#355 Air Quality After Floods and Fires with Restoration and Reimbursement Expert Mike Feldstein

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast,  I am joined by Mike Feldstein who is a seasoned air quality expert. In this episode, Mike tells about why clean air is so important and how homes and our indoor environments have a huge impact on our health and quality of life. We talk about the top things to be concerned about when it comes to indoor air quality, the dangers of radon, and how long the air can stay contaminated after a wildfire. 

For this week ONLY the Jaspr air purifier is 20% off with the LESSSTRESSED code. After that it goes back to 10% off. Normal pricing is $999 for a unit with filter subscription and lifetime warranty, so with the code you can purchase one for $799.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Are there any industry wide standards for mold testing?
• Should I test for mold?
• Are particle meters useful?
• The dangers of radon
• Air monitoring vs air testing
• How to lower CO2 levels in your home
• Why does cooking decrease air quality?
• How nose blindness can trick you into thinking your indoor air is clean 

ABOUT GUEST: Mike Feldstein is a seasoned air quality expert and entrepreneur. He leveraged his experience in wildfire restoration and air quality consulting to innovate in air science and technology. His purpose is to protect air quality and boost human health using the latest in air quality science and tech.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://jaspr.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasprco/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: ****https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY:

• Over restriction is dead; if your practitioner is recommending this, they are stuck in 2010 and not evolving
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

EPISODE SPONSOR:
A special thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode. Get a discount on any of their products. Use the code lessstressed10

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mike Feldstein: Food impacts you if you eat it. Air impacts you if you breathe it. And you're likely not eating or drinking the mold. And you're likely not sleeping right on the drywall on the mold. What you are doing is breathing the mold. The way that the mold goes from the mold, the mycotoxins behind the drywall, under the sink and the cabinet to your body is via inhalation.

[00:00:21] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:51] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:01:09] Christa Biegler, RD: All right, today on the Less Stressedf Life, I have Mike Feldstein, who is a seasoned air quality expert and entrepreneur. So we'll find out what makes a person a seasoned air quality expert. He leveraged his experience in wildfire restoration and air quality consulting to innovate, and Air science and technology.

[00:01:25] Christa Biegler, RD: His purpose is to protect air quality and boost human health using the latest in air quality science and tech. Welcome Mike. 

[00:01:31] Christa Biegler, RD: So Mike and I could have just talked a lot about the biting bugs in Machu Picchu and Costa Rica, but now we've moved on to air quality. I found out that Mike is originally from Toronto, now living in Texas.

[00:01:44] Christa Biegler, RD: But what I'd really like to start with is how Mike ended up in the wildfire restoration career? 

[00:01:52] Mike Feldstein: I would be happy to tell you if you told me a decade ago that I ended up here, I would not have believed you, actually 12 years ago. Yeah I went into digital marketing first like university, did that for a little bit, got into digital marketing.

[00:02:07] Mike Feldstein: I had a lot of clients that were in the construction, home services, and mold business, and oddly enough, that led me into mold removal and restoration. It seemed like a fascinating business at the time, because I'm like, hey, this is like construction, but a way better business. People are scared of mold, how complicating could it be?

[00:02:28] Mike Feldstein: It seems a lot less competitive and we were doing a lot of great work with mold removal companies from a marketing perspective who didn't seem to be running great business businesses. So I was only 23 at the time, whole career ahead of me, didn't have to be a marketer forever and just took a complete deep dive into mold removal.

[00:02:48] Mike Feldstein: And it's cause I had friends in the business that I was able to get a good understanding of how it worked through lot of conversations that were just offline, hanging out. And not very complicating stuff, honestly got into mold removal that led to the flood business. And then once you're in the restoration space, I just parlayed me into emergency response.

[00:03:13] Mike Feldstein: So I was my twenties were spelt spent in the disaster response business. So if there's a flood. We would mobilize for flood restoration. If there was a wildfire, we would mobilize to rebuild clean smoke damaged homes. If there was an ice storm, we would set up to install generators.

[00:03:31] Mike Feldstein: And if there was a hail or wind storm, we would do roofing. So if you think of a general contractor whether you need it to your bathroom or build a new house, there's someone who can understand the problem, come up with a solution and organize a team to get the job done in a timely way.

[00:03:47] Mike Feldstein: effective, efficient manner. We were a restoration contractor. So anything under the sun that involved rehabilitating and restoring a home back to its pre disaster catastrophe state is what I did. And I spent about seven, eight years doing that. And that was all over us and Canada. And It was quite staggering how poor the air quality was after floods and especially fires.

[00:04:18] Mike Feldstein: And I got to see, because after There was a fire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta. It's five hours from the closest big city, like almost near the Yukon, like way up there. And what happened there was everybody got evacuated for a month, because the fire was so significant, about a hundred thousand people.

[00:04:41] Mike Feldstein: And when people moved back home, So we would spend the first month to get the home clean and safe and habitable. And the final stamp of approval to let that family, give them the green light to move back to town, was doing an air quality test on the home. So we would do surface testing and air quality testing.

[00:04:58] Mike Feldstein: Just same with mold, same with floods. You always want to do a clearance test before people move back in the home, so you know the job is done. That is a good thing to do before you get paid, before insurance companies sign off. It is standard protocol. And we would sign off on a house and then a week later get phone calls, especially this one, her name was Tanya, and their baby was back in the hospital with respiratory issues.

[00:05:22] Mike Feldstein: And after the fire, respiratory issues were crazy. And everything was exasperated. Allergies, asthma, autoimmune stuff COPD babies that already were on nebulizers, just the volume was turned up for everybody because of the smoke. And we're not just talking about tree wildfire smoke, when 3, 000 homes burn, 000 cars, factories, every single can of paint, and WD 40, and every piece of furniture, all those chemicals were in that toxic plume of smoke.

