance, if you're washing your face with, you know, this toxic water. And yet, like, nobody talks about the air. We're talking about it. Yes. We're talking about it. True. I mean, have you found it to be challenging to try to get people to care about this? No. Super easy. Really? Super easy. It's anyone who already cares about their health at all. It's like an obvious thing. This is not like, you know, EMF, for example. I'm EMF conscious. I'm EMF aware, but I'm also unsure. It's a little bit harder. Tell us about that a little bit,

about EMF. So I'm not an EMF expert, but I know more than most people because, you know, I'm in the whole healthy home world. So yeah, like naturally I could imagine that sleeping beside a microwave with it running all night would be bad. So, you know, the Wi-Fi at 20 feet, maybe like a lower version of that or like high-voltage power lines, bad. So going to bed at night with my AirPods. I do it still, but I'm like, this, this doesn't feel ideal. So I'm, I'm kind of conscious and aware in keeping my eye on it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all. It's like, food was like the first thing, food and exercise, like the first things we paid most attention to. Yeah. Then water's kind of behind and then area behind that. Now EMF's coming up. So I haven't really

had a difficult time with the air stuff because it's very, very relatable. And in just a few, also when people sleep with clean air, like I travel with my jaspbri. Do you know how? annoying it is to lug that box around. It sucks. It sucks. But I do it anyway because... Do you have it in a box carry on or do you put it in like a case? Luggage, box and luggage. It's so annoying to travel with and the box gets destroyed and it never makes it home. But when I got used to sleeping with really clean air, I can't now really like now it just like it feels like my little security system. When I went to the Airbnb and I know it's moldy, I did. did an Instagram video, I tested the air before, I tested it when I got there and I got it 90%

cleaner in 30 minutes. And you could just smell it as soon as you went in the room like, ah. And as soon as you left that room, like, ah, this house smells like mold. So the one downside to getting air aware is it's more air annoying when you start to pick up on these things. But no, like, you know what water is to fish, air is to people. Like how come the fish don't swim away from like the polluted waters to the clean waters it's like because they can't tell they're just living in it like we don't realize but like you can feel air when you move your hands around you can feel it and actually saw a really good YouTube video recently and there was a little old goldfish and two baby goldfish and the old goldfish swims by the baby goldfish and says how's the water boys

and then the little goldfish look at him and say what's water it's like fish are not necessarily aware of water. And until like super recently with, you know, science and gadgets, I wonder if humans even had a word for air or a concept of air or just like, we're in it, we can't see it. You know, we see smoke burning. So we identify that smoke, but we don't appreciate. Like air has currents. It's very much like water. And it's crazy to think that like it only exists between the sea and the sky. Even at like 30,000 feet, the air is already thinning out. There's not much left. So between like the core of the earth in space, there's this little teeny little tiny, layer of air that we can survive perfectly and that's like perfect for us and it's pretty

remarkable. And we take it for granted. And if we keep taking it for granted, it's going to, it's like if you don't take care of your health, it'll make you pay attention to it. Yeah. And people talking about climate change, it's like when people think about climate change, they're imagining like these natural disasters and these one-offs. But what it really is all about is that 400 I told you about, the CO2 is 400 outside. If we keep going down this path, that 400 becomes a 2000. So if you go into a little closet, you know, and you notice you can't breathe, it's too stuffy after a bit, or like in an elevator you feel suffocated. Imagine that was the outside air. Like, that's scary enough for me to care and you don't really need to look at much other than the outdoor. When they say carbon, what they mean is

carbon dioxide. So that number goes up. And like when you, I like a, so a couple hundred years ago, that 400 was like a 200. So it's like the outside air would have been so fresh. We can't even like conceive it. So I wish I could go back in time a few hundred years and, and, Take a breath. Yeah. And we can't adapt quickly enough, probably, at the rate that that carbon dioxide number is increasing, right? Ugh. I don't know.

Or maybe we're going to grow gills or something. I'm not sure. I think we're pretty remarkable at adapting. It would be neat if we can get that 400 going down instead of up. Are there any things that people can do if they are traveling and they can't bring their Jasper necessarily? That can help to offset a little bit of that. if they are staying in a place where they feel like, ooh, the air here is not great, aside from, like, opening the windows. And then also, what is the difference between, like, outdoor pollution and indoor pollution?

