[00:00:00] Mike: I have a talk and a book now that I'm working on, and it's called You are What You Breathe? I'm working on the trademark.

[00:00:06] Luke: Yeah. Cool.

[00:00:07] Mike: So it's like the essence of the spirit I'm moving towards.

[00:00:09] Luke: Awesome. You are what you breathe. I like that.

[00:00:12] Mike: Yeah. We going to have some sweet little shirts

[00:00:13] Luke: Well, that's the funny thing, is there's so much emphasis on the diet wars. I've been around the wellness space for almost 27 years, and so I've seen the raw vegan thing, and then paleo, and macrobiotic, and carnivore, and everyone's so concerned about the food. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, what about the air, and the EMF, and the water? But now people are catching onto that.

[00:00:46] Mike: They only catch on by talking about it.

[00:00:48] Luke: Exactly. And that's what we're doing right now, my man. For those listening or watching, the show notes for this episode can be found at lukestorey.com/air. And we'll be talking about all kinds of stuff related to that. So first thing I want to ask you about is how you got into the air. I've done some research on you, and we've met before, obviously, and had quite a few chats. You've been in the house before. What about the biggest flood in Canadian history in 2013 and then 2016 cleaning up after the biggest fire in Canadian history? How did those two events shape your passion for air quality?

[00:01:32] Mike: The flood one was my first disaster. I spent 2013 to 2018 basically being in the disaster business. So floods, hurricanes, power outages, ice storms, hailstorms would be a disaster. We would basically mobilize and set up to rebuild and restore and clean homes. Calgary 2013 was the first massive event. I was in online marketing before that, and then somehow we were working with a lot of mold companies. This was back in what they used to call the mold rush-- mold is gold, was the saying.

[00:02:13] So I got into mold from marketing. It was the entrepreneur opportunistic, whoa, this is drywall removal, but 10 times the price. You just have to take it really seriously and do a good job. It's like a lot of people were doing construction, but it made a lot more sense to focus on bigger problems that way less people were knowledgeable about.

[00:02:34] And I had some friends working in the mold space, and then through marketing clients, and I was really not enjoying the marketing world at all. Clients, and relationships, and retainers, and going to bed at night thinking about 12 different people's businesses. So when I discovered the mold as a business, I was very intrigued.

[00:02:53] So I started to work with some mold companies where I would generate all the business, and then they would do the jobs, and we would split it. And I'm like, this is way better than running a marketing company. And then this huge flood happened in 2013, and I started a company called Flood Experts. So it was crazy.

[00:03:11] We put up a one pager website, floodexperts.ca. Flew to Calgary. Had my friend from Toronto I was working with, ship all of his equipment down. And we went there. We went on Craigslist and Kijiji, which is like a Canadian Craigslist. And we were going to do door to door signs. And anyway, the Kijiji post, our first call getting out there.

[00:03:35] So I have flood experts, and I have a truckload of equipment. I wasn't even 25, so I couldn't rent a car. So I had to rent a U-Haul. And we were staying in a motel, and it was just very much like-- I heard insurance companies were prepared to spend $2 billion, and this city was so underwater, you can't imagine.

[00:03:53] So I'm talking like downtown skyscrapers and water's up to the second, third level of the building. Six-storey deep underground parkades, completely filled with water. So I got really thrown into it, and the first call we got was the biggest hotel in Calgary. So I had to go from entering the flood business with a friend who's been in the game.

[00:04:14] He was used to house floods and a plaza flood, not six storeys deep, not trucks upside down. It was like war zone stuff. And it was funny because I knew online marketing. I ran a Google ad for flood stuff Calgary. And 20 minutes later, I got a call from CBC, which is one of the biggest national news companies in Canada.

[00:04:41] And they asked if I was in Calgary. I was not yet. I hadn't flown down yet. And I was like, yes, yes, I am. They're like, are you free in 30 minutes to do a live radio interview about the state of affairs? And I was like, yes. So I was prepared to fly out a couple of days later, and I remember opening my windows, putting on YouTube in the background to create background noise.

[00:05:05] And I was like, it's mayhem here. I sounded like a war reporter talking about what's going on in Calgary. Next day, we fly out there. We get a call. It's this hotel. Between speaking to friends watching YouTube videos, I didn't have much money at the time. I literally immersed in the biggest flood ever, had to figure out how to clean, restore, and fix a hotel, and several other residences.

[00:05:28] So I got my flood degree times 100. Just really threw myself into it like no other. And fundamentally, we have to get water out. We have to get out the mud, clean the stuff, and we had to hire these air testing companies every day to come and check for asbestos, to come and check for mold and make sure things were safe.

[00:05:47] And we had to pay these guys every single day, but we don't get paid for six to 12 months fighting with insurance companies, construction. It was annoying. And I'm like, when this is all said and done, I want to look into the air quality business. These guys come, they test the air, we pay them every day.

[00:06:01] I'm like, this seems like a really stress-free way to make money and do some good. So after that flood, I went back to Toronto, and I got certified in air quality stuff and became a home inspector, which I'll talk about that later because the training to become a home inspector was a two-day course.

[00:06:18] And now I was certified to help people make the biggest purchase of their life. And I got into air quality consulting, and that company still exists today in Canada. We're finally now done with that chapter, but it was a decade run of being in thousands of people's homes. They're sick at home. They don't know why.

[00:06:38] And we would test the air, test for mold very much like Ryan, who's been on your podcast, from Test My Home. It's like if you go on vacation and you feel good, and then you come home and you feel sick again, hmm, is my home making me sick? So that was the one liner. If you think your home may be making you sick, we'll come in and figure it out.

[00:06:57] And then it got quite frustrating because there wasn't great solutions for people. It's like there was these big, loud, ugly, industrial air purifier machines that looked like subwoofers or photocopiers that we were using for mold, and flood, and fire. And then there was Best Buy and Home Depot that were selling 1.99, 2.99 little nothing purifiers.

[00:07:21] And between seeing thousands of homes where people had these air quality issues, and then being in-- really what brought it home, man, was the wildfires. People are so sick after wildfires, so sick. No one talks about this. You just see the smoke. It's in the news for a few days, and it's gone.

[00:07:37] If you look at a doctor, a pulmonologist, a pediatrician, these guys are slammed. Everybody's immune systems are shot. Their respiratory stuff shot, their asthma spiked. They're psoriasis. Everything's off the chain when the wildfire smoke comes through. And I remember having a big air scrubber in a customer's home and they unplugged it. Why would you unplug it?

[00:07:59] And they were sick. They were quite sick. They just moved back in their home, and they were like, it's loud, and it's ugly. And I realized, whoa, people care about their health, but it needs to be convenient. If it's a loud, ugly thing in your living room, you've just introduced noise pollution.

[00:08:15] I never thought I'd be in the airspace. It was one thing at a time. The flood, the fire, the air quality testing, and then realizing-- we had sedans and we had pickup trucks, and we needed an SUV. So yeah, it was just really through the disaster stuff, the air testing, being on the other side of mold removal, mold cleanup, just being so immersed.

[00:08:38] And I would say the one thing that really brought it home for me was whenever you would finish an environmental cleanup job, we would test the air to make sure it's safe. Insurance company signs off, yeah, it's safe, but what was considered safe wasn't great. It just wasn't horrible.

[00:08:54] And it really reminded me of the medical system where it's like, you get a blood test, we'll call you if you're dying. I'm like, what? But like, am I great? And it just shifted to me that I saw the most critical situations of bad air, and then I saw what was considered good wasn't really good. And then I started putting air purifiers in my house, started to sleep. It was just gradual from there.

[00:09:21] But really, it was that stumbling into the disaster space and being on the other side where I had construction and dealing with the most messed up buildings and homes and the sickest people possible. And then just realizing that, whoa, we need something that's-- I didn't want to be reactive anymore.

[00:09:38] Wait for the disaster to strike. I wanted to have a solution that when there's just bad allergies, or smoke, or whatever, we'd have a solution for it. So yeah, the whole goal for this business was just to create an air purifier for wildfire smoke. I never thought we'd be doing what we're doing now. I thought we were just for California to British Columbia, and we were going to be the wildfire guys.

[00:09:58] Luke: Interesting. Yeah, you just reminded me. And for those, watching the video, we have one of Mike's Jaspr units here, which is one of the most coveted technologies in this house, especially due to allergies and Christmas tree I just learned about, which we can talk about, but you just reminded me over there in the corner, I have the first air purifier I ever had, the Austin Air.

[00:10:21] And this is back in late '90s, early 2000 or something, I became aware of indoor air quality issues and got that, which I think for a HEPA filter, is probably pretty good, but it's exceedingly loud and also not that cute to look at. And that's the thing. And they're just a black box basically, but there are other ones out there that are also too loud.

[00:10:53] And some of them, the filtration is a bit suspect. And also what I like that you've done is you created one that actually has an air quality sensor in it, which is really cool. And also I know it works because if I light some incense or do any kind of shenanigans in the house, it speeds up if you have it set to auto. So yeah, I've been in the same struggle of wanting to keep the air clean and have it just not done well, or it's creating noise pollution, or it's just aesthetically an eyesore.

[00:11:31] Mike: That unit over there, that Austin Air, the thing about it, you said you bought that in the '90s, right?

[00:11:36] Luke: That one I probably bought 20 years ago or something.

[00:11:41] Mike: Here's the thing.

[00:11:42] Luke: But I had a little one at first and then upgraded.

[00:11:44] Mike: It's the same model now.

[00:11:46] Luke: There's been no innovation.

[00:11:48] Mike: So in the HVAC, in the air quality space, the idea is if none of us innovate, none of us have to innovate. And I'm like, some people say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't say that. I say, if we can make it better, let's make it better.

[00:12:05] This house is beautiful, and it's streamlined, and it's minimalistic. And if something's really ugly, and loud, and manual, no one's going to use it. And I hate trying to be healthy and optimize my environment, optimize my food. It's hard stuff. One of my favorite quotes by a guy named Dean Jackson, he said, I love my Jaspr because it's the laziest way to be healthy.

[00:12:30] He's eating clean and all this stuff. It's a lot of work, and exercising, and moving, and I just wanted something that was out sight out of mind. You don't touch it. You don't interact with it. But these sensors, even a decade ago, would've been probably three, four grand. This was not possible.

[00:12:46] The really high-quality air sensors have gotten so much more affordable. Remember even in 2014, my little particulate probe was $5,500 and that same sensor is onboard here now. It's not expensive anymore. So why aren't we putting it on there? And the whole idea is, it cleans your air, but it's also supposed to be an educational tool.

[00:13:08] So if you live in a polluted city on a bad day and you crack your window, it fires up. If you cook, it fires up. Your incense. So you're like, oh, whoa. Because air is invisible, we can't see it. Most of the things in it we can't smell either. So the idea is how do we make people more air aware, air conscious, and reassured.

[00:13:26] So yeah, the idea was it has to be beautiful, and it has to be smart, and it has to be quiet. Otherwise, no one's going to ever use it because the cons arguably outweigh the pros or a bright light in your bedroom that you're duct taping all over the place.

[00:13:41] Luke: Oh, that's another thing you nailed, is the lights off switch. Because there's so many technologies, whether it's just little indicator lights, just weird stuff, which I really notice when I check into a hotel room.

[00:13:55] Mike: Oh, dude. It's the worst, man.

[00:13:57] Luke: I bring little red tape, little dots. I think the company's called True Dark. And I have these little red dots, so I go and tape up all the lights. But that's one thing that does suck just about electronics in general, is if you're trying to minimize light pollution at night, especially blue light, and you turn the light switches and the lamps off, and then the room is still illuminated by all of your kitchen stuff and--

[00:14:21] Mike: Even one teeny little light, you're like, whoa, that little light is bright.

[00:14:25] Luke: Totally. And once you get used to having a dark home at night, or you just have red lights on, like we do at night, you really start to notice it. It's one of those things you just get used to it when you don't know about it.

[00:14:37] Mike: Like everything else.

[00:14:38] Luke: Once you start to try to fix it, it's super annoying. So I love that you guys put the lights off.

[00:14:44] Mike: I call it dark mode. So I almost never launched this as a company. There was two years when we were developing it, and I'm like, I don't know that I really want to start a whole business, but I'm like, what I do want is a great air purifier for me and my friends, my family. I'm like, we're 90% of the way there. Let's just finish. I want one.

[00:15:01] So I didn't do market research. I didn't interview a bunch of people. I just built the exact thing that I wanted, and I'm like, hopefully some other people will appreciate some features I did. So there's a reason there's no Wi-Fi, there's no Bluetooth, there's no app.

[00:15:13] I developed an app, and I scrapped it. I'm like, why do we need an EMF and an app and a remote? I don't want a smartphone and all these smart products because they're not smart if I'm controlling them. They're actually dumb if I have to be fiddling with them all. I'm like, a smart product is something that you don't touch because it's smart. It's not relying on you and your scheduling. My dishwasher has an app now. What the heck?

[00:15:42] Luke: Dude, it's crazy. And I agree. I think anything Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled is inherently stupid and shouldn't be called smart. But when we started buying the appliances and stuff for this house, after we finish remodeling it, it's really hard to actually find things that don't have connectivity to the freaking automatic fancy cat litter machine, the self-cleaning thing. It's like, I'm calling these companies, can I disable the Wi-Fi? Can I disable the Bluetooth? It's actually a lot more work to keep the EMF out of your house because they just put it in everything now. It's crazy. It's like really hard to avoid.

[00:16:22] Mike: And you'll be surprised how many boards come ready to go. I was shocked way more products than you think in your home have microphones on them because they're this big now. They're just on the board. In case they need the functionality later-- so much stuff.

[00:16:37] So that dark mode though, what was important about it was the air purifiers that did have the ability to go dark, they call it sleep mode. There's a button, it says sleep. Cool. You push it, the lights turn off, put on just about almost every other model. When you would push the sleep mode, the fan speed goes to about two to 5%. So I would joke the only thing that you were putting to sleep was the air purifier.