[00:05:53] Mike Feldstein: These homes weren't just contaminated with regular campfire smoke, but like a very toxic smoke. And people got really sick. So we would clear a house, family moves back in, baby's sick. We go back, we check the house again, and it was deeply contaminated again. The reason is your indoor air comes from outside.

[00:06:13] Mike Feldstein: So even though we would clean the indoor air, the ambient air in that community was so contaminated for a few months after the fire that the house would get recontaminated again. And we would clean it up. I called the insurance company. I'm like, Hey, your customer's home, unfortunately is recontaminated.

[00:06:30] Mike Feldstein: I propose that they go back to Edmonton, which is the nearest city, five hours away. They wait for another month or two until the air quality, the ambient air outside is at a safe level. Then let's do a reclean because it's silly for us to clean it now. The house is just going to get recontaminated again.

[00:06:49] Mike Feldstein: So they said, no, they're like, Not a chance. We're paying you. The homeowner signed off. Like our work here is done. We only clean once that sucks. So what we did is we left our giant air scrubbing machines there. So think about an air purifier, the size of a subwoofer or a photocopier, loud, ugly industrial.

[00:07:09] Mike Feldstein: So we would leave these behind. And after a few hours, that would be enough to bring the air quality down to a safe, habitable level where the family could move back home. So basically that's what we did to make sure the air was safe for the family to stay there. But this was not going to work for all of our customers. We were getting calls like this. So I'm like, let's just go to Best Buy, go to Home Depot, buy four or five air purifiers and put it in their house.

[00:07:33] Mike Feldstein: And that'll be let them keep it. It's better than us leaving our giant commercial stuff there. And to my surprise, it didn't do anything. The air got worse and stayed bad. The analogy I like to use now is most little portable air purifiers are like trying to heat a bathtub with a kettle. Kettles are awesome at heating water for tea.

[00:07:51] Mike Feldstein: They do a great job, but you can't heat your bathtub with a kettle because the bathtub will cool down faster than you can heat it up. So that's my long winded way of saying yeah, we got deeply into restoration. And then after seeing a lot of contaminated situations and learning a lot about air and how sick people were, and I myself got quite sick.

[00:08:12] Mike Feldstein: I've had autoimmune and psoriasis and stuff since then from the massive I'm thinking now it's probably from heavy metal exposure and PAH and everything else, and I'm just starting to now like detox stuff from those years of being in those hazardous areas, but yeah, I got into this one.

[00:08:31] Mike Feldstein: Marketing led to mold led to everything else. And here we are. 

[00:08:35] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm a really curious person, so naturally I should go forward talking about air quality, but I'm stuck on how you went from marketing to disaster recovery. So we're going to start there cause I'm just curious. I actually was looking at all the disaster response companies not too long ago because of a mold situation with a vehicle from water damage.

[00:08:53] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I went down that rabbit hole. And so I was curious if you, because you were working with so many different areas, I would think that naturally you started in one area and then you just added and added, or do you work with a chain to do, I know you. Said you on, you got to know the business because of other people in the business, but it's such a dramatic shift to go from a screen warrior to like a literally tearing apart a house warrior.

[00:09:16] Christa Biegler, RD: So I don't know if you were managing the oversight of the business. I'm just curious about,

[00:09:20] Mike Feldstein: I was deeply 

[00:09:21] Mike Feldstein: in the weeds because in the marketing business, it was really frustrating and really annoying going to bed at night thinking about everybody else's business. And I was like, I feel like it would be better served using my best thinking power.

[00:09:38] Mike Feldstein: Like I want to go to bed at night stressing about my own stresses if I'm going to have stress to deal with. As opposed to 20 other completely uncontrollable stresses. And I remember with a swimming pool company in Houston. I was living in Toronto at the time, but they were in Texas and we were able to get them like 20 X the amount of phone calls they panicked and wanted us to stop because like it broke the business.

[00:10:01] Mike Feldstein: They couldn't handle it. I was ignorant in my early twenties. I didn't realize life is not just marketing. It's actually hard to get a thing done really well, really reliably, consistently. 

[00:10:11] Christa Biegler, RD: The service based part of it. 

[00:10:13] Mike Feldstein: Service is tough. Everything's tough, but that was its own kind of tough that I was not super well.

[00:10:18] Mike Feldstein: And it was frustrating because wearing my marketing hat, I could only have so much influence over these businesses. I could only go so far with how much I could help them with operations and obvious things that I was deeply had a desire to fix. A lot of them didn't answer their phones all that often and they didn't call people back and they didn't record their calls and they weren't improving things.

[00:10:40] Mike Feldstein: And as a marketer, I was listening to their sales calls to ensure I was getting them good quality customers. And I'm like, what, this is how like you guys aren't helpful at all. So I it was like a combination of seeing the opportunity that lay within mold removal back then they called it the mold rush.

[00:10:56] Mike Feldstein: And honestly, the mold rush is bigger now than ever before, because the mold awareness is growing up. Mold is renewable. It keeps growing. Homes aren't getting built any better, and there's more and more savvy marketers who are able to scare people. So Yeah, the transition went just from shifting from having customers in the marketing business to middlemanning leads.

[00:11:21] Mike Feldstein: So I started a company called Rapid Mold Removal back then, and we would broker leads. So we would set up websites. It was completely from a marketing standpoint. We would set up these websites, get the leads, and then hand them out. And honestly, the companies we were handing them out to weren't doing a great job.

