[00:00:01] Luke: So Mike, it seems like half the world's on fire half the time. Every time I go and doom scroll social media, it's like LA's on fire. North Carolina's on fire. And I know you have a background in helping people with fire remediation, and now you're one of the foremost experts in air quality. What do you know about what's happened with the air in places like LA where we've had these insane fires?

[00:00:26] Mike: Is doom scroll actually a website or is that just a concept?

[00:00:28] Luke: No, it's a-- is an adjective an action?

[00:00:34] Mike: Dude, no one even believes me when I say I don't know verb, noun, and adjective.

[00:00:38] Luke: Yeah, me too.

[00:00:38] Mike: And then they explain it to me and I got it, and my brain's just never chosen to remember that.

[00:00:42] Luke: I have no idea. I made it through seven grades. I'm exempt from those requirements. But anyway, no, doom scrolling is a thing you do. It's an action.

[00:00:50] Mike: Okay. It's like when you're going through a bunch of sad things or negative things on the Internet.

[00:00:55] Luke: Yes.

[00:00:56] Mike: Okay. Well, it would be a cool domain.

[00:00:57] Luke: Which depending on who you follow, the ratio of positive to negative news is going to be determined.

[00:01:06] Mike: They say if--

[00:01:07] Luke: Who I follow on X, it's all bad news.

[00:01:11] Mike: People say that. My X is all great news.

[00:01:14] Luke: My Instagram's all great news. Or it's funny, or inspiring.

[00:01:18] Mike: So X is your doom spot.

[00:01:19] Luke: Yeah.

[00:01:20] Mike: Hmm. They say if it bleeds, it leads. And I get that there's some truth to that, but also if you look at the most viewed videos of all time on YouTube, it's always cute puppies and kittens. So I feel like there's a really great opportunity now for people to make more of that content. I don't know that if it bleeds, it leads, is actually true.

[00:01:39] Luke: That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting.

[00:01:42] Mike: Some of that dog reuniting with owner after 20 years, those heartfelt things, they also crush. So I think there's a really good place for that.

[00:01:50] Luke: I love those videos, especially when it's a wild animal, like somebody raises a tiger in captivity and--

[00:01:57] Mike: The polar bear hugs the man.

[00:01:57] Luke: Yeah. They leave for 30 years and come back and they recognize them.

[00:02:00] Mike: Yeah, you love it.

[00:02:01] Luke: Yeah.

[00:02:02] Mike: I would pick that over the doomy option. I don't think people are creating enough polar bear and tiger style content. I guess it's hard to produce that kind of content.

[00:02:13] Luke: Sometimes we have Cookie here on the podcast, my dog, and maybe that will have that effect. I should always have Cookie being super cute when I'm talking to someone about something really dark like 5G or chemtrails.

[00:02:26] Mike: Yeah. Be petting your dog.

[00:02:28] Luke: Yeah. Talking about the mass genocide of vaccines, and at least the dog's cute, guys.

[00:02:34] Mike: Yeah, unvaccinated dog.

[00:02:35] Luke: Yeah, exactly. Well, I wish she was, but they got to her before I knew.

[00:02:39] Mike: Oh no.

[00:02:40] Luke: Yeah, before I adopted her.

[00:02:42] Mike: So LA wildfires. I went there, by the way.

[00:02:45] Luke: Oh, you did?

[00:02:46] Mike: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

[00:02:47] Luke: Whoa.

[00:02:48] Mike: Dude, it was crazy. I was at a retreat in Mexico right as the fires were burning. And it was a week of no internet, no phone, nothing. So just as we were entering airplane mode, phones away, that was happening. I'm like, "The universe is really fucking with me right now." because like, normally that means go to LA right now.

[00:03:09] When it's burning and I see evacuations, historically, that means head to the city, what I used to do. For anyone who hasn't listened before, my background was wildfire restoration, floods, and mold cleanup, hurricanes.

[00:03:20] So I'd go to wherever the worst devastation was and fix things and rebuild and test air and clean up. And that's what led to Jaspr. So I went to LA. The reason I went was because I feel uniquely qualified for that situation. That LA wildfire in January, it's a very unique fire because historically, wildfires only burn trees.

[00:03:45] So you're dealing with wildfire smoke, but that's a big camp. It's a glorified campfire. It's trees that were burning. Still a big problem. But with the LA wildfire, 12,000 homes burned, maybe 20,000 cars burn. LA's got a lot of Teslas. So imagine how many lithium batteries got cooked.

[00:04:06] When someone had to drink too many and they're lazy at the end of the night, and they throw the marshmallow bag after s'mores on the campfire, that is not a natural smell. Never put plastic on a fire again. So now imagine every bit of drywall, every paint can, every WD-40, every aerosol, every Windex, every Lysol, the car, the battery, it's all part of that toxic soup. So this is not a normal wildfire.

[00:04:33] So most fire restoration companies, some of them have experience with the home is burnt down. Let's knock it down, clean up the ash, and rebuild it. That's not a rare situation. And most fire restoration companies and mold companies and flood companies, they're used to day-to-day stuff. Your kitchen had a leak. Your bathroom flooded.

[00:04:55] The toilet flooded. A kitchen fire, a dryer vent fire. Fire department comes or someone fire extinguishes it, and they have to clean up the home. Very few of them have experience with regional smoke damage, meaning the home has no visible damage, but it was basking in a toxic soup.

[00:05:16] My experience in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the biggest Canadian wildfire that's on record, it was just like the LA thing. So thousands of homes burnt, cars burnt, and it was more of a smoke damage situation. So when you look at the news, the news only films the area where the homes are gone and they only talk about the lost homes and insurance and all that stuff.

[00:05:47] What I'm most concerned about, the most impacted person after a wildfire is the person who didn't lose their home but all their neighbors did. Person who lost their home, despite what you might read online, 99% of them are going to get a brand-new home, and they're going to get a check for half a million dollars for most of the contents-- a lot of money.

[00:05:56] So this is horrible. They lost a lot of things, but it's a very known situation what needs to be done. When your home was 300 feet from another home that got lost, your home is literally just completely toxic soup. Every fiber of that home is ruined and insurance company's telling you to get back in that home next month.

[00:06:16] So I feel very uniquely qualified because of my experience with regional citywide smoke damage. It felt like, let me go there for myself and see what's really going on and do some testing. So yeah, I'll get into a bit more of the specifics, but the air quality after a fire of that magnitude, it could be bad for three months. It could be bad for a year.

[00:06:41] So best-case scenario is a few months later, we're all good. The worst-case scenario is this is 9/11 and a million people get cancer in a few years. Because this is not a normal situation. No one has the data on what this means.

[00:06:57] Luke: Wow. I had that sense based on what we build things from being so toxic. And when you burn those things down, it's completely different than when a bunch of trees burn down. Even just the term-- I'm going to get a little conspiratory here-- but wildfire is pretty ambiguous, if not dubious, when you see all of this arson going on and strange phenomenon wherein trees are not burned down, but a whole car is melted to the ground. You know what I mean?

[00:07:40] And then anything painted blue is not burned. There's some weird stuff going on, and none of us really know what it is. But I don't know. I think humans have a basic understanding of how fire works just intuitively, and there's so many things going on these days that are just like, hmm, something seems off with that. It's just not behaving like normal fires. But regardless of how it starts, what you're talking about is the real concern, is what do we do with what's left.

[00:08:09] Mike: And man, the amount of times I've seen a home where every home on the street's gone and then one home is there. But sometimes you find out a crazy story, like old Joe never left.

[00:08:19] Luke: He was out there with a hose.

[00:08:20] Mike: He was out there with a hose and a gas mask and saved his house. And then he is like, "Shit, my insurance company is saying my home is fine." By the way, I put some pictures on Instagram, but I went through Altadena, which is one of the most devastated areas, and not the rich, devastated area, not the Palisades with all the fancy homes that people talked about.

[00:08:42] I have a picture of a Ford Transit van, and then you see a molten aluminum river of liquified metal that had now hardened. So literally, when a home burns, it's like 1,800 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Aluminum melts at 1,100 degrees or so. So you literally would see these rivers of molten aluminum. Think about heavy metals.

[00:09:08] We get heavy metals from all kinds of stuff. Never mind cooking, soupy metals. So you have homes that are still piles of ash. I was monitoring the air throughout the day, and as the wind was changing, the air quality was really changing because you have those piles of ash and then every time-- people think it rains and then it's all gone.

[00:09:30] It's not the case at all. Where do you think it goes? It dries and then the wind kicks up and that's why it can be a problem for a while. So the only way to accurately see what's going on really, you'd have to test the air, test the water, test the soil, and test people's dust in their homes.

[00:09:46] And you need to do it weekly for a prolonged period of time. No one's doing that. So there's a girl named Kayla Barnes. She's a biohacker longevity girl, and she's been doing her blood work monthly for a couple years. Brian Johnson too. And both of them, their blood work post wildfires are off the charts.

[00:10:05] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:10:06] Mike: Heavy metals and the chemicals. And they're doing comprehensive blood testing.

[00:10:08] Luke: Wow.

[00:10:10] Mike: And they were in areas that were even the worst affected. Actually, by the way, it's a free course that I took some time doing. If you live in LA or you have a wildfire issue in your area, I created a resource at jaspr.co/smoke. There's no offers. There's nothing there.

[00:10:29] It's just a choose-your-own-adventure course where I went to the studio for seven hours. Because I'm like, every time this happens, dude, I'm on the phone for an hour a night with everybody helping them navigate insurance, contractors, helping them test their home, assessing everything. I'm like, "Let me just go to the studio for a day and say everything that 90% of the time is the same conversation."

[00:10:49] So it's jaspr, J-A-S-P-R,.co/smoke. And I created a resource on how to assess your home. So if you lost your home entirely, if you were a minute from the fire, or if you were 15 miles away, but you're still concerned, it teaches you everything from how to DIY, detox your home, how to navigate insurance, how to get things covered, how to hire a contractor, what to do if your home was water bombed. Man, you don't realize this, but if your home was water bombed with thousands of pounds of water, it's now structurally screwed.

[00:11:21] Luke: Whoa.

[00:11:22] Mike: I found fish--

[00:11:23] Luke: And probably moldy.

[00:11:24] Mike: Moldy. Very moldy. I've seen fish on rooftops before. Because when they're grabbing water from the lakes, they grab a lot of fish. I've seen tons of seaweed and fish, and then someone's bust a hole through the house. So you go into a home that I thought was smoke damage, there's a skylight and fish in the living room. I'm like, "This is like a crazy dystopian movie.

[00:11:45] Luke: Holy shit.

[00:11:46] Mike: And you're like, oh yeah. yeah, it got water bombed. The water source was a lake. It's not that crazy. But yeah, oftentimes you really need to know how to-- just like with your health, the doctor, the naturopath, they're all tools and resources, but you have to be your own student, and you have to be your own general contractor of your own health, even for your home.

[00:12:07] No matter what GC you hire, the customer's still the ultimate GC. And with your health, it's the same. So when you're dealing with insurance and they're denying stuff, you have to document every single conversation. And if they approve something, ask for it in writing in an email, like, "Hey, for my records, can you just email me that now?

"[00:12:25] Otherwise, a week later, there's a new insurance adjuster and they're like, "I didn't say it. You got no backup." Just because they approved it on the phone and they told you to hire all these people, now they're like, "Sorry, not covered." So it's like a friendly cop who's like your best buddy and then still hits you with the harshest ticket. Thought we were boys, man. So insurance is like that.

[00:12:45] Luke: We've all experienced that at one point, I think, with customer service. You call to straighten something up with whatever. You think it's sorted and then it's not. You call back, and they're like, "I don't know. What?" I'm actually going through that with PayPal right now. It's very top of mind, dude.

[00:12:58] Mike: Really?

[00:12:59] Luke: Oh yeah, dude.

[00:13:00] Mike: It's not fun.

[00:13:01] Luke: Yeah. Just this morning, I finally had ChatGPT write a proper email documenting everything that we've ever said for the past two months of trying to straighten out this one issue. Yeah, it's just like you get a new person and they're like, "Oh." They give you the automated reply that's like, "Oh, click here, go there."

[00:13:17] I'm like, "No, dude, we've been through this 20 times over the past two months. Here are all my case numbers." Dealing with bureaucracy, and especially now with so much automated customer service, it can be very frustrating.

[00:13:30] Mike: I'm glad you said ChatGPT though because you reminded me of a good thing. I talk about it actually. This is the one thing I didn't talk about in the smoke course, but when I went out to LA, it was very evident. So the homeowner's asking me, he's like, "What about my leather couch?

[00:13:45] Because I was explaining how all the porous things are-- anything in your home, a carpet or a couch or whatever, it's porous. So it pulls all the chemicals in, and it can't really get out. If you had a hardwood table or glassware, you can clean that, but I can't clean a carpet. I can't clean a sponge. I can't clean clothes. I can't clean insulation.

[00:14:07] Anything that's porous. Anything that could get wet by water can also absorb air. And what was interesting was he was asking me like, "What about this? What about this?" And I was just explaining my justification for each item of like, why insurance should replace it. AI is a master at this. Wow.

[00:14:26] And with insurance companies, it's like, can you please explain to my insurance company why my record player and my vinyls need to be replaced? Because they're going to be like, "It's fine." With TVs, for example-- I'll give you a fun example. TVs and computers need to be disposed of. You're like, why? It's a computer. I can wipe it down.

[00:14:45] Well, those things have intakes. So just because it's working today, your microcontrollers and stuff, the smoke is very corrosive. So let's say your TV should last for 10 years. Sometimes six months, 12 months after the fire, all your electronics start failing. And GPT can write a very beautiful scientific thing explaining how the smoke residue is on the board and it won't fail on day one, but it's going to fail on day 300.

[00:15:12] I remember the guy had this whole vinyls collection. Well, first of all, if you don't have the vinyl cover, the vinyls are worthless. So the vinyls are all porous. So those are contaminated. And the smoke will actually get into the, I forget the word, but basically the rings in the record.

[00:15:28] Luke: The grooves, man.

[00:15:29] Mike: It gets in the grooves.

[00:15:30] Luke: It's in the groove, baby.

[00:15:32] Mike: And the soot will mess them up, and then the audio quality will be distorted. So then if they're like, no, they're fine, then what would you do there? You'd be like, "Okay, well, then I need to have an audio engineer listen to each one with special equipment to test it."

[00:15:48] Well, how much do you think that guy charges? Now you get a $40,000 bill to assess your-- then they're like, "Fine, we'll just cover it." So it's very much this like cat and mouse game, but AI is fantastic. You're like, "Give me justification on why I need this replaced." And it's masterful.

[00:16:05] Luke: Epic. Great idea too with answering all the questions in one fell swoop. I did that with my EMF course, which is free. What's our link for that? lukestorey.com/emfmasterclass. You know what? Now I think about it. We'll put all the notes today at lukestorey.com/air, including your smoke course.

[00:16:27] But I think that's a great just overall service toward the betterment of humanity. If you have an area of expertise, rather than spending the time and energy answering each question, which is a really nice and altruistic thing to do, if you just archive all of that information somewhere that's universally accessible, especially if it's free--

[00:16:51] Mike: I'm going to do one now in a few weeks for mold as well. How to inspect your house for mold, how to deal with your own thing, how to hire a contractor, how to test. I don't know if you're getting scammed. I'm going to do another one for if you're having a baby and you need to optimize your nursery to not be a VOC box, so all these things that.

[00:17:07] Anything that I've talked about on a podcast that was useful, I'm like, let's just turn that into a free course. And my setup is so ghetto, but I really like it. So I literally just use a Google doc or a Notion. You know Loom videos?

[00:17:21] Luke: Yeah.

[00:17:21] Mike: So I just record like 20 looms and then I have a title. So I just call it choose your own adventure course. I'm like, "If your house didn't get water bombed, you probably do don't care to watch that piece." So based on your situation, you don't have to get the Kajabi and go through the whole course and do my modules.

[00:17:37] It's like an FAQ page and each one's like a five to seven-minute video. So I was able to just rant at a camera for three hours and then edit that into little digestible things. So I'm going to do the same thing with mold.

[00:17:49] Luke: Epic. I'll watch the mold one. That's a tough one to tackle because with this house, we did a lot to get rid of any mold when we renovated it and then monitored. You've come over here and done testing for us and stuff. We have the Jasprs now in pretty much every main room, which is great.

[00:18:08] But still sometimes I wonder. We got a new HVAC system. They said they did it right. I'm like, "But did they?" Because there's a little condensation coming out of one of the vents. It's like after you live in a place for a while when it comes to mold, you can't really be sure unless you stay on it.

