1071: Mike Feldstein | The Hidden Crisis of Indoor Air Pollution

1071: Mike Feldstein | The Hidden Crisis of Indoor Air Pollution

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show

[00:00:02] Mike Feldstein: After a rainy day, the mold levels are a hundred x what a house normally would be. The thing is outside, we got the sun. We have the most amazing UV light of all time. We have the wind, basically the wind and the sun and the trees are the most incredible air filter ever, but we left that shit outside.

[00:00:22] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show, my friend Mike Feldstein, we're doing a deep dive on indoor air quality. I know it's kind of a weird niche topic, it's also a roundabout way.

He ended up here. I was researching air filters and then I got into air quality, and then I got introduced to a bunch of people who know a lot about mold and all this stuff, and everybody just pointed me back to Mike, who I already knew. From a previous business that he was running. It turns out he really knows his stuff when it comes to air quality.

So he jumped on the phone and I was just like, wait, wait, wait. We should be recording this conversation. So he flew out here and here we're doing a show, and this is a bit of a niche topic. Again, maybe not our usual kind of conversation here on this podcast, but I really think that the air we and our children breathe is massively important.

Most filters that people have in their homes are kind of like fans with a towel in front of it, and there are simple fixes for a lot of issues that can actually cause some pretty serious problems over time. So while I will be. Sort of shamelessly shilling, Mike's brand of Jasper Air cleaner here. It's not something that you have to buy in order to get a lot of the benefits from making changes around your house to get cleaner air.

Like I said, I gotta warn you, I'm gonna shill pretty hard for this air purifier. I love it. It's one of the reasons we're doing the episode. 'cause I've had these for a while and they're just amazing. It's interesting air quality info. It's the best product out there. I've tried every brand of air cleaner.

I've had my indoor air tested afterwards, and Jasper was actually the clear winner. I'm not a lab that was good enough for me. So here we go with Mike Feldstein.

Humans have built in temperature and humidity sensors, and I recently read that humans are better at smelling fresh rain. And fresh water than sharks are at detecting blood in the water. Have you heard that? The first part? Yes. The second part, no. I almost don't believe it, but it was like a credible source.

It was like a science magazine, which is, I mean, sharks basically have superhero level abilities to detect blood in the water. So you, I You wouldn't think humans be good won't bears and other animals can like hound dogs. That's true. They do it in the air. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that.

The reason this is relevant at all, before we lose the audience, what we don't seem to have is air quality detectors. Like I will be in a place and I'll be like, eh, that's fine. But then like the Jasper, the air filter that's right there, I don't know if that's on camera. I assume it is. That thing will turn orange and I'm like, oh yeah, my wife's cooking something.

But unless it's like fish or bacon, I basically can't tell. And unless there's a wildfire and the windows are open, I can't tell. So I, it's interesting because you would think that like we would need air quality detectors, especially with all the studies that show. Not just athletics, but even like people who play chess, when there's bad air, they get worse at making whatever calculations they have to make.

So it's, it's like it's SAT scores too. SAT scores. Yep. Which is great. 'cause we're in like asbestos filled school rooms with windows closed or with windows open at a lawnmower outside taking that test.

[00:03:56] Mike Feldstein: Yeah. So I think we do have air quality detectors and we just don't have it built in yet. So like we, we don't have access to it.

Okay. We don't have the air awareness to use these sensors. So if you think about water growing up, you would just drink water from the tap. And then when you think about taste, you're like, Hmm, that hose water did taste kind of plasticy. Yeah. And mely and everything. And then you discover, especially in the last decade, filtered water.

And you're like, oh wait. Once you start drinking filtered water and then you go back to tap, all of a sudden the tap water tastes like chlorine. It tastes like chemicals. It tastes like metal.

[00:04:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. My wife flew back to Michigan where I grew up and she wanted water. We didn't have filtered water, so I gave her a regular glass of water and she wouldn't drink it.

And I was like, what a freaking diva. And then I drank it and I was like, this tastes like if you accidentally drink water at the swimming pool except slightly cleaner. And it's just, it's, it was horrible. And I grew up drinking just gallons of that. Straight outta the tap. Yeah, exactly. '

[00:04:52] Mike Feldstein: cause so, because you didn't even notice it.

Right. So because you didn't have the water awareness Yeah. You weren't able to leverage your taste buds to even navigate that. But now that you have calibrated, I, I like to say calibrated. Yeah. We got that reverse osmosis back there and all of a sudden that water tastes really good, but pool water, tap water.

So the taste lets you realize like, this is not good. The same way like smell, if you smell a pooey diaper or a bunch of garbage or a wet dog, you're like, this doesn't smell very good. Right. Right. So the smell can allow you to navigate certain situations. If it smells smoky, you're like, we need to get out of here.

Yeah. It's like a safety thing.

[00:05:28] Jordan Harbinger: Unless you're in California, that's just background.

[00:05:31] Mike Feldstein: Just regular baseline smoke. Background smoke.

[00:05:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Just baseline smoke. Maybe Canada now

[00:05:35] Mike Feldstein: too, I don't know. So if you take five people and we all go outside and we all have to write down the temperature on a piece of paper and then we all look at once, and I've done this experiment a bunch of times.

Typically we're all gonna guess within like a few degrees at most, usually five. Very unlikely. I would guess that it's 95 degrees out and you'd think it's 67, right? That's true. Yeah. So that's because you've calibrated your temperature sensors. Mm-Hmm. By looking at the weather every day, looking at the thermostat every day.

Like right now inside here it feels like 68 to 70 range. Sure. Like we could tell, 'cause like we've calibrated that if you go into a desert versus a rainforest, you haven't calibrated your relative humidity sensors. Yeah. But you can feel dry versus humid. Yeah. And the same thing holds true for air. So yesterday I walked into, when I got to the hotel here in San Jose.

One step in the lobby, I go mold. Yeah. Oh really? Wow. Instantly. I'm like, for us, what's the room gonna be like? You go to the elevator, you're like, disgusting. Carpet, smoke, VOCs, pollen. I go in my room. Of course the windows don't open. Yeah. 'cause buildings are designed for energy efficiency. Yeah. And that sucked.

So I went to Target. I bought a horrible air purifier. Oh no. It didn't do great, but it did something.

[00:06:46] Jordan Harbinger: What do you think? So you went to Target and bought an air purifier, and do, are you gonna bring it home or are you just gonna like, leave it at the hotel or return it? I returned it though already. Yeah,

[00:06:54] Mike Feldstein: I already returned it.

Sorry. Target, I, I can't be traveling around with that thing. No. I often fly with Jasper, but it's a little bit too big for

[00:06:59] Jordan Harbinger: that. Yeah. It's, uh, again, if it's on, if you're watching us on YouTube, what do you compare the size of that thing to? Like, it's not, it's not portable.

[00:07:07] Mike Feldstein: It's like a cylinder trash can.

Yes. It's about 30 inches tall. Yeah. About a foot in diameter. But like realistically, it's the same footprint as most air purifiers. It's just a little taller. Yeah. And like it's not taking up useful space in your

[00:07:19] Jordan Harbinger: house. No, it's not. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying you can't really, like if you brought that on a plane, you couldn't bring any clothing.

I have. I've traveled.

[00:07:26] Mike Feldstein: No,

[00:07:26] Jordan Harbinger: dude, I

[00:07:27] Mike Feldstein: get a dolly, like I had three locations on my trip. Mm-Hmm. And the box was just like falling apart more and more and more. So I like to do it if I know someone in that city. Yeah. And then I can like give it to them, Uber it to them before I go home. But yeah, it's, so the number one request we get by far is why don't you guys make a travel size Jasper?

Is that even possible though? It's not. And I'm like, guys, I can't. That's why it's big. Yeah. When they're small, they don't work very good. They'd have to be on the loudest speed all the time. So what I'm trying to do instead is I didn't bring it on this trip, but usually when I go to a hotel, I bring all my air quality testing equipment and I film myself testing the air.

So I've been building up this database for a couple years now. Oh wow. Eventually I want to start Jasper List where we basically, I, every hotel I go to in Airbnb, yeah. I show people what the air is like. I recently was at a hotel in Santa Monica called Ambrose. It had amazing air. It was the first time we went to a hotel that actually had great air.

I don't think it had carpets either. Really? So, so like I don't think we should have to travel with air purifiers or filtered water. Yeah, that's a good point. Our own bed. That's a good point. I think hotels, like, why is it on me? The hotel is in the sleep business. Yeah. Sleep as a service. They're supposed to give you a comfortable bed.

Like if it didn't get cool, you shouldn't travel with your own air conditioner. So it's not okay to go to a hotel and have horrible air. So I'm like, I'd rather put pressure top down, bottom up, raise awareness. So like next week or 10 days from now, I'm going to a hotel event. Just to like scream from the top of my lungs that like, you guys are giving your guests the worst air ever.

And it's one of two things. Either they're not aware or they don't care. Yeah. But once a few hotels start providing people with way better sleep, it's

[00:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: gonna be something that they all have to do. You're gonna have a hotel that says like, clean air guarantee, we guarantee less than pm. I don't know, like 0.01 6:00 PM 2.5.

And then people are, who know what that means are actually gonna care because there's nothing grosser than walking into a hotel and you smell that like powder crap that they put on the carpet to clean it. And it's just, you know, you're kicking that up into the air and all it is is like to absorb barf and urine smells from the previous guests.

[00:09:26] Mike Feldstein: Dude, when I was in, so my background was in mold remediation, fire restoration, floods, hurricane toxic cleanups. Yeah. And in the course for fire restoration, I remember the, the big saying that goes when you're done cleaning the house before you leave. They would ask us to spray lemon deodorizers, a very chemical lemon deodorizer all over the house for mold, floods and fires.

Okay. Because they said if the home smells clean, the customer will assume it is clean. Yikes. So there's so much wrong with that. If you think so. That was in the training. Yeah. For me. Has a wildfire mold and flood guy. They go, perception is reality, and the house must smell clean. They go, if the house doesn't smell clean, they're gonna question the integrity of your work.

So after we do all of our extra cleaning, we had these pump bottles that we would spray lemon. And I wasn't even thinking, I didn't have the awareness back then. I'm like, oh, we're cleaning the mold and adding lemon, lemon chemical instead. Right. No fun fact. There was no lemons. No, no lemons were used in the making of this lemon scented toxic spray.

And if you think about all of the general products that you'd buy at a big box store to clean your house, they all have a ton of fragrance because they want it to smell clean. Once you have that shift and you realize, same thing with deodorants, cleaning products, when you realize this is not clean. This is actually, I call, so the term I have for air fresheners is air makeup.

[00:10:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I learned this kind of the hard way too. I went to Japan and I for snowboarding and I have these pads 'cause I fall, 'cause I'm new, right? And they stink after like, you know, one day or so. And I was like, I need a spray that washes these. 'cause they, they're hand washable. I'm not gonna, I just look, I'm not gonna do that.

Right. I need them to be cleaned by whatever spray. So I, I bought a product, I won't say the name, but it rhymes with, uh, pleb sneeze. And uh, I sprayed it all over and I was like, wow, this is amazing. How does this clean stuff so efficiently? And I looked it up and what it does is it disables your ability to smell what's on the thing.