[00:11:36] Mike Feldstein: They weren't tracking sales very well. I'm like, okay, forget this. And then magically this car shows up on my street living in Toronto. Someone's this girl across the street, her boyfriend had a mold removal company. I'm like, wow, this is awesome. Like it was just an online thing. And then here he shows up and I'm like, Hey, how's it going?

[00:11:55] Mike Feldstein: He's been in the business for a couple of years, doing some good work. Not a ton of business though. And I'm like, why don't we team up? I'll get all the business. You get the jobs done and we'll split it. And he was like, let's do it. And within a month, this was more lucrative and more fulfilling than the whole marketing business by far, because I was closer to it, but I had learned if you don't intimately understand something, you don't really have a business middlemanning it either.

[00:12:22] Mike Feldstein: You aren't able to ensure a proper quality from a business standpoint, you're very susceptible to being ripped off. And I'm so I'm like, let me get in the weeds and do some mold removal myself. I got all the certifications with the IICRC. I was binging. I became a home inspector, an air quality inspector, a molder mediator, a flood technician.

[00:12:43] Mike Feldstein: Honestly, these are all like two to five day courses. It was a joke. You don't learn much in those courses. You learn it by doing it and then testing the air and things like that. So yeah, it was a slow natural progression. And then this Calgary flood happened across the country in Alberta.

[00:12:59] Mike Feldstein: Closer to you, closer than I was. And it was the biggest flood and still to this date, what is the biggest flood in Canadian history? Think about this downtown core, water was up to the fourth and fifth story of buildings. So six story deep underground parking lots were filled all the way to the bottom.

[00:13:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh my gosh. 

[00:13:17] Mike Feldstein: When we would go into homes where the basements were filled with water, we would actually have to send in, for some of them people who had rare valuables, scuba diving crews to go into the basements to retrieve valuables. So it was just crazy and no, I was never local actually. The mold removal for the first couple of months was a bit local, but ever since then, it was actually just, Wherever it was, Calgary, it was British Columbia.

[00:13:41] Mike Feldstein: It was California. It was hurricane Harvey in Houston. It was the Carolina hurricanes. It was Napa Valley fires. It was really everywhere. It was wind storms in the Midwest. 

[00:13:51] Christa Biegler, RD: I was just thinking about how this industry, I would. Almost guess that there's, cause I'm thinking about you going from Canada to the U S and I'm thinking about whether there's standards for their quality and who's setting those, because we have different governing bodies.

[00:14:04] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm thinking about in medical, in the medical field insurance, or at least the way the government does insurance, they're they set the kind of standard and then the other insurance will follow and then it goes like that. And so as I'm hearing you talk about getting insurance reimbursement, I guess you're working, which I mean, I don't know.

[00:14:21] Christa Biegler, RD: It's interesting. I always tell people if I had to work with insurance, I'll just gouge my eyes out and find a new job. I loved it. You loved it? 

[00:14:28] Mike Feldstein: Loved it. Loved it. If you ever have a flood or a fire, give me a call. I don't do it for work anymore, but I'll make sure you don't get screwed. As long as you have patience and you are good at dotting your I's and crossing your T's, insurance is designed to screw over the lazy person who can't handle a little bit of stress and sometimes a lot of stress.

[00:14:48] Christa Biegler, RD: This is a 

[00:14:48] Christa Biegler, RD: whole episode on its own, how to navigate disasters and insurance. 

[00:14:52] Mike Feldstein: I would love to help 

[00:14:53] Mike Feldstein: people with that. That honestly, the impact was great. I was really good at not only doing a good job and restoring the home, not only making a lot of money, but I was really good at making my clients make a lot of money.

[00:15:04] Mike Feldstein: So I remember I got a guy almost 80, 000 for his action figure collection and he had like DVDs and stuff because he wanted, he's yeah, it's worth like 120 grand insurance. He's yeah. Buddy. They look fine. So I'm like, okay, here's a quote. He had thought, I'm like, if it takes us 30 minutes per action figure and we have to store them and ship them and ultraviolet light and inspect them, it was, it'd be like 140, 000 cause it would take 20 people a month.

[00:15:30] Mike Feldstein: And then, they paid him out on his action figures because it was a little bit less than our quote to restore it, which to clean all of those with like toxic smoke would have been a nightmare. So I really enjoyed most people when they have a disaster, they call the insurance company. And the insurance company sends somebody, this is a big conflict of interest because the insurance company has, they feed these vendors, tons of work.

[00:15:56] Mike Feldstein: So if the vendor does a lot of work and restores the whole home, it's going to be very expensive. And then when insurance sees their profit and loss on that vendor, they're going to cut that vendor. So just about everywhere, every policy that I've ever seen gives the homeowner the right to choose their own vendor.

[00:16:13] Mike Feldstein: So I would always market myself as the people's choice say, look, you can either call the insurance company and send them a vendor who has a conflict of interest or call us. The more we fix your home, the more money we make. It's aligned. It makes sense. And I also added to that. We don't get paid.

[00:16:29] Mike Feldstein: If you don't get paid, we don't get any money till the end. You don't put anything out of pocket. We own all the liability. So it was a very reassuring offer. So I took on the insurance relationship and insurance. They want to create a rift. They want to be buddies with the restoration guy against the homeowner.

[00:16:46] Mike Feldstein: And then they want to be buddies with the homeowner against the restoration guy. They love though, they love ganging up because then you can use the other party to diminish the other party's value. So I always told everyone I worked with, I said, look, are going to try to make us hate each other.

[00:17:01] Mike Feldstein: So it was very much like a cool relationship survivor situation. And some people, the adjuster would break them and it would be tough, but mostly. If you just explain things simply and you can back it up and do the necessary testing But yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I really did. It was like wartime, I'd go into a zone with fires and floods and there was no power and there's no accommodations and I wasn't, I never got to be in the army and go to real war.