[00:18:23] Mike: I always tell people--

[00:18:24] Luke: It's dynamic. It's not just like I set it and forget it. It can be great and then it changes and it's not. And most of the time we don't find out until it's too late and everyone starts getting sick and you got to throw all your shit out and all that.

[00:18:35] Mike: In the mold restoration industry, they call it the mold rush. Because how the demand is growing so quickly, it's like the gold rush. But unlike gold, mold is a renewable resource. Gold is finite. So it's the gold rush that doesn't end. Mold will is growing every single day faster than we can remediate it. It's growing.

[00:19:00] When your home is being built-- first of all, most people live in an apartment, a condo, or in a cookie cutter subdivision home. That is the standard American home. There's no time when the designer, the architect, and the builder are sitting around in a board table saying, "How do we make the most healthiest human optimal home possible?"

[00:19:18] No, they're saying, "We got 2000 acres. How many trees do we need to cut down? How many homes can we build? How fast can we build them? How cheap can we build them?" Those are the big three questions. The HVAC system is the lungs of your home.

[00:19:33] And then usually, in home design, often-- even I've seen high-end architects doing this. They design the floor plan. They're like, "The bedroom, the kitchen, the master, the bathroom." Then they're like, "Where can we shove the HVAC, and how do we duct it? It's not like, how do we create an efficient process where the home breathes good?

[00:19:49] So in Texas, everyone's furnace and air conditioners, all the mechanical is usually in your attic. Your attic is typically in unclimate condition space. So you have a cold AC air, a hot attic. What do you think happens? Condensation, drip, drip, drip, drip, mold.

[00:20:08] They don't usually spray foam the attic and put your HVAC equipment in a climate-controlled space. Why? Most of the things in a home, like a water filtration system-- the average home now has over a million dollars.

[00:20:22] Putting in a five or $6,000 water filtration system is not a big deal. A lot of the mechanical stuff, the HVAC, the furnace, the heating, the equipment's often fine. It's just how are they running it and how are they installing it? One of my huge missions for the next few years is-- remember, I used to test air for a living, thousands of homes.

[00:20:44] I'm like, "There should not even be an air quality testing industry because the HVAC guys, they come to your house for free." It's funny. Renovators can have the worst marketing in the world and still build a multi-billion-dollar business because their offer is so good. It's like, I'll come to your house and I'll build you a new kitchen.

[00:21:02] I'll build you a new bathroom. I'll paint your whole home. And they offer free estimates. It's like I'll come to your house, measure things, take pictures, give you a quote. It's like, wow, okay. So their offer is so good and that's allowed them to just have a yard sign or a Craigslist post and build big businesses.

[00:21:19] Most people can't do that. But their offer is so good. So it's like, why is the HVAC industry-- by the way, if you have any furnace, air conditioner guys here, they usually have a carbon monoxide detector on their waist. They're checking for gas leaks. Because God forbid you die that night. They're now liable if there was a gas leak.

[00:21:36] So they're looking for all the gases that will kill you tonight, but they're not looking for the stuff that's slowly killing you. So why doesn't he also have a carbon dioxide detector? Why not go to baby's bedroom and do a little mold check? Hey, I'm already at your house. Let me make sure that the baby's bedroom and your master bedroom actually has clean air being blown into it. Great products exist. So it's like how doctors don't learn anything about nutrition. The guys who install furnaces and air conditioners don't know anything about air quality.

[00:22:08] So as an industry, one of like my biggest, biggest missions for the next few years is to help teach the HVAC guy,-- and they love getting in your home for free and selling you stuff. So it makes sense for those dudes to have the gadgets. I walk around with my air quality detector all the time.

[00:22:24] These guys are already in your home looking for additional things that they could potentially sell you based on looking for problems. All they got in their tool belt is like, your AC's old. It cost me two grand to fix it or eight grand to replace it. Instead of spending an hour and assessing it and selling you air filters and fresh air intakes and upgrading your bathroom fans, installing a new rain shed.

[00:22:46] We talked about that last time. A lot of people have horrible ventilation in their kitchens. So the air quality testing industry, they're like, I will come to your house for $1,000 and test your air. There's typically under $50 of lab testing done. And if the HVAC guy is already there, okay, it's 50 bucks for a mold sample.

[00:23:03] The lab cost is typically about 20 to $22 per test for mold. So the mold rush has created this whole industry that doesn't really need to exist. And I would love to see the 100,000-plus guys out there every day in people's homes just doing that as a part of their sales.

[00:23:20] Luke: It's a great idea for their business model. You reminded me of when we first installed the home security system here, the ADT shit or whatever. The guy was really, really annoying to the point where I almost didn't sign it. But--

[00:23:40] Mike: You still [Inaudible] how you paid him to--

[00:23:40] Luke: But he went around and he is checking all the windows, and then he's giving me crime stats on the neighborhood and how people break in and when they do it, and how often it happens around here. And by the time he left, I was like, "Okay, I need a sensor in every room and every window."

[00:23:53] He had me sold on everything just based on giving me what I think was probably accurate data. But had he just come in and said like, "Oh, so you weren't an alarm? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, and that's what grownups do." I probably would've just gotten the bare minimum. But by the time he gave me his whole pitch, as annoying as it was, it was still pretty convincing. And next thing you know, I got the whole meal deal.

[00:24:19] Mike: And once he's got you on the ground window, he is like, "Criminals these days, have you seen these collapsible ladders that they can stuff into a trunk? They can go right into your master bedroom. Do you ever travel out of town? They're more likely to break in when mom's home alone. When your wife is here is the most likely time.

[00:24:34] So we should probably do some extra security on your master bedroom. So yeah, it's the same thing. But it's a huge con. Yeah. So there's already people in homes doing this.

[00:24:47] That's why Jaspr, eventually, not for at least the next few years, but eventually, I'm intending to actually make full HVAC systems and then use that as a vehicle to train the HVAC industry how to do air quality. Because they're already heating and cooling. HVAC, heating, ventilation, air conditioning. They typically don't do much of the ventilation part. And why is there not an air cleaning part? What about the cleaning of the air?

[00:25:16] Luke: Totally, totally.

[00:25:17] Mike: So an analogy that I can't unsee since I first saw it, is water is to fish. Air is to people. I imagine that swimming is like dancing in the air. We just call it swimming because it's underwater. And if you take the fish out of the water, they flail around and die in a few minutes. The same thing happens if you take the human out of the air.

[00:25:40] And if you ever had a fish tank or a swimming pool, you don't go into the pool with a sponge and scrub the bottom of the pool. You get a water filter and a pump. If you have a fish tank, you need to get a filter and a pump. You have to clean the bowl and change the bowl and do that stuff a little bit.

[00:25:57] So people have housekeepers and they're mopping and they're dusting and they're vacuuming and all this stuff, but that's the equivalent of jumping into your swimming pool and scrubbing the walls where the air is actually the thing that needs to be cleaned and recycled. So we have a whole industry.

[00:26:13] We have home builders, developers, designers, architects, HVAC stuff, and somehow no one is picking up yet. And that's where the air awareness piece to me is everything, because I'm not going to be building massive subdivisions. At least that's not in my plans.

[00:26:28] But imagine, I'll just call it the wellness trend. I don't call things a trend that I think you're going to keep going up forever. I don't think filtered water was a trend and we're going to go back to tap. There's certain health trends that come and go and new supplements and stuff, but clean water, organic food, those don't feel like trends.

[00:26:49] They feel like areas of awareness that are constantly expanding and at certain moments of time that accelerates more than others. But I don't like to call them trends. So I don't feel like air is the new trend. It's an area of emerging awareness.

[00:27:02] Luke: Yeah.

[00:27:03] Mike: And when that happens, if your subdivision home said like, “If you buy this home, you are 300% more likely to get cancer in the 10 years.” Nobody would buy the house. So that's not on the sign. So now if the developers were like, "Hey, wait a second here. No one's buying our homes anymore." They've realized no one's buying our food or no one's buying our homes anymore.

[00:27:25] And this is a situation I've heard a lot of podcasts about the food industry and pharma, and I'm sure you've had all these guys and gals on your pod. And I agree with a lot of it. A lot of it seems nefarious and evil. And then other parts of it were like, this was just done, subsidizing crops after war. The memo never happened that it's not war anymore. So things just over decades got weird and broken.

[00:27:54] All the home environmental air stuff, I don't think there's a sick home cabal and they're working with the medical industry to give you allergies and mold poisoning. I really don't. I just think it's completely lack of awareness, which is exciting because there's no big pharma force that we're against.

[00:28:14] If the developers were like, "Wait, you mean we could just build homes with better materials and really great air quality?" That would be a feature you could market. Especially, you could make a home with under 10 grand of upgrades that would be wildfire smoke proof or allergen proof.

[00:28:32] You could make a home that would filter any of the cedar or pollen that comes into home. So imagine you're a home builder, much like that alarm guy, and he's like, "Hey, allergens are the sneakiest burglar of them all. They'll come in and steal your sleep every single night." And he does a little tap on your couch and is like, "There's more pollen in your home right now and on your pillow than outside.

[00:28:53] Cedar fever comes in and it can't get out, which is the truth. But if we were filtering your air inside, if we set in a fresh air intake with the clean air system, it's five grand. You're going to have a pollen free home. That builder now is going to have the most demand.

[00:29:09] So that's why I love this awareness type of stuff where it's just a no-brainer. So for anyone who's a home builder or a developer, an architect, this stuff is just-- and even when the housing market has crashed 2023 and 2024 compared to where it was, you know who's not crashing? Healthy home builders. Their prices haven't gone down at all. The people who have generic homes are dying. People who have unique and cool homes are doing great still.

[00:29:34] Luke: Yeah. I like your line of thinking there of creating the awareness that then breeds the demand. Even now, to your point of working with HVAC professionals, we've gone through a few of them and haven't had the most positive experiences, but our recent company, I'll give them a shout out. They're called AC Superheroes.

[00:29:57] We were having some issues and they came in. I just was like, "Screw it. I'm just getting two new whole systems. I'm over it." Trying to repair them and stuff after a while just gets to be a black hole. And they were really polite and cool, but I wouldn't say they were annoyed by my request about the air quality, but they were kind of like, "Wow." Give me kind of, "Dude, it's not that big of a deal. Why bother?"

[00:30:21] I want them to put the UV lights in the condensers and all these little add-ons that I'm sure don't totally solve the problem, but at least I think will hopefully slow down the possibility of mold developing. And they just give you a little side eye, but they're like, "All right, if you say so, we'll do it."

[00:30:41] But they weren't that excited about it or like, "Oh yeah, of course. We always do this." It was kind of like, "Yeah, some people like you that are a little neurotic ask us to do this, but it's not a standard.

[00:30:51] Mike: And this is in Austin where the awareness is as high as anywhere.

[00:30:52] Luke: Yeah. And it's not a standard part of their operation where they're like, "Oh no, we definitely have to do it like this, because you got to pay attention to the ventilation and the air quality." They're just like, "Yeah, we'll do it for you if you want, but if I hadn't mentioned it, they weren't going to tell me about it."

[00:31:05] Mike: No. And there's no reason.

[00:31:07] Luke: It was up to me to have the understanding and make the request.

[00:31:11] Mike: There's no reason why they didn't get you on bathroom fans, a range hood. Even, "Hey, your range hood is one foot higher than it needs to be. I know it's annoying and it seems like--

[00:31:19] Luke: Mine is?

[00:31:19] Mike: No, I'm just--

[00:31:20] Luke: Oh, in general. Okay. I was like--

[00:31:21] Mike: I think your range hood's fine.

[00:31:22] Luke: It's too late to change it now.

[00:31:23] Mike: I think your range hood's fine. But for a lot of people, it's an old thing. People generally are pretty happy to spend money on aesthetic things like a new bathroom and a new kitchen and all that. So when the kitchen's being done, getting the sweet range hood-- or your range is fine, but for $1,000, we actually have to drop it a foot lower.

[00:31:43] Look, imagine they took a pot of water, start boiling. Like I showed you, you use your back burner last time and that stuck. So with some people it's like the range hood needs to come down a foot. So these are the guys that are in your home right now-- already there that-- the spray foaming in the attic, the UV lights, the RVs, the HRVs, a lot of these tools exist, but what good is an instrument if there's no musicians?

[00:32:09] So all these two tools exist, but the people-- the HVAC industry, I'm so excited to disrupt it. I'm so excited. You just can't start a furnace company on day one. We used to be called Jaspr Medical when I launched in 2020 for the first two years.

[00:32:27] Remember a great marketer named Dean Jackson, he goes, "If you put medical at the end of your domain and you have a high price, you don't need any reviews to get started. It's true.

[00:32:35] It was during COVID when we started, so we were only selling to doctors and dentists anyway. And it's extra true if you already have 500 doctors using your product, that really-- and then we've been able to get priced in and all that. I forget where I was going with that.

[00:32:49] Luke: I do too, but I know plenty of other places to go.

[00:32:52] Mike: Let's go.

[00:32:54] Luke: One thing that I think was really interesting in our prior conversation, which we'll link to, of course, in the show notes at lukestorey.com/air was the range hoods where the venting goes nowhere.

[00:33:10] When we were building this house, we rented an apartment, and I didn't really think about it at the time, but I did after you shared this with me, there was a range hood fan, but then I could see the top of the cabinets, and there was nothing coming out of it. It was not going anywhere. Where's that going? Is that just a total scam?

[00:33:31] Mike: This is awareness.

[00:33:32] Luke: Is there any kind of filtration even happening? Because you want it ideally going out the top of your house, not even--

[00:33:39] Mike: Outside. Ventilation has to leave the house. They can't go into the cabinet.

[00:33:43] Luke: Not into the crawl space of the cabinet.

[00:33:45] Mike: But literally a lot of them, especially in apartments, you're talking like there's a cabinet above it. You open it. If you put your hand there, that air is just coming out there. There's no filtration system in range hoods, to answer your question.

[00:33:55] Luke: Oh, okay.

[00:33:56] Mike: No, there's not. So yeah, you want to suck it out of the stove area and then push it outside the home. So it can go out to the attic and then out. That's often a pretty straight shot in a normal path. Or if it just goes to your attic, your attic itself needs to be breathing a lot.

[00:34:12] Often it doesn't. Same thing with the bathroom fans. It just goes into your attic. So you're like, you shower, you turn on your bathroom fans, you're like, "I'm venting. I don't want to get mold." And you get a moldy attic instead. So yeah.

[00:34:23] Luke: Wow.

[00:34:23] Mike: That's one.

[00:34:24] Luke: That's crazy. Another thing about the range hood too that I didn't realize is I'm not-- I don't really cook a lot, and I definitely don't enjoy it and I'm not good at it, so it's not been part of my life other than where it's necessary. But I didn't even realize that the fan on your range was for the fumes of the gas you're using.

[00:34:45] I thought it was just for the smell of the bacon or whatever you're cooking. I think you were the one that told me. You're like, "No, dude, that's because when you burn propane or you burn natural gas, there's exhaust just like when you burn any fuel, and that just fills your house up with--"

[00:34:57] Mike: It doesn't perfectly combust. So I've never tested a home. And they say there's safe levels of carbon monoxide, and maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But I've never tested a home that doesn't have ambient amounts of carbon monoxide all the time. Usually around 0.5 parts per million. I can't say how much that is a problem, but I prefer zero.

[00:35:16] Luke: Yeah.

[00:35:17] Mike: I prefer zero. So yeah, that's a funny one. And it's like the bathroom too. People think bathroom fans are for poop smells. I guess it helps for that too, but it's for the humidity. It's because if you shower, think about how much water you can suck up with the towel. Not to mention what's sitting in the floor of the shower or the bath or whatever.

[00:35:37] It could be a gallon of water that you could soak up into a sopping wet towel. So that water has to go somewhere. Let's say you have a family of four and everybody's showering in a day, that's four gallons of water just going into-- of course, bathrooms are moldy.

[00:35:55] It's not usually because of plumbing issues. It's because you don't vent it out. Once again, we have the bathroom fans installed. Are they venting outside, and are we actually using them? And that's where this awareness, it really needs to be top down and bottom up because, especially with the purchasing of homes, it breaks my heart. When you bought this home, did you get a home inspection?

[00:36:16] Luke: Yes.

[00:36:17] Mike: Do you remember that process at all?

[00:36:19] Luke: Pain in the ass.

[00:36:20] Mike: So you pay 4 or 5, $800.

[00:36:23] Luke: It was around eight, yeah.