So I was like, oh. So all the gross stuff is still on here. A chemical that just disables my noses ability to tell that it stinks. I don't know how I feel about that. As soon as

[00:11:31] Mike Feldstein: I get in

[00:11:32] Jordan Harbinger: the

[00:11:32] Mike Feldstein: Uber gross, like Ubers are probably the worst air of all. Oh yeah. You get in there chunky Christmas tree thing. I'm the fan.

As soon as I get in the Uber, I'm always, I'm like, can you please take out the, they're like, I do. I do that too. They're very confused. I'm like, does, does everybody not ask this? Like, are, are you okay? I tell them I'm allergic to it. Me too. Then they're like, oh, sorry. Sorry. I tell 'em it gives me headaches.

Yeah. And like when I'm in Austin and it's 112 degrees out and I open them to ask them to crack the windows, they don't like that very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, yeah, so once you kind of like as soon as you go to an Airbnb, I walk around, I unplug every single air fresher. Good air smells like nothing.

You know, the smell of trees and rain and natural smells. This is not what it smells like inside. Right? So if anything, that's what I bring it back to. The first thing you said. There is an ability which I've, I can tell you what the carbon dioxide is. Mm-Hmm. Pretty precisely in this house. I would say right now it's between six and 700.

And I have my CO2 detector. We'll check

[00:12:22] Jordan Harbinger: after. Yeah, I wanna check it. I, I was gonna buy some and I wanted, I was waiting for you to come by to ask for your recommendation because when I record a lot in my studio, there's an, that's the door over here that it's off camera, but there's a soundproof door and it's also air sealed.

Uh, there's an a return, but it's like crappy. I get really tired in there if I'm in there for a long time. Granted, I'm doing voice acting and recording the show and stuff like that, but I can't help but think my CO2 is just like off the charts because I'm not getting any fresh air in there. So I start to feel really sleepy and then I'll come in here and I feel a lot better after a really short period of time.

And I, one, look, I'm working way harder in there 'cause I'm literally like making video game monster voices or, or doing this talk show in there. So that's part of it. But I really, I do suspect that after a long enough time chatting in there, I'm just inhaling my own stank breath at some point. And that's, and there's no fresh air at

[00:13:12] Mike Feldstein: all.

So CO2, which is short for carbon dioxide, unfortunately this is not something an air purifier will solve. You can't filter CO2 out of the air. The only way to deal with CO2 is ventilation. However, there's a few crazy things. So first of all, a lot of people who are, have a sauna practice and they find themselves after the sauna.

It's so hot, it's been five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and they're dying of heat. I've measured the CO2 in a lot of saunas. So good to set baseline here. Outdoor. CO2 is 400. Okay. That's the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's like normal slash good. Right. That's just what it is outside. I see. So that's as good as it's gonna get.

Yeah. Apparently several hundred years ago it was like 200. So we can't even conceive. I see. So when they talk about like climate change, global warming, all this stuff you picture like natural disasters and stuff, it doesn't really get people motivated to make a difference when they talk about carbon in the atmosphere.

That 400 number's going up. Yeah. So think about it, if, if 13 or 1400 is the CO2 I'll level set here, so four hundred's outside. So when you're like in a building and you're like, I gotta go outside and get a breath of fresh air. Mm-Hmm. What your body's saying is like the carbon dioxide in my blood and in in my lungs is way too high.

So you need to go get a breath of fresh air. You could go outside, it could be a pretty polluted day outside, but it'd still be like, oh yeah, it's gonna be the easiest breath to take. Interesting. Because you've been in this co high CO2 environment indoors fairly normal. 600 to 800, so it's almost twice as much as outside.

Yeah. But that's not horrible. Okay. 600 to 800. It's okay. Once you hit a thousand, we're starting to get into brain fog. Fatigue. SAT scores are dropping once you get into 1500, 2000. It's like the word that the human uses to describe high CO2 is stuffy. So if somebody ever says it's stuffy in here, that's true.

Yeah. I'm always like, the carbon dioxide is high here. Yeah, that's interesting. We gotta go outside. So saunas can get up to 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 in 'cause people are breathing heavily. Is that why? Or you're breathing? It's a tiny box that's designed not to breathe. That's true. That's how it heats up very quickly.

So most saunas don't have good airflow at all. And if they did, they wouldn't heat as well. This is a solvable problem. You need two vents at the bottom. But that's why often it's unbearable and uncomfortable. It's not just the heat. Hmm. It's the carbon dioxide.

[00:15:25] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. I never, I never think about carbon dioxide.

Probably nobody does. That's, I'm so interested to find out with your equipment.

[00:15:32] Mike Feldstein: So I have one in my bag. I

[00:15:32] Jordan Harbinger: I take it

[00:15:33] Mike Feldstein: everywhere I go. Yeah. The battery lasts four years in a car. Normal CO 2 6, 700 ish. If you hit that recirculate button in your car, within minutes, it's gonna be 3000 plus. So if you're ever, I always use that too.

If you're on like a, a highway dr. A drive, long drive, you're getting exhausted. You're like, I just need to open the window to get some cooler air. It's like, no, you are suffocating from 75

[00:15:55] Jordan Harbinger: some fresh, I 75, uh, highway 10, whatever,

[00:15:58] Mike Feldstein: air. Yeah. So it's just like, it's, this is an air awareness situation. Yeah.

Because once you know, you use that button more sparingly, you crack the window, you crack the door. When I was living in Kelowna, British Columbia, I had air sensors. So luckily I was able to diagnose this, but I was sleeping 10 hours a night. Waking up exhausted every single day. I was gonna say that sounds amazing, but not.

No, no, not the last one. Waking up exhausted. Yeah. And turns out our CO2 is going from 600 to 3,500 at night because we had, um, baseboard heaters and heat pumps. We didn't have a, uh, HVAC system. I see. So we closed the door at night to keep the cats out and the CO2 would get so high. So we were just like starving for oxygen, getting pumped with CO2.

The exciting thing about this, once we were aware we could crack the window, except for during wildfire season. Yes. But leaving the en suite door open and the bathroom fan on at night was enough ventilation to keep it under 900. So it's interesting 'cause I had this like, very critical health situation.

Yeah. And one little button using my bathroom fan was the most life-changing thing. That's

[00:17:03] Jordan Harbinger: shocking. Actually, I, I should probably get a CO2 tester. Maybe I'll find a good one on Amazon or get a recommendation video. I use one called the air net four. Yeah. I'll put put A-R-A-N-E-T four. I'll link it in the show notes.

We'll get the exact model so people can like crack it and buy it. This house is relatively new. We tested the air a year or two after moving in and it turned out to be, I won't say really crappy, but like medium crappy. And it wasn't because we had a ton of dust or anything, it, it was just largely because of, I think the guy, this is like a professional, not, I didn't just buy some thing, it was California wildfires.

And just having people living in the house just kind of does that, but also like an HVAC pan didn't drain properly, so it basically was like a bed for mold. And that was just being blown in that from there into this room and stuff like that. And what was interesting though, is this house is of course painted.

There's stuff glued onto whatever, you know, from the contractors, but we weren't able to move in right away because of permit issues. And we had four to six months or more. I, I don't remember that. We couldn't live in it. We were living next door. So it was actually lucky because all of the offgassing kind of happened.

Not all most happened during that time. So when we moved in, nothing stank. Like we didn't that plastic heat smell, no new car smell, no new car smell. And it was this giant window back here also off camera, this door window. We were waiting for that to come in from Taiwan and it had gotten destroyed in shipping and so they had to send us another one.

And this was just open, which is fine 'cause it's California and Rain can't get in here. But it was all open. So everything in the house, all the paint, all the wiring, all the whatever, pipe glue, all of that just blew out there for four to six months. And when we moved in it was fine. So when the guy tested the air, he's like, this is a new house.

It's actually pretty good because you don't have, and I can't remember, it's v these chemicals and stuff. Yeah. So what are VOCs again? Tell us what these are.

[00:18:58] Mike Feldstein: So I'm very happy for you that you had this experience. Because, so VOCs are volatile organic compounds and this is the cap all name. Mm-Hmm. For thousands of different chemicals.

So people wanna just like think, you know, formaldehyde would be a very popular one, benzene, tolling. But there's thousands of different VOCs. And I can tell you actually your air in this house is quite good. That's good. My internal air quality detectors well are very pleased. We have air filters in every single room.

Uh, and that helps. But it's funny 'cause you know, we talk about just like testing for air or testing for water, as if there's only one thing to test for. You know, I did air quality and water testing for a decade. We have to specifically test, it's like when you get your, you know, I used to just get my blood test and then only the last few years I'm like tested for what?

Yeah. Turns out they were only testing for six things right now you like get tested for hundreds of things. Yeah, they're like, your blood's fine. I just figured it was the blood test. Right. That was testing for all things blood. It wasn't the case at all. Now. It was like a sliver. And what was considered.

Good enough was actually not great at all. So the same kind of things apply to our house. So when you look at like what are the particles like, there's tons. And of course you have to be practical. You can't test for everything. So in a new home, every single thing in this home would off gas. So the new car smell dissipates after some time.

New car smell is not necessarily great. No. So we associate it with a good smell because it's an exciting

[00:20:27] Jordan Harbinger: new

[00:20:27] Mike Feldstein: purchase.

[00:20:27] Jordan Harbinger: I remember a long time ago my uncle had a can of new car smell air freshener in his car. And I was just 20, 20 hindsight, like 30 years later. Seemed awesome at the time. Probably pretty gross and not something you should actually spray in your car.

'cause you're right, new car smell is like that rubber crap that they used to make dashboards out of, uh, in the eighties and nineties. I think they may still use that, I'm not sure. But like, you know, a new Ford Topaz. That's just plastic offgassing in your face and couldn't close space and wouldn't be surprised

[00:20:56] Mike Feldstein: if they're doing extra stuff to enhance that smell.

Oh yeah. Just like I was doing in restoration with the lemony stuff, they'd probably Jack put a bunch of new car smell in the filter. Right?

[00:21:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:21:05] Mike Feldstein: So with the house, if you think about everything here, everything was manufactured somewhere. Yeah. Whether it was these chairs, the table, the flooring, the windows, the bed, the couch, everything was manufactured.

And when you manufacture stuff, the goal is make it, pack it, ship it, then the distributor gets it. Their goal is sell it. So if only our food was so fresh, but the time that it, this stuff goes from like finish manufacturing in a factory in China to in your home to off-gas. Also, once they're done manufacturing it, it's instantly sealed.

Yeah. So it doesn't get, you know, moldy or damaged in, in transit. So what happens is the off-gassing process takes place in our home.

[00:21:44] Jordan Harbinger: In your home. Yeah. So if you buy, like even think about

[00:21:46] Mike Feldstein: this, if somebody buys a new couch, often Jasper will pick up right away. Yeah. Because it's the, or a new bed. Ooh, that new bed smell, that new mattress smell called formaldehyde, they don't tell you that part.

And uh, so yeah, with this house, it's really great that you got to do that. I always tell people when they're setting up their baby's nurseries to don't wait till the last minute to paint. Oh, I new crib. Think about that. New furniture like babies

[00:22:08] Jordan Harbinger: do. Next two weeks, let's paint a giant rainbows and stuff on the wall.

Quick. Quick. Yeah. With latex paint.

[00:22:13] Mike Feldstein: And why are we even making, it's like, do you think your baby cares about the thousand dollars crib and the wallpaper? Yeah. Your baby can't even see hardly for the first couple. So it's like, are you doing it for the baby or are you doing it for yourself? And it's like, are you doing it for yourself or are you doing it for Instagram?