[00:17:29] Mike Feldstein: So going to deserted areas with toxic contaminants and help people get back in their home and volatile situations, honestly, I couldn't have thought of a better way to spend my twenties. 

[00:17:39] Christa Biegler, RD: There's lots of room for that. If there's other people that aspire to be just like you Another day, we can talk more about, 

[00:17:44] Mike Feldstein: yeah hopefully not a 

[00:17:45] Mike Feldstein: day where you have a claim though.

[00:17:46] Mike Feldstein: Let's just, 

[00:17:47] Christa Biegler, RD: yeah, not a day where we have a claim. I'm just, I think for a lot of, for me, for other people, I'm just like, ugh, paperwork, something you said earlier was you use different words, but you said, yeah, we could just, it wasn't that hard, right? Like we could just make it simple.

[00:17:59] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think, yeah. A lot of stuff is around that. And I think mold cleanup for a homeowner feels exhausting. I just was talking to a client today and she's I'm pretty sure I have mold in the shower, but it's going to be this expensive thing. And we're going to move in a couple of years and I don't want to deal with it.

[00:18:13] Christa Biegler, RD: And I don't have any judgment on the situation. It's just that's how we perceive it. We're just like this is going to be really difficult. So I'll just leave. And your take is what if we could just make it simple? So I'd like to talk a little bit about the background of doing good on mold remediation.

[00:18:28] Christa Biegler, RD: And poor mold remediation. And then let's go talk about some of this air quality testing and whatnot. But I just have to ask. 

[00:18:33] Mike Feldstein: It's quite intertwined actually. 

[00:18:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes. 

[00:18:36] Mike Feldstein: Because mold is an interesting thing. It is unfortunately a market where it's either usually downplayed Buy the contractor, the demolition guy, maybe the home inspector, definitely the realtor.

[00:18:50] Mike Feldstein: Cause the selling and buying realtor don't want mold to kill the deal. So you have a lot of people in the market who are just, their incentives aren't aligned, it's mold, it's mildew, whatever. But then you have the other side. That is vastly overstating the issue because they can get this new family who just moved into a new home to spend a quarter million dollars gutting and rebuilding their old home.

[00:19:17] Mike Feldstein: Most insurance companies don't cover mold. They will cover some mold as a result of the flood. So another time you need to study your policy and know what to call, where to push for, is this cleanup for the water part or for the mold part? So if you don't understand that, they'll use 

[00:19:33] Mike Feldstein: words against you for sure.

[00:19:35] Mike Feldstein: But the problem is there's tests and then, the naturopathic industry, I don't blame them, but the ERME test, for example, has been an extensively used test. It's not that this is a bad tool. There's different ways to test mold, but most tests generally are either designed for a false positive or a false negative.

[00:19:57] Mike Feldstein: So the ERME I don't know anyone who's ever seen an Ermey that wasn't positive, unless it was like after a deep clean, like right after and the way that the report shows, it's designed to be alarmist. Ermey originally was designed mostly for restoration companies. So when they would go through a initial flood clean and then do a test, it would be positive and they would get paid double and clean the house again.

[00:20:22] Mike Feldstein: And again, so it was a really good tool. If you want to do more restoration work, it was a great tool for a restoration contractor. Who's assessing your home and doing various testing or a mold testing company. Who's getting kickbacks from the restoration guy. Ernie was great. Look that you have a test called the aerosol ZFON basically just air testing, which is often can sway.

[00:20:46] Mike Feldstein: False negative. Not always. They're both good tools. I like both tools, in each industry, they're not like just mold people, so they're trying to incorporate. Lots of new modalities and understanding and risk factors and symptoms into their knowledge base and be helpful. And then you learn something and who doesn't want a silver bullet for anything?

[00:21:06] Mike Feldstein: Everybody wants a silver bullet. One clean test, one simple solution, one detox protocol. If it was only that easy. So it's, unfortunately, this is where the difficult thing comes in. And then people really use it as a sales tool. I remember watching Dave Asprey's early mold stuff. This was like 13 years ago, almost, but it was like, went across the country, educating health food stores and stuff on how like mold will kill you.

[00:21:33] Mike Feldstein: Then he made a video called moldy, the movie, and it shows people in like wheelchairs. And as soon as they were, they got the house and then the kid goes from like a wheelchair to like running around. And this is not. I've only done 500 homes. This is never the reality I experienced with my boots on the ground.

[00:21:50] Mike Feldstein: So it's step one, make people scared of mold. Step two, say all coffee has mold. Step three, say mine doesn't. Masterfully done. Well done. So mold is complicating, but I like to put it more in the bucket of allergen. Like pollen ragweed and cedar, like all that, all, it's an allergen I can't tell you how many times I've seen a family where one person is chronically sick from the mold and the bumps and the rashes and respiratory issues, one or two of them are a little sick, and then one or two of them is totally fine, just like an allergy to a food or a pollen or whatever, so it's not if you have mold, It's how much mold, like what is your mold load, I think is a more appropriate way to looking at it.

[00:22:33] Mike Feldstein: I've never seen anyone do a mycotoxin urine analysis and not have mold, because there's a so much mold and mycotoxins outside. The same way most homes I've tested have more pollen in your bed and in your carpet and in your couch than outside. And they're like, it's a high allergen. They stay inside. I'm like, There's nothing in your house that's preventing the pollen and the mold from getting in and staying in.

[00:22:55] Mike Feldstein: It is tough to navigate. It took a lot of experience to get there. I wish I had a really simple answer, but unfortunately, if you call three or four restoration contractors you might get a quote as low as two thousand and a quote as high as a hundred thousand. 