[00:16:58] So you walk the thing for your bedroom at night to work, and the only way to turn off the light was to also turn off the fan. I'm like, this is annoying. A lot of people keep it on fan speed, two or three, in dark mode, like the white noise machine, especially with babies, nurseries. And then once your kid's on the white noise, you get addicted to it. And if you live in a city, it drowns at the background noise. I'm like, why are we using a speaker to make white noise and we could just have a fan that cleans air?

[00:17:24] Luke: Yeah, totally.

[00:17:26] Mike: So that was the idea.

[00:17:27] Luke: I became addicted to white noise when I lived in LA because it was so loud out here, not so much. It's pretty, pretty quiet at night in this area. It's a bunch of older folks I think around here.

[00:17:39] Mike: No, it's pretty quiet.

[00:17:39] Luke: Which I like. If anyone likes a quiet neighborhood, move into a retirement community. That's a good way to do it. All right, so back to what we were talking about with people being so concerned with their food. And I think now I've observed people becoming more aware of their water quality, which is great. And you've got the EMF. Yeah, I think it's important to not eat poison. So eating organic and whatever people's diet is, is fine, but we drink about three liters of water per day, about three pounds of food, but we breathe 20,000 liters of air.

[00:18:18] So that's one indicator to me that this is something we really want to pay attention to. So let's go ahead and get into-- and I don't know how much of this you know. I'm assuming some. I think mold is something we want to get into, but how does breathing dirty air, polluted air, whole lives affect us physically, with autoimmunity or just other general toxicity? I think that's probably a good place to start and we're going to get into all of the nuances of the weird shit that can exist inside and outside the home in the air.

[00:18:56] Mike: All right, I love it. So another way to look at the importance is you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air. So one's the quantity that we're consuming and the other is how long we could survive without it. And I saw a really good YouTube video the other day, and there's three goldfish in a bowl. There's this one older bigger goldfish, and he swims by these other little two goldfish, and he goes, how's the water boys? And then the little two goldfish, look at them and say, what's water?

[00:19:26] Luke: Yeah, I love that.

[00:19:28] Mike: What is water? How would they know they live in it? And I'm like, when did he-- think about if we went back a few hundred years ago pre advanced science and the way we know it now. I don't know how far we have to go back. Probably not very far till actually the awareness that air is even a thing existed. If you didn't know much about underwater, they probably knew that, or space.

[00:19:50] You just figure we're just breathing, but what is air? And I think it's fascinating that the first thing we do when we're born, take a breath. The last thing we do before we die, our last breath. When we sleep for ideally about one third of our life, we're not eating, we're not drinking, the only thing keeping us alive is air.

[00:20:13] You can be in a coma and keep breathing. If you're hungry, you go get food. If you're thirsty, you go get water. But the air awareness-- humans are so good at adapting to our environment that I feel like people just have no air awareness because we have no awareness, because our body, it's so core to our existence that you can't survive without it.

[00:20:38] And whenever I talk about this, it's stressful because once you think about breathing, you can't stop thinking about breathing. And then you're like, oh, that's stressful. Thank God this body can just breathe without me, without my conscious effort in the way that food and water, it cannot. So if you go into someone's house or in a restaurant, it might smell a little bit.

[00:20:58] In five minutes, it doesn't smell anymore because your body's like, hmm. It's not a very good feature to make you constantly annoyed by this odor. But maybe it would've actually been good if it kept smelling because you might leave. And people often say, it's stuffy inside. I'm going to go outside for some fresh air.

[00:21:19] It's like, that's not fresh air, that's just air, likely quite polluted air depending on where you live. But your air inside is so bad that regular polluted outdoor air you call fresh air. And I would love to see a world where I say, let me go inside to breathe some extra clean air. You would never go to a pond on the side of the road and be like, let's get a drink of fresh water.

[00:21:42] You know your filtered water, it's the same source, but you've taken out the stuff. And with our food, we want to cook it. Ideally, it's organic. So I believe air is just another one of our three top bio requirements with food, air, water. So if you eat a bunch of French fried fries and bad Big Macs every day, you won't die tonight, but you're going to feel exhausted after.

[00:22:12] You're going to feel tired. You're going to feel suboptimal. You might get some heartburn. You might sleep poorly. And then what's the impact of poor sleep? So if you start drinking really unfiltered water, what may happen if someone drinks filtered water? It's like, why? Because you know that there's things in that pond water, and your tap water is arguably just as bad because to get that pond water, groundwater lake water, cleaned, we had to splash it with a bunch of chemicals.

[00:22:38] It was the most economical way to bring scalable, "safe" water. Safe nowadays basically means it won't kill you this year. It might slowly be killing you. And I think what's important is to realize we could quote the stats, and they say, how many hundreds of millions of people die from air pollution and stuff like that.

[00:23:01] And it's really hard to completely say what it is and isn't, but if someone's dealing-- I have some psoriasis right now I'm dealing with. It's getting a whole lot better, but I have to clean up my diet, clean up my water, clean up my air. And if I have a stressing event, all the stuff gets worse. It doesn't really matter. I find what the trigger is, if it's emotional stress, physical stress, food stress.

[00:23:27] If I want to be healthy, mitigating the source of toxins is really helpful. I think the best way to be empowered to deal with your air is by realizing that like you have all the sensors on board in your body to actually detect this and navigate this. We've turned them off. For example, they teach us about the five senses in fifth grade science class, touch, smell, taste. What else we got? Sight and hearing.

[00:24:07] And I don't like touch has a sense. I think that's really surface level. So I've removed touch from my vocabulary, and I've replaced it with feel feelings. That's a sense. If there was a garbage can there with poo in it and food, you could close your eyes right now, tie your hands behind your back and find the source of the bacteria. The shark who smells the blood two miles away, or the bear, you're like, how does he do that? Well, that's because it's traveled that far.

[00:24:37] He can smell upstream, the currents, to find that blood, to find that dead wounded animal. They can smell it. And we can smell really well too. If you go into dry sauna or the desert, you know what dry feels like? If you go on a rainforest, you feel the dampness. You have a relative humidity sensor on board. If you told me to guess right now the CO2, the relative humidity, I get it. I'm within couple of percentage points, even temperature.

[00:25:06] We check the weather. We think temperature and will it rain is the only factors of a good time outside. Is it warmer, is it cold? That will determine my happiness outside. But what we don't think of, what's the air quality today outside? Because if it's super polluted and poor and the pollens off the charts, bad day to go for a run.

[00:25:24] But if it's a super good air quality day, great day to go outside, open the windows, go out for a run. So we're not really in tune with that. I tell you right now, your CO2 is pretty good. It's in that 650 to 800 range. I only know because I usually carry a CO2 sensor with me. So I've calibrated my biosensors.

[00:25:42] If it's smells very chemically or there's a bunch of smoke, I would smell the smoke, and I'd be like, yo, we got to go outside. I smell gas. So these senses are incredible features that we have. Once you go to filtered water, you know what chemical water tastes like, and you can't go back.

[00:26:04] Luke: Oh man. It's funny, when you go to a restaurant and they bring the water, I finally just gave up, but when I first really got into water quality, say, oh here's your glass of water. And I would try to refuse it, and their heads explode. Servers can't stand not giving you a glass of water. So now I don't have them take it away, but it just sits there. I'm like, there's no-- if I was dying of thirst, I'll drink any water. But if I have a choice, I'm not going to drink tap water.

[00:26:34] Mike: But growing up you probably didn't notice. It was just water.

[00:26:36] Luke: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:26:38] Mike: Tap water is great. It's got lots of extra fluoride. Good for the teeth.

[00:26:41] Luke: Dude, I remember drinking out of the hose in the summer. And you'd be drinking that plastic water. Do you remember that?

[00:26:47] Mike: Yes.

[00:26:48] Luke: Yeah.

[00:26:48] Mike: Yeah. And you're like, ah, it tastes a little funny, but it's hydrating, and it's great.

[00:26:53] Luke: Or the water fountain at school. Yeah.

[00:26:56] Mike: You could taste it now thinking about it.

[00:26:58] Luke: All metallic and shit.

[00:27:01] Mike: Crazy amounts of lead. And once you got into the filtered water, you could taste. You've calibrated, for example, your taste sensors to water. You're going to have a pretty good idea if this is like too minerally, if it's metallic, if it's extra chlorinated. You've now calibrated those same sensors.

[00:27:21] So when someone can do that with air-- if you can feel that the air is stuffy, stuffy is our best way of describing, all we're saying is it's high CO2. It's not stuffy outside. CO2 is lower. It's like we've taken a metric. Carbon dioxide levels are high. We can't survive off that stuff, so it's stuffy.

[00:27:42] So instead of cracking a window, open a door, going outside, changing your HVAC system, we just like, it's stuffy in here. Let me just go outside for a quick whiff of some of that fresh air and then come back inside. And so foundationally, I'll get to your question of what's in our air and how it impacts us, but I really think to anyone who's already down the rabbit hole on how food impacts you and how water impacts you, water is a liquid. We could drink it.

[00:28:10] If we freeze it it's a solid. If we heat it, it's a gas. Air and water aren't so different. If you can ever see visualized air currents, it looks just like an ocean. Water currents, air currents, you see the weather satellite image, the air currents move very similarly in your home. We just lost the awareness of it. But the beautiful thing is my favorite thing about-- I've many times lent someone a Jaspr for a week when it was local. I'm like, you know what?

[00:28:39] Put it in your house for the week. Sleep with it for a week. I'll come pick it up. And then you take it back, and they call you. They start having panic attacks. If someone sleeps with a Jaspr on fan speed two in a bedroom, and then they go from breathing-- so the average bedroom has about 800,000 particles floating around between 0.3 microns and 10 microns.

[00:28:58] A micron is a millionth of a meter, which is hard to visualize, but when we test the air in an average house, we got smoke, dust, pet dander. If your neighbor was doing construction four streets away, it's like if the shark was smelling the drop of blood four miles away, that neighbor a half a mile away who has a contractor out back ripping out asbestos, that's in your air.

[00:29:24] The mold abatement down the street, that's in your air. Where does the air in your house come from? Outside. There's no barrier of filtration. In fact, the air is typically five to even 50 times dirtier than the outside air, because the world's best air purifier is nature. It's trees. It's wind. It's hydroxyl radicals. It's the UV. The best UV light in the world is the sun.

[00:29:49] So notice you've never seen dust outside. It's not stuffy. It's not moldy. We have it all figured out. Unfortunately, when we started building airtight homes, we left nature outside. So now I like to basically look at outdoor pollution and indoor pollution, just keep it really broad. Outdoor pollution is your pollen. It's your mold. It's your allergens. It's your cedar fever. It's your wildfire smoke. It's your smog. It's your car exhaust. It's the road debris.

[00:30:14] Luke: Geoengineering, nanoparticle, dust, barium, aluminum, strontium, microplastics, graphene. They're putting in that shit now, graphene oxide. It's crazy.

[00:30:26] Mike: It's funny that you said microplastics because everyone's freaking out about microplastics in their water, rightfully so. I don't love it either. When they tested rainwater in Antarctica, it has microplastics. If you test the air basically anywhere for microplastics, where do you think the plastic goes when it does decompose over the years and it breaks apart and it gets heated and gets burned?

[00:30:53] We're breathing microplastics right now, but for some reason, the marketing has been a lot better on the water because it was easier. Everyone who's like microplastics in your water, they conveniently have a solution. But we got the glass bottle. And I'm glad. I want the glass bottle. I'm happy to pay for it. I like spring water.

[00:31:12] It's cool that the best water filter is also earth. It is the minerals, and it is the rocks. So yeah, we rattled off a lot of outdoor stuff. So that stuff comes inside. And then once we're in the house, here, anything in a home that is porous-- actually, before I get into that, I'll say, let's talk about indoor air pollution now.

[00:31:34] Indoor pollution, the biggest source by far is cooking times a million. And indoors is a new invention, cooking indoors. Cooking indoors in an airtight container, it's like our houses are wrapped in vapor barriers. They're basically Tupperware containers with a couple of little holes, and then we cook in it. So light a match in your Tupperware container. It's not so different than indoor cooking.

[00:31:54] Luke: Dude, this is one of the most life-changing things I learned from you is the reason you have hood exhaust fans over the stove. My whole life I just like feel stupid. I thought that was just so your house didn't smell like food.

[00:32:10] Mike: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:11] Luke: If you cook a burger, in a frying pan, your whole house smells like meat. It's a gross smell once it gets settled. It smells good at first because you're hungry. But I literally thought it was for the smoke, and then you told me, you're like, no dude, the propane exhaust, the carbon monoxide or whatever it is, gets all over your house.

[00:32:29] That's what the fan is for. And I think it was you that even told me, when you have four burners, you want to use the ones closest to the wall because they're going to get sucked up into the fan easier. I'm just like, my whole life, I never been that into cooking, but I don't remember anyone ever turning the fan on unless it was smokey or super smelly. I think many people don't realize, like myself, or maybe I was just dense, that you're actually getting the exhaust from the burners or from the oven going all through your house.

[00:32:59] Oh, you have that. And then if you're using, let's say a non-stick pan, you're aerosolizing the coatings, so yeah, you have the gas. So most range hoods are installed way too high. And why do you have a range hood? It's so all the cooking particulates, the odors, the gases are outside your house instead of inside your house. It was a box that a builder checks.

[00:33:21] But builders and architects, they don't even think about air quality. Contractors, they put them up high so they're out of the way. So if you actually look at the smoke, very little of it is in the rain hood. Half people's rain hoods don't work. A huge percentage of rain hoods vent in the cabinet up top. They don't even exhaust all the way outside, especially a lot of apartments and stuff.

[00:33:41] Luke: So they're just going up into the crawl space.

[00:33:45] Mike: Sometimes they're just going to the cupboard above.