For the perception?

[00:22:29] Jordan Harbinger: It's true,

[00:22:30] Mike Feldstein: like it's your baby's room. This is not a place that necessarily needs to be. Beautified and I like to buy new stuff. Yeah. But I tell people when you're setting up a nursery, if you can, a secondhand crib and a secondhand dresser means they've already off casted for you.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but it's a great idea. Open the windows, let that nursery breathe. And while I'm on the topic of nurseries, diaper pales, did we have one of those?

[00:22:56] Jordan Harbinger: I wanna say we just threw 'em in the garbage and then took the garbage out more often. Well, you are

[00:22:59] Mike Feldstein: a rare breed.

And that is you, you're doing good stuff on the air fry. Yeah.

[00:23:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That was an accident. I, I think we just didn't want to sleep with a room full of poopy diapers. You had the baby in your room. You had the baby in a room. Yeah. So you had that, luckily

[00:23:10] Mike Feldstein: you had that awareness. Yeah. It stak a lot of folks. Was she?

You get the nursery, you buy a diaper pale. It's like, first of all, if the thing was airtight, your room wouldn't smell like poop. It wouldn't stink. I've tested the air in a number of nurseries. The bacteria levels are like, evacuate the building levels. So fun story. And then they leave their baby and they're like, goodnight.

And they go in their clean, clean room and sleep. Rachel is, is my wife's name. And when Aria, it's like four years ago, I was like, R it smells like poo in here. Like can you please take the diapers directly outside? Yeah. And she's like, easy for you to say 20 diapers a day. This hallway's really long. Yeah. I have all these things in my mind.

Like this is just way more convenient. We put it out there for a while in the patio, so I was like, has a rite of passage tonight, Rachel, let's put the diaper pale in our bedroom and I'm sleeping on the couch tonight. Mm-Hmm. And she's like, Ew, no, I'm not sleeping with that diaper. Pale in in our bedroom, but, but my infant will.

So, but once she, she had that realization for herself. Yeah, it was done. And so an average adult breathes between 10 and 20,000 times per day. Oh wow. And they give you stats like, I will breathe. I'm like, people don't all breathe the same

[00:24:15] Jordan Harbinger: amount. I'm sure I breathe more 'cause I spend hours outside walking and talking on the phone.

You want me, my job is with my voice. I gotta inhale lot. Way more than people normally do. I think so.

[00:24:25] Mike Feldstein: An adult's breathing 10 to 20,000 times a day. Babies breathe 60,000 times a day. Their respiratory rate is way higher. Their lungs are tiny. Yeah. Their immune systems aren't developed. Their filtration and their body's filtration systems aren't yet developed.

So baby can't talk yet. Right? So we, we paint brand new crib. Close the door, shut the window, put the poop beside their head. Right. Good night. Good night. Oh, that's so gross. No wonder baby. Baby sleeping 18 hours a day and like it's so gross. So that's why I bring everything here back to I wish Jasper was the ultimate solution for everything I do.

Yeah. Well, I don't. Air awareness is the actual solution. 'cause once you, you realize, and going back to the thing you were saying about like the shark and our abilities to smell. If we put a poopy diaper pretty much anywhere in this house and I blindfolded you and I tied, I could find it. You would find it.

I could find it. Yeah. So you also can smell through air currents. Yeah. We have these crazy abilities that we just aren't really in tune with. And once you realize, like if it smells like poop, it is poo. Like when you smell a thing, it's 'cause that thing's going inside you via air. That's

[00:25:26] Jordan Harbinger: the worst realization when you go to a public restroom and you're like, there's just little bits of strangers.

Fecal matter just landing inside my nose and on my tongue or like

[00:25:35] Mike Feldstein: driving down the road. You're like, smells like asphalt, smells like rubber tires. I'm like, how poop. No, no, it's 'cause you're, you're, you're not, instead of drinking it right now, you're breathing it. Yeah. Not that different. Still tasting it.

And then if it smells like pooh, it is poof, it's pooh, it's bacteria and e coli and intact. So when you can kind of like trust your nose to navigate your health a little bit more and get more air aware and. And air sensitive all of us. And like the more healthier choices that you start making. And I wanna make sure we, like, there's a lot of free stuff that people can do instantly in their home like today to get a lot of benefits.

So I wanna make sure we touch on it a little

[00:26:09] Jordan Harbinger: bit. We will. I know we're, we are going a little bit outta the order that I had assumed, but you know, that's what conversations do. But I, I'm curious, used to be in the disaster chasing business, so when there was a flood or a giant fire, you were on the scene and I'm curious kind of what you were doing.

You said remediation, I don't know if everybody knows what that means. Yeah. But it sounds a little bit like a miserable scene 'cause you're kind of going into like the ruins of people's lives like this. You're not in my house here in enjoying my charming company. You're in like the ruins of my home with my children's photos that are half burned and like water damage.

And all my belongings that I can no longer use are here. And you're like getting rid of them and. Trying to clean up my house so that maybe it's livable again, like that's, it sounds like a rough thing to do for a living and bad for you. 'cause you're, you're there, I'm gone. 'cause it's an unhealthy place to live and you're just like working in there for two months.

Some people are running from the fire and

[00:26:59] Mike Feldstein: others are running towards it. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So I was never in the army, so I never went to a war zone. I never had bullets flag my way, but this feels as close to anything that I could experience, has wartime mode, so you go into a disaster zone. Also, another thing that people don't realize is often there's no power, uh, that makes sense.

When, when there's a, a citywide flood or fire, the power gets shut off.

[00:27:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

[00:27:25] Mike Feldstein: Hotels are basically all sold out. Yeah. Or shut down. There's basically no rental vehicles. The infrastructure of the city is not really operationalized yet. So in addition to dealing with thero, you're also kind of like on a camping trip.

The first responders who are like getting infrastructure going again. Sure. We would get in and often it's like military blocks it off. You know, civilians aren't allowed in just showing my restoration business card was like, you're all access clear. That's crazy. Like, oh, I'm gonna go clean up some of this mess.

And they're just like, whatever. Go ahead bro. The first thing to restore is gas stations, post office, grocery store and hospital water treatment plant. I'm missing a few other things. Sure, yeah. But like essential infrastructure. Sure. Then once those things are done, sometimes people are evacuated most of the time in the big disasters, but not all the time.

So you have, you know, thousands of homes burned down. Every breath you take is just like ash piles kind of flying all over the place. And it's not like we were making a campfire and it was just wood and s'mores when thousands of homes burnt. Yeah. It's like WD 40 cans and paint in the garage. Every car you drive down a street and all you see is chimney stacks.

'cause that's the last thing standing in a home. So all the tires from cars, all the roof shingles, which are made outta like tar. Gone every days of gone. And they don't really like let the city breathe very long. How can, I mean, what, how, what can you even do? I mean, if you waited three months to read through the city.

Oh, three. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. But like they're like, we gotta get everything going again. Yeah, I get it. So we, we'd go in, so you're usually like one of my first wildfires ever. There was seven of us in one hotel room. That sounds cozy. Seven of us in one, because we could only get one hotel room. We had like two pickup trucks, $2,000 a night hotel room with seven people in it at least.

And yeah, you're dealing with the situation where often when people aren't there, but you're going in there and I can't tell you how many furnace filters I would pull out that were yellow, green, red, purple, like all of these crazy colors that were intaked and. You get nose blind very quickly. So when you're in this disaster zone, normally you would smell it, but because the whole city is intoxicated by smoke, you lose your ability to smell things.

So you can't trust your nose has something to navigate for you anymore. Are you wearing respirators the whole time? I mean, you can't wear

[00:29:39] Jordan Harbinger: respirator for a month, can you?

[00:29:41] Mike Feldstein: No, not really. We put on P 100 respirators, so not like the N95 masks. Right. But like a, like a gas mask, basically. Like a

[00:29:47] Jordan Harbinger: real,

[00:29:47] Mike Feldstein: yeah. And that's what we'd be wearing into people's homes.

But yeah, it's a difficult type of work. It was gratifying work. It was perfect for my twenties. Like leave your families, if you navigate things well, it can be a good business opportunity. Sure. But a lot of people also can go bankrupt because insurance companies don't tend to pay you till you're done. Oh, I see.

So you're like, so you're managing, you're fronting all those costs. Yeah. You're imagining an emotional family with potentially sick children. You're managing insurance companies. Then you're trying to like hire a bunch of crews in a place with like very limited power water. So we have to get generators, we have to bring in bottled water, we have to bring in like porta-potties.

So yeah, the, the, uh, I'm grateful for the opportunity. Yeah. 'cause it taught me so much about like logistics and survival stuff. That's something you wanna do when you're 50 years old, even 32 kids. Yeah. No way. I can't do this type of work anymore. Yeah. But, so yeah, it was difficult work. But a lot of people who are in the restoration business, so restoration means restore things back to their original state.

So if it's a flood and when there's a fire, it's also often a flood because water bombers, bomb homes. Oh, I, I see. So you get water and fire departments are blasting homes with hose. So often it's fire damage is also also water damage. I saw homes in the Calgary flood, there's basements in Calgary, so the water would be the entire basement fold, and then half of the first floor as well.

So when people had serious values, there's this company called Team Rubicon. They would come in and scuba dive into people's basements to retrieve the most valuable thing. Ugh,

[00:31:19] Jordan Harbinger: that is really gross to think about doing. That's really, really gross. I was not

[00:31:23] Mike Feldstein: team room con. So, you know, with a flood, it's like there was a hotel in Calgary called

[00:31:28] Jordan Harbinger: the, they, they were retrieving it for the residents, or were they just like for the residents.

Okay. Like that sounds illegal potentially.

[00:31:34] Mike Feldstein: No, it's like, let's say like the diamond ring or, oh, I see, I see. Insurance is like this thing. Might not be recoverable in a month. We'll pay you guys five grand today to scuba, dive to the basement. Go find the

safe.

[00:31:45] Jordan Harbinger: That's in the basement. That's underwater. Yeah.

That's a verys job. Specific job. That's a job. Crazy. If you're wondering how to become a professional scuba diver, same thing for us to Google. Team Rub. Rub team. Team

[00:31:54] Mike Feldstein: Rubicon. Also, when a fire burns down and there's all the ash there, they would go in with like full hazmat suits, like a nuclear looking suit.

Like way more than restoration year. Yeah. Go into the ash pile to try to also retrieve valuables. Stuff you don't think about existed.

[00:32:09] Jordan Harbinger: That's so interesting.

[00:32:09] Mike Feldstein: Just think about it, if your husband broke would never, there's one or two things you're like, we really want these. Yeah. Like so there's, whenever there's a demand that there will be an industry that, so interesting.

[00:32:17] Jordan Harbinger: I don't, it makes me realize I don't own anything valuable. I wouldn't, there's nothing in here. Uh, like obviously my wife and kids, obviously aside, that's not what I'm talking about. I don't own anything where I'd be like, you need to go in and get that. I would just be like. Oh, well I keep like super essentials in a fireproof bag at my house.

I'm trying to think what that would even be. I think I have my Woodland Testament passport, like little like Will Will,

[00:32:40] Mike Feldstein: but little stuff like that. Nothing, but like Also,

[00:32:42] Jordan Harbinger: my lawyer has a copy of that and I can get another passport in like a month. Yeah. If you're in your home country, the stakes are lower.

Yeah. Uh oh. Right.