[00:23:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. That was what I wanted to talk about was like the home aspect as a person with boots on the ground.

[00:23:14] Christa Biegler, RD: I see it from the people perspective all the time and would agree that it's a big gamut. Like I can't give you a couple sentences about it. It can be a really nasty, toxic thing depending on what someone's total body burden is. And for some people it's not really a big deal, but, and I actually have a really hard time.

[00:23:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Drilling down this statistic because I was working on something recently where I was looking for how much do we know about how much mold is in homes? And I just didn't find a very good resource on a very solid number. Some people will say, and in home inspection classes, I hear that you're told all homes have some mold, right?

[00:23:51] Christa Biegler, RD: So it's just

[00:23:51] Mike Feldstein: they do 

[00:23:51] Mike Feldstein: actually in home inspection class, we were told to put a disclaimer in our contract that says we're not looking for mold. We're not responsible for mold. And no part of this inspection is environmental. 

[00:24:00] Mike Feldstein: Which is crazy because people get a home inspection to make sure that the water tank's not 14 years old and is going to cost them five grand, but no one's inspecting your home to see if it's a healthy place for you to move your family into.

[00:24:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And I think there's a little bit of subjectiveness there. And then also your experience was with pretty severe situations, right? Where it's like all of the above everything 

[00:24:19] Mike Feldstein: from no, everything from the bathroom with a little bit of mold to the under the sink and the toilet bowl. My first little bit was regular mold removal, not just catastrophe, catastrophic molding floods.

[00:24:32] Mike Feldstein: will find it for sure. The interesting thing though, people do have to be practical and look at the whole solution.

[00:24:38] Mike Feldstein: If this is your dream home for 25 years, versus that if you're moving in a year or two, and if you're moving in a year or two, are you really going to spend 20 grand doing the best job ever? Are you going to paint over it? Is there a happy medium? Is there a reasonable compromise? If you tell the buyers there's mold, you're not going to have a buyer.

[00:24:55] Mike Feldstein: It's definitely not an easy, it really tests your moral fortitude, for sure. 

[00:25:00] Christa Biegler, RD: And you also 

[00:25:01] Christa Biegler, RD: don't know how severe something is, right? If it's bothering one person but not bothering you. 

[00:25:04] Mike Feldstein: Yeah, we feel 

[00:25:05] Mike Feldstein: fine, it's a little black speckle in the bathroom, what's the big deal? 

[00:25:08] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:25:09] Mike Feldstein: But the thing is about mold and I had a severe situation with mold myself in 2018 I was renting a home when I was developing Jasper before we bought a house and we moved in and I don't know what I was thinking.

[00:25:22] Mike Feldstein: We must have just ran in and out and it was the outside was beautiful and we signed the lease and we moved in and there was so much mold. All of the windows were black there was black on the walls behind the drapes. I guess there was boxes and furniture there but with all that those layers pulled back.

[00:25:37] Mike Feldstein: Whoa, there was mold everywhere. So I did a bunch of air testing. The mold levels were off the charts. Luckily, I was just starting to develop Jasper. So I had a bunch of, I turned on all my air purifiers in the basement where I was running all my tests. Oddly, this actually cleared up all of the mold to basically have no visible mold that was airborne.

[00:25:55] Mike Feldstein: I used soap and water, Benefect, which is like a mold cleaning product. I didn't do the whole proper restoration scrubbing situation because I had a lot of air filtration going on downstairs, but for the first time in my life I was getting horrible sleep, a little bit of d I actually got exercise induced asthma.

[00:26:16] Mike Feldstein: When I would run, 

[00:26:17] Mike Feldstein: I 

[00:26:18] Mike Feldstein: would like, find myself on the ground wheezing for my last possible breath. I'm like, am I about to die? Is this thing closing up entirely? And the only eventually I would calm down and regain my breath. But I couldn't run, I couldn't exercise. Sometimes I'd have these like breathing panic attacks at night.

[00:26:33] Mike Feldstein: And then with the air purifiers on, lots of them, the We were good and one day, me and my wife Rachel, we both came home and we were like super sick within an hour or two. Stuffy nose, itchy eyes, puffy face, inflamed, the power had went out earlier in the day so all of the air purifiers were off. And if you think about it, water impacts you if you drink it.

[00:26:58] Mike Feldstein: Food impacts you if you eat it. Air impacts you if you breathe it. And you're likely not eating or drinking the mold. And you're likely not sleeping right on the drywall on the mold. What you are doing is breathing the mold. The way that the mold goes from the mold, the mycotoxins behind the drywall, under the sink and the cabinet to your body is via inhalation.

[00:27:20] Mike Feldstein: So oftentimes. It is more economical, like if you have visible physical black mold, stachybotrys, stuff like that, this is the thing that requires removal, but aspergillus, penicillin, badiospores, lots of it's outside, you don't visibly see much mold at all often it's way more affordable just to filter your air, it's if the city water source is bad, are you gonna drill a well?

[00:27:46] Mike Feldstein: Which also might be contaminated, or are you going to just get a water filtration system? So with water, that seems obvious with air. A lot of people are trying to play whack a mole or whack a mold, I should say with the source, but you're never going to get it all. So you need to find that balance of dealing with the source.

[00:28:03] Mike Feldstein: And finding every source of mold because it's reoccurring or just dealing with it before it gets into your body. 

[00:28:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So I want to talk about let's go back to the question on are there really any standards for the testing? You have some, like when you're doing air sample testing from California to Ontario, are there any industry wide standards that you have to look for when you're doing that before and after testing? Let me ask you that because that kind of 

[00:28:28] Mike Feldstein: minimal, very minimal. The U S more than Canada, it's very state specific like Texas and Florida for sure have state remediary licenses and because of asbestos and all the mesothelioma claims that is evolving, it's coming for sure.