[00:33:48] Luke: Oh man. Oh yeah, I've seen that.

[00:33:50] Mike: Just there.

[00:33:50] Luke: I've seen that in apartments.

[00:33:51] Mike: And then there's always there because you're dumping all your humidity in--

[00:33:54] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:33:56] Mike: So if you think about it, and when I used to do wildfire restoration, hexavalent chromium, which is the same thing from Erin Brockovich, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAH, soot and ash, these are the big things when we're detoxing a home from smoke that we're looking for. Well, high heat and protein creates PAH.

[00:34:20] So when that chicken and your frying, doesn't mean you need to be using bad oils or anything, but protein fires are one of the biggest causes for fires in homes. You leave the stove on, the protein catches into fire, but cooking asparagus with olive oil is going to set up a Jaspr. There's tiny particles that are being created from the cooking process.

[00:34:42] When you light things on fire, when you make things hot, they go into the air. Same thing with food. So you have the pan, you have the gas, you have the food itself. You have all the stuff you put on the food. Ovens are a little bit better often because they typically have decent ventilation. That's why if anyone likes bacon in the oven versus the stove, it's way less smelly.

[00:35:06] Once again, these odors were supposed to be signs to us. We're not supposed to smell yesterday's dinner in the house. So when people can open windows during cooking, it's a great idea if temperature permits it. So cooking is the biggest source of indoor pollution. Then you have all your cleaning chemicals. Then you have your personal care items. Jaspr will go crazy when women are blow drying their hair after putting hair products. Jaspr will--

[00:35:35] Luke: From the VOCs?

[00:35:36] Mike: Yeah.

[00:35:37] Luke: Oh man.

[00:35:38] Mike: Not just the VOCs.

[00:35:39] Luke: Dude, you know what's a really bad one too? Are those dryer sheets that have those chemicals smells.

[00:35:47] Mike: Those coated lins.

[00:35:48] Luke: I haven't used those since I was probably a little kid, but we have a neighbor who's a really lovely guy, so if ever hears this, no offense. You never know who's listening. Your neighbors, they know I have a podcast. Hopefully they don't listen to it, but--

[00:36:04] Mike: Hopefully listens and get upgrades is--

[00:36:06] Luke: But we don't use this dryer sheets or any of that stuff. And when they run their dryer, dude, it fumigates our whole backyard. I'll go out there and you know how we were talking about with water and you're drinking purified water, and then if you drink tap water, you're like, holy shit, this is straight pool water? The chlorine's so strong. Well, I've become so sensitive to chemical smells. Yeah, when he's running the dryer over there, man, I go in the backyard, and I'm just holding my breath because it's so gnarly.

[00:36:37] Mike: And it's in here too.

[00:36:37] Luke: Right. But I'm thinking, how does this smell good to anyone? It's like you take one whiff and it feels like you're in a freaking gas chamber.

[00:36:45] Mike: How crazy is this, man? The air freshener market is a lot bigger than the air purifier market.

[00:36:51] Luke: Oh wow.

[00:36:52] Mike: Little Glade plugins that just shoot a bunch of chemicals around to cover up smoke, this is a bigger market than air cleaning,

[00:36:58] Luke: And those black ice little mirror trees that they put in Ubers and stuff. I've actually tweeted to Uber, like, please ban these things in your cars.

[00:37:07] Mike: I open the window every time I get in an Uber. It's horrible.

[00:37:09] Luke: Gnarly.

[00:37:11] Mike: So offgassing, paint, furniture. And when you build a home, when the manufacturers are creating the dry boards, and the rock, and the flooring, the goal has the businesses make the thing as fast as possible, sell the thing as fast as possible. Then the people they sell it to, want to sell it as well as fast as possible.

[00:37:27] Typically, if we are doing the highest quality standard building companies, they'll let their floorboards cure and off gas for a year. Furniture should off gas for a long time as well, but it doesn't. So if anyone's ever buying a new home or moving, I'm like, if you can, leave the doors and at least the windows open for a couple of weeks before you move in. If you're doing some renos, give yourself a large period of offgassing, and the wind is really good. The sun would be good to agitate it all--

[00:37:57] Luke: Yeah.

[00:37:58] Mike: But at home, it just offgasses and stays inside here. So it's everything. It's the furniture you got, the cooking, the cleaning products, the chemicals. And then anything that's porous can absorb-- anything that can get wet from water can get absorbed by smoke. So if you think about that wood table is a sealed table. This Jaspr is metal. This railing is sealed. These things aren't absorbing water. They're not going to ever get water damage, and they're not going to get permeated by smoke. But when I would restore homes from smoke damage, every soft item in the house is trash because the PAH, the hex chrome, the chemicals literally--

[00:38:36] Luke: And same for mold too, right?

[00:38:38]  Mike: Mold spores.

[00:38:38]  Luke: Mold spores. Yeah.

[00:38:39] Mike: Yeah, mold will never grow here, but it will grow in carpets. It will grow in clothing, it will grow in insulation, it will grow on drywall, any organic material. It will grow in your sponge. It will grow in that cardboard box. If you have an IKEA furniture, the sealed part's fine, but the MDF on the bottom that's exposed, that absorbs it too.

[00:38:59] So I learned so much because if you didn't get these homes perfect, they would stink and they would test positive for chemicals. So at first the protocol was like, steam clean the carpet, dry clean it, clean the couch. But no, it's way deep. The couch is not salvageable. And a lot of people have floods and fires, and they clean the outside, but it's deep in there.

[00:39:18] Luke: Is this why it's recommended at times when someone has a major systemic mold situation in their house, that they're like, you got to throw away all your clothes, and rugs, and all your fabric, furniture, and stuff? There's no coming back from it.

[00:39:35] Mike: Clothes, there's pretty decent environmental dry cleaners that can salvage clothes. But I paid thousands of dollars to clean clothes many, many, many, many times and it still didn't get it out, so the answer is yes.

[00:39:51] Luke: That's funny. I have one t-shirt that Alyson has tried to throw away three times, but it's one of my design samples from my merch line. By the way, you guys check out my new merch line, lukestoreymerch.com.

[00:40:06] Mike: I like. It is creative stuff you got.

[00:40:07] Luke: Yeah, thanks. Well, I have this one shirt that was just a sample and somehow it got a musty smell to it. And dude, I've washed that thing 50 times. The only thing I haven't done is put it out in the sun. That's the only thing I haven't tried. But no matter how many times I wash it, it smells like you just went to the gym and it--

[00:40:22] Mike: Volcanic rock.

[00:40:23] Luke: Is that the key?

[00:40:24] Mike: You buy volcanic rock, you get it charged, and you put it all over the clothes, and you let it sit outside in the sun for a couple of days, that might pull it out-- nearly impossible, otherwise. I have a shirt. I really like this shirt. It was from Lululemon, and it's funny because it was a long sleeve shirt that you would work out in. It was like a shirt you'd work out in. I wore it to Benihana's once five years ago after I got it. This shirt's still Benihana's. It's a Friday new shirt. I haven't done the volcanic rock myself, but it got in, and it won't come out.

[00:40:58] So our homes are like that. And it's a blessing and a curse. The curse is our homes are pretty toxic mostly. The blessing is we spend so much time in our homes. Over 95% of our lives are spent in our homes. So the cool part is it's very controllable. And your bedrooms are pretty small. You spend one third of your life in a place that's typically a couple hundred square feet, and because it's quite small, it's easy to have your bedroom dialed in, a sleep sanctuary.

[00:41:32] So yeah, the bad things is-- and you know what? I never want anyone to be overwhelmed, but this awareness is a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because you go crazy with perfectionism, but it's a blessing. I'd rather have the blessing of the awareness and make my good decisions than find out 10 years later, what's these things that were harming me that I had no idea about.

[00:41:53] And yeah, so that's picture on outdoor pollution, indoor pollution, how it gets in our home. And then instead of saying how it impacts us, I will say the way I've seen people's lives changed. So we call it the life changing gear. Instead of having a 30-day return policy, we call it the life changing guarantee, and it's a 60 day policy.

[00:42:15] We've only been taken up on it about five or six times ever, and over 3,000 units sold. It's like if you put this in your house and it doesn't change the quality of your life noticeably, my favorite feedback we could ever get from someone is, it's the first air purifier I ever had that I actually knew worked. They're like, I had a bunch of others and hoped it worked. I never changed the filters because I didn't know.

[00:42:38] Luke: Same.

[00:42:39] Mike: But they're like, I know this one works. I see it, and I feel it, and it's quite obvious. It's visceral.

[00:42:43] Luke: Well, dude, I have one of those for you, and I forget. I might've texted you. But Alyson has these seasonal allergies here she's never had before. They call it cedar fever. And last year she had it so bad we actually had to just leave town, and there was just no helping her. All the supplements, all the things, nothing worked. This year, she hadn't had it yet, and then we went and bought a Christmas tree, and the Christmas tree is in here for a few days, and her allergies started adding up.

[00:43:11] And I forget which one of us discovered it, but one of us googled Christmas tree allergies or something. It's like, yeah, they're covered in mold and this and that. And I was like, oh shit. So we put the Jaspr right next to the Christmas tree over there in the corner, and by the next day, no problem.

[00:43:29] It's crazy. I should write you a testimonial. I'm one of those cases too. It's like, did your life improve? Yeah. Granted, we messed it up from bringing a Christmas tree in. Apparently, you're supposed to hose them off first and let them offgas or something.

[00:43:41] Mike: Did they have shaking, spinning thing there?

[00:43:44] Luke: What thing?

[00:43:45] Mike: Typically, when you go to those places, they put it through a spinner.

[00:43:49] Luke: I didn't look. It was at Home Depot, and I was in a hurry to get out of there.

[00:43:52] Mike: If you go to the Christmas tree stands around here, they put it through this amazing spinner agitator shaker that just gets off most of the loose particulate. So I would definitely get the tree from those guys if you're going to do it again. But yeah, it's those air aha awareness moments that's like, oh, be more careful about the things I put in.

[00:44:11] But like I told you, I got to bring you a couple more of these things because your water filtration system was not cheap, but you don't feel bad about the investment. Because you could bought a Brita or a Burkey and a shower filter head, and you could have really whack a mold it at the point of use, but you're like, no, no, no. I filtered water in my whole home, including for bathing, including for showering.

[00:44:32] And I think I am guilty of this. We've done a disservice by under educating that the true scope of air because it's three grand to have deck out a home with a whole home air filtration system. Under $3 a day for filters and lifetime warranty. It's like once somebody can feel it and see it, and the best way for them to see it and feel it is sleep, man. Fan speed two, lights off. It's crazy. But when I go to hotels now, I bring one.

[00:45:03] Luke: Really?

[00:45:04] Mike: I fly with this thing.

[00:45:05] Luke: That's funny.

[00:45:06] Mike: I do.

[00:45:06] Luke: That's hardcore.

[00:45:07] Mike: It is hardcore because once I got to-- the same way you feel about chemical water, I feel about air. So if I go to a hotel room and I've tested hotel air a lot, it's carpeted most of the time, then they use all the most harsh chemicals in the room. You got whatever buddy and Mrs had in the room last night, all the last--

[00:45:28] Luke: I find hotel rooms are commonly really moldy.

[00:45:31] Mike: They never have windows. They don't breathe.

[00:45:33] Luke: Yeah. It's like when you walk in, it's pretty common that you smell that musty mold smell. It always feels--

[00:45:39] Mike: Even in some nice hotels.

[00:45:40] Luke: Yeah, because they're hermetically sealed. The upper floor ones with no windows, it's like they literally never get outside air in there.

[00:45:48] Mike: And they'll never have windows because it's much cheaper to heat and cool. If everybody in the hotel had their windows open, which they would, then the building would cost three times as much the heat and cool.

[00:45:59] Luke: Right.

[00:46:00] Mike: So let's see--

[00:46:00] Luke: Oh, you just reminded me of something. In terms of off-gassing furniture and stuff, you mentioned IKEA and some cheaper furniture that's this particle board with formaldehyde and all this stuff. One thing I've really struggled with, anytime I buy anything, I do my best to put it out in the sun.

[00:46:17] When I bought these rugs, they're antique Turkish rugs, and I don't know where they've been, so I put them two days in the Texas Sun and just let them bake. And I do the same thing with furniture, but even some like that little thing over there, that credenza was from, I think Urban Outfitters online, and it reeked so bad, chemicals.

[00:46:40] Mike: Takes about a year.

[00:46:41] Luke: I'm like, damn. But I just found, and I just want to announce this to the people on the show, finally, I found a company that makes eco-friendly, non off-gassing furniture that's super cool, mid-century modern, dope furniture. It's called a Medley Home. And we'll put that in the show notes.

[00:46:59] Mike: Is it because they're using better materials or they--

[00:47:02] Luke: Yeah, they're just not using glue. There's no particle board. It's real wood shit. And the fabrics they use are not microplastics. They're all wool and natural fibers. It's super dope. They reached out to me a month ago, and I was like, ah, furniture store? What am I going to do with this? And I looked, I was like, finally, someone figured it out.

[00:47:19] So that's Medley Home. We'll link that at lukestorey.com/air. So I just want to mention that because I think that's a really helpful tool. And you mentioned the wood floors we had. These are made by a company called Green World, I think they're called. They're--

[00:47:34] Mike: Engineered hardwood.

[00:47:35] Luke: Engineered hardwood. Yeah. But this wood was all sitting out for six months in case it was offgassing. They claimed that it doesn't, and I believe them, but luckily our contractor was a total piece of shit. And so took a really long time and did a really bad job, the first one, who will remain unnamed.