[00:32:50] Mike Feldstein: You're a foreign, you're an immigrant. I'm working on it. I'm an immigrant, so my passport is like, I forgot about that. My visa lives in the passport and they don't just replace it. If you lose the passport, they you, you lost your visa. Yikes, man.

[00:33:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot you were here.

Totally legally and above board. E two

[00:33:04] Mike Feldstein: Visa. Yeah. But to conclude, there a lot of companies that do water damage or floods, they're used to like a kitchen fire or like your toilet leaked and there's a little bit of mold. I wasn't in that business at all. It was specifically like traveling around the country, going to the most devastated

[00:33:21] Jordan Harbinger: places possible.

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Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. The course is free. I don't sell anything there. You can find it@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Mike Feldstein. So this is probably not related, but I always wonder if the town next to you burns down.

Let's say that there's no fire here, but there's a fire a couple towns away. And I mean like a big one, the whole town, you know, wildfire, the smoke is burning and flying past me for a month. Isn't my home drenched in toxic crap that's stuck to the walls and stuff? Big time. Yeah, that's what I thought. It'd be like going to a bar where everybody's smoking and you're like, but I don't smoke.

And then you're like, why do my clothes and hair stink even though I've washed them three times? Exactly. I remember those days in Michigan, and I'm like, okay. And that's way less a bar is way less than 300 single family homes burning down over the course of four days. And the million acres

[00:36:47] Mike Feldstein: of trees, right?

And trees and yeah, because that smoke is also, so when you have high heat. There's still something called PAH, which is poly soic aromatic hydrocarbons. So it's not like you're just breathing tree at those super high heats. Also, generally in a wildfire situation, there's gonna be, uh, helicopters and planes dropping fire retardant.

Oh, I never thought about that. So even if homes themselves aren't burning, the things that they're using to suppress the forest fires get caught up in that smoke plume as well. So, you know, Jasper's normally gonna be at a five. That's good air, like you said, when there's smoke, it could be 50, 60, 80, a hundred.

When Toronto and New York City last year were getting fires from British Columbia, their Jaspers were heading 102. Oh, interesting. I did see crazy, horrible air quality in New York that during the time, so the fire wasn't in New York, it was, you know, a thousand miles away. Yeah. The really crazy thing is.

If somebody tests their bed, their carpet, their furniture. Now in New York City, it's filled with toxic ash smoke pH. Oh. So you need to replace that stuff. If you're filtering your air, you filter stuff out of the air before it becomes a service problem. If you were servicing it, just 'cause the smoky smell went away.

The most harmful part of the air is the things you can't see and you can't smell. It's like raw chicken. We put it on the counter, you know, it can give you salmonella, like Yeah. If you go to a pond and fill it up like ocean water or pond water. Looks clean. Even if it's radioactive, it looks clear. Right.

But if you drink it, you'll get very sick. Yeah. So the most harmful stuff is too small to see or smell. So anyone who had like the smoke blow by, oh, the smoke's gone now, it's not gone. So we would test people's everything in your house, basically. Yeah. So if you don't have something to deal with it while it's in the air, every single particle that was in your air absorbs into everything porous in your home.

[00:38:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That, I heard you say that before. Like if it absorb, if it can absorb water and it can absorb air. Air and the stuff that's in the air, and I always think about these fabric chairs that we have, which are great for having little kids that wipe boogers and food on everything because they're impossible to clean.

Almost like, what were we thinking? But how do you clean a lot of this disaster stuff? What do you do? Do you use some kind of air scrubber? But like, do you, you obviously have to rip out all the carpet and maybe even the walls. It's, it's gotta be like having a meth lab in a house.

[00:39:02] Mike Feldstein: And insurance companies are so upside down and backwards.

So they typically evaluate the performance of an insurance adjuster, not by how much money they spend, but by how well they justify the money that they do spend. So talk about misaligned incentives. Oh, I see. What, okay. It took me a second. If we were restoring this house and I would say, Hey, insurance company, we're throwing out the couch because it's clearly intoxicated with smoke, right?

They're likely gonna say, Nope, we need you to attempt to clean it first. Meanwhile, they determine the cleaning rates. It's all like they give you a rate sheet. So to clean this couch could be two grand, for example. Sure. You know what? We might be able to clean it offsite. We might have to take it offsite to like an ultrasonic ozone.

Tank. Because even if we vacuum and wipe down the outside, it's everything inside that makes, it's the inside stuff. Yeah. That's the absorbent stuff. So we're like, okay, we cleaned it now. It still stinks. So like, okay, now you can throw it out where if you throw it out, right, they're pissed. 'cause now they have to pay the customer back for a couch.

Right. But they're like, clean it. And if it's not perfect, but I'm like, it won't be perfect. They're like, just try first anyway. Yeah. So that's everything in the house. So often we're hepa vacuum, we're steam cleaning, we're doing everything. We're washing the clothes three times. They're like, now that you've tried multiple times, now

[00:40:12] Jordan Harbinger: throw it out.

Right. So $600 later or $2,000 later, you're throwing it out and you're like, I told you that this was gonna, so now instead of a $10,000 couch or whatever, I don't know what couches cost obviously, but instead now it's a $12,000 couch. Yeah. And we

[00:40:25] Mike Feldstein: wasted longer because you wasted all the time and the family hasn't moved back home, so they've been paying hotels.

Sheesh. So it's totally backwards, but broadly also, it's kind of, this is also another big thing. So typically when someone has a flutter or a fire, they call their insurance company first, and the insurance company sends you a guy. They go, let me, we'll send out the contractor, or here's a couple. The problem is if that contractor is consistently doing expensive claims Mm-Hmm.

They get cut off. They don't wanna bite the hand that feeds them. So when I see I was doing restoration, I was the people's choice, meaning I never worked for an insurance company once. 'cause in your policy, you have the right to choose your own contractor. So a lot of people don't realize that they just call the insurance company first.

They send someone over. Yeah. With totally misaligned incentives. So I, my whole thing was, that's good to know. I go, we're the people's choice. The more work I do in your home, the more we get paid. So our, our incentives are totally aligned. Right. And we don't get paid until you get paid. So if, like that was our whole thing, if you get screwed by the insurance company, we'll fight with them for you.

So that was our very, that's a great deal. Unique positioning and made it. We went viral, like every time we went to a disaster zone on. Then I also would do post environmental checkups for 2 99. So it's like if the insurance company came, they cleaned, then we would go in to do an inspection and we would find ash and soot everywhere and ash and the atache and chemicals everywhere.

We would do more comprehensive testing. Also, insurance companies will typically say we won't pay for air quality testing. Yeah. 'cause they don't want you to do it. But if, but if you pay for it and it's positive, yeah. We will reimburse you. Oh, interesting. So I just tell everybody, always do it. Yeah.

Because it will always be positive, right. A hundred percent of the time. It's fascinating. And now that you've got the positive result and it's tough. A lot of people can't afford it. Yeah. And I can't tell you insurance companies, they profile everybody hardcore. So for example, that's if you have an insurance claim, yeah, you're gonna be traded.

Great. They're gonna quickly Google you be like, this guy has reach. Don't do him dirty. 'cause if we do, he's gonna talk about it and we're gonna lose a lot of customers. That's good news for me.

[00:42:28] Jordan Harbinger: But it's bad news for like. A third grade teacher who doesn't have a giant microphone, teachers

[00:42:32] Mike Feldstein: get treated.

Grade two. Do they thank God teachers get treated well because they're part of unions. I see, okay. But like in Fort McMurray, Alberta, huge fire, like a lot, there was a lot of like Filipino immigrant families cleaning there. And instantly I knew that they were gonna be raked over the coals. Right. So with them, I actually offered free testing because I'm like, once I get them testing, I'll be able to fight with their insurance company.

Yeah. On merit, on science. And it was wild though, like just by walking in and asking someone kind of like what they did, I instantly knew what their insurance company's response was gonna be. So this, I didn't read a book about this. This was just like, you

[00:43:07] Jordan Harbinger: mean for what they did for a living? What

[00:43:08] Mike Feldstein: they did for a living.

So if you

[00:43:09] Jordan Harbinger: find out that somebody's like a landscaper or owns like a driveway finishing company, they're just gonna get denied. Deny, deny. Interesting. I did not know that. And especially if it's

[00:43:19] Mike Feldstein: a low income. Yeah. The owns the company. He might be better 'cause they'll, they maybe will think he could fund legal uhhuh.

But if you just like. Have a job that's paying you under $30 an hour, the insurance company will deny you for sure. 'cause they know you're not gonna be able to deal with the legal. Yeah. You can't deal with it. You're like, I gotta get back in my house and start working. So they're very well designed to

[00:43:37] Jordan Harbinger: profile and that's fascinating.

I've only seen anecdotal evidence of this kind of stuff happening. Like I've got some friends who are just buddies that have similar hobbies as mine, and some of 'em are in their like twenties and thirties, younger dudes. And they'll be like, I got in a car crash. You're a lawyer, what can I do? I'm like, call your insurance company.

Calm down. It's fine. And they're like, my insurance company's denying the claim. I'm like, it's always bs. I'm like, so you need to tell me your car was parked. Someone smashed into it and they're not going to pay you. And they're like, no. And then meanwhile, I won't go into detail, but there's been other things where I'm like, Ooh, I, this is definitely like my fault, my issue or our fault, our issue.

And the insurance company's like, sure, here's your check. Oh, if you're a lawyer, for example.

[00:44:16] Mike Feldstein: Yeah. Especially a practicing one. Yeah. Insurance is gonna treat you like gold. Yeah. Because they're like, this guy's got

[00:44:22] Jordan Harbinger: free legal. I had my cat dump water all over my computer. Totally not covered by anything. And they were just like, go to Apple and ask how much the repair is.

And they were like 1800 bucks. And I was like, they said 1800 bucks. Here's this sheet. And they sent me a check. It was there in two days and they didn't ask for proof of anything. They're very good at this. Yeah.

[00:44:41] Mike Feldstein: I mean, I get it from a big corporation Yeah. Standpoint. It makes sense. But it's horrible. It is horrible.

So yeah, we would uh, kind of deal with that all the time. And yeah, the fire flood stuff was very eyeopening. It gave you really good insights into. People and big business. But by being the people's choice, which is something that I, if anybody can leave with a tip here, if they have a mold situation, like getting three quotes is a good idea.

Yeah. I wanted to talk about mold 'cause I was, let's talk about mold.

[00:45:10] Jordan Harbinger: It's a buzzword now, kind of, it's in your coffee, it's in your hvac, it's on my toenails or whatever the hell that is. Everything's moldy, moldy, moldy. It like, is this a really big deal or is it overblown? Because it seems like a big deal, but I'm also like, maybe it's also a buzzword to get you to buy, I don't know, different coffee or whatever.

Both.

[00:45:28] Mike Feldstein: It's definitely was used by a certain brand to basically tell people mold will kill you. Yeah. All coffee has mold, not

[00:45:36] Jordan Harbinger: ours. Right. That's what, that's what I'm, that's what I'm referring to right now is like well played folks. This person that we know, and I don't know if they're wrong about all coffee having mold, but also we're eating mold constantly because mold is on everything.

But is it like, if it depends on the mold, man, right. Mildew or whatever. I don't wanna breathe it all day, but if it's on an orange peel that I touch, like whatever. This is

[00:45:56] Mike Feldstein: important. This is important. So going back to my previous career as a mold restoration guy, there was two sayings in the industry, and this was 2010, 2011, way before it was a buzzword.