[00:28:44] Mike Feldstein: But broadly it's wild west still. Like you should never do a mold test the day it rains or the day after it rains. But imagine if the mold testing company calls you and says, we're canceling it. It would be a horrible business. It would suck. The customer's not going to pay you not to come that day.

[00:29:01] Mike Feldstein: They have a whole week of jobs scheduled. It's not like the roof where they could bump it to the next week. And there's only so many projects and even that's tough. So it's like really tough for everybody involved, but. There's factors, really the customer should have their windows and doors shut for 24 hours prior.

[00:29:19] Mike Feldstein: They should have bathroom fans and range hoods not running, like there's a bunch of stuff that should be done, being done for an optimal testing situation. The funny thing is I don't even need to test anymore because I've done so many tests. don't know if you ever connected with Ryan Blazer from test my home, but we laughed because when you go into a house, he was doing like 10, 000 healthy home assessments within the first 10 minutes, you pretty much know exactly what you're going to be recommending.

[00:29:44] Mike Feldstein: And then the whole day is just gathering the evidence to explain it to the homeowner and substantiate what you already know, 

[00:29:51] Mike Feldstein: You know what it smells like. You know if it's stuffy, which is a human's way of describing high CO2. The CO2 is going to be high. If you smell mold, damp, musty odors, there's going to be mold.

[00:30:02] Mike Feldstein: If the relative humidity is high and the CO2 is high, there's going to be mold. So just by the amounts of carpets in the house, the general hygiene level peaking in the ducts 95 percent of what you need to know in the first 10 minutes, visually with no instrumentation.

[00:30:15] Mike Feldstein: And then the rest of it is just confirming what you already know. But unfortunately, there are not great standards at all. And if there was standards, they would probably be set by insurance lobbies. And they would probably sway towards your house being A OK. Like it's very feel, much feels like the HVAC architecture construction mold space.

[00:30:37] Mike Feldstein: It often to me feels like the Western MD medical world. Where it's like, Adequate and optimal are not the same things. It's you get a blood test. They're like, we'll call you if you're dying. And with a lot of these home tests as well what's considered good clean air is you won't die today.

[00:30:54] Mike Feldstein: It's not like critical, but it could be so far from optimal. It could be such a significant problem, but they won't bring that up with you because that's just not the way standards broadly are written. Things are done. Long winded answer for there's not a ton of national regulation and standardization.

[00:31:13] Mike Feldstein: The IICRC are the guys who are like the big insurance accredited guys for flood, mold, carpet cleaning, restoration, things like that. But taking a bunch of their courses, they're all two days and I learned almost nothing. When I got certified as a generator repair technician, Everybody else was done in an hour.

[00:31:31] Mike Feldstein: I was there for five hours and near the end, the guy just came and gave me all the answers. I'm like, I'm getting out of this business. It's all been a joke. 

[00:31:39] Christa Biegler, RD: I have so many questions. Let me finish a couple thoughts I have about filtration and mold because of other people I've interviewed. We were talking about this guy offline that I'd interviewed.

[00:31:49] Christa Biegler, RD: And we were talking about, at that time, we talked a lot about filters and we talked about a filter is just a filter. Air filter is just like a fan and a filter and a box fancy case. Yeah. I do want to talk about how, and I know it's the filter and the quality of the filter, but one of the conversations we talked about was that physics is that you can't eliminate a particle, right?

[00:32:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Like the particle, like you can't like. You can filter, but you need to remove the overall source, like you were saying, and so it's can you filter enough? And this is what you're just, this is what your story was. Can you filter enough to get to a good place? And so I'm not really making great sense of my questions, but it's It's like filters of the wild west also, right?

[00:32:30] Christa Biegler, RD: Where it's like, there's no real good way for you to know if they're working. I had a mold situation, long story short. I cleaned this space. I was gone for two weeks. I had this like little leak that whatever, it doesn't totally matter. But my point is I had to work from home. And then what happened was that room was connected to the furnace room.

[00:32:46] Christa Biegler, RD: And so the next day when I worked from home, I had some filters going in some rooms that I already had, fortunately had, and then I was in another office and I Left and came back and I was like, Oh, I can tell that there's this musty moldy stuff and I went crazy and whatever, but in the rooms where there were filters, I could tell there was a difference.

[00:33:03] Christa Biegler, RD: And I had the itchy eyes, et cetera. Nice. If you have that experience, like you had the experience, you guys came home and you had that illness, but for the average person, how are they to know, right? We have a whole filter guide and we say like what the microns are that this filter filters, there's like scouts honor.

[00:33:19] Christa Biegler, RD: For all of this. 

[00:33:20] Mike Feldstein: So there is a little 

[00:33:21] Mike Feldstein: bit. 

[00:33:22] Christa Biegler, RD: And then you talked about commercial scrubbers. So maybe you could even tell us a little bit about what's a commercial scrubbing filter? What are they using commercially that actually is effective? And maybe it's just a much larger thing, 

[00:33:32] Mike Feldstein: it 

[00:33:32] Mike Feldstein: isn't, it is just a much larger thing.

[00:33:34] Mike Feldstein: It's what's the difference between a Honda civic and a pickup truck. At 

[00:33:39] Mike Feldstein: the end 

[00:33:39] Mike Feldstein: of the day, it's mostly size. 

[00:33:41] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:33:42] Mike Feldstein: It's mostly a larger engine. That's. Mostly it, bigger frame and tougher chassis and a hitch on the back, but fundamentally it's just a larger car. It uses more fuel and it can pull your boat and it can haul your stuff.