[00:36:23] Mike: The really good guy. You probably didn't want the cheap one. You're like, "This is the most expensive thing I've ever bought in life.

[00:36:27] Luke: I think we actually paid extra for a mold test specifically too. That wasn't even part of the--

[00:36:34] Mike: This is new. This is a new thing that very few home inspectors are-- by the way, I got certified as a home inspector. I'm just like, "I got to see what the training's like." It was like three-day course online that I did in the evening. And then I'm a certified home inspector.

[00:36:49] What? So you mean the people who are inspecting the most expensive things that people buy is a evening course that you can do? Same thing. When I became a certified mold mediator, it was a two-day course. Very long lunch breaks. It was a joke. Same thing.

[00:37:07] When I did the fire restoration course, I remember it was like a half an hour video where they showed you like, if you put a cigarette in a garbage can, how the whole home will burn down within half an hour. It's like, that's great, but very little of the time was actually teaching me how to restore someone's home after a fire.

[00:37:23] Give me some training. There was no practical hands-on stuff. It's a two day course and then you go downstairs to the store and they sell you all your stuff you need to get started. By the way, the only people that teach mold restoration courses are the companies who sell mold cleaning supplies. That's where the lessons happen.

[00:37:41] Luke: Ah, interesting.

[00:37:42] Mike: That's the education department.

[00:37:44] Luke: The old fox guarding the henhouse.

[00:37:46] Mike: That's who teaches you.

[00:37:47] Luke: Huh.

[00:37:48] Mike: And then often the teachers are the people who work for the companies who sell the products.

[00:37:51] Luke: Oh yeah. This is a good one for the listeners, I think. I've heard, it might've been you or someone else told me that if you're doing a mold inspection on the house, you should do it with a company that only does the inspection and not remediation because of the chicken and henhouse thing, where a company could come in and if they're less than scrupulous or just incompetent, you could end up getting false positives or a bad assessment because they want to sell you their remediation.

[00:38:23] Mike: Generally, this is a good idea, but for some reason, as a society, we choose where this rule applies and doesn't apply. It's so funny. So with the mechanic in your vehicle, it's very normal that it's one guy. You go in. Is my car broken? Yes, your thing's messed up, your catalytic, inverter, your brakes.

[00:38:40] So for cars, it's a one-stop shop. Eye doctor, for whatever reason, it's always the-- optometrist is right beside the eye store. That one is a conflict. So the eye doctor doesn't typically sell glasses. But when you go down the list, with accountant, you go to the tax man. "Hey, how bad am I looking?" And then he charges you.

[00:39:03] You go to the lawyer, I want you to assess my situation. So societally, we choose which industries are acceptable and not acceptable for this conflict thing. It's very strange. There's no reason why the lawyer, the optometrist, the mold-- the human behavior is the same across the board.

[00:39:23] For example, usually the home inspector is not the renovation contractor. But you wish he was like. If your home inspector was a great guy and he is like, "Hey, look, you have all these cracks. I can have my guys come out Tuesday." If he was a good guy, you'd want him now.

[00:39:37] So I've seen really honest mold remediation companies and they could be like-- watch me flip that conflict on its head for a second. He's like, "Look, I charged you $1,000 to do this mold test to remove my conflict." Now, what's also suspect is when the mold mediator comes out, and like any contractor, he has a free-- your HVAC guy.

[00:40:01] Your heat's not working. Your AC's not working. You call the furnace man and then he tells you you need a new furnace. You didn't call the furnace inspector technician guy. You could have called one furnace company, be like, "Look, no matter what, I'm not hiring you. Charge me a few hundred dollars for an unbiased inspection."

[00:40:17] And in insurance land, that's what you do. You would hire a roofing inspector or a roofer. So it's this kind of strange thing. At the end of the day, it comes down to people you trust, because most air quality companies or mold testing companies are going to recommend one to three vendors, and they're going to have a kickback model in place.

[00:40:43] Luke: I see.

[00:40:44] Mike: It's the affiliate model. They're mold affiliates. So same kind of deal. In fact, when there's two of them going, it's perceived less bias, and it's become part of the sales pitch. Like, use us and trust us, and we use third-party laboratories. It's like, if I trust you, I'd prefer you to handle as much of this as possible.

[00:41:05] So that's where it's this strange situation that I don't believe is necessarily always true. It just comes down to like, yeah, there's no systematic move that you can make here to avoid being screwed.

[00:41:20] Luke: It's situational and based on trust. I think that's one thing I've learned, is how important referrals are. Not just reading reviews that could be a plant posting them on Google or something. But if you're going to spend a considerable amount of money on something, to be like, "Hey, can I talk to two of your customers and see what their experience was like?"

[00:41:40] Mike: If you're getting a home built, it's like no one does it, but not a reason will be like, "Hey, dude, can I actually go to one of your--" You're making the biggest purchase of your life. People make million-dollar decisions, and then the realtor's like, "You got to make an offer today, or you're going to lose the house."

[00:41:53] You're like, "What other thing would this apply to, your car? If you're buying a business, there's months of due diligence and big statements and meeting the team. But with the home you're like, quick, quick. We've created this whole industry where the buyers and sellers are both applying pressure on both sides to get you to panic and buy a home.

[00:42:13] And sometimes a seller's, it's a hot market. It's like, what are we doing here? So then you get the home inspector. Usually, in the standard wave liability that a home inspector gives you, it says, this is not environmental. So anything behind walls, anything environmental, anything fungal, asbestos, roofing is not subject to this.

[00:42:32] So the average person's spending 500, $800. Generally what the home inspector is looking for is things that are going to affect your wallet. How old is the roof? Do the plugs work? These few hundred dollars items. Maybe how old's the water heater? Honestly stuff that anyone who's owned a home could probably just check for themself. There's nothing wrong with getting the inspection done. Usually, it's more of a negotiation technique.

[00:42:58] Luke: Yeah.

[00:42:59] Mike: You'd also argue that, is it a conflict if the buying agent refers you a home inspector? Kind of, because the-- they're like, "Yo, please don't tell them about this thing. We're going to lose the deal." So it happens everywhere, but the home inspectors, someone's spending 500, $800 to look for a hidden cost but not checking the air, not checking for mold, not checking for bacteria, not looking if the lighting is bad. No one's doing an environmental--

[00:43:23] Luke: EMF.

[00:43:23] Mike: EMF. What about an environmental home inspection? So this is another market that I would love to see emerging. Once again, I don't think we need-- the home inspectors are usually great and they're usually retired guy. He's in his 50s. He's sick of crawling in attics and doing manual labor.

[00:43:45] He is like, "I'm just going to be a home inspector. It's way less stressful." That dude would be the best air tester. Often, they're the best people. They understand homes, humidity, construction, building science. There's no reason why that person is not the same person who's doing the air testing and the mold testing. We don't need a whole separate industry. As a guy who did air testing for eight years, we didn't need to exist, and we should not.

[00:44:09] Luke: You just reminded me of a situation in which I hired an inspector. This is 20 years ago. I was going to buy a house in LA when we were in the real estate boom there. It was like 400 grand or something. I found a really cheap busted down house and I was like, "Oh, I'll flip it or something like that." I totally didn't know what I was doing, but I had the wherewithal at least to get the inspection. So it was like an echo park in the hood at the time. It's probably--

[00:44:35] Mike: Fully gentrified

[00:44:36] Luke: 10X'd in valuable now. Anyway, guy comes and does the inspection. I'm sitting on the porch waiting for him. He comes out. I go, "Hey, what do you think, man?" He looked at me. I was like, see if anyone's listening. He whispers. He goes, "Do not buy this house, man." He goes, "Get out of here." I was like, "What's up?"

[00:44:55] He goes, "The electrical's bad. The plumbing's bad. The roof is bad." He just named all the really big expensive things. He goes, "Man, this place is a disaster. Get out." And thankfully he told me that. Because if he would've given it, "Well, it's okay. It needs a little work." I might've gotten myself stuck in something that ended up being a money pit. So I had one honest inspector.

[00:45:15] Mike: No, they're great. It's generally a pretty honest industry. It's just the fact that the training and the courses and the licensing-- I remediated hundreds of homes from mold. I learned that by doing it. I learned that by working with experienced people. My wife was a nurse, is a nurse. She's like, "I learned nothing about nursing in nursing school. I learned nursing by nursing.

[00:45:35] Luke: Right.

[00:45:35] Mike: Imagine you studied how to shoot a three pointer in basketball. For 10 years, you studied the book every day, four hours a day, reading about how to make shoot a jump shot versus a guy who's just been shooting jump shots for three days and he is never read a book about basketball before.

[00:45:52] You still can't shoot a jump shot no matter how many books you read. And that analogy really hits home for a lot of stuff. It's like, just go shoot some jumpers. Don't read books on how to shoot them. And this is like most things in school, I think.

[00:46:05] Luke: Yeah. Great point. I want to ask you about a little bit of a niche topic here. When you've done testing here, and I've hung out with you and seen you do, get out your little gadgets and test air, when we were at the vent we were talking about earlier, you were testing the CO2 in the air. And so I'm always like, oh man, we don't want CO2. I think of CO2 as something you don't want to be breathing in your home.

[00:46:29] So fast forward a couple of years from when I learned that from you, I started researching CO2 as a therapy, and dug into it. There's some pretty solid science behind it. So I bought a whole system from a company called Carbogenics, and it's basically a mixture of pure CO2 in a tank that you get from a home brewing place, which I always run out really fast. I need a bigger tank.

[00:46:57] There's a number of ways you can do it, but I have an inhaler. If anyone's seen the movie Blue Velvet with Dennis Hopper, you got a cannula mask and you basically huff the CO2. And then also, there's a full body suit that's like a puffy wetsuit and you suck all air out of it.

[00:47:17] So it's skin-tight, shrink-wrap, and then you fill it up and inflate it with CO2 and you just chill in that. And both of those therapies, I could rattle off a number of proven health benefits. But subjectively, what I like about it, it's super, super relaxing. It puts you in a very solid parasympathetic state.

[00:47:38] It's like you just took a Xanax. It's incredible. But every time I'm doing it, I'm like, "Yeah, but Mike said CO2 is bad for you." Have you looked into like acute CO2 therapy like that where you're intentionally really saturating the body with it versus ambient levels that over time probably aren't great?

[00:47:55] Mike: So CO2, first of all-- yeah, this is a good point. It's actually a fun one. I don't get to talk about that.

[00:48:02] Luke: Have you heard of the CO2 therapy thing?

[00:48:03] Mike: Oh yeah. Totally.

[00:48:03] Luke: Okay. I didn't know if you even were aware of it.

[00:48:05] Mike: No, no. I am. So a couple of examples come to mind. Number one, cold therapy. I like cold plunging, but I wouldn't want to be in there for half an hour. I like saunas. I don't want to live in a sauna. So there's a lot of things that in a limited doses-- what is exercise?

[00:48:30] You wouldn't want to keep that weight on forever. There's a lot of things where an acute experience with that-- for anyone who's not very CO2 aware, CO2 is carbon dioxide. The outdoor CO2 is about 400. Inside, 600 to 800. Once it gets over 1,000 parts per million of CO2, brain fog is kicking in, fatigue is kicking in.

[00:48:59] So brain fog and fatigue are pretty bad if you want to get some work done. But brain fog is fine if you want to go to bed. So another thing is like when I was living in British Columbia, we had baseboard heaters and heat pumps, not a HVAC system. We'd close our door at night to keep the cats out of the room for all their allergens.

[00:49:20] And the CO2 was getting up to 3,300. Remember, 600 to 800 is normal. 1,000 is when negative health effects start happening. We were getting it over 3,000. I was sleeping 10 hours a night, waking up exhausted.

[00:49:36] Luke: Interesting.

[00:49:37] Mike: If I wasn't tracking my sleep or paying attention, I was sleeping like a log. I'm sleeping 10 hours a night. But I couldn't heal or rest to recover at 3,000 plus. By the way, when they talk about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and all this stuff, what they actually mean is the outdoor CO2 is going up.

[00:49:56] So imagine being in an elevator, a long elevator with seven or eight people and you're, ha. You're happy to get out. Or you're at a party and then you're like, "I just got to get some fresh air." What you're really saying is the CO2 in here is too high. The feeling of stuffy, all you're saying is carbon dioxide is high.

[00:50:16] I remember being at an event, there's a wellness event in New York, and I'm noticing the-- it was a six-hour all day event, and it was hour two and I'm noticing people are leaving. I'm like, "Why is this? The event's pretty nice?" I happen to have my CO2 monitor.

[00:50:29] I'm like, "Ah, shit, it's 2,500." People don't even know why. It's subconscious. They just got to get out of here. They're antsy. They're agitated. They're unhappy. This is like a defense mechanism. I need some air to breathe. At David's event that we were at, I start opening windows and doors, and I'm observing it, watching.

[00:50:47] Oh, I'm seeing everybody fade. Everybody's yawning. So I open up some windows and the carbon dioxide drops. Or if you've ever gone on a long road trip, carbon dioxide can get over 3,000 when you're in your car because the HVAC-- if you're just sitting there, it's okay. But if you're talking or singing, the car wasn't designed for that.

[00:51:06] Especially if you have that recirculate mode on, what is that doing? It's like closing the fresh air intake. So carbon dioxide gets over 3,500, you're on a road trip, and you're getting tired. You're opening your window, like, I just need some cold air. No, you just needed to purge the CO2. So acutely, it makes sense to me.

[00:51:24] It's a stressor. It makes total sense. I believe that there's many therapies and situations where putting your body under controlled stress for a reasonable period of time-- it's like people who do hyperbaric chambers or they train in altitude and then they come down to perform.

[00:51:42] But if they had to perform at altitude, they wouldn't do so good. So what you're referring to, there's different things like this for breath work and all kinds of stuff, and it makes sense to me. I haven't gone deep down the rabbit hole, and I haven't studied the literature. But it makes sense that in acute intentional doses, it would be like any other resistance therapy. But you don't want to sleep in it. You don't want to live in it.

[00:52:03] Luke: Yeah. That's a great way to frame it. Speaking of living in it, you just reminded me of something that I was looking into a few years ago. I think it's marketed toward older people that live at high altitudes. I forget the name of the company.

[00:52:21] I have it bookmarked somewhere, but there are probably a number of them at this point, but essentially, it's like an oxygen concentrator that goes up somewhere in your attic and vents into your vent in the bedroom. And so that while you sleep, you're sleeping in a high oxygen environment, the oxygen level that would be present at sea level or something like that.

[00:52:44] It's an anti-aging hack. Have you looked into kind of infusing environments with oxygen? Because when you talk about people starting to fade and get tired, first thing I thought of was Las Vegas casinos. I don't know if this is true, but--

[00:52:57] Mike: I know because we always used to say that.

[00:52:58] Luke: They pump oxygen in to keep everyone alert. And I'm imagining if there's large groups of people in a building like that and you want to keep extracting their money, you wouldn't want it a high CO2 environment where everyone's getting tired. You want high oxygen.

[00:53:12] And to your point of waking up groggy after 11 hours of sleep because of high CO2, if you're in a room, sleeping with high oxygen or at least adequate oxygen, it seems like it would be healthier and you'd be more refreshed.

[00:53:25] Mike: So first of all, I can't believe I haven't done this yet, but the next time I go to Vegas for a conference or something, I'll bring my oxygen tester in there. Let's just figure this out once and for all.

[00:53:34] Luke: Yeah. because you've heard that too, right?

[00:53:35] Mike: Oh yeah. They pump out oxygen to keep you awake. I'm like, "Is it the bright lights? Is it the alcohol? Is it the noise? Is it the simulation? Is there some like legal amount of amphetamines they pump in the air?" I don't know. But I'll do the oxygen test next time, and I'll send you the results so you can let everybody know. So I've actually experienced being in a hotel room with an oxygen generator in Peru, in Cusco.

[00:54:01] Luke: Oh.

[00:54:01] Mike: Before I did my Machu Picchu hike, they typically have you acclimate there for a few days and you get there and it's like-- the mountains in America are tiny. Their base was 13,000 feet. The peak was 30-something thousand feet.

[00:54:13] Luke: We just got back from the Andes two weeks ago.

[00:54:15] Mike: Oh. Those are real mountains.

[00:54:16] Luke: Yeah. Legit. But we brought little oxygen canisters. Very helpful.

[00:54:22] Mike: Yeah, they work. So the hotels there at altitude, some of them either have standard levels of oxygen that they're adding in the room. Or if you're suffering from altitude sickness, they can increase the oxygen in your room.