Okay. One was mold is gold. Right. 'cause it's expensive to get rid of. Yeah. And it's also profitable for the get ridder of it. Well that's what I mean. Yeah. And the mold rush was a term, the

[00:46:20] Jordan Harbinger: mold rush.

[00:46:21] Mike Feldstein: So corny, dead jokes and looking back at the, the what they thought was the mold rush now. Yeah. Haes in comparison.

So when I was doing mold restoration, once again, the same thing. They taught you the amount of times the word Hollywood came up when I was becoming a certified mold remediation guy was crazy. So they're like, the restoration's very important, but the optics are equally important. So think about it, if you're like a contractor who could.

Do demolition or like re remove drywall. Yeah. And flooring for a bathroom to like pull up two floorboards and a foot of drywall, you're gonna get like 200 bucks, 300 bucks. If that drywall is moldy, that could potentially be $10,000. Why? Because now it's mold remediation. How much are you willing to remove a piece of wood?

How much are you willing to safely remove harmful mold from your So because of the fear level, I see the budget is much greater. So what happens is if somebody gets three mold quotes, mark my words, you'll see a 400% variance. In the quotes. You'll see quotes from $2,000 to potentially $50,000. And not always, but often the thing that impacts the price is how good the person is at selling fear.

[00:47:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like, oh, you're, this can make your kids do poorly in school and their brains are developing versus somebody with no kids who. Doesn't spend very much time in their house. And

[00:47:46] Mike Feldstein: if they're like, that mold is not just there. Yeah. It's actually behind all of your drywall. So we have to gut the place you have to move out.

It honestly breaks my heart from a health standpoint, sustainability standpoint, financial standpoint, to see a family get told that they have to leave their home, go rent an apartment for six months. Yeah. Oh, six months, which is way moldier likely gross than their house that they're moving out of. Right.

And now they're in this like teeny little apartment or like a, a hotel or an Airbnb or something, which also insurance company doesn't cover mold. They'll cover mold. They don't as a result of a flood. I see. If you did your best to mitigate it, but if you just like find some mold, it's not covered. So that's typically a private expense for people.

It's not covered at all. Now what happens is a lot of times people are, they're concerned about their health. So they get their home tested for mold or they call a mold restoration guy. First of all, if you're calling a mold restoration guy, little bit of a

[00:48:37] Jordan Harbinger: conflict. That Right. He like his incentive is to find mold in every part of my house and rip out all my drywall, even if it's fine.

Exactly Right. And then

[00:48:46] Mike Feldstein: when the mold guy got trained, even in the training, they teach you to be scared of mold. 'cause the more the remediation guy's actually scared of mold, the better that he will be able to actually sell older mediation services. That's interesting.

[00:49:00] Jordan Harbinger: So, right. 'cause he's really selling it.

If he's shows up in a hazmat suit or whatever. Right. He's like,

[00:49:06] Mike Feldstein: yeah. He's like, I can't breathe this air. Oh god, it's gonna kill me. Yeah. And usually they don't bring the hazmat suit. I have seen it done before and then, you know, they'll use big words that will mycotoxins and stacky bots and show you some pictures.

And I don't want to like push too far the other way and say, mold's not dangerous and scary. Sure. It very much is. I've heard a stat that says 70% of homes have mold in them in America. Mm-Hmm. It's a hundred percent. Because when you go outside Yeah. There's also mold is everywhere. It's everywhere. Yeah.

It's, it's like saying pollen mold is everywhere. So. When you test for a house properly for mold, this is what you do. We'd come here, we'd take six or seven mold samples inside of the air. We'd look around. We'd also take a test outside. Okay. And we are gonna compare the levels of indoor mold That makes sense to the outdoor mold.

[00:49:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Because aren't we evolved to be able to deal with some baseline level of mold? Absolutely. I mean the of breathing mold before

[00:49:58] Mike Feldstein: when it rains, mold levels, beans existed after a rainy day. Sure. The mold levels are a hundred x what a house normally would be. Right. The thing is outside, we got the sun.

We have the most amazing UV light of all time. Yeah. That kills. We have the wind, which creates no it'ss, called hydroxyl radicals. Basically the wind and the sun and the trees are the most incredible air filter ever. But that we left that shit outside. It's outside, yeah. Not inside. So yeah, mold is a problem.

Same thing with dust. If you go outside, you won't find dust. Outside dust is an indoor problem. Dust only occurs in these artificial air type boxes that we created. You won't find dust outdoor. It's not a naturally occurring thing. It happens inside. And dust is an air problem. If there's dust on your counter, do you think it ca A came from the counter, right?

Or B came from the air. How is

[00:50:45] Jordan Harbinger: there no dust outside? That part I don't understand. Because isn't dust just dead skin cells? Surely that's outside pet dander. We got wind.

[00:50:51] Mike Feldstein: We got sun, we got, we got filtration out there. And there's also airflow. So the CO2 is much lower and there's adequate airflow, which is the filter.

I see. Trees are the most amazing air filter ever. But inside and no, a few plants won't cut it. I was gonna say, what if I just like make my living room kind of a jungle? Plants wanna live outside. Yeah, they get pissed inside. So mold is kind of like that. And so of those homes that have mold, so often you'll be, someone will tell you that they had a mold problem.

They're moving out. Yeah. Be like, oh, like. What kind and how much they'd be like, oh no, no. Like it was the airborne mold. So it's like playing whack-a-mole and ripping up drywall to like find every little leak. It's a house. Your roof's not perfectly sealed. Pipes leak a little bit. There's gonna be a little moisture in your home.

You can't hide from water. Yeah. So I always tell someone, if you're ever trying to break a lease, a friends and family gimme a call. I'll come over, I'll find the mold. We'll get you outta that lease. That's smart. I

[00:51:41] Jordan Harbinger: feel like this is a, that's your real business niche right here. Breaking leases. Breaking leases, like, oh my God, I gotta move to Canada.

'cause you know, my girlfriend lives there, but I have six months left on my lease. I've gotten out of five leases early. I feel

[00:51:55] Mike Feldstein: like That's fine. All because of mold. Wow. Few of them were actually landlords. Significant. Sorry, landlords hate this one trick. Yeah. You'll find the mold. Don't make it though.

That would not be cool. Don't make the mold. That's, that's horrible. It, it's a renewable resource, so that's why it's also, it's better than gold. From a business perspective. But what's happened now is a lot of naturopath and functional medicine doctors who are great at what they do, they're like, ah, all of a sudden I'm getting a call all the time.

People want to check for mold and do mold detox. So what do they do? They like Google, like mold certification. They take like a two day course, two days sounds comprehensive. So flood fires, all the environmental certifications I did. Two days is like the longest. Like it's not like we went to Mold University.

That's sort of disturbing. I thought it would at least be a few weeks of like intensive, no flood guy, fire guy, F-S-R-T-W-R-T, all of these I-I-C-R-C accredited courses. They're typically like one to three days. Typically it's a weekend and then you're a certified old man and yeah. So you don't learn anything in there.

You actually learn everything what not to do. You learn it on the job and from other experienced people if hopefully you have the privilege of working with experienced people. Yeah, ethical, experienced people. So now the naturopath is like, ah, I'm getting. A huge inbound, if you like, type in um, mold or mold testing or mold sickness on Google.

It's like a hockey stick to your point about being trendy and buzzy and it's 'cause it really does make people sick. People are really, they get really sick from mold. If you have any respiratory stuff, it exasperates it. It can make autoimmune stuff much worse. Yeah. It can make you sick. It can wreck havoc on your sleep.

[00:53:32] Jordan Harbinger: Did you ever get sick doing that? I mean, you're exposing yourself to molding chemicals back in the day to all that stuff to get outta people's homes. Yeah, I did it. I

[00:53:38] Mike Feldstein: still have a little bit of psoriasis. Oh yeah. Which is mostly under control. There you go. But this autoimmune condition popped up after flood fire mold situations.

Geez, that's interesting. So the naturopath is trying to do their best. Right. They have a business to run. They have patience to see. It's a difficult career and now there's all of a sudden this mold thing. So you know, they learn about a couple things. How do we test people's blood and bodies for mold And like mycotoxins are like the airborne mold spores that mold creates to like grow and survive.

So if you go and get tested, essentially everyone's gonna have elevated levels of mold. If you're not filtering your air, drinking a lot of filtered water and sauna regularly, like I walk outside and sweat a lot. Does that count you? You got really clean air?

[00:54:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's true. I got really clean air. So

[00:54:18] Mike Feldstein: you, you're gonna be probably fairly good.

But it's one of those things like if you test for heavy metals, if you test for stuff, you're gonna find some of it in you. Yeah. And then someone goes and tests their house for mold. Ah, it's in the air. Yeah. They test their blood for mold. It's in me. Panic. Yeah, panic. They're in the perfect state to have someone come over and charge them.

50 grand. A hundred percent. I would totally fall for that too. And I don't fault at all the naturopaths. And there's typically, there's two types of mold tests. Almost universally there is tests that skew towards false negatives and tests that skew towards false positives. So there's a type of test called irmi.

RMI. It's skews towards a false positive. Not that it's a bad test, it's a great tool. They're all good tools if they're used comprehensively together. So IRMI doesn't actually like test the air, it tests your dust. So we would take your furnace filter or some dust in the home. I think that's

[00:55:06] Jordan Harbinger: what we had done because I They had to wipe stuff.

[00:55:09] Mike Feldstein: Yeah, there's a lot of wiping. So of course there was mold there at some point. Yeah. And if you test just the air and the windows were just open, or your air pur virus is running, it can skew towards a false negative. So if you're the insurance company, you love false negatives tests. If you're the restoration guy who wants to be paid to come clean again, you love an irmi.

So there's various tools that are skewed particular ways, or there's this little Petri dish test. That will always grow mold. Yeah. It'll grow it outside. It'll grow it inside. So to summarize this whole thing, if you have visible physical black mold growing in your home. Mm-Hmm. If it smells musty and moldy, it's like the poop thing.

Yeah. If it smells like poo, it is poo. If it smells musty and moldy and dent, you most likely have a problem. If you look in your attic under your, in your toilet bowls, under your kitchen sink, your bathroom sinks. If there was water damage, bulging something that's a real problem at that point, call, get a few restoration quotes.

They have to seal off the area. They put commercial grid air purifiers in that room and in your house. They use an antibacterial antimicrobial to clean the mold, double bag the drywall. So you like, it's like a surgical, you know, you're removing it and then they come back and they test your And it's all good.

That's 'cause usually the air purifiers are still running. I see. Or just work. If they came back a week later. To get tested. It's moldy again. 'cause mold is everywhere. Right. That's interesting. So it's like your water. If you have bad water, do you like dig a new well or like run a new main line to the city?

Or do you just filter your water so you kind of just need to filter it at the end point? Right, and And mold. How do things get in our bodies, there's four ways. We eat it, we drink it, it absorbs in through our skin or we breathe it. Mold is only getting in through inhalation the same way allergens and pollen are making you sick.

It's all a breathing issue. So that's the only way allergies impact people. So if you get the pollen and you get the mold out of the air, you're gonna be doing great. So yeah, if you have real mold in your house, you see it, you feel it, definitely get it removed. But most of the time, if it's just like airborne mold, make sure they tested the outside and you're not supposed to test for air, mold and air unless it hasn't rained for two or three days.