[00:33:56] Mike Feldstein: But you can't pull your boat with a small car. And if the car manufacturers pretended that a Honda Civic could pull your boat, it wouldn't go very good for them. It'd be very obvious when you try to pull the thing and it doesn't go anywhere. Then you rip the back of your car off.

[00:34:12] Mike Feldstein: You'd call bullshit really quick, we'd have lawsuits, we'd have problems. Air filtration and filtration in general is, A little harder to tell what's real and what's not. So I would say that the first thing is yeah, water filtration and an air filtration. So size is the most important thing broadly.

[00:34:37] Mike Feldstein: Another disappointing thing that people hear the word HEPA. HEPA is a standard. HEPA is not a material and if you go deep into the lab data, most HEPAs have lab tests that are skewed because if you think about it, a third, there's a company, they do third party testing for filters. They were handing out bad grades.

[00:35:03] Mike Feldstein: So it's another massive conflict. It's almost like buying, it's like a BBB or like a social proof thing. Because they say, what fan speed should we run the fan at to test your filter? So there's CFM fans, it'd be like testing the fuel efficiency of your car. At two miles per hour for versus actual city or highway driving, those have standards now.

[00:35:30] Mike Feldstein: So HEPA is just a filtration percentage. It means you filter 99. 97 percent at 0. 3 microns. Which people don't know it actually is even better at smaller sizes. If you look at like the efficiency chart, that is the size particle that's most penetrating. You people think it only filters to that size.

[00:35:49] Mike Feldstein: That's not true. It filters way smaller than that, all filters. But bottom line is it's just another thing where the standards are difficult to understand. And it's sad because I think the standards should be. It should be with, when you do a HEPA test, it should have in parentheses the fan speed that you were running when you did the test.

[00:36:09] Mike Feldstein: Because if your air purifier is 200 CFM, and you test it at 2 CFM, like a Kleenex would almost be HEPA, if you were barely blowing on it, because HEPA is just saying how much stuff passed through. A piece of paper could be a HEPA. It's tough to understand. Now, like your Your situation in the rooms where you could tell a difference.

[00:36:30] Mike Feldstein: If you don't tell a difference physically, tangibly, then I always tell people, if you're buying a product, try to buy something with a really good return policy and test it. Actually. If you can't get a hundred percent of your money back, then maybe you don't buy it, maybe that company is not putting their money where their mouth is, but most going back to the wildfires and trying to heat your bathtub with a kettle.

[00:36:53] Mike Feldstein: Most people are buying space heaters and they're trying to heat their living room. Space heater is great for your bathroom or for a very small kid's bedroom. Not so great for outside under the patio. It doesn't, it's not meant for that. But everybody wants to have a cost effective option. If you want to have something cheap and small and cute, brands will make it for you.

[00:37:15] Mike Feldstein: So there's no better feedback I've ever gotten than this is the I've had seven air purifiers before and I didn't know if they were working and with the Jasper, it's 100 percent obvious. I'm like, that is the only feedback I've ever needed because if you're buying something that you're unsure of, people are like, what test should I do?

[00:37:33] Mike Feldstein: Should I do mold testing? Should I do? I'm like, you can, I encourage you to do especially if you have like health issues and your desire to be more. Understanding of the data, yeah, you should do testing. But broadly I've seen someone go from a 61 sleep score on an aura, as their average score, to a 91 instantly.

[00:37:51] Mike Feldstein: Because they all of a sudden they weren't breathing mold, pollen, insect parts, dead skin cells. It's like water filtration. Taste is a little bit more obvious with water. You can like test chlorinate, lake water or city heavily chlorinated water. You run it through an RO or something and it tastes better.

[00:38:10] Mike Feldstein: You can tell with your taste. Air, we get, we live in air. What water is to fish, air is to people. We're in air, it's not separate from us. We do a really good job at adapting to it. So yeah, the un, you didn't love your question and I don't love my answer. 

[00:38:25] Christa Biegler, RD: It feels like there's not a very good way to know.

[00:38:27] Christa Biegler, RD: And this helped, as we talk about indoor air quality and I think about smoke, I always say that. No one really thinks about their indoor air quality until they can't breathe because there's wildfire, then it becomes really popular. And I'm wondering if there's these particle meters.

[00:38:40] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm wondering if particle meters are useful in this case. I'm not saying people need to buy one, but I'm just trying to wrap my brain around is how different. Obviously it's very different the testing for mold versus sample quality for like after a wildfire, but if you're doing an air sample test, aren't you just looking for air contaminants in the air of that three feet radius?

[00:39:01] Christa Biegler, RD: If you're urinating a lot when you're drinking water, maybe you're not actually hydrating that much. Or, in other words, getting the fluid and nutrients into the cell. Electrolytes are minerals that help fluid and nutrients get into the cell. I recommend all of my clients start by drinking electrolytes when we begin our work together, so to improve energy.

[00:39:21] Christa Biegler, RD: And then we get even more strategic with our electrolyte recommendations as test results come in. Now, generally electrolytes are potassium, sodium, and chloride. One of my favorite electrolyte products is pickleball cocktail from jigsaw health, because it's one of the only products you can get with an adequate dose of potassium to meet my recommendations, which is critical for blood sugar, which everyone should care about hormone health.

[00:39:44] Christa Biegler, RD: And digestion huge thing for relapsing digestive issues. Jigsaw health is also maker of the famous adrenal cocktail made popular by the pro metabolic corner of the internet and root cause protocol, as well as a multi mineral electrolyte for recovery called electrolyte supreme. You can get a discount on all of jigsaw's amazing products, including pickleball, electrolyte, supreme, and adrenal cocktail at jigsawhealth.