[00:54:38] Luke: Wow.

[00:54:38] Mike: And then all of a sudden your altitude sickness is going to be gone. My first night, I just got here. Hit me with the oxygen on night one and then let's decrease it over the next few days. So I've experienced seeing it in hotels in mountain towns, and I'm interested in that actually.

[00:54:59] Luke: Yeah. You say you live at 8,000 feet in Colorado or something. To me it would make sense to just--

[00:55:07] Mike: It's no different than getting a humidifier when it's dry. It's like the oxygen's low look. Let's subsidize this thing.

[00:55:12] Luke: Yeah.

[00:55:12] Mike: So that passes the sniff test of worthy of further inquiry. The red flags are not going off.

[00:55:21] Luke: Good.

[00:55:21] Mike: Green flags are potentially waving.

[00:55:22] Luke: Because even living at sea level, I was like, "Ah, I'm going to get it just to optimize." And then, whatever, it was expensive and I dropped it. What about humidity? I think that's obviously something here in Texas, where you live in Florida, or somewhere it's really humid, tropical areas, that's an issue.

[00:55:40] So a lot of people have dehumidifiers. But speaking of Colorado, when I would go visit my dad in Colorado in the summer, I'd start getting dry skin and a runny nose, and I would just get destroyed by the dry air. So I'd have to run humidifier. So what do you think is a practical way to test the humidity levels in your house, and how would one best find the sweet spot depending on if you live in a dry environment or a humid one?

[00:56:08] Mike: So humans have the most amazing sensors in our skin, on our tongues, all over. We're just these sensor machines. If you think about it, one, I love doing it. It's a very fun game if you're ever with a few people, primarily in the morning where no one's looked yet.

[00:56:25] But right now, or if you go outside and you ask everybody you're with, write down on your phone or on a piece of paper what temperature you think it is outside right now, you ask five people, everyone's within two degrees. No one's going to say 60 Fahrenheit and someone else says 100.

[00:56:43] You won't even see a 90-70. Typically, we know because we usually all look at the weather daily. So we've really calibrated our skin sensors to a number that we call Celsius or Fahrenheit. Right now, we know it's probably somewhere between 69 and 73 degrees maybe on the cooler side. It feels like about 69 to 71 Fahrenheit in here right now. I'd be shocked if it was 65 or 75. We'd be hot or cold.

[00:57:11] Luke: Yeah, true.

[00:57:11] Mike: So we know that. And the same thing, you can apply this to more areas of your life. So we're so impressed by the shark or the whale who can smell blood from miles away like a hound dog. I think we all have a little hound dog in us. So if I closed your eyes right now and blindfolded you and I took an old dirty diaper pail or a bag of stinky trash and put it anywhere in the home, you could find that bag very quickly.

[00:57:40] Luke: My wife could find it if it was like four miles down the road.

[00:57:43] Mike: You could find it because--

[00:57:45] Luke: Have you noticed women are-- I don't know if this is true, but in her case, she can smell stuff I cannot detect whatsoever.

[00:57:54] Mike: Yeah. I think it's this innate thing to assess risk for the family.

[00:57:59] Luke: Yeah. It's interesting.

[00:58:00] Mike: They're the ones who are more heightened awareness of these types of things.

[00:58:03] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[00:58:04] Mike: So yeah, I have. This was a problem growing up. I was living in Canada, and man, my mom could smell the weed from down the street.

[00:58:13] Luke: I knew you were going to say that.

[00:58:14] Mike: Holy shit. I'm like, "Yo, I don't even have any. Can you find it?"

[00:58:17] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:58:18] Mike: I thought I'm out. If you smell it, it must be somewhere, and she'd find it.

[00:58:26] Luke: Humidity.

[00:58:27] Mike: Yeah, man. So we know what hot and cold feels like. That's the most acute thermal comfort. If we go into the desert, it feels dry. Or the mountains, it feels dry. Rainforest, it feels humid. Dry sauna, dry. Steam room, humid.

[00:58:41] I would say the humidity in here right now is 47% or so. 45 to 55 is the sweet spot. That's where you want to be. Over 60%, we start having mold growth. But under 40% we start having rhinitis, ozone, allergens.

[00:59:01] So too dry is problematic too. You start drying out and a lot of other things start happening. It's bad for your skin, bad for your throat. And if your throat is not sufficiently moistened, it's not catching a lot of the stuff. You get way more sick. You want to have--

[00:59:15] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:59:17] Mike: Hydrated airways.

[00:59:19] Luke: Oh, right.

[00:59:20] Mike: There's actually a product I use.

[00:59:22] Luke: That's interesting. I never thought about that.

[00:59:23] Mike: That I use to inhale that hydrates your airways called FEND. It's pretty cool. I haven't gone deep into the science, but I definitely feel good using it before flights and stuff. And so we know what humidity is. So what's fun is the same way you check temperature every day, if you looked at the relative humidity every day, within three months, you would be able to tell me the relative humidity just as good as you could tell me the temperature.

[00:59:49] So because I usually have my carbon dioxide detector on me, I can tell you right now the CO2 in here is about five 70 to 600. If you have one, we'll check after. But it's like a party trick for me. What's the CO2? I can tell because of the ease of breath.

[01:00:05] If it starts getting harder, it's a little bit more constricted when you breathe, which is why if you go outside in a lot of people's homes that aren't well ventilated, ah, outside, fresh air. Even if it's an allergen filled day and a bit s smokey and it's rush hour, ah.

[01:00:20] Luke: That's very true. And I know that because I've been working with the CO2 inhaler for a while, and if you turn it up to a high concentration, you get hella out of breath. It's like you were just like doing a HIIT training and you're just sitting on your ass. It's crazy. It's really hard to breathe it. It fatigues the hell out of you. That's probably why it's so relaxing.

[01:00:41] Mike: Of course, that's why it's relaxing.

[01:00:43] Luke: It's like in five minutes you just felt like you meditated for two hours. It's really interesting. But it is very hard to breathe. It takes--

[01:00:51] Mike: I believe you feel so good because then it's the same as like, why do you like nature? If you close your eyes, you still like it. Even if you close your eyes and plugged your ears, you'd still like nature. What's going on here? The air is great. That's what's happening. When you're in the presence of trees, you feel awesome. The air is cleanest freshest air ever.

[01:01:13] So even though the outdoor carbon dioxide's about 400, when you're like in a thick forest, it's 360, 370. It's lower. So you can develop the ability to actually notice these things. And to me, that's true air awareness. So if you walk into a home, you're like, "Ugh, it's disgusting. It smells in here. "

[01:01:33] Why does a filthy home smell? Because that dirt, that garbage, it's airborne. Everything that you see, every surface is also-- if you go close to it, you can smell it because it's being aerosolized constantly. That's why things have smells. You clean the home and it doesn't smell anymore.

[01:01:51] So yeah, if you can tune in-- so to answer your question, I just like to really always take a moment to shine all the light on air awareness just to admire that our bodies have all this tech involved. So a great mold detector doesn't even use a testing kit anymore.

[01:02:08] You know Ryan Blaser. We joke he'd go into a home for these 10,000-dollar high-end audits, and he's one of the best in the biz, if not the best at assessing a home. He's like, in the first 10 minutes, you know everything already from your own sensor. Because he's calibrated. He's looked around a home. He's run his gadget.

[01:02:26] He's like, "At that point, the homeowner would be pissed if they paid all this money for me to come out and after 10 minutes I'm just like, get an air filter, get a water filter, and there's mold there. See ya." No, they want the data, but it's not really necessary. The best mold detector is the mold dog.

[01:02:45] We have a lot of those same features built in. And the further you go down in the path that you're on of filtered water and filtered air and low EMF, I wouldn't be surprised if you could feel EMF right now.

[01:02:56] Luke: Oh, I definitely can.

[01:02:58] Mike: You feel it.

[01:02:58] Luke: On airplanes, I get smoked. That's where I really notice it.

[01:03:02] Mike: Or if you're in busy cities.

[01:03:04] Luke: Like Wi-Fi-enabled airplanes.

[01:03:06] Mike: If you were in a Manhattan hotel versus the rainforest, even with your headphones on, with white noise, and an eye mask and an air purifier, you can feel that energy of that city. Is it the people? Is it the EMF? Whatever it is. But your body is now more receptive to it. A lot of people aren't.

[01:03:24] That's why, until you start drinking filtered water, you have no awareness. You can't taste the chlorine in the water. You can't taste the hardness. Until you start breathing filtered air at home, you don't go into hotels and smell mold and VOCs and fragrances everywhere. But I bet now you probably don't even go on Ubers.

[01:03:40] Luke: Oh, I can't do it.

[01:03:41] Mike: The Christmas tree--

[01:03:42] Luke: The Black Ice air freshener, dude. Back in the day, when I did use Ubers, I'd get so annoyed. I'd go on Twitter and tweet at them like, "Would you guys ban these fucking air fresheners." Fresheners.

[01:03:55] Mike: Air freshener is more searched than air purifier.

[01:03:57] Luke: I rarely watch TV in general, but if I do, it's like something I'm streaming, so there's no commercials. But I was watching something the other day. I forget. Maybe I was on the airplane actually. I think I was on a flight and there was a commercial running.

[01:04:12] It was for these Febreze plugins, and I'm like, "What? People use those?" I'm just like, dude, if I walk in a room and it smells like that, I almost like want to throw up. I have such a strong aversion and sensitivity to it.

[01:04:31] Mike: I'm working on that problem. The biggest focus for Jaspr this year is, first of all, I'm going to be doing some awareness this year about air fresheners in Ubers. You know the whole ban the Kellogg's, ban the red dye? I want to do the ban the air freshener, or at the very least get a filter in the Uber so you can at least hit the box for scent-free Ubers.

[01:04:52] And then I'm also working now-- so for the last few years, every time I go to a hotel, I test the air sometimes for mold. I look at the VOCs. I do particulate testing. I test the carpet. I test the bedding. And also, I travel with my Jaspr. So then I run the Jaspr for 30 minutes. You see the air get 95% clean. I'm like, "Thank God." And then lately I've been sending that report to the general manager of the hotel.

[01:05:14] Luke: Epic, dude. You're like the air quality Karen. I love it. I don't know what the male equivalent of Karen is, maybe Ken or something.

[01:05:23] Mike: Maybe. I'm doing it, but I'm doing something different. I'm doing something that Karen would never do.

[01:05:28] Luke: Actually fixing the problem.

[01:05:29] Mike: I offered them a free Jaspr for every room of the hotel.

[01:05:31] Luke: What?

[01:05:32] Mike: Yeah, man. This is what I'm doing right now. So actually, when we were in the car today, the first hotel actually said, "Let's go." So we're setting them up in April. I'll give them a shout out. It's called the Carillon Hotel in Miami, the Carillon Wellness Hotel in Miami. Dude, they have BioCharger.

[01:05:47] Luke: So you're sending them 400 freaking Jasprs?

[01:05:50] Mike: So they have 91 rooms, and we're going to send them about 110, for their massage rooms, for every single hotel room, for this two per suite.

[01:05:56] Luke: You're a nice guy. I think you're a good-hearted person.

[01:05:59] Mike: It's nothing to do with being a nice.

[01:06:00] Luke: Well, no, but that's where I'm going with this. I'm sure you like to make a living like the rest of us, but you're a heart-centered dude. I know you a bit. I think you're an authentically caring person. But is the idea there, aside from you being a caring person, that everyone that stays in the hotel is going to be like, "Wow, it feels and smells awesome and here. What's that thing?" And go buy one?

[01:06:20] Mike: Yes.

[01:06:21] Luke: Okay.

[01:06:21] Mike: Just like the contractor gives free estimates.

[01:06:23] Luke: Got it. Okay.

[01:06:23] Mike: You know when we're at a trade show or something, a wellness show, biohacking show, I could show you the Jaspr cleaning the incense. You could see it going up, but you can't have the felt sense.

[01:06:37] We have almost 100% success rate. If I let someone try Jaspr in their bedroom-- it's a feasible business model for us to drive around a city and let people borrow Jasprs for a week at home. I started going down the rabbit hole of Coca-Cola's business model. I was getting that annoying thing done every year in Texas where you have to get an emissions test for 10 bucks in five minutes.

[01:07:01] And I'm noticing in the waiting room they have a Coca-Cola machine. I'm like, There's no way these guys drop 10 grand on a vending machine." So I looked into it, and their main path is they put the Coca-Cola vending machine there for free, and the business gets to have cold drinks for their customers.

[01:07:20] They don't have to stock the drinks. Coca-Cola will handle that. And they get 10% of the revenue. So I'm like, "Huh." The idea came before the Coca-Cola thing, but I'm like, "Okay." I know, because I travel with it-- that's how much I need it-- by far the most requested thing people ask us about is, "Can you please make a travel-size Jaspr?" And I'm like, "No." Because a travel size Jaspr would be a Jaspr that doesn't work. It has to be the size that it is. So I will not make it.

[01:07:50] Luke: Which, for those listening where it's about three feet tall.

[01:07:52] Mike: Smaller, 30 inches, two and a half feet. 12 inches in diameter. So floor plan wise, it actually takes up more room than the average air purifier.

[01:08:01] And that's pretty useless floor space, that extra foot of height. It's like a condo. We go up instead of out. So yeah, the idea is the hotel provides-- some hotels, by the way, they charge you an extra 95 or $100 a night to put an air purifier in your room.

[01:08:19] First of all, they're usually 200-dollar garbage air purifiers. Second of all, them alone charging you extra for an air purifier admits that their air is shit. They're like, "We've given you this room for $800 with crappy air. If you want less crappy air, it'll be 900." They don't give you an upsell on memory foam for the shitty bed.

[01:08:39] You're paying all this money, and hotels are very expensive, and the cleaning companies use really harsh chemicals. They got nasty carpets. A couple of them have filtered water. Most of them don't. They're in the sleep business, and if you want to have good sleep, you need a comfortable bed, no bright lights, dark, quiet, and clean air. And ideally cool air.

[01:09:02] And they're all completely missing this whole clean air part. So I was like, "Hey, guys." Selling to hotel's man is like selling to the government. They're all owned by PE firms, and they're very, very cheap. I'm like, "Fine, I don't even want to sell you guys stuff."

[01:09:17] And this hotel, by the way, they're the coolest. Their management team, their staff, they're caring. They're actually awesome. They probably would've bought them. So I said, "Look, I hate traveling with my Jaspr. I just don't want to do this anymore." And I've been testing the air now for years, and I'm starting to get more people testing the air and building it up.

[01:09:35] So in the next couple of years, we're going to launch like a TripAdvisor of hotel air. So you'll be able to find the scent-free, mold-free hotels. So yeah, if you sleep with the Jaspr, especially fan speed two or three on dark mode-- little tangent. We did a study since we've chatted last with Oura, with Oura rings.

[01:09:55] So we gave 150 Jasprs to people who've been testing their sleep consistently for years. And the 150 people, Jaspr in their bedroom, the door had to be shut, or at least just cracked a little bit open. Sometimes pet people like to let their dogs in at night. And the average person slept 27 minutes more per night, 18% deeper sleep, and they fell asleep five minutes faster.

[01:10:19] And then the best thing was at the end of it, the amount of people, and this was a free unit from a trial, the vast majority of them bought additional units. So it was so cool, so cool that from a business perspective, we can give away free product and then everybody bought more that paid for the free ones.

[01:10:38] Luke: That's been my experience. Full disclosure, you didn't charge me for mine, which I thank you very much. I appreciate that. I think I got you early enough where--

[01:10:49] Mike: You got me early.

[01:10:50] Luke: Yeah. It was Ryan Blaser actually, but we had one at first and I was like, "This is awesome in the bedroom." But I spend most of my time when I'm not sleeping in my freaking office. Then I got one in there and now we have, I think, three.

[01:11:04] Mike: And that happened. You had the first Jaspr before we even did a podcast together. And that's the whole thing. I call it prove it marketing. I'm like, "If you have a product that works, the best marketing is getting it into people's homes." You have a podcast, you talk to the Internet to a lot of people who care about health every day.

[01:11:20] Luke: But now I couldn't go without it.

[01:11:22] Mike: It's like what I was telling you before.

[01:11:23] Luke: I don't fly with my Jaspr because I have so much other shit that I drag around with me to feel great.

[01:11:27] Mike: It's cheaper for me than for you too.

[01:11:29] Luke: Yeah, exactly. But man, I miss clean air when I travel.