You're not supposed to because you'll just get a false positive. It's gonna skew your results if it's just rained or a false negative 'cause it's very moldy outside that day. I see. But what a horrible business mold testing would be like, ah, it rained. We have to cancel our jobs for days. So no one actually does that.

No one cancels it. To conclude mold does make people very sick, but you do have to be careful that it's a nuanced thing. If you're removing it, get a few quotes. I believe people should filter it from their air, especially if they're in a humid environment. But yeah, proceed cautiously.

[00:57:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense.

I, I will say filtering the air has been quite incredible. These things. The little sensor detector on the Jasper is pretty awesome. I, I don't smell anything. Right. I'll see that thing go on full blast. First of all, I have to make sure we're not cooking in the house, so I'll get to that in a second. But there's been a few times where that thing has just gone crazy and then I think, oh, something's wrong.

But then the other one goes crazy or the one in the bedroom goes crazy. I don't my window's open or anything. And then like three minutes later, fire trucks. And then five minutes later, my brother-in-law's like, I'm flying my drone. There's a house fire three blocks away. Let's go check it out. And I'm like, we'll check out the drone footage.

And it's a house fire that I didn't smell. My windows are shut. The jasper senses something toxic in the air, starts working overtime and meanwhile there's a house burning down three blocks away. And it just started, like really just started. It's really, it's really incredible. I kind of wonder how that's possible.

My, this, I probably shouldn't give this example, but my son in the bedroom, he likes to fart and then wait for it to turn on. And it almost always does. It will. It's, it's almost instant too, which is incredible. Methane.

[00:58:45] Mike Feldstein: Methane is a VOC.

[00:58:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's actually quite amazing. 'cause I thought, oh, you fart it under a blanket and you're, you're five, like there's not that much.

And then this thing will go for like 30 seconds. Similar. Similar to like

[00:58:57] Mike Feldstein: if you cook bacon here. Yeah. Even if you had a 10,000 square foot house, the entire home would smell like bacon. Yeah. Yeah. So if you think about a bathtub, if you fill the bathtub with water and you put like three drops of red food coloring in it.

Yeah. It doesn't like swim around. Within seconds. All of the water is equally distributed. It's incredible. Air works the same. So with that fire that happened over there. I like to think about Jasper kind of as an air security system. It is helpful all of the time, but air is not linear. It spikes and it valleys.

So when you're cooking, when you're cleaning, my mom was varnishing a picnic table, 200 feet from their cabin, uh, at the lake in Canada, doors and windows all shut. And her jasper went crazy red. And then so because, you know, it's like if you see someone at the beach spraying their sunscreen, like, I hate that a hundred feet away.

I hate that you smell it. So think about the, the coating my lungs, the, the radius that that sunscreen is, is covering. Yeah. Guys do not use aerosolized sunscreens. Especially not indoors. Yeah, but not anywhere people spray. It's not spraying for you. And it goes in my, my kids'. It's lose my

[01:00:01] Jordan Harbinger: mind. I lost my mind at these people at the beach.

I felt kind of bad. Dude, you're spraying my d 2-year-old daughter in the face with this nonsense. Uh, makes go

[01:00:08] Mike Feldstein: crazy. Jason, uh, and Candace gird. Jason was in bed and Jasper went red. Mm-Hmm. And he trusts Jasper. So he is like, I'm gonna go walk around my house. They left the stove on and a protein fire was about to, oh my gosh.

Get started. Someone named Megan, she similar situation, lying in bed. Jasper went red. Her dryer vent was just ing about to fire. Oh wow. So in two situations prevented a house fire, they dealt with it and prevented a house fire. Wow. So it's not like something that I thought we would be really monitoring for.

Right. And like if, if you barbecue outside a hundred feet away, just in that moment that you open and close your door, it's gonna go crazy. It does. If you see it goes red sometimes if you like look outside, you might find someone 12 homes down. Is their contractors in the front cutting like two by fours or like tiles?

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I am happy to dig that stuff up for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Mike Feldstein, it happens. There's construction, uh, when leaf blowers go off, they turn up and I don't open my windows or doors that often. It's just seep in.

And you have a good

[01:03:36] Mike Feldstein: HVAC system in a brand new home. Yeah,

[01:03:38] Jordan Harbinger: it's just seeping in through whatever. It's actually incredible. I thought the range hood would take care of it, but the fact is it just in mind vents outside good. Which I know a lot of range hoods actually don't, which is shocking. Like it just blows it around your house.

But it doesn't really do a hundred percent. I mean it, as you would expect, it can't get a hundred percent of the smoke, especially from like. If we overcook something like Brussels sprouts, these things, Jaspers are just going nuts for the next 10 minutes. Cooking is a big

[01:04:04] Mike Feldstein: deal. Yeah. So I tell everybody do do your range hood test, take a tissue, hold it up to the range hood and make sure it's pulling it.

If it's like flapping there, I've seen range hoods that are blowing, not pulling literally. How is that useful in any way at all? It's the opposite of useful. Yeah. And then so number one, make sure it's pulling. Okay. Number two, make sure it's venting outside. Yeah. So a lot of time it's like venting in the cabinet above or like down in the attic or attic in between your drywall.

Oh my God, this is not

[01:04:35] Jordan Harbinger: uncommon. We have this giant metal box out there that I first was like, are you kidding me? This is annoying. 'cause it's like a foot out from the wall and you can't park that close to it. But when my wife's cooking, I can smell it a block away because it's blow, it's blasting, you know, chicken air out into my driveway.

[01:04:51] Mike Feldstein: There's indoor pollution and outdoor pollution. Outdoor pollution is, you know, the poll and the mold. The rubber tires, the wildfire smoke. And then there's indoor pollution, which is your cleaning products, your cooking products, your pets, your dander. Yeah. But someone else's indoor pollution can become your outdoor pollution.

So like if someone's using like bounce sheets in their dryer and then venting it outside, right outside their house. And right into your house. Yeah, it goes into our house. Yeah, man. Also, most people, you know, you have a, a down drafting rain show. It looks like a Jen Air. I think so. So

[01:05:20] Jordan Harbinger: what, what this, this thing comes

[01:05:22] Mike Feldstein: out.

Oh, it comes

[01:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: out of the kitchen island and then it sucks in air at a crazy clip and absolutely insane. It has to be crazier

[01:05:29] Mike Feldstein: or it wouldn't work. Yeah. But like I'll just be, most people have an A above rangehood. I see. So we don't have that. Another pro tip is if you're cooking, it's gonna be a little annoying if you're like using a pan or a walk, but especially if you're boiling stuff, use the back burners because they're more directly under the rangehood I see.

Captures a lot more of the air.

[01:05:46] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. This is an induction stove. You can put the pan wherever you want. It's actually like a miracle of modern science, in my opinion. But yeah, I don't, I didn't, I didn't think about putting things closer to the range. Speaking of moving a ton of air, we replaced our other name brand air purifiers with Jasper because we did the test and we realized that they weren't working.

And I, I used to have one plugged in right next, like the other one plugged in right near the Jasper. The Jasper would turn on when she was cooking and the other one, it was like kind of a coin flip as to whether it would detect the pollution and do its thing. And I always thought that was kind of interesting.

The other thing is this thing, it moves so much air that my kids play with it. They put these little scarfs on top and they go up like a tornado and they swirl around in one place and the other one would just sort of like gradually puff this, the scarf off and put it on the floor because the fan just couldn't move nearly the amount of air.

It breaks

[01:06:39] Mike Feldstein: my heart. If you go on Amazon or Walmart, everybody wants to think in Amazon filter boxes these days. Yeah. So they want to, they go on, they, they set the price low and then they say extra large room. Yeah. And they're like, like often the richest people have the cheapest air pur fires. Yeah. It wasn't like a conscious decision.

They thought they were just like checking the box. And that's not the case at all. So what brands do is they talk about square foot coverage. Square foot coverage. Air doesn't care about square feet. Okay. It cares about

[01:07:03] Jordan Harbinger: cubic volume. That's what I wondered myself. 'cause like. So what if I have a, let's say I have a 1500 square foot house, but I got a freaking 12 foot ceiling in here.

So like how is that The same as where I lived before, where I could jump up and touch the ceiling with my hand

[01:07:17] Mike Feldstein: if I was not the same. Yeah. So air, how is that the same? It's not Air cares about cubic volume. Yeah. It cares about also the layout of your home. Is there lots of different doors and rooms and windows.

Is your HVAC system a central air system? So everybody wants to just think in this like simple little linear, linear way. Like, I dunno, did I send you a video yesterday? Was that Target? I dunno if I did. I don't think so. Dude. They had an air purifier at Target. I posted it online. It was this big, it was called the Never Change Filter.

First problem with that. Yeah. And then they said covers 1400 square feet. It's a multi-room, air purifier. So they're like, oh, what's the c fm? What are the specs Not on the box. I go to the website, not on there. Their specs are 1400 square foot. If that thing does 1400 square foot, we do 10,000. But we don't, it doesn't talk about ceiling height, it doesn't talk about anything.

And then in little tiny baby fine print, it's like based on one air change per hour. Like what's one air? What does that even mean? That means in one hour all of the air in the room has been circulated through the purifier. One time you want that to be like four or five. Oh, I see. So I didn't know that 1400 square foot is more like two and change, not 1400.

Right. Okay. So it's all like, you know how statistics lie type stuff. So it's very sneaky and Yeah, people just think they're like checking a box. So when you cook, you might see Jasper go crazy always. And then maybe half an hour-ish later, maybe 10 minutes. Depends on what you're cooking. Yeah. And it's back down to baseline.

If we turn off all your Jaspers, we can even put a few little small, cheap air purifiers in the room and then we put an air quality detector in here. The air will be bad up to 48 hours later. So it's not like we went from like 20 minutes to like three hours. We go from like 20 minutes to like days. Days.

And then where do you think it went? It's now embedded in all of your surfaces, right? And it's not just like, you're like, oh, but I'm eating healthy. I used avocado oil, right? Had organic grass fed grass-finished beef. Certainly that'd be fine to breathe. Well, here's the thing. When you take high temperature and protein, it creates byproducts and other chemical compounds like the PAH, like sulfur dioxide.

It creates other things that it puts into the air that it's not just like the food in the oil itself. And then on top of that, just because you can eat something, it doesn't mean you can put it in your nose. Well,

[01:09:29] Jordan Harbinger: that's, yeah, I was gonna say, just because grass fed, I, I, I'm not gonna try and take a steak intravenously either.

No, no, you wouldn't. No. If you, I wouldn't even try. If you, if you eat. Don't think would be a good idea.

[01:09:42] Mike Feldstein: It's gonna end up in your digestive system. Yeah. Which is like a big acid soup that breaks things down, pulls out nutrients, filters out the rest. If you breathe it in, it goes into your respiratory system.

Right. Which doesn't not have that process. So it irritates it. It causes inflammation. Yeah. So just 'cause you can eat something, it doesn't mean you can. Yeah.

[01:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: I'm surprised that anybody thinks that just because you can eat something and it's healthy like vegetables that you could also breed it. But I guess this it is 2024.

What's a good number to see on the Jasper? Because mine always says like four, almost all the time, unless we're cooking, it goes up to like 80 and then it goes back down to four. And if I open up the windows or whatever, it'll go to like maybe six or even eight. But that's only because we have really good outside air here.