[00:47:56] But as a result of him taking so long, the wood flooring all set out for months. I was like, it's cool. It was a happy accident. A lot of the building materials in this house actually sat out for a really long time before they were installed before anyone was actually sleeping here. So when we moved in, I got very little offgassing, which I think is one of the reasons when I bought that piece, for example, I really noticed like, oh my God, this--

[00:48:17] Mike: And think about it, the stuff that you smell, whether it's offgassing, smoke, cooking, wildfires, the stuff that our little noses can smell, it's the tip of the iceberg. Think about the part you smell, and then think about the 99% of stuff you're not smelling.

[00:48:35] When wildfire smoke passes through, New York had it, Toronto had it. You think it's there for the three days that you see and smell the smoke, but it's what you can't see. Look at the glass of water from the pond. That could literally be hepatitis water from a random little pond in Africa.

[00:48:51] It still sometimes looks clearish, but the parasites, the bacteria, etc. Because we can't see it. Same stuff. We can't smell most things that are bad for us. We don't have the ability to detect everything. So when you look at, yeah, the, the smoke or the offgassing, yet we only are detecting a small part of it. Imagine someone's pet, their dog that has a thousand times better sense of smell.

[00:49:15] Luke: Right. And also tiny little lungs.

[00:49:17] Mike: Tiny lungs.

[00:49:19] Luke: I was thinking about that because I've managed to give our dog, Cookie, a lot of great supplements and really good food. And so her allergies and reverse sneezing and weird shit the dogs get, has gotten a lot better. But one of the things that occurred to me was like, if Alyson's getting the Caesar salad allergies, the cedar allergies, Cookies lungs are, I don't know, the size of a silver dollar or something, right? So that particulate, and VOCs, and anything that's bothering us for babies and small pets and stuff is probably way worse. They don't have the lung capacity to handle it.

[00:49:57] Mike: We breathe 20,000 times a day. Babies breathe 60,000 times a day.

[00:50:01] Luke: Really?

[00:50:01] Mike: Well, the respiratory rate's way higher, and their lungs are this small, and they don't have much filtration. Dude, I'm so passionate about babies' nurseries. People spend all these thousands of dollars on the 1,200-dollar-- the SNOO.

[00:50:16] Luke: What's that?

[00:50:17] Mike: Dude, everybody's got them now. It's a $1,200-dollar Wi-Fi, Bluetooth--

[00:50:22] Luke: Oh God.

[00:50:22] Mike: Rocker to put baby to sleep. Ryan Blazer got into some hot water because he did testing at a customer's home. The EMF was just off the charts. So here you're, you bring this little baby. You buy this little auto rocker. Now they all do this thing called the outlet. They put it on the ankle to detect the-- it's like a WHOOP for babies when they sleep. Also, EMF, Wi-Fi off the charts.

[00:50:43] Luke: Even the baby monitors.

[00:50:45] Mike: Baby monitors, you need about eight feet from them. You can hardwire them too. It's a doable thing. We realize that the 80/20 of baby monitoring, you just need the audio. You don't need a CCTV closed caption on the baby.

[00:51:01] It actually makes you go crazy and sleep less. If it's baby screaming for a while, let me know. You can't just hear it anyway. But people spend all this money baby proofing, childproofing. There's all these consultants that do this good work, I would say. But they're putting plugs on outlets.

[00:51:19] They're putting railings, and they're doing all this stuff to baby proof in case baby's going to jump out of the crib, and all this. But what they didn't mitigate against is they just bought a brand new crib. They got their SNOO. They got their outlet. They got all this new furniture that they scrambled together.

[00:51:36] They just painted it all nice for baby's room. Baby's rooms have the worst air quality. Then they get the speaker, white noise machine. It's an EMF box. And then a lot of baby's toys. Here's a really famous baby toy called the Sophie. They got like super recalled because every Sophie was covered in mold.

[00:51:57] If you cut open most kids' toys, they're super moldy because they aren't super airtight, but they also can't breathe. So it's the cheapest plastics, the cheapest woods, the cheapest coatings. Baby don't complain. And then people buy this thing called a Diaper Genie. They buy a baby pail.

[00:52:13] That's supposed to be an airtight diaper box. Well, if it's so airtight, how come it stinks like shit in the room? So my wife was using this with our first kid. It stunk.

[00:52:23] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:52:24] Mike: I'm like, Rich, I know you're the one who's doing the day-to-day stuff, but I really think these diapers should go directly outside. And she's like, ah, but it's super annoying. I'm like, all right, fine. I proposed that tonight, we bring the Diaper Genie in our bedroom and we see what it feels like to sleep in the shit room. She's like, hell no. I'm not sleeping in there. Got you. And that little thing, that little shift there, she's like, oh, you're right.

[00:52:53] Well, if it smells like poo, it's only because you're breathing poo. Poo is not a good-- it's a lot of bacteria there, harmful stuff in a little tiny sealed room. So we got mold, we got VOCs, we got EMF, we got crazy levels of bacteria. And I empathize. Mom read every she could on baby proofing. She read a lot of the wrong stuff. And it really is quite simple. But funny that my favorite application is the baby's bedroom.

[00:53:26] And that baby is breathing 60,000 times a day with the tiniest little lungs, just a regular dollar. So that's a thing. As a new dad with a four-year-old and a two-year-old and a nursery and stuff, air quality-- baby ain't going to complain. So go try to sleep in baby's nursery on the floor one time, and you will quickly realize the chemical levels. It's just a horrible environment most of the time. And people are worrying about baby jumping out of the crib and getting SIDS. Meanwhile, they put them in the most toxic little box possible.

[00:54:01] Luke: That's really, really good info. I'm glad. See, I don't have a kid yet, so I didn't even know about some of the shit that's come out. Again, the smart technologies, it's like putting your baby in a little Wi-Fi router that rocks does not-- and no shame to the parents out there, always like say.

[00:54:16] Mike: They're doing the best.

[00:54:17] Luke: We don't know until we know. And then you learn. You're like, ah, God, I'm a bad parent. It's not that. We just don't know until you listen to a podcast like this and you learn. Let's get into-- I did the show with Ryan Blazer, and we talked about mold, and EMF, and water.

[00:54:35] And then I did one with Michael Rubino, The Mold Medic, a couple of years back, specifically on mold. But I think for the people that didn't hear those episodes, we'll put them in the show notes at lukestorey.com/air,

[00:54:48] But I've learned a lot about mold since those two podcasts. And the reason we started renovating this house to begin with was due to mold, not systemic, thankfully, but under a few of the sinks and stuff. So we're like, whatever, let's just demo all the bathrooms and the kitchen, and the laundry room, and just start from scratch. And thus began actually just building the entire house, which was a blessing in disguise.

[00:55:13] So we move into essentially a brand new house. Everything in the inside's totally brand new. There's a leak under the freaking kitchen sink, as you know because you came and tested it recently, and I'm like, now it smells like mold under there.

[00:55:27] And so I'd have to demo all new custom cabinets, countertops, the whole thing. I have to demo the whole thing, rebuild the whole thing. And it's just like, it was a great lesson in how important it is to monitor leaks. That was only going for, I don't know, maybe a week or two, just a small leak.

[00:55:45] And now the entire 10-foot cabinet is moldy, even after someone went in and replaced all the drywall with hardy board and basically mitigated it and it still reeks. So maybe just give us some of the overview on some of the most common causes of mold, how fast it grows, how do you test for it, and all that.

[00:56:11] Because I think a lot of people don't realize that you can just have little outbreaks of mold throughout your house. I think when somebody gets really sick from mold, we think, oh, it's in the HVAC system. It's all over everything. And then you just got to basically move out and throw all your stuff away.

[00:56:26] But I've learned it can sneak back into your house, even if you've been really mindful about your humidity levels and all the plumbing's, all brand new, still a leak happens. We got mold that I'm now dealing with again.

[00:56:38] Mike: Yeah, so a couple of things there. The first is mold is an allergen. So the same way you think about pollen, you can think about mold. They're both naturally occurring. There's tons of them outside. Based on the rain, and the wind, and the time of the year, and the temperature, those levels go up and down.

[00:56:56] It's a very naturally occurring thing. I've seen many times there's a family of five, one of them has rashes, and bumps, and itchy throat, and all the symptoms and can't sleep. A couple of them feel a little bit sick, and then a couple of them are like, I feel great. Lots of energy. So mold impacts everybody vastly different.

[00:57:17] Just like pollen would, ragweed, and any of the other allergens, mold behaves very similarly, and mold is outside, lots, so much, especially after rain and heat. The thing is outside, it doesn't really affect us because of the wind, and the sun, and the CO2, and the air filtration that the environment provides.

[00:57:37] Mold doesn't usually impact you as much outside. And indoors, we trapped it in here. So the best thing is if you have a place that's breathing, like if you lived in like a Hawaii or a place where doors and windows are open all the time and there's a little mold here and there, it's not really going to affect you because there's so much fresh air coming through.

[00:57:58] So one those things that-- there's no home that will ever test for no mold unless it's like a surgical, operating clean room with a bunch of HEPA, or positively pressured, or something. Mold's everywhere. So I've never found-- I used to tell someone if they ever need to break a lease, let me know.

[00:58:15] I'll find the mold, and you can get out. Anytime I need to get out of a lease, I just found the mold. You'll always find the mold. The water wins. You can't beat that stuff. So whether it's in through the roof or a foundation or behind a wall. One of the biggest causes of mold is people who hang dry their clothes inside. That is a wild one.

[00:58:38] Luke: Oh wow.

[00:58:39] Mike: Bathroom fans vent into attics. Like we talked about the range hood, it just is venting to the attic. They didn't carry it outside, or the attic has poor ventilation, just like the range hood is not for the just the smoke, bathroom fans aren't for poop smell.

[00:58:55] Bathroom fans are for a little bit carbon dioxide, but mostly relative humidity. So another thing that's just bonkers, the fact that bathroom fans don't all have either relative humidity sensors or two-hour timers. Think about it. Your towel can absorb quite a lot of water. You can get a lot of water in that towel even after you shower.

[00:59:14] A lot of water, towel is soaked. If you were to wring all that, you'd fill a bucket up. Well, that towel dries/evaporates/that water is just going in your home. So if it's really dry, okay, cool. It's a little bit of a natural humidifier if your water's clean. But these are the things that typically increase-- it's not about if you have mold or you don't have mold. It's, what is your mold load? What is the species of mold, and how are you taking care of it?

[00:59:41] Everybody's got some parasites and some bacteria. I've never seen a urine test where people don't have mycotoxins. We are organic beings. Mold is not something that's black or white, like I need to get rid of the mold. Because you will never win. You can't. If we knock it out there, maybe there's some a little bit in the toilet bowl. It's like what's the threshold and what are you doing about it?

[01:00:06] So for example, your water, you didn't create a piped in system from a spring. You're like, I'd bring bad water into my house and then I filter. So I lived in a home that I was renting before we bought a house in 2018 when I was developing the Jaspr. So luckily, I was testing 15 different air purifiers in the basement in Canada, and in the north, you got basements. It's cool in Texas, no basements.

[01:00:33] Luke: Because it's impossible to dig here.

[01:00:35] Mike: Well, it would be so expensive to blast all that limestone. It wouldn't be cheap. There we do it because it's cheap.

[01:00:39] Luke: I wondered when I moved here. I was like, why does everyone have propane tanks? Because in California, everything's on natural gas. It just like pipes right into your house. And then I realized when we had this fence built, I had to pay extra to have the holes dug or actually jack hammered out to put the fence post in, and I'm like, oh shit. There's like a foot of top soil across all of Texas.

[01:01:01] Mike: Then it's all rock.

[01:01:02] Luke: Solid rock. No wonder they don't pipe natural gas around anywhere.

[01:01:06] Mike: I wonder if the soil was naturally occurring here, or a long time ago, people brought the soil and put it on top of the rock.

[01:01:11] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Who knows?

[01:01:12] Mike: Who knows? So your water source is poor. So with all these things, it's a combination of mitigating source and then dealing with said source. You still light a little incense and a little candle here and there. You're like, I'm going to filter it.

[01:01:30] You don't go outside to light your incense because it has some benefit, a little bit negative on the air quality, but you've put something in a Jaspr to mitigate it. So it's the same with water. You just truck in your water. That'd be quite impractical.

[01:01:47] So your source is bad, your filtration is good. So with my house that I was living in, the mold loads were so high. All of a sudden, I was getting exercise induced asthma attacks, puffy eyes. I was sick. My wife was sick too. We tested. Lots of mold. It was going to be so annoying to move out.

[01:02:06] We were moving in six, seven months anyway, but just at time I was developing the Jaspr. So once I turned on the bunch of air purifiers in the basement, we have an HVAC system, which heats and cools your home, but it also mixes the air throughout the whole home. We tested for mold again, and the mold levels were basically zero.

[01:02:24] And the way mold impacts you in the house, it's not because you eat it or drink it, it's because you breathe it. So if someone has a pretty solid-- you can have a huge leak and a bunch of black mold, but if you have a whole home air filtration system dialed in, a little bit of mold is not going to be an issue.

[01:02:41] If you have one air purifier in a bedroom or in a living room, that's not full air filtration coverage. But if you have a really good air filtration system that's covering your entire home, you're dealing with the source because it's always going to be somewhere. So like, yeah, what's going to cause it? Water with a lack of fresh air. That's why it's under the cabinet, under the sink.

[01:03:01] If we pour a little water here on the floor, it's not going to be as big of an issue. It's going to breathe, evaporate, but behind things, behind drywall, in the attic, under the floorboards, this is where it becomes problematic. So I'm like maintaining a clean omen. If you go into a home and it smells musty, that's those biosensors.

[01:03:19] If smells musty, it is musty. If it smells musty, it's mold. It's fungi. But my relationship with mold is I don't believe mold is the enemy. It's very naturally occurring. In fact, it's the only thing that can survive in the vacuum of space spores. What?

[01:03:40] Everything else would die in space, but these things there's some magic in there. They don't call them magic mushrooms for nothing. It's mold. Mushroom is fungi, mold. This is all just different species of similar stuff. So I find that it's something that we live with. It's outside.