[01:11:34] Mike: It's a big deal

[01:11:34] Luke: If you can be addicted to a product, I would say I'm addicted to yours because you don't know the difference. And I've been using air purifiers, oh man, 25 or more years. I started out with the Austin Air, the HEPA one. It's in my garage now.

[01:11:49] It got retired when you came out with yours. I've had the Air Doctor. I might have had a bunch of different ones, and it's just like, I don't know. One issue is they look really ugly. You solve that. The other issue is they don't test the air and turn up or down depending on the air quality, which is a cool feature.

[01:12:09] If I light some incense in here, your freaking Jaspr's like, red alert. So if I want to smell the incense, I have to go turn the Jaspr off because it'll filter it out so fast. I'm like, "No, I want to smell that smell." So anyway I don't even know where I was going with that.

[01:12:25] Let's circle back because we didn't close one loop, and that was the humidity. I think that's really important for people. So where we left off was like, hey, your body is a tester. Get to--

[01:12:36] Mike: Amazon.com. Type in relative humidity tester. 20 to 50 bucks. It's one of the cheapest air testing gadgets there are. Don't trust the one on your thermostat too much. Get one. Literally a cheap one is fine. This is not a complicated sensor. It'll be under $50 for sure. And just make sure you're in that 45 to 55% range.

[01:12:59] If it's too humid, this is harder to deal with. Ventilation helps bathroom fans, range hoods, opening windows. But if it's just like Houston or whatever and it's really humid and muggy, that's when-- first of all, air conditioners naturally bring the humidity down. Some people even need dehumidifiers. You just want to be careful to not make it too dry. And because homes--

[01:13:19] Luke: A dehumidifier's something like a humidifier that can be a small little device you just throw in the corner of the room?

[01:13:25] Mike: Yes.

[01:13:26] Luke: Okay. So it doesn't have to be a systemic, whole house--

[01:13:28] Mike: It doesn't have to be a big system. So you can do it in the bedroom. A lot of people put them in basements because basements are humid and moist. They put them in laundry rooms. And then typically they have a hose. So you either drain it into a drain in the floor or into a sink or something, or outside.

[01:13:48] Now, if you're using tap water or bottled water-- I've even seen tests with RO surprisingly-- you've dealt with the humidity issue. But by aerosolizing the water, you put all this other harmful particulate in the air.

[01:14:01] So you have two choices if you're using a humidifier, which a lot of people do because they are really helpful. So it's like you said, it's dry. You're like, I went to a dry place to escape the mold, but then I'm getting dryness sickness, so I got the humidifier. But now I'm putting all this aerosols in the air. So you have two issues.

[01:14:18] Luke: You're talking about if you're taking chemical laden tap water, putting it in your humidifier. You're creating a gas chamber.

[01:14:24] Mike: But even bottled water, I meven saw even RO somehow. It's not that great. Distilled water is perfect. So a fun test for anyone who does have Jaspr and a humidifier. If you put tap water in your humidifier, which is often when people travel, that's what they have-- even if it's at home-- your Jaspr is going to go crazy.

[01:14:45] If you use distilled water, Jaspr is going to do nothing. So you either need to get distilled water every single time or get a Jaspr or another air filter. Because if you are, it's okay. It's not horrible. And the Jaspr would be red all night long. So you'll probably take it off of smart mode because all those other-- you want the humidity, but you don't want everything else being aerosolized.

[01:15:07] Luke: Ah, yeah, that makes sense.

[01:15:08] Mike: So that is the humid situation.

[01:15:10] Luke: That's a good case if you're using a standalone humidifier. You buy one thing, then you need another thing. That's the way it goes if you want to be healthy in the modern world. But one thing, for an unrelated purpose, we got a water distiller, a little countertop thing.

[01:15:29] It's freaking awesome because I used to have to order jugs of distilled water for my hydrogen generators and chili pads, things that require distilled water. And now I just make it. It's freaking awesome. I always have two gallons on tap and just keep it there.

[01:15:46] Sometimes I drink it even, if I'm on a mineral-free tangent or something. But that would be, if you're using a humidifier and ongoing basis, great thing to do would just be get a water distiller and then just have it going.

[01:15:58] Mike: That's a good idea. I like that.

[01:15:59] Luke: What about in the dehumidifier realm? I'm sitting here talking to you. I'm like, "Why didn't I ask you?" So please don't tell me if I messed up and wasted a bunch of money. But we had our HVAC guys come. The two that we had were trash. So they show me the different options. They show me the options ranging from X dollars to X dollars at the high end. And I read all the features and stuff. I don't want Wi-Fi. I have certain--

[01:16:28] Mike: Just take the humidity out of the air.

[01:16:29] Luke: Certain criteria, and I was like, "You know what?" At the end I said, "Just give me the number one platinum level." And I just financed it and I'm paying it off for five years. You know what I mean? But I was like, "I just want the best thing that doesn't break. And I also wanted them quiet." So outside.

[01:16:43] What's that thing called? The condenser. So it's not [Inaudible]. Ours sounded like you had a helicopter on either side of the house if you're outside. It's just a lot of noise pollution. So I got the top-of-the-line thing, but one of the features was I think some sort of humidity regulation built into it.

[01:17:02] Mike: That would make sense. The modern ones do have that. Where it becomes a problem is, your HVAC system is quite balanced, but you know sometimes you're in a home and like one room's hot and one room's cold. That's because the thermostats is blowing air throughout the whole home. So it's like the basement's too cold and the upstairs is too hot because it's not well balanced.

[01:17:21] Luke: Ah, okay.

[01:17:22] Mike: So let's say wherever the humidity sensor is, is more humid than another part of the home. It's still working and working and working and it's working on overdrive. So that could be the issue. But much like a space heater or like Jaspr detects air, your thermostat for your heating cool works the same way.

[01:17:42] So because your air is fairly well balanced, your dehumidifier is probably only going to work in the summer here a little bit. And lately, because of the droughts in Texas, it hasn't even been humid the last couple years. But it rained the last couple of days, so it's going to be humid now. So your dehu will probably kick on. No, you done good.

[01:17:59] Luke: Okay, good. Sometimes I know experts like you and I go rogue and make a decision and then they're like, "Ah, man, I wish you would've called me." You know what I mean? That would've been an expensive mistake. So it's cool to know anyway, just to put a bow on the humidity thing. Your body can work as a sensor. You can get one on Amazon that's super cheap. And then there are local room by room--

[01:18:23] Mike: There's room dehumidifiers. And often you don't need to go whole home. Everything to me comes back to the bedroom. With basically almost everything health related, to optimize your whole home is maybe 25k. I'm just being broad if you're doing the air and the water and all the light bulbs and everything.

[01:18:43] But doing your bedroom is five. Get a good bed; get the air filter; get the humidifier; do the lights that you want to do. Dialing in a bedroom and giving yourself like a sleep sanctuary, that's cheap.

[01:18:55] Luke: 100%. I agree. That's been my motto for so many years. Non-toxic mattress, the Essentia mattress. Get some good non-blue light bulbs. Faraday your room, or get some EMF solution. Bed cool.

[01:19:10] Mike: That's recovery time.

[01:19:11] Luke: I'm still a Chilipad guy. I don't know how people sleep anywhere that's remotely warm without having a cold bed. When I travel, I'm like, "It's torture." I'm so hot, dude, at night.

[01:19:21] Mike: Yeah. You're just breathing shit and cooking it.

[01:19:23] Luke: It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So yeah, I'm with you, man, the bedroom. What? We spend a third of our life in bed.

[01:19:30] Mike: A third in one spot. Why'd you buy a home? You bought a home to have a place to hang out and sleep. So you spend a million dollars on your home or more and you're going to have a crappy bedroom that makes you sick? This doesn't make any sense.

[01:19:44] Luke: Yeah, brutal.

[01:19:44] Mike: Maybe hold off on the next bathroom reno or painting and make your bedroom a healthy place to sleep first.

[01:19:52] Luke: Let's talk off-gassing. I just bought some furniture on Wayfair, whatever, a couple of cabinets for my office because I'm such a hoarder of things, but I don't like clutter. It's an issue. So I'm just constantly buying freaking furniture.

[01:20:05] Mike: Oh, that's funny.

[01:20:05] Luke: And I got cheaper ones that are very manufactured wood particle board. Opened the box and it's just like somebody just sprayed you in the face with cancer. And so a couple of things I've done to mitigate specifically furniture, carpet, off-gassing, things like that.

[01:20:24] One thing is just now I only buy wool carpets, which helps instead of synthetics. But two things I've done is this: a, got the Jaspr in the house. That's going to suck up a lot of it. But still, if the Jaspr's not right next to said off-gassing furniture, then by the time it gets to the Jaspr, I probably already breathed it in, especially in a small room.

[01:20:47] So one thing I've done is take an ozone generator and take the new said off-gassing thing out in the garage, close the garage, and just blast it with ozone for 28 to 48 hours straight. Seems to get rid of it. Same with new car smell. I've done that to new cars. Just shut the door with the freaking ozone generator on.

[01:21:06] Go in two days later and the smell's gone permanently. It's pretty cool. But I just discovered something recently, and I forget the name. I'll find it and give it to Jarrod. I think I got it on Amazon, but it's a non-toxic natural sealant that you can paint on particle board that--

[01:21:23] Mike: An encapsulin.

[01:21:24] Luke: Encapsulates the off-gassing, which is what I'm doing in the garage with that shit you guys helped me carry. That's the next cabinet that I got to treat. But it's very labor intensive. So it's like you either pay exorbitant amounts of money and have limited design options from some of these great green companies.

[01:21:41] There is an emergence of companies that are solid wood, real wood, no weird stains and lacquers and no particle board and formaldehyde and all that. But it's expensive. You don't have a lot of choices. So most of us are going to be buying furniture that is super toxic.

[01:21:57] Not everyone is going to be as psycho as me to go to the lengths that I go to to get rid of it before I bring it in the home. And nightstands. That would be the number one thing for me that you got to deal with and whatever your bed's made of. But talk to us in general about the issue of furniture, carpet offgassing, building materials offgassing, and more practical ways to deal with that.

[01:22:21] Mike: Yeah. So off-gassing. This an interesting one. And when you think about how things are manufactured, supply chains are very efficient. Meaning, you would be shocked when your Wayfair cabinet was at the time that the manufacturing process concluded until that's going in your room is a much smaller period of time than you're thinking.

[01:22:46] They have it down to a science. So an item, a chair, a desk, a couch, whatever, it gets manufactured, gets sprayed, fire retardants, all that stuff. It's instantly shrink-racked, airtight sealed. There's no off-gassing process that occurs at the manufacturing facility.

[01:23:03] Then it gets quickly shrink-racked, put on a boat from China here, gets to the port of LA, lands at some distribution center in an airtight box, and then within another week or so, it's here. So the offgassing period, even though that furniture might be two months old, it starts here.

[01:23:23] That's why when you open it and you got that can of cancer in the face, it's because-- or new car smell, you get punched in the face with it, it's because that was like packaged so efficiently right after it was produced.

[01:23:35] So there's a couple things here. Number one, I would never buy a used bed. I would never buy a used couch, but I would buy a used dining table. Real wood stuff, particle board things. By the way, in Austin, the secondhand market of stuff is incredible. Set the coordinates to Westlake. People will have 10,000-dollar couches, like "Eh, wrong size. Two grand. Just take it away." So there's people who--

[01:24:07] Luke: I missed that in LA. I used to buy all my stuff on Craigslist. Just get insane deals. I didn't think about the offgassing. If somebody's had that shit in their house for five years, it's done off-gassing.

[01:24:18] Mike: Especially a baby's crib, man. Baby's coming in soon and they go and paint the nursery right before baby's born. Buy the new dresser, the new table. I'm like, baby is living in off-gas city. And then you put a little diaper pale in there, so now we have poop particles and a bunch of VOCs. This is not optimal.

[01:24:36] Luke: And a EMF baby monitor.

[01:24:38] Mike: Oh yeah, a wearable. Those are dangerous.

[01:24:42] Luke: They have wearables for babies now.

[01:24:44] Mike: Dude.

[01:24:45] Luke: Oh God. I remember I just was doing some research on the baby monitors that run on Wi-Fi and stuff, and you're basically like-- I don't know, maybe there's better ones now. And it's difficult with EMF because you really have to hardwire stuff. I can see why you would want a baby monitor, but some of them are having a Wi-Fi router next to a skull that's as thin as a piece of paper. It's super not good.

[01:25:10] Mike: Ryan Blaser actually--

[01:25:11] Luke: I'm not trying to shame or guilt parents out there, but it is something to be aware of.

[01:25:14] Mike: Ryan got a cease-and-desist letter because he did a podcast and then he shared the content of testing one of the EMF levels on the wearable. Also, man, I know some moms that literally, if that EMF monitor, if the wearable for baby breaks, they will go buy another one for 500 or $800 the next day. It becomes an essential.

[01:25:39] It's like these schools, man, now that have cameras in the classroom. You start by just check in, next thing you know, mom's watching the kids in class 24 hours a day. Or like home cameras and stuff. It's a slippery slope of where that's going to take you.

[01:25:53] So with those baby wearables, all of a sudden you're freaking out in the middle of the night about your baby's heart rate. And what the heck? This is not ideal. I actually think so. We have a baby monitor because it's on the absolute opposite side of the house. So first of all, we had set the camera up on the opposite corner of the room. At least it's 14 feet away.

[01:26:14] Luke: Distance is everything. That's the thing. Something that could be really harmful three feet from the crib exponentially gets safer the further it is away. I think we call it the inverse square law. It's like a logarithmic decrease in exposure.

[01:26:34] Mike: The baby monitors, by the way, it's like the lowest quality camera ever and it's $500. I'm like, "Our phones are-- wait, what's going on here?" So I think what we've noticed though, a little hack for people, you don't actually need the baby monitor. All you need is the audio. The video doesn't give you any good data.

[01:26:54] If baby's crying for a prolonged period of time, you want to go investigate the situation, the video part, meh. Now you have this bright light in your room. If there's two kids, it's switching between the rooms and the frequency. The sounds are a little different in each room, so it's like, [Inaudible].

[01:27:11] Luke: I know.

[01:27:12] Mike: And the bright light's flashing. I'm like, all you really need is an audio only one that's like walkie talkie tech, a radio. You don't need the Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth. It could be a 50-dollar item or cheaper. If baby's crying for two minutes, let me know.

[01:27:28] Luke: You got to turn the nursery into like Watergate. You basically just bug the room.

[01:27:32] Mike: Yeah. That's it.

[01:27:28] Luke: But that's a good point actually, because the RF from a walkie talkie or something like that is, I think, much less harmful and a much weaker signal than--

[01:27:43] Mike: I feel that way too.

[01:27:44] Luke: There's less data. It makes sense, right? It's like if you have a FM radio on in your house, it's not blasting you like having a Wi-Fi washing machine.

[01:27:52] Mike: Yeah. I feel that way as well. So with the off-gassing, that's why babies' nursery, getting the dresser or the crib that are a couple years old, it's not a bad idea. Your idea with the ozone is really good. I've never heard of this before. Ozone is just like CO2 in the sense that it's a good acute tool. You don't want to have that ozone generator running all the time in your home. And a lot of people are.

[01:28:20] Luke: I would never run it when we're in here.

[01:28:23] Mike: It's a tool.

[01:28:24] Luke: Yeah. I keep thinking of all these things. Remind me to come back to ozone, and the question would be, is it good every once in a while if you leave the house and your pets aren't in there and you maybe cover your plants, just do a clean sweep and just blast your place with ozone? Actually, you can just answer it now. Is that a viable, just--

[01:28:45] Mike: We'll work ozone into off-gassing.

[01:28:47] Luke: Okay, go ahead.

[01:28:48] Mike: So ozone, it's a tool. I used ozone extensively after wildfire smoke situation to clear the home of the smoke odor. It's amazing for deodorization. And yeah, you're correct with your removing things and covering things.

[01:29:07] So when we would use ozone, you would have to take all the plants out of the home, take the fish out of the home, take the pets out of the home, take the humans out of the home, and then you'd have a dissipation period. So if the ozone machines were running for 12 hours, equal part dissipation. So you'd wait 24 hours.

[01:29:23] And ozone machines typically have a timer on them. We were using very industrial ozone machines. It would turn off after 12 hours. So you could go back after 24. You wouldn't even want to enter the home when it's operating.

[01:29:37] Luke: It's gnarly. And you know, too, when we were doing construction in here, I used to set one up here after they had painted or glued the floors or whatever. If there was off-gassing, and I'd run it in here. And when I opened the door the next day, you couldn't even come in. Burn your lungs. You can definitely tell when there's too much ozone.