Like really it's also because

[01:10:23] Mike Feldstein: you're, you are filtering it. Let's say you had no air filters, but we had an air sensor that eight might be like an 18 or a 25.

[01:10:29] Jordan Harbinger: Well, when we first got 'em it was 24 for like one or two days, and it slowly went down to four and it's been at four for a year probably. So most people

[01:10:38] Mike Feldstein: when they buy it, it will be between a four and a 10.

Now just be, that number is called PM 2.5. Yeah. What I was gonna ask about that. What does that mean? So there's two sensors on board. Okay. The one that you see on the screen, which is called PM 2.5. Okay. And there's another sensor that's called A VOC sensor, all the chemicals. Okay? So you might sometimes notice it.

It's designed to be subtle, but you'll see it on fan speed too, but it'll still be green, and that's because it's detecting a chemical PM 2.5 is particulate matter under 2.5 microns in size. This means particles small enough to enter your lungs and your bloodstream. So these are, if you see outside, that's like the most.

There's a QI, but generally when they talk about particles and pollution, we're talking about PM 2.5, which is like the really harmful stuff that our body doesn't filter out. Very good. So that is the best thing that we can use to control the fan speed and give you a general indication. Just like when you get your blood tested, it doesn't test for everything.

Or when you get your water tested, it doesn't test for everything. That can't detect mold, it can't detect asbestos, it's detecting particulate. 'cause that's the best thing that's gonna go up and down on cooking, on smoke, on dust, on pollen, on allergens. So an excellent number is in that three to 10 range.

Four is three common for a really good

[01:11:54] Jordan Harbinger: clean home. What I've noticed is, it's funny, when my parents come in, my PM 2.5 goes up briefly and I used to think, oh, it's because they opened the door. But now I'm like, are my parents offgassing? Like, what's going on? Because when I come in, I know I come in, it doesn't go up.

My parents come in, it goes up.

[01:12:13] Mike Feldstein: How weird is

[01:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: that?

[01:12:14] Mike Feldstein: Well, there's a few things that might be contributing to this. So one thing is if I've put on, and I'm actually trying to like find something more natural, but if I use like a regular deodorant brand Oh yeah. And I go any, if I use like even regular, like a hotel body washer, a shamp shampoo, like a more mainstream toxic soap shampoo, conditioners and I go near it, it will, it will jump.

And if it doesn't jump, the VOC sensor will likely spike. Huh. Hairsprays are one of the craziest That makes sense though. It's

[01:12:46] Jordan Harbinger: smoke smokers spray. We have a smoker outside when that thing's on, even with all the windows and doors shut, these things turn up to, they go up to like 30. So,

[01:12:55] Mike Feldstein: yeah, if somebody had smoked or, I mean there's a bunch of other fact it could be the stuff that they clean their clothing.

My

[01:13:01] Jordan Harbinger: parents live in a dirty house. It's not that their house is dirty because of them. It's just an old ass house and you smell the dust when you go in and it has a fireplace that's unused. But they didn't, they didn't clean it or seal it or, yeah, they didn't seal it. So you can, it smells kind of like dusty and s smokey almost.

So fireplace in the house. So places is

[01:13:19] Mike Feldstein: backdraft. Yeah. So when it's like windy out Yeah, that chimney smoke soot, Ash actually blows back inside. So yeah. Maybe we gotta get mom and dad a little jasper. We did. We, we, we got one now. Yeah,

[01:13:30] Jordan Harbinger: we, yeah, recently. 'cause I was like, it's so fun to see if it doesn't go

[01:13:34] Mike Feldstein: up as much anymore.

[01:13:35] Jordan Harbinger: I'm very curious. I actually wanna put it in their bedrooms because their bedrooms are the worst. That's where they need it. Their bedrooms are the worst. The number one place to have clean air is the bedroom. Yeah. By far. Incense. You know, I, this goes without saying incense makes it go crazy. I stopped lighting it.

Even the good stuff I feel like is bad for you 'cause it's, you're just inhaling that's like campfire. Like it's, maybe it's not horrible for you, but you're still inhaling like ashes and it's not great. And then the cheap stuff though is gross. 'cause I'm like, this is maybe not supposed to be lit on fire.

There's like fragrance or soap or whatever they're using. The non-natural stuff. There's all kinds of stuff I stopped using. Another thing that it used to that tripped me up a little bit was I would close doors to bedrooms and things like that when we were cooking. And I thought that that would help. I thought, well the bedroom Jasper won't go up 'cause I shut the door.

But obviously the HVAC systems job is to circulate the air. So it was completely pointless to keep the door shut because what would happen is the air return would just blow in here and then blow the air in there. Which is great when you're trying to get the AC to spread but bad when you're trying to get the chicken, bacon, whatever out of your indoor air pollution.

Like you can't escape. The indoor air pollution, you really just have to clean

[01:14:45] Mike Feldstein: it up. A lot of people had a big moment of awareness when they have a Jasper in their kids' room and then they had, they're cooking something that they didn't even realize was Offgassing. Yeah. And they like go to wake up their baby from the nap and the Jasper's like red in baby's room.

[01:14:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:14:59] Mike Feldstein: Your whole home is one system and literally, like you said, the hvac, which is basically just your furnace and your air conditioner is designed to mix the air in your home efficiently. So yeah. The plus side of that though is whenever someone's like, where's the best place? If I can only afford like one Jasper, where should I put it?

The first place would be in your bedroom by far. The second place would be in, in your kitchen living room area to pick up cooking particulate. But even if it's in your bedroom, so let's say that's making the air in your bedroom like 99% cleaner, it's making the air in your whole house like 20% cleaner.

Mm-Hmm. Because of the HVAC system, it's almost like it's a part of your furnace. That's interesting. If you had two, let's say in two bedrooms. No matter where in the home it's positioned, it's contributing to the air being cleaner in the whole house. I, I like to give the analogy of Sonos. Yeah, we have that too.

Back in the day, you would have a giant speaker. It'd be way too loud and like the base would be crazy. And then like in every other room you couldn't hear the speaker anymore. Really? So it's like you'd have to get like, the only way to change volume was like the volume button crank, or your proximity crank to the speaker crank.

Yeah. Yeah. And then along came like Sonos, and you could have the perfect amount of volume in every room. So that's why we actually, I spent years trying to develop an HVAC style air filter, but it didn't work because when your furnace is off, it doesn't work. Right. It's kind of like having that one big speaker in the middle of the house.

Yeah. You really want something that's decentralized and sporadically placed out. That makes perfect

[01:16:23] Jordan Harbinger: sense, I suppose. Oh, okay. So to open the windows or not to open the windows, right. If you have, if my outdoor air is relatively clean like it is most of the time in California, like, it's literally like the h UI is eight or something.

Or even better. Okay, fine. If there's wildfires, you keep the windows closed. But what if you, okay. If you live on a major road or just regular suburban living. And what about like people who live in New York in an apartment? I mean, are we opening the windows or are we closing the

[01:16:48] Mike Feldstein: windows? And it's not just urban because folks in a rural environment, often they're surrounded by farms that spray.

Oh, I didn't think about that. So they have more pesticides often than even an urban environment.

[01:17:00] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting.

[01:17:01] Mike Feldstein: So to open the window or, or close the window. That is a wonderful question. And it does depend on the outdoor air. So you know, has that air awareness goes up. Like I don't just Google and I will say air awareness is going up because Teslas now have a QI in the car.

They do. Yeah. How do I find that? And it's a new update on like the top right. No kidding. Apple weather, Google weather. Is that indoor

[01:17:23] Jordan Harbinger: A QI? No. No, it's outdoor. It's what the car

[01:17:24] Mike Feldstein: detect. It's not, that's pretty cool. I don't think the car's detecting it, but it's connected to weather. It's connecting network.

Yeah. Yeah. So cities, just the way that they're monitoring people just think about air has like, well they don't even think about it. Yeah. If you think about the weather, you think about is it hot out, cold out? Yeah. Pretty much sunny and will it rain? Right. That's the extent of how you think about outside, not really thinking.

Those are all air things. You don't think about the particulate or the pollution at all. I'm really happy to see a lot of these big weather companies are starting to add more air quality stuff. Mm-Hmm. They're not like putting it in your face yet. But I, if I was gonna go for a run, I'll usually check the air quality that day.

I check the air quality every day anyway. There's some really good air apps there. If you just Google like air quality and my,

[01:18:02] Jordan Harbinger: I have it on the, I have it. Literally you'll be, I might be the first person that has this. It's literally, well yeah, of course it's an airplane mode so it's not showing up the one time I wanna show it off.

But yeah, I've got. A QI UV index, weather unavailable because I'm on airplane mode and uh, podcast app. That's it. But yeah, I hit, I'd look at that like every single day. Hopefully it updated now. Yeah. No, thanks. Thanks for blowing my demo. iPhone.

[01:18:27] Mike Feldstein: Yeah. If the air quality is good that day and it's not really hot or really cold out, great day for it.

Also, if you're cooking and you don't have ear filtration, that's a no-brainer. Time to open it window and definitely open the windows. I never thought about because of letting things out, only about letting things in, but yeah, that's a good point. No, no. It's more about letting things out. Yeah, sure. That makes sense.

So two windows is better than one and ideally on opposite sides of the house.

[01:18:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course I have noticed that I'll open this and I, a little bit of a temperature change, but then if I open that and then I open like a window in this room over here with the door open, it's like the subway's coming. You feel that rush of air?

Yes. Every time there's a breeze and it really

[01:19:03] Mike Feldstein: flushes out the house. It's not like open it all the way or close it all the way. I would crack the window. Like even if you're just cracking two windows, that way you're getting the benefit of ventilation without opening it all the way. Like in the winter or the summer.

It's, especially if it's really hot or cold, it's gonna kill your energy bill. Damn, we don't

[01:19:19] Jordan Harbinger: have that problem here. No.

[01:19:21] Mike Feldstein: You're just like temper it always. It's like spring

[01:19:22] Jordan Harbinger: slash summer 24 7. That's crazy. We get charged for it and we get a sunshine tax. I do have a question about the sustainability of this.

'cause Jasper's made outta metal and all the other air purifiers and I bought like every other brand that I could find that wasn't just a Chinese knockoff with a fake name. They're all plastic. So Jasper's heavier and it uses metal. The carbon footprint of metal is higher. So what about people who are like super into sustainability?

Is that gonna be a problem for them? No, it's the

[01:19:49] Mike Feldstein: opposite. How's that? So when you manufacture one ton of plastic, it creates about three tons of carbon. So, okay. The big, big, big difference is Jasper's is designed to last about 30 years. 30 years that thing's gonna last 30 years should, yeah. Holy smokes.

And that's why we can do a lifetime warranty. Plastic, didn't you? Air purifier typically only lasts three years, four years at most. Oh yeah. So it's commercial in its nature. I see. So Jasper used to be a $2,000 product that we only sold to doctors and dentists in that world, doctors and dentists, air purifiers were like two to 7,000.

Well, um, at the beginning of Covid d. Every dentist in Ontario was mandated to put an air purifier in every room. Really? And dentists were already one of the biggest, dentists were already the biggest air purifier purchasing industry. Because of the mandates only? No, no. Before covid, really? The Department of Labor ranks dental and dental hygienists has two of the top five most dangerous jobs in America.