[01:04:01] And a really cool thing about allergens that I love to learn, and I've seen it proven so true probably on a weekly basis, we get taught early on what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Well, there are rules and there are exceptions to these rules. So an exception to this rule would be UFC, MMA boxing.

[01:04:21] Once you get knocked out, you're way more susceptible to being knocked out again. Your chin is weakened, is what it's called in the fight game. And allergens are the exact same. So many people won't have met many big allergy. They'll be cool their whole life, and then they'll have a big mold exposure event.

[01:04:38] It could be a haboob from a dust storm in Arizona. It could be living in a really moldy apartment, or in a dormitory, or in a bad hotel, or being in Austin and having a bad seasonal allergy. What doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. It beats you down. Your immune system and your ability to respond to environmental toxins gets crushed.

[01:05:00] And typically it gets crushed across the board. So that mold event makes you worse at pollen, makes you worse at ragweed. And the thing is, we go outside, we're breathing allergens. We come inside, we're breathing allergens. We go in our bedrooms, we're breathing even more, the pet dander, the mold, the spores, all of it.

[01:05:15] We're intoxicated in it 24 hours a day. So people start taking allergy shots, which basically never work. And what's been fascinating that I never thought would be true, but when I learned about it was Dr. Pompa actually has told me this quote, you can't detox your body if you don't detox your home.

[01:05:34] You could take all the supplements you want, take all the saunas, all the red light therapy, but if you're sleeping in a toxic environment and you're living in it, you can't detox because you're living in a contaminated space. And what's really fascinating is I would've thought if we have really clean air inside, we'll go outside. We'll just be panicked. The contrast would be so great. It's not how it works at all.

[01:05:55] These new problems are the mold levels, the allergen levels, sleeping indoors are kind of modern creations with these airtight homes and all that. So when someone dials in air quality in their bedroom and in their house, what happens is when you're sleeping at night and ideally your body is consolidating memories, repairing muscle fibers, recovering, healing-- I actually reframed sleep to myself when I recently was sick. I stopped using the word sleep, and I just called it healing time. And in the evening--

[01:06:26] Luke: I like that.

[01:06:27] Mike: It's time to heal. Because I realized my cold didn't get better during the day. It actually got worse at night. But I would sleep. And then you wake up, you're like, what's the body-- my back ache, my knee, whatever hurts, whatever you're dealing with, you wake up and it's a new day and it's like, am I worse? Am I better?

[01:06:44] But typically, you're better the next day. It's like you go to bed for these eight hours, you wake up. So I'm like, this is healing time. And it was such a different energy that I had towards going to sleep. Sleep doesn't have a great energy to it.

[01:06:57] Luke: Yeah. And even the words we used were like, ah, I got to go to bed. It's getting late. I need to go to bed. I have to go to bed. But framing it as like, ooh, it's getting late. It's almost time for my healing.

[01:07:08] Mike: Dude, I would get under the covers and honestly, instantly, I'm not restless at night because it's almost like I'm going to do a sauna or a cold plunge. It's like I'm biohacking every night. I'm like, it's time to heal my brain, my body, my everything. It's healing time. We'll deal with everything after healing time. I really could use a good eight-hour healing session right now. And I'm like, okay, how do I have the most conducive healing environment that I can go in every night for eight hours?

[01:07:39] And like I said, in the bedroom, ideally when this healing process is going to occur, when you're breathing the mold, the pollen, the dust, the chemicals, the off-gassing, the paints, the neighbor's construction, the cooking particulate, the smoke, the dander, all of it, your body's in defense mode all night long.

[01:08:00] You don't actually get to do healing time because you're still doing defense time. Your body can't get to those proactive healing processes because it's still dealing with the mold. It's still, you're sleeping, your brain's off, whatever that is, but you're alive still, not dead. You're still here, and this is the time when you're supposed to heal.

[01:08:22] But because you're still basking in those toxins, in those allergens, those particulate, those VOCs, you wake up and you didn't heal very much. But when your home is a clean air sanctuary, your mold levels are very low, your pollen is very low, your allergens are low. It's the way you feel when you drink filtered water.

[01:08:40] You can live in that filtered air environment. What happens is your ability-- you can go outside now for a walk for three or four hours because you had time to heal and calm down. It's like sometimes if you're stressed or exhausted, once you've rested, you can handle a little bit more stress.

[01:08:58] Well, it's the same thing. If you can take a break from all those allergens and those pollutants and heal properly, you can go aside. Ben [Inaudible] had a good analogy with a cup with our immune system. He is like, if it's filled with water to the top and we shake it, it overflows. But if it's only 20% full, we can give it a good shake, and it doesn't overflow.

[01:09:17] And I've learned, from my own health and talking to thousands of Jaspr customers now over the years, that people's seasonal allergies, that's why I call it the life-changing guarantee. I'm using bold words because I mean it, and we put our money where our mouth is.

[01:09:32] If you can spend under three grand to have a whole home air filtration system, and all of a sudden you sleep better, you breathe better, you live better, you go outside, your allergens aren't impacting you, I think it's a bargain. And it took me a while. I had to see the customers have these transformational effects where little Susie's asthma attacks used to be four times a week. Now it's once a month. The runny nose, gone. The itchy eyes, gone. I can go for hikes. I can go for runs. Whoa.

[01:09:59] So this was the most beautiful-- this is why I to start a new disaster business every couple of years. I've been doing this now for four years, and I'm intending to do it for the next four decades. Not building this thing to sell it. I want to do this forever to raise air awareness and create the most-- like I said, no one's been innovating on furnaces, HVAC, space heaters, furnace filters, range hoods.

[01:10:23] This is just step one. I'm going to systematically one product at a time, make the best thing, and I'm going to-- once I innovate, the goal's not for Jaspr to change, dominate the world, and own the whole market. But once we come out with a furnace that's designed to do air filtration, once we come out with a rangehood that has a smart sensor, why is it a manual process?

[01:10:43] Why doesn't the rangehood just turn on and off when the air's bad there? This is so silly. So once I have a smart HEPA range hood, everyone's going to have to do it. And then they're going to make something even better than what I got. I just want to create the ecosystem. None of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let's make the best things possible.

[01:10:59] But to me, it was just a beautiful discovery that when you start optimizing your indoor environment, you're way better outside. So when I heard that you guys had to leave Austin, I'm like, that's why I'm going to bring you guys two more Jasprs, because you to feel the full effects of a whole home clean air system.

[01:11:17] Luke: I agree. Well, that's the thing I didn't realize too, when you brought this one. Actually, I think you gave it to Ryan and he brought it over for me.

[01:11:24] Mike: Ryan actually got that for you.

[01:11:26] Luke: Yeah, and I'm so thank-- shout out to Ryan Blazer from testmyhome.com. Incredible guy, doing great work. But yeah, I put it in the main part of the house here, and I was like, I'm good now. But then after getting to know you and learning a little bit more, it's like, no, if you're closing doors in different rooms, if you want the true whole house thing, ideally if one can afford it, and depending on your square footage, you want one in your bedroom, in the main living area.

[01:11:50] And I spent a lot of time in my office, and I'm sitting there going, oh man. Need one of these. I also want to let people know, and thank you for that. I'm super excited to get it more dialed in. I highly encourage you guys to go check out jaspr.co. That's J-A-S-P-R. jaspr.co. And we got a code for you there, and that code is, of course, LUKE, and that'll save you 10%. So I want to make sure I got that in there for people. And we always put those things in the show notes too, whenever there's a link or something. But, yeah, dude, you're nailing it.

[01:12:23] Mike: The HVAC is something I can't forget to say, man. It's so important, man. The HVAC system is the lungs of your home. And what we do now, people are like, let's put in Merv 12, Merv 13. Let's upgrade it. Your furnace was designed to heat and cool your house energy efficiently.

[01:12:40] It was not designed to be the air filtration system. Those little paper filters in your furnace were designed to keep your furnace safe. So when the dust goes down, construction debris doesn't clog the motor and blow up your furnace. And then people are like, let's jack it up and put a super heavy-duty filter in there so my whole house is clean air.

[01:12:58] They do nothing. The only thing that they do is they choke out your airflow. It increases your heating and cooling bill. It costs you a ton of money because you've just-- would you want to add two filters in your lungs? No. It would be really hard to breathe.

[01:13:12] Luke: That's funny, dude, because I just had some work done on the HVAC here, and it had only been six-- we have those thick ones. They're like four inches.

[01:13:22] Mike: Four-inch cabinet filter.

[01:13:23] Luke: Yeah. And I'm always looking for the highest Merv on Amazon.

[01:13:26] Mike: I use a Merv 8.

[01:13:26] Luke: Probably played myself, but the guy came over, and I was like, ah, we might as well change those even though it's a little premature. And he took them out, and they were disgusting. They were already so dirty after just a few months. I'm like, Johnny had to change those things every three months.

[01:13:39] Mike: After six, seven months, mine are still perfectly white.

[01:13:43] Luke: Really? Because you got the Jasprs rocking inside the house?

[01:13:45] Mike: I have clean air, so they don't get dirty.

[01:13:49] Luke: That's cool.

[01:13:49] Mike: My furnace is not my air cleaning system. It's the heat and cool of my house. They can, if you put a steam humidifier and a dry thing, help with humidity, but everybody wants a silver bullet solution. Before we made this, we spent two years making a whole home furnace air filtration system, and it just didn't work.

[01:14:07] I'm like, do we bring this thing to market? It's the best on the market, but I'm like, it still doesn't work because right now, I don't think your HVAC's running. It runs when you're heating. It runs when you're cooling. If your home's energy efficient, it's running 20% of the time. So when it's not running, the air purifiers are off.

[01:14:22] Luke: Oh, right.

[01:14:23] Mike: So your whole home air filtration system is almost never running. A big air filtration system for HVAC is 4, 5, 6, 7 grand. People don't bat an eye because it's an appliance. It's a whole home thing. But it doesn't work. So if you are building a house from scratch, you can put in in-floor heating, and ERVs, and HEPA, and dial it in. Maybe 50, 60 grand, and really dial in your air from your HVAC.

[01:14:50] You can do it. But we went back to a-- I this a decentralized whole home system because I want to put the clean air in the areas that need it most, in the bedroom, in the living room. And these have their own fans. So whereas the filter in your HVAC system is decreasing airflow, these are increasing airflow. So they're actually making your heating and your cooling more efficient because they're helping circulate the air.

[01:15:13] Luke: Oh, that's interesting.

[01:15:15] Mike: And if you think about a Sonos system, Sonos is so cool because would you rather have one speaker in the middle of your house, or let's say eight small speakers in every room. Well, we one speaker in the middle of the house, and we want to hear the music everywhere. We have to blast it. So now it's way too loud in the middle of the house, and it's loud, and it's bassy, and maybe can't hear it on the other side. And then here comes Sonos and whole home speaker systems where it can be just right everywhere.

[01:15:45] Luke: Yeah.

[01:15:45] Mike: So by having five air cleaners, four air cleaners, and is decentralized system, it doesn't have to be too bassy. You can have just the right clean air all over your house, clean air. Our original tagline was clean air everywhere. And back then I was thinking about it as meta in terms of all of earth, which I still really is the ultimate mission.

[01:16:06] But clean air everywhere meant clean air in just your bedroom is not getting the job done. But really, the HVAC system is the lungs of your home. And builders, the same way doctors aren't even taught about nutrition-- it's not even in their school. There's like one day, here's the food guide.

[01:16:26] You go to them with a huge illness, they don't talk to you about your food or your exercise. Just here's your pills. Well, builders, HVAC fat contractors. Architects, they're not taught about air quality and water quality. Home inspectors, which I'm a certified home inspector, the contract that we give people when we do home inspection says, we don't look for anything environmental, mold, asbestos, flood, air, water.

[01:16:50] That ain't it. We're looking for something that's-- so people make the biggest purchase of their life, over a million bucks to get you a house these days, almost everywhere. And we hire this inspector, we pay him 500 bucks, he comes over, and he's going to check me if my hot water tank needs changing in four years.

[01:17:07] Is there a two to 10 grand thing that we're unaware of? What isn't the home inspector doing? Seeing if this home is making your family sick? So I like the term healthy home inspection. I want to see a world where home inspectors are doing the environmental work automatically and they're not just raiding the home for does the window need replacing in four years?

[01:17:31] But like, yo, the mold, the VOCs, the air, the water, structurally this home is fine guys, but, hey, family, it's going to be 30 grand for this home to be actually safe, and clean, and offgassing. It ain't simple stuff. And these people know construction. So most people live in a building apartment, a condo, or a subdivision home.

[01:17:50] These homes were not built for you. They weren't built for humans. There were developers who were working with banks and investors, and the equation is, there's 2,000 acres. How many homes can we build? How fast can we build them? How cheap can we build them?

[01:18:04] Let's get the materials cheaply. Let's put them in. Let's get to lockup as quickly as possible. Let's get the deposits. Let's sell the homes. They're not sitting around in a boardroom and saying, how do we make the healthiest home possible? So what I love about this, there's no conspiracy theory here, and I can drink a lot of that Kool-Aid myself.

[01:18:26] This is not an ill intent thing. This is just simply we have a housing need globally. In this country, we have a 5 million home shortage. Canada has like a 1 million home shortage. So it's like, damn, we got to build a lot of homes quick. The consumer needs to look out for their-- you have to not tolerate. If the home said cancer here, you wouldn't buy that cheap fast house.

[01:18:48] We cut down 2,000 acres. I was telling you before I came here, my heart's broken because these beautiful lots in my neighborhood with old majestic oak trees got cut down. So someone could build a curb kissing home 9,000 square feet with no yard. And so you cut down all the trees. They're going to build a big deck outside for shade. So we kill trees, and then we call it wood, and we give it a cute name. It's like bacon. It's a pig guys.