And is it sometimes better to keep the windows shut if you're in a place like, I mean, LA, I think, yeah. Well, why don't you tell me? Yeah, so it's twofold. The outdoor pollutants, it's like, I look at pollution in two categories, indoor pollution and outdoor pollution. Outdoor pollutants would be your car exhaust fumes, wildfire, smoke, allergies. inside is things more like cleaning products, chemicals, hairsprays, cooking, pet stuff. So they both become indoor pollution and outside pollution is less of a problem because of the amount of fresh air. Like at least in like here it's coastal. If this was like in a valley far from the ocean, it would be so much worse because everything would just like sit in that valley.

So I mean, it's hard not to be polluted when there's like 30 million people and or 10 million. however many people are here and all the cars and the exhaust and the manufacturing and the cooking, how many people are drying their clothes right now with their like Fabrizpods just venting out. So yeah, with this amount of people in this size area, it's definitely pretty bad. Okay, so let's talk about the process of purification because I was telling you before we started recording that when I set up my Jasper, I put it in my bedroom because I figured, you know, I'm not generally home that much during the day. When I am cooking, I have these like sliding glass doors everywhere that I can open.

But I'm most concerned about the air that I'm breathing when I'm sleeping. And when I first turned it on, the PM reading was like a 30. And within an hour, it got down to like, I want to say seven-ish. This is great. Yeah. So what is that number? Explain to everybody what that is, what that represents. And how does it go from a 30 to a 7?

So that's my favorite situation. There's nothing worse than when you plug it in. It's like already a four or five. Yeah. And it's on us to educate that like, so that number is called PM2.5. And that means particulate matter. That's 2.5 microns in size or smaller,

which is a fancy way of saying small enough to enter your lungs, your bloodstream. So in your case, it's because you had a humidifier on. If you have on a humidifier or a diffuser, that will likely happen. Often if someone plugs it in, It's just like there's so much off gassing in the home from furniture, paint.

It could be your neighbor across the street doing a renovation, and that air is just coming in your house. So in your case, the humidifier was the culprit. So you were like emitting stuff into the air and nothing was taking it out of the air. So it's great that you got it under 10. So under 10 is great. 30, not so good. But, I mean, yeah, you would have had it like that for some time. And then that, all that stuff gets embedded into clothing, into fibers, into,

you know, insulation. It's just anything in a house that's porous that could get wet can absorb air. So if you think about this pillow here, if I pour water on it, it's going to be soaked. That means air can absorb into it as well. But if you think about this sealed table that you would pour water on and you could just wipe it off, air can't get into that. So, yeah, PM2.5 is like the most important number to keep an eye on. So if someone's cooking or cleaning or whatever, it will spike occasionally.

but I think you made a good choice by putting it in your bedroom. Do you prefer to sleep with white noise or quiet? Brown noise. Brown noise, nice. Okay, good. You know your noises. Brown noise is the new white noise. Uh-huh.

I can't do quiet. I have tinnitus, which I got randomly like four years ago. And so ever since then, I need something. I have a little bit of it too. It's been in my family for a while. Tinnitus? Yeah. 24-7.

Oh, no. I actually, like when it first started happening, it was so jarring and I like went to the doctor. They put me on steroids. They tried to, you know, stop it, which you can't really do, I don't think. The best thing that I've done for it was acupuncture. That helps because I think that it definitely is exacerbated by stress and nervous system activation and all of that. But then this could be a totally different conversation. But I think the other good thing that I did for it was when I meditate and when it first started happening, I would try to to ignore it when I was meditating and then I just focused on it. So I tried to habituate my brain around the noise. So I don't really notice it that much anymore except for before my period it gets

super loud. Whoa. Yeah. So it's like when other stressors go off it like it pings. And it's same all the time. So mine just hits me in like knee like super high pitch for a couple minutes and then it dissipates. And like my grandfather's, his started like that by the time he was 90. It became chronic. Both my parents have it really bad and they've actually found lymphatic drainage stuff. Really? It's like my dad is so bad it made him deaf. So he has hearing aids and everything now and it's not that he can't hear. It's that the tinnitus is so loud that he can't hear over it. Wow. He's like switched cars three times in a year to like road noise and HVAC systems drive him nuts and everything. But yeah, the lymphatic drainage like every couple weeks when he goes there is hearing's like

80% better for a few weeks. Wow. So I'm not sure if it's the solution or like a band-aid, but there's some correlation there. I also prefer some kind of noise as well. So I realized and then I educate people on it more, but sleeping with the Jasper on fan speed two or three. So instead of like just the speaker, you can use the fan has a natural source of white or brown noise.