Because of drilling teeth. I mean, what, what's in there? What's in the air In a dentist's office. It's called bio aerosols. And it's ranked more dangerous than coal miners, cops, firefighters, power plant workers. But

[01:20:57] Jordan Harbinger: what's what's in the air though? I don't get

[01:20:59] Mike Feldstein: it. Well, when the two dirtiest parts of us are our mouth and our butt, I bring both of those to the dentist.

Yeah. When they, when they take a high velocity air and water. And shoot it into your gums. Yeah. Well, the point is they're getting all the disgusting crap outta my teeth. So when you test the air in a dental office, including in the lobby and the waiting area, it's off the charts. No kidding. The bacteria is, the viruses and dentists are very aware of this.

There's tons of companies that only make air purifiers specifically for dentists, and some of them are like 3, 4, 5, 6, $7,000. Wow. So when we launched, we used to be the discount medical air purifier. I see. And then then patients started to buy it, and then we're like, I wanna help families breathe better at home.

Right. I don't like this whole medical side of the business. Okay. So yeah, the dentist and the hygienist wear masks when they're treating the patient, but your mouth is wide open. Yeah. So I will never go to a dentist that doesn't have high quality air filters in every single room. Some of them use an extractor.

That is designed to like be like a range hood. Most don't and we don't have that. Even if they do, it doesn't capture most of it. Yeah. My dentist doesn't have that. Here's the crazy thing. The reason we have the lifetime warranty, the reason we have one day shipping for replacement units is because when we launched during COVID, we would get calls from dentists, but their, their hygienists would refuse to work if the Jasper wasn't running right.

Okay. 'cause it orange between every single patient, in fact, wow. Turbo mode. Yeah. That was. Created for dentists because when they're done treating a patient, I always ask the dentist, I'm like, by the way, once upon a time, dentists didn't use masks or gloves.

[01:22:32] Jordan Harbinger: I remember those days, man, very clearly. This is called the eighties and the nineties, man.

They were just, my dentist would be like, oh, I guess I should use gloves when I'm poking around in your mouth. There's a new log, uh, uh, for this. But he, I mean, he washed his hands like, yeah, not long ago. Yeah, this is like, not that. And now that seems insane. Absolutely insane. Yes. They're like, get your dirty aids is when they were like, oh, I should probably wear gloves.

And also, what was the other, yeah, like a surgical mask and now they have like face shields and everything.

[01:22:58] Mike Feldstein: It was the same mouth. It was just as dirty back then. So yeah, they're blasting all this stuff around. It's in the air and then your, the mouth is wide open. So we created turbo mode because I would ask them to, I go, do you wash your hands between patients?

Yeah. Duh. Of course. I go, do you clean all of the instruments between your patients? They're like, yeah, duh. We disinfect it. I go, do you clean your air between patients? Uh, no. So the percentage of dentists who do filter the air is going up dramatically. Yeah. Once you kind of realize that people won't go to a dentist that doesn't clean the air anymore.

Uh, yeah. And it, it goes orange. It's always orange because it's actually working. Wow. So once the dentist and the hygienist, they learn about bio aerosols in school and training, but it never was visualized for them. And then they realized like, why are they getting sick all the time? Dentists have one of the highest percentages of any industry of adult onset asthma.

[01:23:50] Jordan Harbinger: That's so interesting.

[01:23:51] Mike Feldstein: So you're breathing tooth particulate, blood, saliva, and then any other viruses that are in, in the air. So that turbo mode was designed. 'cause right when the hygienist is done with the patient, they can hit the turbo mode. It will run on full speed for like 10 minutes. Yeah. And then go back to smart mode.

And then we kept it. So now people use that mode. When they leave the front door, they like hit it to do a little deep clean. But yeah, that machine was, it was originally for wildfire smoke. And then when Covid happened, it was a medical and dental thing. And then the hygienist would, they would use it as a sales tool.

Yeah. Of why you should come to our dental office. That's a good idea. And then the patient's like, uh, my kid has asthma. Will it help? Allergies would help. They're like, probably, do they sell it for families? I don't know. Call Jasper. We had no e-commerce. Yeah. Yeah. The only way you could buy one was to call me.

That's funny. And I like two people working for me. We would talk to every single person on the phone or like email with them and then we'd send 'em an invoice. So the ability to buy these things online was only February, 2023. Geez.

[01:24:44] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like I got mine shortly thereafter. Probably. Yeah. Because I think, didn't we get in touch originally because I had my air tested and then someone was like, send it to this guy.

And I was like, oh, this. I'll send it to this Mike Feldstein guy. And then you were like, oh, hi Jordan. And I was like, oh, you're that the same person? Because it's not, you know. Well you,

[01:24:59] Mike Feldstein: you got some MO testing done.

[01:25:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And then you were like, let me decode this for you. And then you were like, Hey, let me send you this thing.

And I, I saw that it was just, then the fire happened right after. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And then it was like far superior to anything that we had in every room in the house. So we ended up putting those in other like Airbnbs that my brother-in-law owns and like get got rid of 'em and replaced 'em with Jasper.

Once you start noticing Oh, the dentist?

[01:25:21] Mike Feldstein: Yeah. Oh wait, the salon, the barbershop. Yeah, the restaurant. As you start noticing like your home air, like Yeah, clean air should be like outside in an area with good air generally doesn't smell like much. And if it does it's in nature. But when you go to like, dude, I can't go to shopping malls anymore.

[01:25:36] Jordan Harbinger: Well, they already smell like the per perfume from the department store. The lush and the

[01:25:40] Mike Feldstein: bath and bodyboard. Yes.

[01:25:41] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, when you wash, when you walk by that store, lush. I do. It triggers my gag reflex and it makes my eyes water. And my wife will go in there and she's like, I wanna look around. And I'm like, I can't even wait for you like anywhere near this store.

I have to go. Literal anywhere else.

[01:25:54] Mike Feldstein: Yeah. The once the air gross, there is a price to be paid for being an air snob.

[01:25:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Well, thanks, uh, for coming all the way to my house to do the show. I'm glad we were able to

[01:26:03] Mike Feldstein: show off the Jaspers. You know, we don't run Facebook ads, we don't do Google ads.

The whole mission is go teach people about air. Mm-Hmm. And, you know, we can't help you with CO2. You gotta open your doors and windows. And there are are other products that clean the air just as good. No doubt. The downside, typically if they're half the price, it's usually 'cause they're louder and uglier and made from plastic.

I see. So where our kind of unique value proposition is, is if you wanted to be beautiful and quiet and smart and have good service. But I would rather people get something rather than nothing. So I believe this episode's gonna drop October 28th. Yep. So we set up code Jordan, for anyone who's listening, it'll be $400 off.

Wow. It'll be Oh wow. Literally the biggest offer we've ever had. And it's gonna only last one week. So between October 28th. For seven days after, it'll be $400 off. And then after that it will be a hundred dollars off for eternity. We'll just leave that code for anyone. Okay. That helps. But any of like loyal listeners who heard and they were like, whoa, I want to invest in clean air.

Yeah. And uh, this sounds like something I want to do. Code Jordan, October 28th for one week will be $400 off and uh, hopefully I should buy some

[01:27:09] Jordan Harbinger: more for my own house with my own code. So sushi time, is that legit? Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Pay those bills and uh, I will have to use some of that to get some delicious food 'cause I'm starving.

Thank you man. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the one and only Dr. Drew Pinsky of Loveline fame. Always loved that guy. It's like a movie script. This person was saying a bunch of crap didn't make any sense. Yeah. And then you said something along the lines of, is there someone else in there I can talk to?

And then they were like, sure.

[01:27:39] Clip: Oh yeah. I could tell it was multiple. Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty easy thing for me to tell you. Listen, with your whole body, okay. You don't listen with your ears. And that really started happening with dealing with drug addicts out in the clinic because they pull you into a vortex.

If I hear the sound, you know the little cartoon with the East Guard Y Yoga? Yeah, sure. I know I'm with a drug addict. Okay. When I hear that YY yoga sound in my head, I go, uh, somebody's doing drugs. I just know it. I'm just gonna be sitting here listening to somebody going, ha ha ha. And all of a sudden I go, YY YI go, oh, okay, I got it.

I can stop listening now and just start asking what they're taking, how much they're on, that kind of stuff. I'm thinking right now, this guy that, uh. Called us and wanted to know. Women always freak out when they find out what I was in jail for and all of a sudden Adam goes, wait a minute. Find out that you were in jail or find out what you were in jail for.

He goes, what I was in jail for? And we go, oh, well what were you in jail for? I broke into a mausoleum and I twisted off the head of an old lady and boiled it to a skull 'cause I needed it for my little brother's snakes, aquarium. And I thought, wow. Wow. And don't understand. That might be a little disturbing to people.

Why? Okay, so he was psychopath. Psychopath. Yeah.

[01:28:49] Jordan Harbinger: Self-esteem obviously doesn't care if you're successful, right?

[01:28:52] Clip: Self-esteem is something established I think by age five. I mean, you can enhance it and you can move it a little bit, but most of it is set early and mine was bad. Yeah, that's okay. That's all right.

I, I, you know, it just, if it gives you trouble, if it makes you feel bad, if it gives you symptoms as it pairs your functioning, that's therapy time. Okay. Did you ever try therapy for it that 11 years? Oh my God, it was not for that per se. I was having overwhelming anxiety. That was my main reason. At least that's my wife's reason for sending me

[01:29:20] Jordan Harbinger: for more with Dr.

Drew, including what experiencing imposter syndrome usually reveals about you and how we can spot the behaviors of addiction in others as well as in ourselves. Check out episode 72 right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, so this air quality thing is real, folks, as a, as a parent of small children.

We put foam on stuff, we put tape on sharp things, we cover up the electrical outlets. But then I just never thought of cleaning the air where they sleep and spend all of their time. So that was kind of a wake up call for me, especially when we had crappy air quality and fires around here. And it, look, I, again, I apologize at least a little if this episode seems more salesy than usual.

I, that wasn't really my intention. But honestly, the more I've researched this. The more I really care about the air quality in my home, the more I feel really good about recommending something like this. I mean, I had him fly out here to do the show at his expense. Uh, this is really a sponsor that I can really get behind.

I went for them to sponsor the show. They didn't pitch me on this or anything. It's always good when I like a product and then I can reach out to the company, have them sponsor the show, instead of it having it come through like a sales pipeline. And I gotta figure out what I like about it. This is really, in my opinion, the most authentic way to recommend something.

And again, these things are beautiful. They work really well, but they're also beautiful. It's like something you'd find at the Apple store. They're super attractive, they're clean looking and like I said, most importantly, they actually work. So if you wanna get one of these things, Jasper JA spr.co and use code Jordan this week for 400 bucks off, that is a pretty amazing discount.

Honestly, I'm actually gonna be using my own code. I. J-A-S-P-R jasper.co. Using Code Jordan. I'm gonna be using that myself to get more for my own house, for my parents, and my in-laws. And if you're interested, if you're on the market for an air filter, this is the one. I encourage you to use this code ASAP and do the same thing.

And I hope this was helpful. I know I kind of nerded out here, so thanks for bearing with me. All things. Mike Feldstein and Jasper will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this podcast.

Also, our newsletter Wee bit wiser. A lot of you love this. I really, I'm so grateful that you do. You hit reply when I send it out and you can always do that to reach me. I just really enjoy sending this out and writing it. The idea is to give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decision, psychology and relationships in under two minutes.

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If you know somebody who's interested in air quality or should be interested in air quality, definitely share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.