[01:19:12] And what I think is really exciting, this whole air awareness thing to me, Jaspr's the tip of the iceberg here. But if homeowners, if consumers, if families can realize that their home, it is their sanctuary, it's this beautiful place where you spend most of your money on, it's the biggest purchase you'll ever make. You'll raise your family there. You'll likely get your work done there.

[01:19:35] You'll create all your best memories in there. And for single digits, thousands of dollars, it can be the healthiest place on earth, and without it can be the most toxic place on earth. And the home wasn't built for you. So unless you are looking for a healthy home or knowing when you buy it, if you're buying a subdivision home, 15 to 25 grand is what it's going to take to biohack, or healthy hack, or dial in your air, dial in your water, some mold stuff, some ventilation, up upgrade bathroom fans, upgrade in the rangehood.

[01:20:07] And if you're thinking about it at the time of purchase, it's much easier to budget for. Just like if you're doing a 200,000-dollar reno or a 100,000-dollar reno, add 10% to that budget for the environmental stuff. But what I'm really excited about here is the HVAC guys care. Let's just forget altruism, and let's just talk business.

[01:20:25] HVAC contractor, usually, you get a call, you're like, hey, my furnace isn't working. It's an ice storm, or it's cold. My furnace shut down, or my air conditioner shut down. They come to your house, they check the furnace, they go, it'll be 1,000 bucks to replace it, or, eh, it's 10 years old. To fix it or it's best we get you a new one. It's near the end of life anyway. Are you sure you want to invest?

[01:20:45] We should just get you a new one. And they're dying for things to upsell. They want to send the technician to your house. They want to clean your ducts. They want to sell you an AC. They need more things to sell. And they a carbon monoxide detector, typically on their hip. They're looking for gas leaks because if there's a gas leak, or they create a gas leak, and you die tonight, it's a big problem.

[01:21:07] But they're not looking for stuff that's killing you slowly. When that guy's already here, he could go into your master bedroom in five minutes, check your CO2, check your VOCs, check baby's bedroom, check the kitchen, check your vent, check your rain shed, and say, hey, your house has horrible air quality.

[01:21:22] Your furnace is okay. We can fix that for a thousand bucks. But flip what's in your air. You've got insect parts, dust, mold, your kid, you're breathing. It's rough. Here's a little sample of your carpet. For 20 bucks, I can do a mold sample. Your environment's bad, guys. It's going to be 10 grand, and we'll upgrade your whole system.

[01:21:40] We'll put in some better filters. We'll put in some Jasprs. We'll upgrade this. There's little things that the products exist, and there's 100,000 plus HVAC guys in people's homes every day in this country. And they'll make a lot more money with the awareness. And that family would really appreciate that awareness. And there's builders who want to build cool better homes. Like in Austin, people care about good design.

[01:22:02] If there was a home that was advertised as the allergen-- so in my house in British Columbia, I built a smoke-proof house, where the wildfire smoke wouldn't permeate. Because normally there's almost as much smoke inside as outside. So we built smoke-proof house. My house here in Austin, we're going to make an allergy-proof house and use it as a show home. And we'll show in most homes there's more pollen inside than outside, but there'll be like no pollen in our home.

[01:22:23] It's an allergy free, smoke free. So if you started to explain, it's like, do you want the house that's 1.5 million or 1.53 million and it's allergy proof, cedar fever proof, you will not have no allergen guaranteed. We're filtering for it. Your water filter will work. Your air filter will work.

[01:22:39] But yeah, what's exciting here is we really have an opportunity, and I'm starting to do more speaking on this. If we can educate 1000 architects, 1,000 builders, the ultimate goal here is for these big subdivision developers that are building 2,000 homes to build the healthiest homes possible. They can sell each home. Instead of it taking you two years, it'll take you two and a half years. Instead of cutting down every tree, save 20% of the big ones, and you can build.

[01:23:06] There's a huge desire, whether it's hotel, wellness, glamping homes-- people want to live in healthy environments. They will make such a premium. They'll make so much money. If there's any builders listening to this, builders, architects, HVAC contractors, I will consult you for free. I will teach you everything I know.

[01:23:24] So I actually have the domain healthyhomecertified.org and air quality certified. So when the right time or the right person comes along, I think this needs to be something that we have lead for energy efficiency, but we have nothing for healthy home standards. I love to explain that Joe, the contractor who's coming to your house, he could change your kid's life, and he can make himself a lot more money with that awareness, and that family when they're doing the reno, it's such an opportunity to upgrade stuff.

[01:23:53] So really, there's such good tools, and people just need that little shift to be able to move the needle so much. And what I really want to get going. I want bottom-up consumer. You get what you tolerate, and the market will give you what you demand. If the demand is there, the supply will be there. There are creative people that will build amazing things. You just have to want it and be willing to pay for it. So that's something that I care deeply about.

[01:24:18] Luke: I love it. A lot of what we've been talking about here today are things that I dreamed about as a renter, and it just wasn't practical to invest in someone else's property. So I just settled for EMF, air quality, water, etc. It was one of the coolest things about buying our first home, is actually being able to dial all that stuff in and create a really restorative, supportive, healing sanctuary.

[01:24:48] Feels good, and then shit happens. You get a leak. You got to deal with it. But dealing with the EMF, the water, the air quality, all of that, it really does make a huge difference, not only for you and your family, but it's really nice to have people come over and they notice like, huh, there's something different here.

[01:25:07] Because the air is being purified, the water's clean, and there's no EMF, there's no Wi-Fi anywhere, all that kind of stuff. It's cumulative in the harm that it causes over time, but it's also cumulative in the sense that your standards of how you feel get better and better.

[01:25:26] Mike: This house is awesome.

[01:25:27] Luke: Even just talking about your sleep sanctuary, just dialing in everything to support good sleep is life changing. It takes a little time, and education, and money upfront, but then once it's set, it's like you're done.

[01:25:40] Mike: It pays for itself, man, because if you sleep better-- you can't have a good day without having a good night. And if you just looked at it from a productivity standpoint, there is infinity studies that show the quality of a chess player's move, SAT scores, absenteeism.

[01:25:55] When you're breathing cleaner air, which at night, I call sleep fuel, during the day, I call it thinking fuel, what else is fueling our brains right now other than oxygen and air? We're not putting anything else in the tank. But if we shut our intake down, we'll both be dead very quickly. So when the CO2 goes up, the brain fog kicks in, the fatigue kicks in, you're lethargic. So even it's about like pure productivity, energy, life, if you sleep good, you'll have a good day. And you can't have a good sleep, and sleep is about the lowest common denominator. So if you can have the most comfortable bed in the world, but it's loud, or it's hot, or the pillow sucks, your sleep is only as good as the weakest link.

[01:26:35] So everybody gets it dialed in, it's cold, they got the right blanket, the right sheet, and then the neighbor's dog is barking, or you're above a nightclub. It's all for nothing. Your sleep is only as good as the weakest link. So when you this comfy bed and you're breathing 800,000 particles all night long, this is not optimal.

[01:26:55] You spent 3,500 on your bed to have a good sleep. But meanwhile, the thing that's keeping you-- you can sleep on a hard floor with good air, done it many times, but you can't sleep on a comfortable bed with no air, or you'll die. So it's like this scale from critical-- this house, for example, I wish your listeners, your audience could feel the way it feels here because it's pretty remote and country here, but it's not like you're on like 100 acres. There's things nearby.

[01:27:20] But it's quite visceral. I'm really growing on the EMF bandwagon, and it's really great because, yeah, you really practice what you preach, and it's a beautiful thing that I getting to see you off camera a lot. The same way you talk on podcasts is the same way you talk off podcast.

[01:27:39] Luke: It's all one life.

[01:27:41] Mike: It's really awesome.

[01:27:41] Luke: On mic and off. I want to talk about the specifics of what the Jaspr removes out of the air. And one thing specifically, and I don't know if they've ever asked you this or if you even have the answer, but one of my primary concerns when it comes to air quality, of course, there's mold. We've talked about that.

[01:28:01] But it's the stuff that's being sprayed in the skies. And by the time this comes out, I think my Dane Wigington episode will have come out, and he's got a website called geoengineeringwatch.org. And this is the guy, he's out there testing air samples, and water samples, and finding graphene oxide.

[01:28:21] And just the stuff that they're putting above us is insane, but a lot of it's very small. It's like nano-sized particulate. And so I've always wondered if-- obviously that's getting inside the house too. Anytime you open the door and through your HVAC, and all that, would the Jaspr get out particles that small, this aluminum dust and shit that's floating around in the air?

[01:28:45] Mike: I can't guarantee that it'll get all of them, but when you ever hear a HEPA advertise, filter is down to 99.97, it doesn't mean down two. It actually means that 0.3 microns, it's the most penetrable particle size. So there's a curve infiltration where they can actually often filter particles smaller even better. So of course there's nanoparticles, there's things that are small enough that the filter is a bunch of things, a bunch of weaved pleats, and you want to capture the things before they get through the other side. So 100%, no.

[01:29:19] But a lot of stuff is going to absolutely get captured in there, and it depends on exactly what it is. I will also say I'm now working with a company in East Texas that typically has done aerospace, very innovative non-consumer facing engineering to work on creating a filter that is not HEPA and not carbon. Using new nano technologies has a new way of filtration, a single layer filter.

[01:29:43] So once again, no one's innovated HEPA in 80 years, and maybe we can't, but let's try. So we're going to start to try doing a lot of things to look at filter. And it's funny because the filter itself will use nano materials. You just want to sure those nano materials are not being released and they're being used to capture only.

[01:30:03] But yeah, it's hard to say exactly. I can't wait to listen to the episode with Dane. That is an area, much like my awareness of EMF, is growing, and I'm feeling it. A few years ago, it seemed a little crazy about stuff in the sky, and then is it stuff in the sky that they're just putting there often? Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[01:30:27] Or is the oil sands, or the refineries a few hours away and huge manufacturing areas in Bastrop, in East Texas where they're manufacturing in the area? Where things are coming from, I think is hard to pinpoint the source, but if you can test the stuff and say it's there, and then we can test the air in your bedroom and say it's not there, I like basic science like that.

[01:30:50] Luke: Yeah. Well, that's about all I can understand, but we're definitely getting out pollen and mold spores because when you came over the other day, we did a before and after mold test and you brought, I don't know, two or three more Jasprs, and we put them around the house, tested the mold, let them run for a few hours, came back and tested, and then the air was pristine afterward.

[01:31:14]  Mike: And that test, we had something working against us too because it was a rainstorm when we were gone. So that changes the game a lot in terms of mold, and washing particles away, and things like that. But yeah, I've done, and love to do a ton of tests like this, where we test-- I should have brought my like 5,000-dollar giant particle counter, but we've never done a demo in someone's home where basically go into someone's bedroom, show them what's in the air, turn on the Jaspr, you leave for half an hour, you go back, the number's 95% lower, and they're like, holy shit, it feels like mountain air in here.

[01:31:49] And then they go back out their bedroom and they go, it feels dusty in here. And when you do the lab testing-- and lab testing's way cheaper than you think. Mold test is 100 bucks. Pollen tests, not expensive. So generally what Jaspr's really good at filtering out is going to be your smoke, your VOC, your pollen, your mold, your cooking particulate, pet dander.

[01:32:10] Pets are horrible for air quality. Cat litters really bad. Even a lot of the kibbles and the foods people are using and eating. And cats poop indoor, and then the cat litter has all kinds of crazy chemicals. So generally, the way you think about your water filter system, you're like, I know it's not getting everything, but it's getting almost everything.

[01:32:30] A good HEPA is similar to that, and HEPA is very foundational and fundamental. There's no crazy voodoo rocket science going on in here. It's a very simple product. It's a metal tube with a huge filter. The bigger the better. Big fan, a big motor. That's basically it.

[01:32:48] So the way air filtration works is when you see these numbers, if it filters 99 point whatever percent, that's per pass. So if we take a filter and the air passes through it and it comes out, there's 99.9, easy math, less stuff. It's really pure air coming out the other side. But if the air purifier is only the size of a water bottle, there's not much air passing through the filter. So if we put it in a closet, it might do a little bit, or in a car, but in a space this big, the analogy I like to use, try to heat your bathtub with a kettle. Kettles are great for tea. If you try to heat your bathtub with a kettle, it will cool down faster than you can heat it up.

[01:33:31] Luke: Right.

[01:33:31]  Mike: Try to heat your home with a space heater. Try to heat your swimming pool with a water heater. Kettles are for tea. Water heaters are for baths and showers. Pool heaters are for pool based on the size of the job required. Look at the size of your pool filter. They're big because the volume of water that you're looking to filter-- if you put a little tiny filter in the middle of your pool, you are not doing anything. It doesn't work that way.

[01:33:53] If you had a little tiny heater, you couldn't heat it. Heat is a cool way to think about it because it's like more visceral, tangible. You can feel it easier, but with air, it's a lot harder. So you get about, let's say, 99% per pass. So the real magic here, what makes it different? Well, it's made out of steel. That's a big deal because I didn't want to make a plastic product.

[01:34:16] It's like, yeah, we're cleaning the air, and this thing's going to be on earth for a million years and was super polluted to create it. Oh, and we can't recycle it. These should last about 30 years, which is why we did the lifetime warranty, because like we can afford to, because we built them to last. But because of the size, for context, a Dyson CFM, cubic feet per minute.

[01:34:35] So now we have efficiency times efficacy equals effectiveness. So we have how much filters does this filter do per pass? If you have a life straw 99%, great for the next sip, but it can't filter much water. So where your big filter is, just a giant badass life drop. So the size was extremely important because if you see a little small air purifier-- so this thing peaks out at about 430 CFM.

[01:35:02] I'll just use the Dyson as an example because it's a beautiful machine, and it's a popular consumer product. It peaks out at 87 CFM. Here's the crazy thing. What about on fan speed one? Because most of the time you don't have your air purifier in full speed. You have it on fan speed one, on smart mode.