I actually should test the frequency to see which one it's considered. I feel like it would fall under the white noise camp, but I could be wrong. But also, then it's way more effective. So it's like most air purifiers have this little button on it that says sleep mode. But when you push it to turn off the light, the only thing you're putting to sleep is the purifier because it goes down to like 5% speed. So you can run yours on any speed and still have it dark, which is very helpful. So, yeah, I use mine on fan speed two or three at nighttime.

And it's like incredible how clean the air is. And when I actually go out for the day, I often turn mine up. Or if I'm going away for the weekend, I'll run it at full speed when I go out of town. That way all the pollen and the smoke and the mold that's in the environment, my house just is like constantly like this clean air box. The energy consumption is so low that if you run it, like a good sign is you shouldn't really have dust inside. Dust is an indoor problem.

There's no dust outside. If you go outside, you won't find dust. Dust is an indoor problem by like having dirty air and it can find space. So like I have a lot of chasper's, but we have no more dust in our home. Like never. Like after a couple months, maybe a very, very thin layer. But basically, yeah, it's dust free. So that's kind of a good benchmark of what the air is like in your house.

How does it purify the air? It's really simple. I was going to say in layman's terms, but it sounds like it's pretty straightforward. It is. It's a metal tube. It's a fan, a motor, a sensor. So like three things. And then a really good filter.

So no ozone or like we don't add stuff to the air. This is very much in addition by subtraction situation. So it's almost like paper, like synthetic paper, folded hundreds and hundreds of times. So has things passed through it, only the air can get through and everything else just like gets trapped. So it's literally just a filter. So any particle that is larger than air itself gets stuck. So air comes out the other side, but all those harmful things just get captured and trapped in the filter. And then after six months, it's like, actually, filters get better when they're a little bit dirty.

Because if they're dirty, it blocks more of the pores. But then there's eventually diminishing returns where the airflow is decreasing. That's why little tiny air purifiers don't do much. They just don't move enough air. Yeah. So it's fan, motor, filter. From the outside, you see this like metal thing and it's green. It looks complex, but there's very little to it.

And because of the potential of EMF issues, that's why we have no app, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth to be no EMF. Whereas no app used to be a bug. I'm like, I don't need more apps in my life. Same. Dishwashers have apps now. Yeah. So I'm like, this thing is never getting an app. I love that.

And I appreciate how simple it is. I mean, it's so simple. And the design is beautiful. And I do love that fan sound as well. So I'm going to sleep with that on too. Crank it. I'm going to crank it. I want to talk about mold a little bit. I just bought a new house. I haven't moved in yet, but I went through, you know, the whole process, all the inspections, everything. Everything.

Literally everything that you could possibly think of to be inspected was inspected. It's also on a hillside. So that was like a whole other thing in fire zones, you know, everything. But tons and tons of inspections. And they did find some mold because there's a wall that's subterranean. in because of the hill and there was some moisture there and so I have to have remediation done. But the mold specialist that came other than that, it was good. Talk about this. Is mold, does everybody have mold? Yes.

Okay. And is it sufficient to just have a purifier? It depends. Okay. Depends. So with mold, yes, it's everywhere. It's outside. It's inside.

There's hundreds of thousands of species of mold. It is an allergen. So I've seen families of five. Two people are like chronically sick and inflamed. One person's a little sick and someone notices at zero. It's kind of like pollen. Cedar fever. Like some people are horribly impacted.

Others aren't. Some species of mold are like aspergillus, for example, is super prevalent outside. But then there's like Stachy Brotteris is the stuff from like movies. It's like the thick blood, well, not just movies, but it's the most. but it's the most famous mold. It's the black mold that you think of growing. And like when someone says a house smells musty, that's just a nice word for moldy.