[01:29:55] Mike: And rubber. So an interesting thing, any rubbers in your home, ozone will break those down and create formaldehyde.

[01:30:06] Luke: And ruin the rubber too like power cables to your computer and shit like that over time.

[01:30:11] Mike: Stuff like that. So that's why short doses, small shots make sense. So the applications that you're using it for is really a unique use case. I like that. If you don't have an ozone generator, I think a couple of things you can do.

[01:30:28] So if it's a good time of the year to have open windows, do that. Also if someone's moving into a brand-new home, one of the best things that you can do is overlap your-- whether you're renting or you're buying or whatever, sometimes with buying it's tough because of mortgages to get the timing right.

[01:30:47] But if you're switching rentals or you're going from a rent to a buy, rent for a month past when you're supposed to move in, that way you can move into the home, go to that house, especially a brand-new home. If you're moving to a new construction, the whole home is off-gassing at a high level. So if you can open your doors and windows and let the home breathe for a month, this is the best thing you can do.

[01:31:09] So yeah, everything off-gasses. Carpets, paints, furniture, insulation, theoretically clothing. Everything off-gases. So you want to be mindful of that. So the best thing that you can typically do is just letting things breathe.

[01:31:23] If you don't have an ozone machine, if you can at least throw it in the garage and have the garage door cracked or put something on your balcony, just realize that-- Jaspr is helpful for sure, but this is still a time when you want the place to be breathing and ventilating. So I wouldn't tell everyone to go out and buy an ozone machine, but if you have one, I think this is a good idea.

[01:31:44] Luke: They're pretty cheap too. We will link one in the show notes. Oh, that reminds me, Jarrod told me in the break that I said the show notes incorrectly. It's actually lukestorey.com/air2, the number two. And you can just click on that in the show description on your podcast apps along with everything else we're talking about. But the ozone generator I have, I bought one of the better ones. I feel like it was under $200. And I've run that thing for days on end.

[01:32:08] Mike: That's not bad. I've only ever used the industrial one.

[01:32:10] Luke: It's just beast mode. You can't kill the thing. It's amazing. It's really light. It's easy to move around.

[01:32:15] Mike: The ones I using were two grand plus. I never thought about the residential consumer market of ozone. I was using the one that the mold man carries around, so I was using heavy-duty stuff. But yeah, that's actually fairly reasonable.

[01:32:28] Luke: Another thing I've done actually sometimes in line with the ozone treatment is just putting things out in the sun. I find baking a piece of furniture-- I'll buy a nightstand and take the drawers out and take it apart and just put the whole thing in the sun for two, three days in a row. And that seems to really help the off-gassing speed up.

[01:32:50] Mike: The reason that air quality is five to 10 times dirtier inside than outside and it's such a big problem is because the world's best air purifier is nature. The sun is the greatest UV light of all time. That thing is amazing. Wind, hydroxyl radicals, rain, trees.

[01:33:12] That's why eventually the wildfire smoke goes away. Because the trees and the oceans filter that stuff out. The air is such a problem indoors because we've left nature outside. The UV is not hitting any of the surfaces.

[01:33:28] The wind is left out; the rain is left out. So everything that cleans, everything is trapped outside. And then our homes are typically wrapped in vapor barrier. So your home is basically like a big Tupperware container or a Ziploc bag tightly sealed.

[01:33:43] Luke: That's funny.

[01:33:43] Mike: In plastic.

[01:33:44] Luke: And if you think about what happens when you leave some leftovers and Tupperware for a while--

[01:33:49] Mike: That's why you get the mold.

[01:33:49] Luke: The shit that grows in there, that's a--

[01:33:51] Mike: If you leave the lid off the Tupperware, the shit won't grow.

[01:33:54] Luke: That's interesting. That's a good metaphor. You got a lot of good metaphors. You're like a metaphor king. You should write a little mini book, a little mini coffee table book of just dope metaphors.

[01:34:04] Mike: I think I will.

[01:34:05] Luke: Yeah. As if you don't have enough projects.

[01:34:07] Mike: I don't. I'm always on the market for more.

[01:34:09] Luke: Every time I see you, you're like, "Yeah, now I'm doing this thing." You're starting a school. Tell me about the school.

[01:34:13] Mike: I will. I know. I know.

[01:34:15] Luke: Did we cover the offgassing thing?

[01:34:17] Mike: No, we're good. That was everything. Let things breathe. If it's a type of furniture that you don't mind getting secondhand, consider doing that. If you're painting, I can't say that no VOC or low VOC paint is perfect, but it's better than not doing it. If you're painting-- we just painted right now, moving out of my Airbnb last night. It ends tomorrow.

[01:34:38] Because when we were painting, we moved out for the week and then we did a deep clean, and then we let the house breathe for three days. So just basically, when it smells like chemical stuff, let the thing breathe. That's the 80-20 here.

[01:34:51] Luke: Yeah. And then again, I think things are a given because I'm living in a siloed world where most people I associate with are like-minded. But back to watching these plugin Febreze things, I go, "People are still buying these, obviously, because they're running ads on TV."

[01:35:08] I figured the whole world is using totally non-toxic, fragrance-free cleaning products. And a couple days ago, Alyson had to order these dryer sheets that were like, oh, natural. And I'm like, "Wow, these smell pretty strong." I look on the box and right in the middle of all these essential oils and plant-based and no animal cruelty and all this greenwashing shit is fragrance.

[01:35:33] I'm like, "What kind of fragrance? That's pretty ambiguous." And you could tell, it's just like toxic. So you have to be discerning in order to even get these products. But how much of an impact do cleaning products and shampoos and things we wash our homes and bodies with do those impact the air quality?

[01:35:54] Mike: Living in Austin, man, I was at one of these events here, and there was a bartender at the event. He's like, "Dude, what's wrong with these people? No one's drinking alcohol. He's like, "We're out of Topo Chico and we're out of like, Olipop, but no one's touched the alcohol." And in my mind, I'm like, alcohol is dying. No one's drinking anymore.

[01:36:17] Luke: And then you go down to sixth Street, people are puking all over the sidewalk. Like, oh no, there's still a faction of people--

[01:36:23] Mike: The alcohol is not a diminishing market. We're in this little bubble where people are drinking less. So yeah, same deal. I feel like everybody hates scented Ubers, but no scents is huge. Hotels have a scent. And if you go to any franchise businesses, they often smell the same across the chain or the hotels, because that's a controlled fragrance. The fragrance market is a big one, and it's not one that I like very much.

[01:36:50] So yeah, I don't know a lot about beauty and skincare and all that, so I'm always just looking at it through the lens of air. I don't know how bad a non-stick pan is. I've never done the research. I've never studied it really. I don't know how bad certain skin cares are in hairsprays.

[01:37:07] What I do know is some hairsprays smell way more chemically than others. Some set off Jaspr, and some doesn't. So I only learn about the products in the home through what sets Jaspr off.

[01:37:19] Luke: Oh, that's interesting.

[01:37:21] Mike: Organic beeswax candle, Jaspr doesn't get so mad. Dollar store camera, Jaspr goes crazy. Jaspr's my non-toxic detector a little bit. It worked with distilled water. It's fine. City water, it's going crazy. So it's become an education tool for me. Certain hairspray-- so now whenever Rachel gets a new better for you product, we'll use it, and if Jaspr gets mad, we go deeper in our deep dive of like, what's in that hairspray. What's in that shampoo? What's going on here?

[01:37:53] So yeah, I don't know a ton about all that kind of stuff, but I just look at it through the lens of air. I can measure for VOCs, and I can measure for particulates. And my siloed air perspective is like if the VOC levels are really high when you use this product, no good. That's my oversimplified approach.

[01:38:10] Luke: What about vacuum cleaners and their filtration or lack thereof and just mold spores and particulate getting through the vacuum? How important is buying a really badass sophisticated vacuum?

[01:38:30] Mike: I think very. I own a vacuum called the GD930. GD930. If you Google it-- I think Euroclean or Nilfisk, honestly, anywhere you can get it, it looks like a little silver canister.

[01:38:43] Luke: I think that's the one I have. Because I did some research a couple years ago and it has a super badass filter in it and the bag's very filtered.

[01:38:51] Mike: Yeah. It has a real HEPA filter in it.

[01:38:52] Luke: Yeah.

[01:38:52] Mike: So the Dyson and then-- I can never say the word--Miele, M-I-E-L-E.

[01:38:57] Luke: I've had one for years. I don't know how to pronounce either.

[01:39:00] Mike: I'm a big fan of anyone's starting a company out there. Make it a word that you can't possibly pronounce.

[01:39:05] Luke: Yeah. I think they're from France.

[01:39:06] Mike: Italy?

[01:39:07] Luke: Yeah, something like that.

[01:39:08] Mike: Even still. Anyway, you know which one I mean. It's a beautiful product, but it's a good daily driver. A Dyson's a good daily, because the convenience ratio makes sense. Busting out the GD930 every time you want a vacuum is not fun. But the housekeeper should use that one.

[01:39:27] Or if you're doing a monthly deep clean of your carpets, you should use that one. By the way, the only reason I know it is because that's what I used when I did mold removal and fire restoration and floods. That was the standard type of vacuum that every restoration company would use.

[01:39:42] They used to be 1,500 bucks. Now they're 599. Some of them is even less. They're very reasonable. And so that should be the deep clean vacuum, whether you're doing your deep clean monthly or quarterly, just getting after a little bit more. That vacuum, it makes a huge difference because the teeny filters on other vacuums are not great. They don't even have a HEPA bag. So they're not great. Good for daily, not good for deep cleaning.

[01:40:09] Luke: Just reminded me of something on the vacuum cleaner tip. We hire a whatever, not a housekeeper that we know, but a service. They just have rotating people that come in. And we have a one vacuum upstairs and one downstairs just because I happen to have two.

[01:40:26] And I would notice after they would clean, you want to come home, and they've already-- they're not using any toxic cleaning products. That's part of their thing. They do green cleaning. Okay, cool. We got that covered. But I noticed we would come home after they would clean again-- first world problem, I admit, but whatever. I work hard so I don't have to clean my house myself.

[01:40:44] Mike: You live in the first world, so what's up?

[01:40:45] Luke: So we'd come home and I'd be like, it has that Febreze, weird, fake floral smell. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And then eventually I figured out they were bringing in their own vacuum cleaners. Did they use in other people's houses?

[01:41:00] I was like, "That is so nasty." So they're probably like, you know that powder you can put on carpet, that chemical smelling powder and then you vacuum it up? It smelled like that. I was finally able to place it. I go, "I think it's that shit, and they're using like vacuums that have bad filtration."

[01:41:15] And so other people's funk and chemicals from God knows how many houses, mold, spores, all this shit, spike protein shedding, who knows what, it's like they're coming in and basically fumigating the whole house with other people's shit. So when I realized that, I was like, "Yo, I'm sorry to be that guy, but please use our vacuums."

[01:41:35] Mike: And carpets are really interesting too. I've been really interested in carpets lately. Now when I test people's air, I always do a disturbed sample of their carpet. Usually the PM 2.5 on the carpet is 100X worse than the regular air. So the biggest air filter in your home other than Jaspr is your carpet.

[01:41:50] Luke: Really?

[01:41:51] Mike: Think about it. So people are like, "Carpets are bad, carpets are bad." Not always true. If you didn't have a carpet, the particles are going to go somewhere still. This is a giant filter. The thing is, it's an exposed filter, not a contained filter. And it's a filter that most people never change or clean. So if you have a carpet and you're cleaning it regularly, it's actually really beneficial for your air quality.

[01:42:15] Luke: Oh, that's cool.

[01:42:16] Mike: Because it's a filter. It's capturing the dust. It didn't make the dust. It's not the dust creator. It's the filter that captures the dust. So when a pet runs on it, walks, when we walk on it, we're aerosolizing it all. That's a problem. But 60% generally of all of the-- if you ever seen a carpet get steam cleaned, black water comes out. It's black.

[01:42:37] Luke: That's nasty.

[01:42:38] Mike: But man, when we get our carpets now, so now as I've been testing it more, if you filter your air, your carpets get way less dirty because 60% of everything-- so 40% of the stuff on your carpet's going to come from your pet, from your feet. You're shedding skin, you're shedding hair from your body, eating on the carpet, stuff like that.

[01:42:59] Luke: Just the skin shedding thing is so gross to me. When you see something that's dusty and you run your finger on it, it's like white dust, the fact that a lot of that is just people's skin in your house, I don't know why that skives me up.

[01:43:11] Mike: It's also insect parts. Every breath you're taking, you have quite a lot of insect parts in it.

[01:43:16] Luke: So no one can be vegan because we're all--

[01:43:19] Mike: Hey, you could say that.

[01:43:20] Luke: We're breathing in little tiny creatures all the time.

[01:43:23] Mike: Yeah. If you want to be vegan, you have to just not breathe.

[01:43:26] Luke: Yeah.

[01:43:26] Mike: That's hilarious.

[01:43:28] Luke: I want to let people know, because I was looking at my notes when we took our break, you've given us a phat ass, and that's P-H-A-T, phat ass discount on your Jasprs, which obviously people can tell through this conversation, I've used, love, recommend. You can go to Jaspr, that's J-A-S-P-R,.co/luke.

[01:43:51] And here's the good part. If you use the code LUKE, you get 400 bucks off. Awesome. But here's the catch, you guys listening. This ends at the end of May, 2025. So that'll probably give you about a month from the time this comes out. So if you want to clean up your air, click on that in the show notes. And just remember after that date, don't email me.

[01:44:14] Mike: We'll keep it live though. It won't be $400 after that day. But after that, it'll be $200 off for perpetuity. We'll leave it live. We'll leave it hanging there. But it'll be $400 off for the month of May. Well, from the day that the pod drops.

[01:44:28] I understand not every day, every week is air purifier investing day. But for those who it is, this will be the biggest discount we ever had. Basically, this is our huge Black Friday offer, but last year we sold out by almost three months. So we're like, instead of just waiting till the end of the year to give people a great deal, let's just educate and give the best offer here and there on a podcast where it makes sense to an educated audience.

[01:44:52] And on our website, if you add more to the cart, that gets cheaper too. So the $400 discount will stack with our own discount, so it can even be as much as $550 off. And we realized, there's no Jaspr at Walmart or Best Buy or Amazon or Home Depot because I'm like, "They would just take the $400 and then sell it to you and offer you a horrible customer service experience.

[01:45:17] So we're like, "Why don't we just teach people about air and be honest with people and then give them the great offer directly and cut out all that shit?" Because man, do you remember direct to consumer was what we all called e-commerce? Remember, the original promise of e-commerce was that we would cut out the middleman and sell directly to customers for great prices?

[01:45:38] That was the original thing instead of the stores everywhere. But then all that happened is Facebook became the new middleman. So all these brands run Facebook ads. So now instead of Best Buy taking the margin, shit has not got cheaper since e-commerce.

[01:45:53] Luke: I've noticed that.

[01:45:54] Mike: This doesn't make sense. We've removed all the middleman, but the new middleman is Amazon, Google, and Facebook. They're digital middleman.

[01:46:01] Luke: Right, right.

[01:46:01] Mike: So we don't have digital middleman. We don't work with any of those partners.

[01:46:04] Luke: Cool. I wish I didn't work with anything Meta related personally. Just because they're evil. Edit that out, guys.

[01:46:16] Mike: [Inaudible] Instagram page.

[01:46:16] Luke: Yeah, I know.

[01:46:16] Mike: Zuckerberg's cool now. He does jujitsu.

[01:46:19] Luke: Dude, yeah. Oh my God. What a freaking psyop. It's funny, speaking of Instagram. And by the way, you guys listening, if you could follow me on Instagram if you don't already, I'd really appreciate it because they're punishing me so badly. I'm @lukestorey, S-T-O-R-E-Y. If you're new to the show, that's how you spell it.

[01:46:37] I posted last August, 2024, a meme that was a collage of a bunch of evil politicians, Republicans and Democrats, to be fair. I had your bushes on there and everything. And then in the corner, one of the cutouts was Hunter Biden in his underwear from one of his crack escapades.

[01:47:00] And the copy on the meme says no one is above the law, because those people are above the law. No one's getting in trouble for these crimes they're committing. We're pretty innocent and not really left or right leaning. Basically just my stance on, I think, pretty much 99.9999999% of politicians are completely evil and fucked. Maybe even 100 at this point.

[01:47:24] And it was a story. It goes away in 24 hours. I'm not making a documentary about these people. I'm just like, "Ah, this is cute." It's just showing that people have this legal immunity. And so Instagram, didn't delete my account, but they're like, "You can't post. You can't go live. You can't monetize."