[01:35:20] A Dyson on fan speed one is probably about 15 or 20 CFM. Most purifiers are in the single digit CFM on level one. And then to make them work, to even get them up to 80 or 90, they're very loud with the fans this big. The Jaspr on fan speed one is about 100 to 120 CFM. So if you've seen big ass fan in a gym, it's moving a lot of air, but it's silent.

[01:35:45] It's like your car on fifth gear is quiet, first gear is loud. More surface area, more volume. So the efficiency is the percentage of air that's being filtered per pass. And then the efficacy is how much air is moving through. So these guys allow you to have a few of them on fan speed one where you don't hear them like the Sonos system, but no Wi-Fi, no EMF, and give you clean air. So the size was the thing.

[01:36:11] Most HEPA are wonderful, but the marketing is vastly lying because everyone-- people say, how many square feet does this thing cover? Square foot, you've got 24-foot ceilings here. It's cubic volume. It's not square foot. Is your HVAC system running? Yes or no? What is the floor plan? Square foot is not the right metric. How many miles does your car go? Are we driving 20, are we driving 200? Are we going uphill? Are we going downhill? It's not a static easy number. Everybody wants to simplify marketing.

[01:36:40] It's the reason I love a podcast or a YouTube video. I don't know how to give you a cute 30-second Instagram post and explain this stuff. I haven't figured that one out yet. So most air filters are great, but when you hear that 99%, that's per pass. So if you think about the little guy in your corner, is it working? You're like, yeah, the one square foot, in that area, there's too much volume. It's the kettle in the bathtub situation.

[01:37:08] Luke: That makes perfect sense. Yeah.

[01:37:10] Mike: It was the size thing.

[01:37:11] Luke: Got it. I was wondering why it's pretty substantial. Those watching on the video will see. What is this, three feet tall or something?

[01:37:17] Mike: A little less, about 30 inches.

[01:37:18] Luke: Yeah. So it's almost up to my waist. And when I first got it, I was like, it's not ugly looking, so it didn't bother me, but I thought, I don't know, some of the other ones are smaller. I wonder why it's that big. And now that explains it. But the thing that mystifies me about the Jaspr is how freaking quiet it is. Because I really don't like background noise. And we have these mics are super sensitive. Jira's laptop over there, I hear. I don't even hear the Jaspr and it's on auto right now. So that's telling me the air is reading excellent if you look on top.

[01:37:53] Mike: The incense has been dealt with.

[01:37:54] Luke: Yeah, totally. But I hear the computer way across the room, and I don't hear this thing at all, which is fucking super cool.

[01:38:00] Mike: Yeah. If you listen for everything right now in your environment, there's a lot of stuff going on. Even in this very little compared to most, but whether it's the cameras, the mics, there's stuff, the goal was if you use a really large motor, high quality motor, high quality fan, it can operate silently. So the goal is be silent, but when it's loud, it's because you need it to be and you want it to be.

[01:38:23] So if we start cooking, the craziest, if someone uses a vaporizer in their vaping, if someone vapes in any room of this entire house right now, all the way on the opposite side, and they blow one little puff of their vape, this will go red guaranteed. Because the air is going to circulate around the home. Nowhere else is filtering it.

[01:38:39] It's not going to get caught in your Merv furnace filter thing, which isn't even running right now. The air currents will, just like the shark, who smells the blood miles away, it doesn't smell it right away. It's when that water current moves out. So the air currents in your home, you have an HVAC, the air is circulating. The sensor will pick it up. It'll go red. It'll take care of it. It will no longer be in the air. So yeah, it's silent because of the size.

[01:39:06] Luke: Cool.

[01:39:06] Mike: To me, if it wasn't silent and it wasn't beautiful, and it wasn't effective, and it wasn't simple, let's not get into business.

[01:39:14] Luke: Yeah. Well played. Last question I have is about CO2. Having had some guys like you come in and test the CO2, if the doors and windows have been open and people are coming in and out, there's more oxygen in the air, less CO2. But if you fill the house with a bunch of people and you seal it up, you get a lot more CO2.

[01:39:36] And so having observed that and wanting a house with more oxygen concentration in the air, people have recommended an ERV, which to my understanding, brings fresh air in from outside and recirculates the air inside, like having a window open would do without compromising the temperature control. Do I have that right?

[01:39:56] Mike: You're pretty close.

[01:39:57] Luke: And what's your take on ERVs? Which are super expensive. That's why we don't have one yet.

[01:40:02] Mike: An ERV is called an energy recovery ventilator. In North America, they're not nearly as good as they're in Asia. That is on our roadmap to eventually make an ERV with HEPA filtration in it, because most ERVs don't have filtration which is okay.

[01:40:15] Luke: That's the thing I wondered. If you're sucking chemtrails in from the outside with that machine--

[01:40:19] Mike: Well, they're coming in anyway.

[01:40:21] Luke: Right.

[01:40:21] Mike: That's where your air is coming from.

[01:40:23] Luke: So the ERV is not doing anything to clean your air. It's just giving you a more concentration of whatever's outside.

[01:40:28] Mike: ERVs are awesome. So they help with humidity, they help with CO2. Fresh air is good. If you have a house that's 3,000 square feet with let's say four Jasprs in it, so the air is being filtered at a good pace, just like your water's being filtered at a good pace, then a little bit of outside air great because we're filtering it faster than we're bringing it in.

[01:40:49] The ERV is excellent because, yes, your description was quite good. It is like cracking the window, but you've almost done it like through a straw. So if you do add a filter to it, it's actually awesome because right now the air in your home is coming in through your dryer vent, your windows, your doors. It's not an air type box.

[01:41:10] You don't have specific air intake. So if you do have a really well sealed home within ERV, it's like a straw to the outside. You've now chosen the channel where the air quality's coming in. So first of all, you could do it in your backyard, not at your neighbor, where they're cooking and venting. So you can decide where the air's coming in, and you can have air filtration on the intake. So how's the air is actually entering your home. That's how I make a smoke-proof house.

[01:41:34] Luke: Oh cool.

[01:41:34] Mike: We filter on intake and for recirculation. So the thing is, though, an aftermarket ERV, it's not doing what you really want it to do because all they basically do is tie it into your furnace system and add a piped outside. If you're building a new home or gutting it and doing a reno, that's when-- so if you have an ERV, you don't actually do use bathroom fans anymore.

[01:41:58] Luke: Oh, wow.

[01:41:58] Mike: The ERV takes the place of all your bathroom fans because it's sensing humidity and CO2 in each room. So if your one bathroom has high CO2, it can pull from there, vent it out, but it has a, not a coil, kind of like a coil. So because the indoor air heats or cools the core to the right temperature, it's able to exchange the heating cool.

[01:42:22] But because it heats and cools the outside air to be more like the inside air, it's not just like a window or door, it's going through the core and getting temperature controlled as it comes in. So they're awesome. But if you're doing it like in the-- someone's building a house from scratch, you cannot beat in-floor heating.

[01:42:43] So now we don't have blowing HVAC, e-dust, it's silent, and you use the ERV-- then you have an ERV with HEPA. So the ERV is your air circulation system. So you have filtered air on intake. You have filtered air. And I'm also working on something that I won't release for a few years, but it's called the Jaspr Sense.

[01:42:59] It goes right into your HVAC system. It can work with a hardwire system, so it doesn't rely on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It will detect your air inside, but it'll also detect the air outside using an API to the weather network and outside. So let's say the pollen level's high, the mold, the pollution, the smoke, it will turn down your intake, almost like the recirculate button into cards. Like, hey, if it's really polluted out there, we're detecting a bunch of chemicals, let's bring in a little less air today, and let's run the filters.

[01:43:26] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:43:27] Mike: But if the air quality's super fresh outside today, the filters can go down a little bit, and we'll use the fresh air, and we'll let the house breathe more. This is simple stuff. The cities are monitoring air everywhere. They have pretty good weather stations and stuff, and that's just not talking to our HVAC system right now. So I want to use the Jaspr Sense, which I have it prototyped. I'll show you the renders, the graphics. It's all built out.

[01:43:48] It's so simple, and it makes all the dumb stuff in your house smart. So the people in the house thing, I've seen a house go from 700 CO2 to over 3,500 by having a dinner party, and it stays high for a few days. It stays high for a few days if you don't purge. So if anyone's ever had a bunch of people after, crack the doors, crack the windows.

[01:44:10] I'm like, be mindful of it. If you're at someone's house and they're hosting and it's stuffy, I'm the guy, whenever I'm at a busy space, I'm always detecting CO2. I feel it. I'm always cracking people's doors, cracking people's windows. If it's a heavy door, hold it open for a minute or two. Every little bit, I can feel the CO2. So I'm always purging it, but it's crazy that I've seen it stay in homes for days because it doesn't really have an opportunity to exhaust it.

[01:44:35] Luke: Interesting.

[01:44:36] Mike: So ERVs, ultimately, I believe in them very strongly, but I think for a retrofit, it's not the best. You're not getting your full bang for the buck. To actually mitigate CO2, first see if it's a problem. So use a CO2 sensor. You can upgrade your bathroom fans, you can upgrade your range hood.

[01:44:55] You have fans in your house, like your bathroom fan, a laundry room. There's still a bunch of chemicals going on, no matter how natural you are trying to be in a laundry room and there's moisture and stuff. We leave our bathroom fan in our laundry room running 24 hours a day in a very hot-- we upgrade our bathroom fans. So it's silent one, but that way that chemical room is venting direct to the outside and my laundry room is not cross contaminating the rest of my home.

[01:45:22] Luke: Awesome. And then what about the UV, the ultraviolet light bulbs on your HVAC coils, which is something we installed here because in Texas, it's hot and humid, and then you cool off the inside of the house and there's like a temperature in humidity differential that can create mold. And we had a little bit of mold starting to creep around on the pan underneath the unit up in the attic. So did a little research, and we had these UV lights installed, and they seem to last about a year. Ours are even over a year, and they're still going. And we haven't had any mold grow.

[01:45:58] Mike: It works. UV is does not clean air. It can't. There's a reason why there's no UV in the Jaspr. It's not because it costs-- there's never been a study that shows UV being efficacious in an air purifier because UV is like soap. UV comes from the sun. So it's like that. UV is great at killing bacteria and mold, so with soap. Soap and water is a great way to deal with mold and bacteria too.

[01:46:24] We all learned during COVID, wash those hands for 20 seconds, because if you wash your hands for one second, you're just rinsing them, you're not cleaning them. UV needs a certain amount of contact exposure time. So UV can be excellent for water filtration. If you have like a holding tank, it can really clean that water. But if the air is just passing through the UV, you don't have any contact exposure time, so it's not cleaning the air. Great for surfaces, great for phones, great for your toothbrush, but it needs that contact exposure time.

[01:46:50] In an HVAC setting or in an ice making machine, it's awesome. It has lots of contact exposure time. So UV won't clean the air in your home, but it can mitigate mold from growing in your HVAC system, which then won't be contaminating your house with mold. So the way you're using it, close to the coil, great. A lot of people are installing it in the return or in the supply, treating it like an air filter. It's not an air filter. It does not clean air,

[01:47:17] Luke: Right.

[01:47:18] Mike: But it will disinfect its immediate region that it's in.

[01:47:21] Luke: Okay. Cool.

[01:47:22] Mike: But UV can also create ozone.

[01:47:26] Luke: Oh, okay.

[01:47:26] Mike: O3, which can be damaging for your lungs.

[01:47:29] Luke: Got it.

[01:47:30] Mike: So UV is not my favorite. However, for the amount of UV that you have in this house, I'm very comfortable. If we check the ozone right at the point of the UV might be slightly problematic, but it's so diluted in the scheme of your whole house. But when we to use UV ozone machines after wildfire smoke, we would have to give it a 24-hour dissipation period before you could enter the home. Every disaster, some kids who work for a restoration company would end up in the hospital because they were in there when the ozone was running almost.

[01:47:59] Luke: Oh, brutal. Every once in a while, and I haven't done this in some time, but I guess when we were building the house, and there's all kinds of building smells, and it was just funky, I would come in here and run ozone generators and seal everything up and then air it out before anyone came back in here.

[01:48:15] And it does seem to be really effective at neutralizing odors to run ozone, but you don't want to breathe it. Do you think there's any sense in you leave the house for a few hours and run an ozone generator in there just to disinfect everything and get a clean slate, and then air it out before you come and--

[01:48:35] Mike: Hell yeah.

[01:48:36] Luke: And inhabit it again.

[01:48:38] Mike: However, ozone can break down rubber and that will create formaldehyde. So you can actually have various chemical reactions because it breaks things down. But generally, I like ozone more for spot treatments. I wouldn't think of it as a whole home solution, but if the car after wildfire smoke, or someone pukes in the car, or you had a bunch of people over, I wouldn't want to do this weekly.

[01:49:00] But I think deep cleaning is the most underrated thing you could do. From a surface standpoint, once a year, Ryan Blazer talks about it a lot, deep cleaning your surfaces. Once per year, clean all your clothes at once, clean all your linens at once, clean in the counters, clean all the surfaces, all the nooks and crannies. At the same time, if you can, do a deep clean of your air. So you do few Jasprs. So that turbo mode, I bet you've never used it before.

[01:49:22] Luke: I have.

[01:49:22] Mike: Have you?

[01:49:23] Luke:  Yeah, yeah.

[01:49:24] Mike: We invented it for dentists during COVID because dentists have the worst air quality. The Department of Defense ranks dentists as the top five most dangerous job in America with hygienists because the bio aerosols in the environment are the saliva. They blast the hose into your gum line.

[01:49:41] Luke: Ew.

[01:49:42] Mike: So the studies, if you don't--

[01:49:44] Luke: I don't know how dentists do. I've interviewed a number of dentists, and I'm like, I don't know how you guys are inside of gross mouths all day.

[01:49:50] Mike: But then the patient comes, hygienist has the mask. Your mouth is wide open. When we test the waiting room in a dental office, it's just as contaminated as the operatory.