Smells musty, it's because there's mold. And I tell my friends, like, if you ever need to get out of a lease, let me know, I'll come over, I'll find the mold. Because like you always can find it. You just need to know where to look. So ventilation is your friend. And like, yeah, so I like to use the term mold load more because it's not binary.

Like, I've never heard of someone who did a mycotoxin urine or blood test and didn't have a bunch in their blood. It's just, it's present. It's in the environment. You can't get away from it. There's some amount of heavy metals. There's some amount of mold. Like, we live in a polluted world. And even if we weren't, like, it's naturally occurring.

So it depends on if you're impacted, if there's black stuff on the wall. I think filtering it out, if you have a tight home, like if you live in Costa Rica or something or in the rainforest and your doors or in your window, are open, there's tons of fresh air, not really worried about it. But if you're in Miami or Los Angeles or New York, it doesn't really matter, and you're closing in the box to keep the cool in in in the summer and the warm end in the winter, it's a good idea to be filtering your air. Just like you could drink tap water. You may not die tonight, but you know there's a bunch of bad stuff in there that you'd rather not have in your life. Air, mold, it's kind of the exact same. So it's great to hear that you did a thorough inspection, like most people get a home inspection done. And I got trained and

certified to be a home inspector just to see what the training's like. And in our training, we're taught not to look for mold. And the contract says, like, we don't look at mold, nothing environmental. And all you're trained to do as a home inspector is to look for things that cost money. So we're looking for the for the cracks in the drywall, for the age of the furnace, how old's the water heater? Does the roof need to be prepared? So you're looking for stuff that's going to hurt the wallet of the buyer. Not looking for stuff that's going to hurt the health. Another thing I think is so important, like getting a healthy home inspection done, you pay $5, six, seven, $800 to inspect the home, but the home was not built for, like, homes weren't

really built for the human health. They're built to be built fast, cheaply, and withstand the elements. There's no time when like the architect and the builder and the developer is strategizing, how do we make this house optimal for human health and longevity? performance. That's not part of the equation. So we now have to, just the way we would like renovate a bathroom or a kitchen to look the way we want, sometimes we have to retrofit the lungs of the home, which is your HVAC system or your purification, to ensure that this house is now like a good place to live. Yeah, HVAC was good. Thank God. Nice. That could be an expensive one. Everything. I mean, obviously there were like some little things here and there, but the mold was the one that was most

important to me because I was just like, I've heard horror stories. I'm sure we all have of people who buy a house or they rent a condo or an apartment and they start developing all these health issues and they can't figure it out and then they find out that they have mold. Yeah, so everybody has it. Like there was a saying in the business, mold is gold. And now, unfortunately, the every test is either like to get you a false negative or a false positive. You know, the restoration industry would rather find mold and tell you to gut your whole home. And now there's been education for functional medicine and naturopath. And they're trying to be kind of experts in as many things as possible.

But there's new things coming up faster than you just can't be an expert in everything. And the mold space is kind of new. So, you know, insurance wants to never talk about mold. The mold remediation guy, super moldy. And now they have all these tests. So naturopath goes and takes like a course and reads about mold. toxicity and how it can impact everything. It's like a chiropractor being like we can cure you. I mean, I've had some great experiences with Cairo, but it's like everything's the spine.

No matter what all roads lead to this adjustment will fix you. Yeah. And then the people on the mold train, it's like all things lead to mold. And it's not so simple. But because it's literally drywall removal with Hollywood theater with 50 times the price. And it's very much has a fear based. It's a scary thing. And then, you know, mold free coffee and mold free this and that. Yeah, chocolate. So a lot of that is just good marketing. Yeah.

Like sometimes the other stuff didn't have mold at all. So it's like anything else. You kind of have to be practical with it all. But there is a theater and an industry behind this. So it's not like this necessary, you know, evil conglomerate with this plan. But like the natural path is like, oh yeah, why wouldn't we do an ermie mold test and test your home for mold and do a pizza? and do a P test. Ah, wow, high number.