[01:47:46] Mike: Oh, it got locked down.

[01:47:47] Luke: Your shit won't be recommended to new people. We're going to limit even people that follow you from seeing your posts. I try to appeal it a bunch of times, and it's never gone away. It's still on there. And I'm like a year and a half in on that one. And I, of course, deleted it. I have no investment in the stupid meme. I could care less if it offends you guys. No problem. I'll just delete it. So that is a long way of saying F` these communists who run social media.

[01:48:13] Mike: All right.

[01:48:14] Luke: Yeah. So I love that you don't give them money.

[01:48:16] Mike: No, we come directly to the people.

[01:48:18] Luke: Epic, epic. All right. I want to make sure there's nothing else-- oh, yes there is. Okay, so you talked about how you won't make a small portable Jaspr because it would be pointless because it wouldn't work and you might make money, but it's not going to be effective. And I respect that.

[01:48:35] One thing that concerns me a lot, and you alluded to this before, is air quality in the car. Because they're spraying the skies with God knows what, 24/7, pretty much all over the world now, and you've got brake dust, you've got exhaust from burning fuel, roads are really toxic, air. So I always keep the windows closed and I run that recirculator, and I'm always concerned about the air quality in the car.

[01:49:02] And of course, you open the windows and get some fresh air, which is chemtrail dust laden, not really fresh air. What do you see in the future of being able to actually have clean air for those of us that do a lot of driving?

[01:49:15] Mike: So the only car that has really good filtration in it that I've ever seen is Tesla.

[01:49:20] Luke: Oh, Goddamnit. I hate those car.

[01:49:21] Mike: But they have a big ass filter.

[01:49:24] Luke: Really?

[01:49:25] Mike: Huge, huge, huge.

[01:49:27] Luke: They also have the highest EMF.

[01:49:29] Mike: They do. They do. So I'm not commenting on overall if you should get the car or not. I don't have an electric car. But from a car perspective, what they've done right, where you can look from is their HEPA filter is 20 to 30 times as-- most cars have a cabin filter that's10 inches by five inches, very thin sheet of-- it's like your furnace filter. The Tesla filter is more like a Jaspr filter.

[01:49:57] It's a big, four-foot-long filter with carbon in it. So their air filter is truly badass. And I say that because I would love to make a car air filter, but there's really not an elegant way to do it. You'd have wires and cords. What do I do? A cup holder one up on your dash, behind the headrest? It needs to be built into the car. So I actually order premium cabin filters for my car off Amazon. There's companies who make them. It's $15.

[01:50:31] Luke: Oh, aftermarket vibes.

[01:50:32] Mike: Yes, yes. So it's like a HEPA. None of them are a cool, sexy brand. I've actually thought about making them, but there's just so many different cars and I'm committed to what I'm committed to right now. So mine is a HEPA layer with a carbon filter too. And wow, is it effective?

[01:50:49] I have a Sierra Denali pickup truck, and I was living in Kelowna during a wildfire situation, and not even a very bad one, and my car's never shook the smell, ozone, everything. It's embedded. But if I switch out my cabin filter every two, three months, it's fine.

[01:51:06] Luke: That's cool.

[01:51:06] Mike: Also, it's funny, last time I got my car serviced, I changed my own cabin filter the day before, and they told me I needed a new cabin filter. It was just off the chart. They didn't even check clearly. I had like a gangster carbon filter in there. So I changed that more regularly than most because it helps a ton.

[01:51:26] The odors that I normally would pick up on are dramatically reduced. But I do think I'm pretty comfortable that I'll be able to advocate for HVAC architects, builders, developers. I think I'll be able to change the way that schools, hotels, and homes are built.

[01:51:40] I feel like it'd be 10 years we can do this. The car one, I'm less sure about. But the right answer would be that the OEMs, the cars, the manufacturers just need to put way bigger and better filters in. It's a simple solution. But whether it's Google or Apple or whoever, there's now a little air quality thing on the weather app, I think.

[01:51:59] And I'm doing my best to raise air awareness in general, so I would like to see-- I personally would purchase a car, a feature that would matter to me, now they're all kind of nice, a car with a badass air filter. I think there's a market for that.

[01:52:12] Luke: If you go build your car-- a couple of years ago, I made the mistake of buying a brand-new car because they were really good at sales at the dealership. I was going to buy my lease at the end. I was like, "Ah, that's good enough. I really don't need a new car. Who am I going to impress?"

[01:52:29] I don't go anywhere anyway. But anyway, he got me in front of the computer and I was like, "Well, those black rims are pretty dope." And he just kept adding things on. And then I got this very custom car, which I did eventually buy when that lease ran out. But if they had had a thing like easy Wi-Fi shutoff switch.

[01:52:46] Mike: Airplane mode.

[01:52:47] Luke: Yeah, airplane mode in your car. Because I have to like click 55 buttons on the dash to kill the EMF router in there. But if there was an option that's like extra dope filter, 100%, I'm in.

[01:53:02] Mike: Especially anyone who lives in an allergy place. We have cedar fever here. A lot of the country's dealing with wildfire smoke, urban pollution, people commute, truck drivers. But it's been just a thing that I haven't-- look at Jaspr. It's beautiful. It's elegant. It fits seamlessly into your life. So I will not create a big, ugly box that's like a car seat sitting in the back there.

[01:53:23] Luke: I'd be brutal.

[01:53:24] Mike: It would suck. So there's just not a really nice thing. It'd have to be really aftermarket and a roof panel. It would have to be like a subwoofer type of-- the AV guys need to get into upgraded air filters. But it's just not an easy thing to make an upgrade. So what I do do is my cabin filters.

[01:53:45] Luke: You can always wear a COVID mask in your car like people in California do.

[01:53:51] Mike: Actually, there was a post a couple of weeks ago someone sent me. I feel bad making fun of them because they were Jaspr customers, but someone sent me a post of a COVID-safe bowling game in Portland. It's this whole TikTok thing.

[01:54:05] A few people sent it to me and they were talking about how the bowling alley graciously opened up an hour early for them and let them have a COVID-safe time where everyone was able to be double masked and play bowling

[01:54:18] And there was eight Jasprs in there, like in between every bowling alley. So thanks guys for supporting us. And I'm like, "That video is three years old during COVID." And then she's like, "No, it's not." I looked, and it was the newest Jaspr. You have the newer Jaspr. During COVID, it was an older aesthetic. I'm like, "Oh shit, those are actually the new ones." That was last week. So this was a month ago from now.

[01:54:43] Luke: That's the power of trauma-based mind control at scale. I'm joking. I am judging those people.

[01:54:51] Mike: Well, you're judging the things that they're doing right now.

[01:54:53] Luke: Yeah. But really, the more human compassionate part of me can zoom out and go, "Wow, it's not their fault." Literally just because they watch television, they're like "The TV said--" And then they follow that. And I just, for whatever reason, I'm not someone who does what the TV tells me to do.

[01:55:11] Mike: Thank God. Your podcast would suck if you did.

[01:55:13] Luke: Oh my God. Can you imagine? One thing I did want to ask you too, which I think would be useful for people is talk to me about, specifically to the Jaspr Square footage. Because I was really excited when we got our first unit, and of course, like we talked about, I'm going to put it in the bedroom. That's square one.

[01:55:38] But then I realized like, oh, if the bedroom door's closed, or even if it's open, this is a huge open floor plan. So then I started adding them, and I don't even know if I have enough of them now to really--

[01:55:44] Mike: They're in a pretty good spot.

[01:55:45] Luke: I definitely have one in the office. Then I have one up here in this bedroom, which sometimes migrates around. And there's one in the living room where the TV is.

[01:55:53] Mike: And one in the bedroom.

[01:55:54] Luke: Yeah.

[01:55:55] Mike: You're perfect. That's perfect.

[01:55:57] Luke: And this house is 3,500 square feet, I think. But say someone's living in a one-bedroom apartment in a city. Is one in the bedroom going to like suck in the air from the living room and take care of everything, or do you--

[01:56:09] Mike: I'm going to start with the first question.

[01:56:10] Luke: Do you need one in every room?

[01:56:13] Mike: The square foot thing is interesting because most air purifiers are marketing based on square footage. This is another just complete piece of bullshit. The air purifier is not a Roomba. It does not care about square feet. It cares about cubic volume.

[01:56:30] Let's just say we have 1,000-square foot place with eight-foot ceilings, or 1,000-square foot place with 16-foot ceilings. That's double the cubic volume. It's double the air in the room, half the effectiveness.

[01:56:41] So when you think about, air should not be talked about in square feet. It doesn't make any sense. It's like if you have a pool heater and a pump and a filter, we go by the gallons and the liters. We don't go by the length and width. Because it doesn't matter

[01:56:58] If you have a four-foot-deep pool versus an eight-foot-deep pool, it's twice the water. It's colder at the bottom. But I can't give people scientific equations to do length times width times height to calculate their cubic volume. It would be just too much for people.

[01:57:17] We do that with businesses because they need certain standards and stuff. But the simple answer-- and also if you go down the aisle at Target or any of these stores who are just selling air purifiers, those purifiers are designed to sell in a retail environment. Who's ever gone to like Levoit or Honeywell's website before? No one. Do they even have a website?

[01:57:39] But they're some of the biggest brands in the world. So when you walk down the aisle, it's trickery. There's two numbers that you'll see. It'll be filters 99.97%. That sounds good. That's a big number. And you'll see extra large rooms, 1,400 square feet. Great.

[01:57:54] I only have a 1,200-square foot apartment. Get one of these bad boys, and my air will be 99% filtered. Not so fast. When you see that 99.97%, that is when they take the filter out of the machine and they very gently whisp some air at it in a controlled environment.

[01:58:18] So that doesn't mean the machine filters 99.97%. That means the filter does by itself. So let's say you had a HEPA air purifier the size of a water bottle or that Update can over there, little tiny air filter. It could filter 99.9% per pass, but it's too small. That can't possibly clean the air in a big room.

[01:58:41] I go back to the analogy of a kettle. Kettles are awesome at heating water if you're trying to make a cup of tea. But if you're trying to fill a bathtub with hot water, the kettle won't work. That water's going to cool down faster than you could possibly heat it up. So the kettle's great for tea, not so good for bath time.

[01:58:58] You need a water heater for the bath. It's not the right tool for the job. So most air purifiers that you see are kettles trying to heat bathtubs, only they're sneaky and you can't tell, which is why my favorite review on Jaspr ever is, I've owned seven air purifiers before. I'm not sure if any of them were working. Jaspr's the first time I bought one that I knew it worked because I can see it and I can feel it. I'm like, "Thank you. That's what I was trying to do here."

[01:59:25] And when they say covers 1,000 square feet, what does covers mean? Does covers mean the air is 95% cleaner or 2% cleaner? What is covers? It's very vague. So we couple two numbers, the big square foot number and the high percentage of the filter efficiency. And we figure, I'm checking my box.

[01:59:43] I've been to 100 millionaire homes, and they have a 99-dollar air purifier. It wasn't a money issue. They thought they were just checking a box. I got my air filter. We're good. No, not really. So to me, it's a personal moral ethic thing. If I was going by the same standard that most air purifiers would, I would say Jaspr filters 7,000 square feet. What? 5%? Not much. It's great for a bedroom.

[02:00:12] Also, when they tell you the square footage, that's assuming low ceilings. If you get into the details, it's assuming low ceilings. And it's also assuming a very controlled environment. And it's assuming that the air purifier is on full speed. Most air filters are at lowest speed 99% of the time. So they're quiet.

[02:00:36] The stat is based on full speed. So my definition of covers is we need to be able to clean the air at least 80% in its silent mode with eight-foot ceilings. So one Jaspr can do about 1,000 square feet with eight-foot ceilings on its lowest setting.

[02:00:54] If we crank it up, it's going to do more. So that's why we did our bundle pricing. So if somebody buys one Jaspr, it's $1,000. If they buy four, it's 625 or 650 each. That's why we tier those discounts considerably. If you think about Sonos, of course, you're not a fan. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, EMF.

[02:01:13] Luke: I have Sonos all over. They're just hardware with ethernet. Yeah.

[02:01:16] Mike: But if you think about Sonos, you wouldn't describe Sonos as a speaker. You would describe Sonos as a whole home surround sound system. So that's how I think about Jaspr. Jaspr is not an air purifier. It's a whole home decentralized system because the HVAC stuff doesn't work that good for filtration.

[02:01:32] So yeah, one Jaspr in your bedroom is going to give you 95% clean air in your bedroom and maybe the whole home's going to be like 10 or 20% cleaner. So now if we have it in two bedrooms, the bedrooms are going to be like 95%, and now we have 40% cleaner area everywhere. If we have one in every bedroom-- the ultimate solution is one per bedroom.

[02:01:54] Put them where the time is being spent. So if you're a family of four, you got mom and dad in a bedroom. You got two kids. One Jaspr in the master bedroom, one in the kids' room, and one in the living room. And now we're dialed in. I used to feel like it was really expensive, 1,000-dollar air purifier.

[02:02:12] But all of a sudden $2,500 for a whole home filtered air system where you're breathing 90% cleaner air 24/7, it feels cheap all of a sudden. If you could spend tens of thousands on a water filter system, and you did.

[02:02:29] So when you think about it as a-- before Sonos, and hardwired systems got good, you'd have one big boombox speaker in your main room. So it would be, if you wanted to hear it everywhere, you'd have to crank it. So then you can kind of hear it in the other room, but the base is sort of killing you. It's blasting you in that room.

[02:02:50] Then you turn it down, and now you can't hear it anywhere. Along came decentralized speakers where it can be just the right volume everywhere. Awesome. And that's why we did it the way we did. There's my passionate rant on why the whole lookout for the square feet and look out for those numbers because it's a lot of bullshit.

[02:03:07] Luke: I love that. That's one of my--

[02:03:09] Mike: That's why I like podcasts.

[02:03:10] Luke: That's one of my favorite things to do on the podcast, is myth bust shitty marketing.

[02:03:16] Mike: I'll tell you, HEPA in general is bullshit.

[02:03:18] Luke: Really?

[02:03:19] Mike: HEPA is crap. HEPA, which we have a HEPA filter. HEPA is a standard. HEPA means you're filtering 99.97 particles down to 0.3 microns. Which by the way, you can actually be even more efficient at smaller sizes. That's the size that gets through the most. If you look at most labs who do third-party testing for brands, they're in the social proof business. They're basically PR firms disguised as labs.

[02:03:47] If they weren't really good at giving you a great check mark, who would hire that lab? So when you go to a lab to do testing for your water filter, for your skincare company with all the testing labs, typically the first thing they ask you is what are your marketing goals? Let's reverse engineer a study to get you to make the claim that you're looking to make.

[02:04:06] So most air filters are like, we want to be HEPA. Great. Well, there's no airflow standard. So let's say you have an air purifier-- the best analogy I can give you, imagine measuring the fuel efficiency in your car, driving one mile an hour. You'd have the most efficient car of all time.

[02:04:22] So with HEPA, they're measuring the airflow at-- an average air filter, let's say it's 50 CFM. We go up to 400. They're doing the test at 1 CFM. So theoretically, a piece of Kleenex could be a HEPA filter if the air was moving slow enough. So HEPA, I believe there should be like a standard with the labs where you have to at least run at the fan speed that the purifier goes on, fan speed one. There's none of that.

[02:04:51] And arguably, less than HEPA, we might be getting off of HEPA in the next couple years as we do more testing. I like this saying. It's like, would you rather have 99% of $1 or 95% of $5? Well, we'll take option two please. So you want to change the air as much as possible.

[02:05:12] So bigger is better. More airflow is great. That's what you're looking to do when you're filtering air, more air changes per hour. If you have a really, really tightly wound filter, not enough air is going through it. So when we do real world studies, we fill a room with mold, we fill a room with dust, we fill a room with smoke, sometimes, almost always, the less efficient filters clean the air in the room better.

[02:05:37] It's less sexy for a lab test with a big number, but because you're cleaning more air, you can clean more air faster and quietly with-- because there's actually a standard above HEPA. It's called ULPA, U-L-P-A. It's above HEPA. It's 99.98%.

[02:05:52] But no one uses ULPA because the diminishing returns are so good but the restricted airflow kills it. It's not moving air anymore. That was the problem with Austin. The carbon's amazing, but the filter's so good that it's not moving that much air.

[02:06:06] They choked it out. Same reason you don't want to put a HEPA filter on your HVAC system. You're going to kill the air flow. No air's going to get through it anymore. So that's my myth busting on HEPA for you too.