[01:49:58] Luke: Oh man.

[01:49:59] Mike: So the good thing is it's pretty--

[01:50:01] Luke: That's nasty.

[01:50:01] Mike: It's very fixable. So when we launched during COVID, our first 1,000 units were sold to dentists, dentists and doctors. The turbo mode was designed so when the hygienist is done with the patient, she can smash that turbo button.

[01:50:14] It'll run for full speed, a deep clean, and then it's ready for the next patient. But you asked the dentist, do you wash? Not long ago. It's decades, not centuries. Dentists didn't use to wear masks or gloves. The finger in the mouth, if you ask your parents when they were kids--

[01:50:31] Luke: Wow.

[01:50:31] Mike: It was straight hand in the mouth and no masks. So now you ask the dentist, do you clean your tools between? Yeah. Do you wipe the counter and the services? Yeah. Well, what about the air? The same stuff that you're cleaning from the services, you're not cleaning from the air. That next patient-- I will never go to a dentist that doesn't have significant air filtration. I've tested way too many dental offices.

[01:50:50] Luke: That's so gross.

[01:50:52] Mike: And it's a big deal.

[01:50:53] Luke: Just when you think you've learned about all the nasty stuff you need to look out for in the world.

[01:50:57]  Mike: Hairdressers, salons.

[01:50:58] Luke: Yeah.

[01:50:59] Mike: And these poor people who work there who have no awareness. It's a very solvable problem, but yeah, we used to call it-- yeah, so that was created for dental office, massage therapist, chiro. Whenever you're sharing the air in a small room with a patient, you're done? Clean the surfaces, clean the air.

[01:51:17] So if you hold the turbo boat button down for a minute, for a second, you can change that to 20 minutes. And then you just hit turbo, it goes to a deep clean mode. And then when it will go back to smart. So whenever me, Rachel and I, remember that we're walking out the house. We walk around, we hit the turbo mode on every unit. So then when we leave, the house, you come in, and it's super fresh.

[01:51:37] Luke: Oh cool.

[01:51:38] Mike: If go on vacation, some people never turn it off on vacation. You want to turn it up because the noise won't bother you when you're gone. But now when all that pollen and that mold, that dust, debris is coming in your house, you're filtering it. My house, we have no dust. Dust is an indoor problem. If you have dirty air, you get dust accumulation. If you have adequate air filtration, you will never see dust on the surfaces. So dust is a symptom of poor air. And then you get dust mites. So yeah, if you have it, use it. And that's another feature I'm very proud of.

[01:52:06] Luke: That's dope. I didn't even know that existed, that you could put the turbo on a timer. That's very cool.

[01:52:11] Mike: Yeah, if I hold it, it will.

[01:52:14]  Luke: This is going to be loud, guys. We're going to go turbo.

[01:52:15] Mike: Do it now. But when you hold it, there's live on it now and then you toggle it 6, 7.

[01:52:20] Luke: Oh, okay.

[01:52:22] Mike: And then it has a memory, so I'm changing it out to 20. So now, in the future, when you hit that turbo button, it has a memory. Now turbo is not five minutes, it's 20 minutes. So when you're going out the door, leaving your bedroom, you know you're changing your linens, cleaning person's hair, you smash turbo. And when you clean your surfaces, you vacuum your wipe counters, air quality always spikes.

[01:52:42] So while your cleaning is getting done, it's a great time to deep clean your air. When our cleaning's getting done, we turn them all up high. So while we're doing the surface cleaning and we're agitating things into the air, we're filtering them back out so they don't just settle right back--

[01:52:54] Luke: Right. That's dope. I'm going to do that.

[01:52:55] Mike: Yeah, you will.

[01:52:57] Luke: Every other Tuesday, when we come home after the house has been cleaned, I'm very grateful that-- I'm not doing it, but yeah, even with the natural cleaning products, it still smells. You're like, oh, the house was just cleaned, but not in a good way.

[01:53:09] Mike: I'm really excited for you to see what you notice different when you're-- because right now you have like, okay, clean air, I'll give you like a C, like 60%.

[01:53:20] Luke: Because I only have one Jaspr going.

[01:53:22] Mike: Yeah, you do.

[01:53:23] Luke: Dude, I'm excited to see what's going to happen for Alyson's cedar fever. Because like I said, when the Christmas tree was bothering her and we ran the Jaspr right next to the Christmas tree, it solved that problem, but still--

[01:53:36] Mike: Allergies should be gone.

[01:53:38] Luke: Yeah. I'm super stoked for that. All right, I got one last nuance thing to ask you about. So we covered ozone, the ERV. What about these air purifiers or other devices that claim to produce negative ions or negative ion generators you can put up in your HVAC system? I asked you about that before, and you're like, ah, they're bullshit. It doesn't do anything. Or it makes ozone, and we didn't really get into it further, but is there any utility value to ionizers, negative ion generators, and this kind of thing?

[01:54:10] Mike: So it's an imperfect analogy, and I'll give it context, but think about the way chlorine is used in water. It does deal with the bacteria problem, but it does create a new problem. So many things are like whack-a-mole. You solve a problem, but you create a problem. So if we're measuring for dust mites, or spores, or whatever else, those electronic cleaners can clean air, but they also create new additives.

[01:54:39] When it comes to my filtration technology in general, I like to do things that filter stuff. I don't like adding chlorine to my water. I'd rather filter it out through mechanical filtration and things like that as opposed to adding stuff to remove stuff. That seems weird. So I've never been an additive to clean guy.

[01:54:58] If you're talking about a wildfire smoke, a flood, a mold job, I like those tools in a industrial situation. In a home, a lot of people get very sick from elect electric cleaners, and yes, they produce ozone. It's like they're changing the molecular structure of things in the air to make them fall to the ground.

[01:55:21] And it's like, what molecular structures in here are changing? So it's a thing that there's so many awesome things that no one's going to spend money to study because how are they going to make the money on the other side? So I've never heard of someone having an issue from carbon or HEPA, very natural filtration.

[01:55:42] I've seen a lot of people go to the hospital from excessive levels of ozone. So it's like UV is fine. Ozone is bad. Most of those fancy electronic things I find are just most likely marketing hoopla. And yeah, so if it's for restoration or remediation, the ozone, the dissipation, puke in a car, like short-term spot treatment. But I've used tablets on camping trips before. It makes your water taste super chemically, but you won't get beaver fever. I don't know if that's a Canadian thing.

[01:56:20] Luke: I have never heard of that.

[01:56:22] Mike: Yeah, if you drink the--

[01:56:23] Luke: It doesn't sound good whatever it is.

[01:56:23] Mike: If you drink the lake water, you can get the beaver fever because the beaver poop in the water. So if you put the tablet in, you won't get that. But I wouldn't want to make that-- I'd prefer to boil my water and distill it and use a mechanical filtration. But sometimes those survivalist capsules are-- it's the way I feel about it.

[01:56:40] Luke: Okay.

[01:56:41] Mike: You're going to remove problems, and then you're going to add new problems. So for me, our core value at Jaspr is fundamental, foundational, simple science. We will get to the cutting edge if we can do it without adding things into the air. But big fan, big motor, big filter. So generally, yeah, anything that's additive is a hard pass for me.

[01:57:06] Luke: Okay.

[01:57:06] Mike: That's why we don't use it.

[01:57:07] Luke: Okay. Noted. Again, guys, visit jaspr.co. That's J-A-S-P-R.co. And use the code LUKE to save yourself 10% off one of these badass air purification systems. Got one last question for you. It's a three parter. Prepare yourself. Get ready. Who have been three teachers or teachings in general that have impacted your life that you'd like to share with us?

[01:57:31] Mike: Okay. Three different teachers?

[01:57:34] Luke: Yeah, or teachings, a philosophy, anything that makes you who you are.

[01:57:39] Mike: I love it. So I'll start from oldest to youngest or oldest to newest in terms of chronological. I'd say my grandparents, a guy named Jack Chisman and Phyllis Chisman, rest in peace. He passed at 92. She was late 80s, but I think he played tennis and golf until 91. And he said in his 60s he was going to live till 92, and he called his shot. I think he lived eight years longer than his dad, and his dad lived eight years longer than his dad. So maybe I'm good for 108 at this point.

[01:58:08] Luke: I hope so.

[01:58:09] Mike: At least. But I got to see a guy who was an immigrant who started with nothing, build up a fantastic business, doing engineering skyscrapers, electrical, mechanical, the whole nine yards. When you see Toronto and all these big buildings, he was the guy for a lot of them. But family night, family dinner every Friday, community, philanthropy, health, gardening. I'm so grateful.

[01:58:37] I don't know. I can't think of another example where you actually got to see love in '80s. Typically people drift apart, and sick of your partner by that time, but being able to see a successful decade. We went to on a family trip together when he was 80, and the guy was totally sharp, but it was like-- I I grew more around people who were workaholics, trading time for money.

[01:59:04] That was just the community I was in. So to see someone who came from an even harder era, be able to dial in family, health, community, philanthropy, that beautiful balanced life, I am very grateful that now I have a real life example of what a sweet decade in my 80s could look like.

[01:59:28] So that for sure big because otherwise you're like, it's hard to picture yourself. They talk about lifespan and all that, but what does that really look like? I've seen it. And there was no biohacking for him. And he did drink wine occasionally and scotch, and he ate meat, and he had sugar sometimes too.

[01:59:43] But that Harvard Longevity Study showed the number one longevity thing was community. So the love in the community was so strong that kept him going for a while. And he checked out right before COVID, so would've been a horrible be a 92-year-old.

[01:59:58] Luke: Yeah, no shit.

[02:00:00] Mike: That was big time. Another one is less of a person and more of an experience that would be summer camp. So in Canada, summer camp's a fairly normal thing to do. So for two months in the summer, you move away into the woods, and you live with the counselors. The staff were 15 to 19, which is funny because you see the 17-year-old now. It's like a baby. And the kids were like six to 15. So it was like kids raising kids for two months every summer in the woods with the bugs, camping, canoes, kayaking, all stuff. There was no phones. We would write postcards to our parents.

[02:00:41] So I got to try a healthy version of this community living, and you don't think outside of the 200, 300 people at camp. Camp is your world. And I got to live in this environment amongst nature with kids, being raised by kids for two months every summer. And my wife, who I didn't meet till I was 19, she also went to summer camp.

[02:01:03] If I didn't get that chance. I know some people now are like, hey, you want to go camping? I don't like nature. I'm like, did you go car camping once, get drunk and eaten by mosquitoes? What your relationship? People who have grown up in cities, it's like nature's this other thing. It's like we come from that place, and we can do quite well there. So yeah, summer camp would be a big one. And then I was blessed to see entrepreneurship from a very young age, but I would say very unhealthy entrepreneurship, time for money kind of stuff, grinding. Both my parents were great mentors, but my dad would say like, I can't listen to you guys in the evening because I'm an accountant, and I get paid $300 an hour all day at work. I listened all day. I have no more listening bandwidth left. And I just thought that seemed reasonable.

[02:01:58] And then I realized, 15 years later, I'm like, oh shit, maybe that was hard on everybody. Dad can't listen because he was working all day. So I got to see the upsides of opportunity. I got to go to summer camp. I got to go do TaeKwonDo, and soccer, and boxing, and not starve.

[02:02:19] I had an unlimited book budget, an exercise budget, and that was amazing. But that came at the expense of-- and I got taken to TaeKwonDo. It wasn't like my pops was absent at all, but he couldn't ever listen. And I got to see uncles living the same life, and they're still doing it in their 60s.

[02:02:41] So I'm like, whoa, hang on a second here. I heard a quote that's like, you become-- and butchering it, paraphrasing it, but the child becomes the expert at the thing the parents most needed to become needed, not wanted. So it's like I've got really great at systems, processes, automation.

[02:03:01] Tomorrow I intend to take the day off work and pull my kid, my 4-year-old out of school because she ain't going to be four forever. And I don't want to stop when she's seven or 17 either. I really wanted to live and create a life that I can have time, money, and location freedom.

[02:03:18] And I would've never known if it was possible if I didn't come from a place where they were entrepreneurs, had the money, had the BMWs and stuff, but they had no time. They had the money freedom, but not time freedom or location freedom. So now fast forward a couple of decades, and now we live in this awesome world with internet, and phones, and computers, and these blessings, and curses, and gifts. I didn't have a cell phone for three years. That experience taught me a lot about--

[02:03:47] Luke: My hero, bro.

[02:03:48] Mike: Going back to it soon. But yeah, so I would say that would be the last one, just being to see a beautiful situation and take it for what was great, but filter out the things that aren't serving me, and now be able to create this life where I'm like 33 years old and I could spend a ton of time with my family and my friends.

[02:04:09] Simplicity. We only have one product and one color because if we had three products in three colors, this would be a very confusing, annoying business. I would be trading my time at a rate I don't like. So just want to a very simple life, an impactful, simple life. So yeah, grandparents, both grandparents, summer camp, and entrepreneurs who traded time for money.

[02:04:33] Luke: Awesome, man. Beautiful. I think we covered it, dude. Thank you for being an air quality geek. I love--

[02:04:40] Mike: I would've never believed you if you told me this 10 years ago.

[02:04:42] Luke: I love recording podcasts with people who found their niche, found their passion, and are making cool stuff available to the rest of the world to solve problems. So thank you for your passion, knowledge, and also putting your ass on the line and creating a company.

[02:04:59] Mike: It's fun, man.

[02:05:00] Luke: Yeah, I appreciate it. And maybe more than anything, thank you for keeping the air in our house clean.

[02:05:05] Mike: Oh, you're just getting started.

[02:05:06] Luke: Without a bunch of noise and an ugly thing in the room that I don't like looking at.

[02:05:10] Mike: My pleasure, man. We're just getting started.

[02:05:11] Luke: Thanks, brother.

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