You need these 30 supplements. You need a son every day and we need to gut your whole house. Well, like, you could gut your house and put it all back. The mold's going to be back in six or seven months. Unless, like, you have a leak or something

or there was a flood to remediate, but they're homes. They're going to have wear and tear. They're eventually going to be moldy, which is why, unless you have, like, a big problem, you know, the solution of a few thousand dollars on a few air purifiers,

it seems expensive compared to not having them, but compared to like hundreds of thousands of dollars, of ripping your whole house apart. It's actually pretty cheap way to go about it. I'm going to go to my new house and take my Jasper and put it in every room. We can get you some more. Yeah. When I move in, for sure. Once I move in, because I just closed last week. And thank you. And now I'm starting the remodeling process. So hopefully fall.

Okay. So if you can, so you're doing a bunch of work. Okay. So ideally, before you move in, if you can have like at least ideally a two week or more arrow period. Okay. So like when you do everything, leave literally every window in the house open. Okay. Like if you're there in the day, like let the house breathe. And even when you get new furniture for the house, same thing. Because all that furniture, the paint, the materials, the drywall, it all needs to off

gas and breathe. And they don't allow the necessary time for things to off gas and factories and warehouse. They want to make it as quickly as possible. Seal it up. Ship it to you. contractor puts it in and now you live with it and breathe all that off gassing. So if you can have like a venting out period, that would be really ideal. Like if someone's getting like a new bed or a couch and they can let it sit in the garage or in a bedroom with doors open for a few days or windows

open, this is a good idea. So it's like letting the house breathe is so trying to have some buffer between when you need to be out of your current place and when you move into that place, if you can have a little bit of leeway to let things breathe. And even when your contractors are there, You have the perfect climate for it here. Yeah. Like windows open all the time. Yeah. And the house is so great not to make this about my house, but every room has like double doors that go out to these outdoor areas and sliding doors everywhere.

And that's why I bought it because it's like so indoor outdoor and there's Jasmine growing everywhere outside. So it smells good inside. I don't need to have air freshener. Like it's just the ideal California home. Yeah. It's so nice. I haven't spent much time in California. Yeah.

It's beautiful. And I'm shocked how nice it is here. Yeah. Really? Yeah. When's the last time you were here? When I was 24, I did a road trip by myself from San Fran to L.A. Okay.

And other than that, like, I've flown in for like an event where I've landed in L.A.X and gone to Ohio for a weekend. But, like, I was in Topanga Canyon yesterday. Yeah, Topanga is so cool. I didn't know there was, like, beautiful mountains and giant trees everywhere here. I'm in Austin and it's like kind of naturey. Yeah. But it's not like this.

Yeah. Thank you. I feel like everybody is migrating from here to Austin. And obviously there are other reasons I think why some people are doing that. But yes, California is beautiful. LA is beautiful. Yeah. And there's so many different little bubbles.

It's not just like L.A. Seems like it's not one thing. No, no. You would have Venice. It's one thing. Santa Monica is a different thing. Malibu is a different thing. Topanga is a different thing.

It's all so many different little pockets. So, well, this is fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge with everybody. Do you have a code that you often use for people? Blonde. Blonde? Well, it's all yours. No one's taking that one.

So we don't really do Google ads. We don't do Facebook ads. We don't do anything like that. So, like my whole mission and vision is to come, have good conversations like this with health and wellness aware audiences and sort of move air a little bit closer to water and elevate it one little bit at a time. And because we don't, like, run fancy ads on Facebook and Google, the way we can address that is by giving really great deals to, your listeners. Amazing. So Code Blonde.

To anyone who's listening today, for the first week, Code Blonde will be a $200 off discount for one week. And then after that week, it will forever always be $100 off. But for your most loyal listeners who tune in in the first few days, there'll be a $200 off discount.

And we have something called the life-changing guarantee. So if anybody buys it, and it's not, forget about anything other than how you feel. If it's not an obvious no-brainer, then what we do is we send you a shipping label, We pay for the shipping to take it back.

We give 100% refund because if it's not moving the needle forward with your health and making you feel way better, then I would rather you spend that money on something else. So anyway, Code Blonde starting today for the first week and then it'll go from $200 off to $100 off. And it would be great to pass that to your listeners. Thank you so much. And I can just say having one myself, it's like a peace of mind thing too. I mean, aside from the benefits of how I feel. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's like one last thing that I have to worry about. The laziest way to be healthy. Yeah, it's so true. Let me know. When it's new house time, we will get you equipped. Thank you so much. Thank you again for coming on. Thanks for having me.

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