[02:06:18] Luke: Wow. Beautiful. Great information as always. It's funny because we're gearing up for this second conversation and I was like, "I don't know. I think we kind of covered everything last time." Clearly not. There's all kinds of new information here. I think because of your passion inspires you to keep learning, you're not just guy that's like, "Oh, I kind of figured this thing out. We're selling a product. I'm done." You're just one of those freaks that's wired to keep learning.

[02:06:40] Mike: I want to tell you about the school before we're done.

[02:06:42] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's do that and then we'll wrap up.

[02:06:45] Mike: Wrap with school. And by the way, that hotel that I said we got into, if you go there, if you're going to Miami or Fort Lauderdale, probably by the time the podcast launches, we'll be in every room of that hotel. And we're helping with their messaging.

[02:06:59] So when you walk in the room, it's going to be like, "Welcome to your sleep sanctuary." So we're using the hotel room as an air awareness place, and the sleep quality is just going to be off the charts for people. And it's just a great wellness hotel anyway. Great beds.

[02:07:11] Luke: Give us the name again.

[02:07:12] Mike: It's the Carillon Hotel, C-A-R-I-L-L-O-N, Carillon Wellness Hotel in Miami. But I'm asking you, if you go there and you have an amazing sleep, please, if you care about the air for all of us, give them a five-star review on TripAdvisor, Google, wherever you can. Mention that you had the best sleep of your life. And mention the Jaspr in the air purifier. Because hotels don't understand clean air.

[02:07:36] They do understand five-star reviews. So if they can get enough reviews talking about it-- and remember, like I said, we're giving them away. We're not leaving, letting them keep it. We're putting them in there and not charging them for anything. The goal is if we can give the guest an amazing sleep, some percentage of people are like, "I want Jaspr air in my room."

[02:07:53] And if this works, we can start giving it to way more hotels. So if you go to the Carillon Hotel, which I think you should, it's a great hotel, great team, and you have an amazing sleep, please leave them a review and please mention Jaspr and your sleep and the air, because that's what will give us the fuel to get more Jasprs into more hotels.

[02:08:12] So moving to school, my daughter, she's five now. When she was two, she started going to daycare. She was never sick before that. Maybe she had a cough here or there. We put her into daycare and then she was freaking chronically ill man. Chronically ill. Boogers, runny nose, stuffed up nose, coughing all the time.

[02:08:31] And you talk to the doctor, like, this is normal. Between two and four, kids are sick 30, 40 times a year. My red flag sniff test, I'm like, "This doesn't feel right." Before she started school, she was not getting sick very often. It's not like we had her wrapped in bubble wrap.

[02:08:49] We're out in the world. We're interfacing. We're on planes. We're in hotels. She was doing pretty great. Put her in school, she's sick all the time. What happens? Now my wife's sick all the time. I'm getting more sick all the time. So look, the true cost of a sick child is insane.

[02:09:05] Because a sick kid gets the whole class sick, then they get all their parents sick, and then your productivity's down, your sleep is down, your energy's down. There's less life being lived. The Super Bowl, the concert, the trip to Disney World, life gets canceled, things don't happen. You stop connecting. It sucks.

[02:09:21] No one has aspirational goals in life when you're sick. You just want to be not sick. So you have this family who's already exhausted. They got a baby. Maybe they have a new baby. It's rough. And then this kid, your child is sick all the time. So first of all, I'd go to the school, and every day I'd go and pick her up, I would unplug the air freshener, and I would put it in more inconspicuous places.

[02:09:41] And every day, the next day it was plugged back in. I'm like, they don't seem to pay much attention around here. But when it comes to finding the air freshener and plugging it back in, man, they are amazing at this. So I start looking at their cleaning products. All toxic, toxic, toxic chemical-- the harshest chemicals.

[02:09:59] The school has no windows that are open. Bright fluorescent light bulbs, flickering at a very unnatural rate all day long water, no water filtration. They're just using tap to fill the kids' waters at school. No air filtration, no humidity control, bunch of little babies, diapers and boogers and all that. I'm like, "What is going on here?"

[02:10:20] Luke: Wi-Fi too, probably.

[02:10:22] Mike: Yeah, they probably got the Wi-Fi too. So we have our little poor babies. We bring them home. We send them off to school, and they're chronically ill. The whole family's sick, and this is a travesty. So I donated a Jaspr to Ari's class. I'm like, "Let's see what happens here."

[02:10:36] She almost stopped getting sick. Enough for the school-- this is actually her second school. They asked for five more and I happily-- they bought the filters. I gave them five more, and the first school, I'm not going to shut them out or negatively shut them out, but they're in the area in Austin.

[02:10:56] I said, "Look-- this was the first school-- we left because the school would not allow me to give an air purifier to the class. They would not let me donate it." I said, "You guys have three locations. Let's put a Jaspr in 50% of all the classes and let's track the absenteeism and show how much it's working."

[02:11:14] They wanted no part of this. Ghosted me. I'm like, "Wow. Well, we're out of here." So there's a study in Finland, this air purifier study in Finland where they did a double-blind or whatever. They did a very controlled setting where they started putting air purifiers into daycares and schools.

[02:11:34] Not even great air purifiers, but okay ones, and almost immediately absenteeism dropped by 30%, teachers and students, like that. Because how do we get each other sick? surface and air. Pretty simple. A lot of it's air, a lot of it's breathing.

[02:11:49] Naturally, if one kid's coughing, coughing germs, where does the cough go? There's no windows. And schools are businesses. Whether it's public school or private school, they're airtight and they're designed to keep the cool air in the summer and the warm air in the winter. And they're tight boxes, so they're not breathing.

[02:12:06] So whether it's a cough, a diaper, or a runny nose, or a sneeze, the droplets, the aerosols, the carpets aren't being cleaned properly-- so they're literally cesspools. So I see this Finland study. I'm like, "Holy shit." They have the data that I needed to move forward with it.

[02:12:21] Me and my wife, I'm 35 in a couple of weeks-- she's a year younger-- we've been together 16 years, and ever since I've known her, we've been working on curriculums together. We've been designing curriculums. We were dreaming of how we would teach and all this stuff.

[02:12:39] The second school was great. It was an outside school. They put the Jasprs in. They had the water filters. That was cool. But they weren't teaching them very much. So I'm like, normally if you want like an outdoor school, it's, I think, little bit of reading and writing and math is good. Not hardcore, but my daughter loves reading and it's really maturing her.

[02:13:00] She likes being able to read the signs on the street and order off menus for her herself. It's actually really empowering for her in the real world, being able to-- in half an hour a couple of times a week. It's not we had to institutionalize her to teach her how to read a little bit.

[02:13:15] And she loves to read, just real practical style reading. And so what the school in our neighborhood, the land went for sale and I'm like, "Shoot, someone's going to buy this building and there won't be a school in the community anymore." And we love bike riding our kids to school. And once I saw that air study, I'm like, "Man."

[02:13:38] And my wife's, she was a nurse. We're super health and wellness-oriented and we care a lot about learning. So we bought the school. We bought the school. We're going to be opening in August in Austin. And our goal is to make the healthiest school in America, the healthiest school in the world. So what's the school going to have?

[02:13:58] It's going to have two Jasprs in every single classroom. It's going to have badass state-of-the-art water filtration systems. We're not going to have direct fluorescent lights. It'll all be high-quality light bulbs, mostly diffused, mostly lamps. No crazy high flicker rates. A lot of the learning is going to be happening screened in porches.

[02:14:17] So outside's great, inside's great, but massive screened in porches. So a lot of fresh air in indoor, outdoor space. A lot of outside time, a lot of project-based learning. Because Montessori is awesome. I really believe in those methodologies for teaching a kid, but what they left out is collaboration.

[02:14:37] So the kids become these isolated learning machines, but they forget about building with each other and collaboration and leadership. The school, there's nothing worse. You're like, rip your kid out of bed at 7:00 in the morning and be like, "Go to school." Shove them out the door. Ah, that's not what I thought we were getting into.

[02:14:54] Or you have to homeschool them, which is tough too. And then school's done. You bring them home. It's like 4 o'clock. You're frantically cooking dinner. Then by the time that's cleaned up, they're in bed. You're like, "What's going on here?" So we're going to have-- you could drop off the kids as late as 9 o'clock.

[02:15:09] You shouldn't have to rip your kid out of bed in the morning. So the school is designed for the entrepreneurial family who wants free thinking children in a non-toxic environment. We're bringing in a healthy wellness chef. We're going to bring in local mentors. So an example, my friend UJ, he started a book called The Five Minute Journal.

[02:15:28] When he's in town, he's going to come in and teach the kids about gratitude and about journaling. We have so many amazing mentors here in the community who would love to come in occasionally and teach a lesson and teach the parents too. Ryan Blaser's going to come in and teach all the parents about healthy homes and healthy buildings.

[02:15:43] So not just for the kids, but for the parents as well. And we're open sourcing everything, man. Everything. So all the financials are going to be publicly available online, what we pay the teachers, how much the food costs, the lighting, the water, the air, the renovations we do, the carpets that we put in.

[02:15:59] Every decision we make is going to be an open book, including our financials. And we're not trying to create some new school nationwide. My wife, Rachel's not even taking a salary. Every dollar that we make is going to be invested into the school. We're not going the non-profit route from a technical perspective.

[02:16:16] All of a sudden there's boards and there's governance. And best way to pay no taxes, just don't make a profit. You don't have to be a non-profit. So yeah, we're going to have a little podcast studio there. And let's say the family wants to travel, we encourage it. Take your kids. Go, travel.

[02:16:33] Public schools have these laws. You can't even take your kids out of school. Call the sheriff. You're like, "Go to court." It's crazy. If you go on a trip, it's like, great. Are you going to learn while you're gone? When you're gone, we want you to present about what you learned and where you went and create little passbooks of all the stickers for all the kids. Where did all the kids in your class go?

[02:16:54] And have a world map on the wall. So if a kid goes somewhere, we're going to put a pin. Where have we collectively traveled? So it's going to be designed for entrepreneurial families who want freethinking children in a non-toxic environment. Not asking too much.

[02:17:07] And so my title will be-- you'll see, by the time this pod drops, my Instagram will be different. It'll be like founder at Jaspr and Chief Wellness Officer at Kindling Academy. So it's called Kindling Academy because our mindset is so many schools are like, we're going to shape your kid, craft your kid.

[02:17:24] These are like, "Yo, I don't want you to shape anything. So kindling is my metaphor for how I like to operate in the world. Every child already has a spark within, So let's put a little kindling on that fire and let that flame become its own beautiful fire however it will. But without kindling, there's a lot of beautiful fires that never get started.

[02:17:43] Can't put a bunch of wet logs. What happens when you put logs on a fire? You suffocate it. It needs oxygen. It needs to breathe. So kindling, thoughtful, small sticks, grow slowly, but we're not going to influence how the flame grows. So yeah, it's called Kindling Academy. The website's going to be live by the time we drop.

[02:18:02] It's a small school, and we're going to podcast and content and open source everything. I love this whole Make America Healthy movement. I think it's great. We're really paying attention, and this is the moment where the attention is on this stuff. So we're going to really attack it from the school perspective.

[02:18:20] We're going to have a wellness, high-quality food, water, air, education, all that. So it's called Kindling Academy, but it's going to be kindling.academy. There's no .com. Literally .academy is a thing. So kindling.academy and @kindlingacademy on Instagram. And if you live in Austin and you're interested, awesome. Come check us out.

[02:18:40] But if you don't live in Austin, if you have kids, if you know anyone who has a kid, check us out. We'll have email stuff and Instagram stuff. Come participate in the journey. We're going to open source everything. We're going to show our absenteeism rates versus the state.

[02:18:54] We're going to show our runny nose and our sickness rate, teachers and students, and prove out that schools can be healthy and can be awesome. So as much as this Jaspr stuff's awesome, and I think you should get one, this is really the most important thing.

[02:19:06] Luke: This is so cool. I'm bummed we waited till the end.

[02:19:10] Mike: We'll get them next time. Maybe we'll do a podcast together sometime at the school.

[02:19:14] Luke: That would be epic. I love this idea, man. As a former kid who was just absolutely tortured by the whole premise of school, it was just like the worst ever. He did it for good reason.

[02:19:28] Mike: It's going to be in your backyard, so you'll be able to come check it out, man.

[02:19:31] Luke: So great. And I know so many--

[02:19:32] Mike: Oh, there'll be saunas and coal plunges too.

[02:19:35] Luke: Sold.

[02:19:36] Mike: So when you drop off your kids, even if you don't, but if people have kids, we found that a lot of schools, they do a really shitty job at creating community. And school has built-in friendship. Here in high school you got friends. All of a sudden, you've coming out one day and you're like, "Where are all the friends at?" There's no built-in friends anymore.

[02:19:53] So the best time, I think, to make lifelong friends at the 30-plus thing, especially if you're not in business, and even if you are, it's through the kids and the kids' school. Nobody wants to hang out with somebody with kids unless they have them too. So there'll be saunas and coal plunges on the property.

[02:20:09] We have a wellness director who will facilitate breath work and stuff. So when you come drop off your kid at 8 o'clock or whatever, you can stick around. When you pick up your kid, you can come earlier, stay late, and stick around, hit the sauna, hit the coal plunge, and get to know the other family.

[02:20:22] So we're really viewing this as healing and wellness for the family and for the community, not just for the student. It comes as a package deal. So [Inaudible], man. Rachel's going to crush it, so come check it out.

[02:20:32] Luke: I can't wait to watch this unfold. Before I forget, on the lighting tip, and I can send you a link, there's a company called Colorbeam.

[02:20:43] Mike: Colorbeam.

[02:20:44] Luke: Yeah, dude. It is so cool. They do residential for high-end homes and stuff, but it's mostly a commercial application, and they make all sorts of different custom basically lighting systems that all run on low voltage, like your landscaping lighting. So there's no dirty electricity. There's no EMF, and they have completely automated and customizable color spectrums and intensity.

[02:21:17] So you can set it to completely match like the full color spectrum of the sun from sunrise to sunset. Super dope. You can have them recessed or in fixtures, so it's totally customizable and controllable and there's no flicker, and it's a much higher-- I've been geeking out on this, so that's why I'm excited.

[02:21:42] It's not like, oh, let's have red light or blue light. You can really like customize it. But the fact that there's zero flicker-- because a lot of lights will advertise as flicker-free, but it's not discernible flicker, but your brain and nervous system still know it's flickering. So it's truly no flicker and, like I said, no EMF and the colors you want. And also, you can make it look super cool.

[02:22:09] Mike: You can make it look cool. Kids are going to love that.

[02:22:11] Luke: Yeah, dude. So if it's a wintertime and it gets dark at 5:00--

[02:22:15] Mike: It's a design thing. It makes you feel good in a nicely designed space.

[02:22:17] Luke: Exactly.

[02:22:18] Mike: Lighting is everything.

[02:22:19] Luke: Yeah. Colorbeam. I think it's colorbeam.com or something. It's easy to find. But yeah, it's definitely worth looking into because it's easiest to do when you're in build-out phase.

[02:22:27] Mike: This is the time.

[02:22:30] Luke: It's difficult to retrofit the system because it's all wired in and all that.

[02:22:36] Mike: It's really built in. Cool. In addition to our tree houses and our tree weaves and our outdoor pizza oven, we will get some sweet lighting in. We'll check out Colorbeam.

[02:22:45] Luke: I'm stoked, man.

[02:22:46] Mike: And Jaspr was able to pay for the school, which is so exciting because I believe better than running all those ads on those platforms, I'm like, "There's no way creating a healthy school and talking about it is not going to be the best thing ever for everything. Investing in Rachel. So yeah, this was good.

[02:23:03] Luke: Epic, dude. Epic. Thanks for joining me again.

[02:23:06] Mike: Jaspr.co, guys, /luke, and it should auto apply the code. But if it doesn't, put code LUKE in there. For the month of May, it'll be $400 off. That will be the biggest discount you will ever see, I promise you. That's the Black Friday deal. But do it now because when Black Friday comes around, we get sold out for months. And Skinny Confidential is dropping sometime in May, and that is going to sell us out. So if you want to get Jaspr and clean air in your bedroom soon--

[02:23:33] Luke: You got to hit the sale before that podcast comes out.

[02:23:35] Mike: But it'll be live for the month of May, and then it'll be $200 forever afterwards. So check out Jaspr, check out the school. Thanks for listening, guys. Thanks you for having me, Luke.