[00:40:08] Christa Biegler, RD: com with the code less stressed 10. That's three S's less stressed. Ten. 

[00:40:15] Mike Feldstein: So it depends if you're testing for PM 2. 5, which is particulate matter that is small enough to get into your lungs, get into your bloodstream. This is the most harmful particle size. PM10, also problematic. Other particles can impact you as well. PM2. 5 is the particles. VOCs are the gases.

[00:40:34] Mike Feldstein: Mold spores are its own thing. So the testing you would do would depend on what you're testing for. 

[00:40:40] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, that was interesting. No one's ever, we don't talk about particulates at 5. I don't know. I would like to know more about this. Can you talk about that? Like, how do we totally talk a little bit more about that?

[00:40:53] Mike Feldstein: Sure. So AQI is air quality index, which varies by countries and stuff. Broadly, it's almost mostly weighted by PM 2. 5. So there's NO2 and things like that, but mostly it's which is nitrogen oxide. It's mostly. PM 2. 5. That is the heaviest weighted thing. So for example, right now in here, it's a four.

[00:41:15] Mike Feldstein: The PM 2. 5 right now in this room is a four. Four is micrograms per meter cubed. And a good clean house is going to be between a, like a four and a 10. Four is quite excellent. After when you see like out west and there's fires or everywhere in the last summer, and they're like, stay inside.

[00:41:36] Mike Feldstein: The air quality is horrible. That PM 2. 5 number can be like 250, 300, Delhi, Beijing. These cities are like 150 to 300 typically. And those are the numbers that we're getting here when we have wildfires. And the funny thing is they're like, stay inside. People don't realize it's like a 250 outside, it's still a 150 inside.

[00:41:58] Mike Feldstein: So your air is so toxically contaminated, but you just can't tell because you're nose blind, because it's a little bit worse outside. So you smell the smoke outside, inside's a tiny bit cleaner, so you don't smell it inside. PM 2. 5 though is the single most important thing. If, whether you're cooking, If someone's vaping, smoking, if the neighbor's cutting drywall across the street, if you open your door and there's a barbecue, all of these things have particulate matter, which will go up and down.

[00:42:29] Mike Feldstein: The cool thing is, so like with Jasper, which is over my left shoulder here we, so the way I can tell it's a four, you can hardly tell, but there's a green light on the front. If It in our scale goes up to 500, which is like critically high. So another good way to know if an air purifier is working is getting one with commercial grade sensors.

[00:42:47] Mike Feldstein: So if we start cooking and not just bacon, asparagus on a cast iron pan, even is going to set Jasper off like crazy because it's still, whether it's In that case, it wouldn't be from the pan because it's not nonstick, but you're heating oils, you're heating proteins and stuff like that, which can create a lot of particulate and other things in the air.

[00:43:07] Mike Feldstein: So ideally if you buy an air purifier, that's detecting the air quality in real time, you say, Whoa, it's a four, somebody the cat uses the litter box or you start cooking. You see it go up to 50, 80, a hundred, the light turned red, the fan speed kicks up, You smell the thing, and then 20 minutes later it's back to 10 and it's green again.

[00:43:28] Mike Feldstein: So it's really, I love what I call calibrating my biosensors, just like Ryan Blazer did in the Healthy Home example. Stuffy equals high CO2, that musty smell equals mold. If you go into dry sauna or the desert, what dry feels what a steam room or the rain forest feels like.

[00:43:46] Mike Feldstein: So like we have humidity sensors built in, we have temperature sensors built in, we have mold sensors and CO2 sensors and particle sensors. So I really love when you can calibrate your own senses in real time. And the only way to do that is like having the data and The situation. So another good way to know if things are working though, is buying a product that has a sensor built right in that controls the fan speed and not just a red, yellow, green situation.

[00:44:10] Mike Feldstein: It's not that simple, but the actual number of the live readings is something that I think is incredibly important. 

[00:44:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I would love, this just makes me think about plants and I would just be really curious what happens when you put this in a room full of plants and you do the same things. I'm just curious, right?

[00:44:27] Christa Biegler, RD: It really actually happens. 

[00:44:28] Mike Feldstein: I don't 

[00:44:28] Mike Feldstein: know if you know a guy named Luke's story at all, but Luke I guess that's a yes. 

[00:44:32] Christa Biegler, RD: I just, it's funny. I just clicked on his name today for the first, I don't know if it would have registered. 

[00:44:36] Mike Feldstein: Luke 

[00:44:37] Mike Feldstein: lives near me. He's got a great podcast as well.

[00:44:40] Mike Feldstein: And Luke when they bought a Christmas tree recently, their Christmas tree, his wife had horrible allergies, like she was like very sick. So it's funny. They moved the Jasper beside the tree. And then it like turned red and kicked it up. And that was just a Christmas tree. Maybe it wasn't shaken or spun enough, but that was like a very staggering example of all of the pollens and the pests and the allergens that would have been on the tree that then, you know, because he put the filter right beside the tree, it was able to actually deal with the situation before it spread to the rest of the house, plants generally don't create particulate, they do often create humidity problems and they do often create Pests you get bugs and stuff living in them.

[00:45:23] Mike Feldstein: I love plants though. So this one's fake. But the, I have a love hate thing with indoor plants because of the pests, but the interesting thing, the NASA did a study like a couple of decades ago on the efficiency basically of plants on air quality. The problem is it's going back to the The kettle and the bathtub analogy, the plant is awesome.

[00:45:46] Mike Feldstein: But for the scale of the amount of air in your house, you would need like hundreds of plants. Like a plant would be like an air purifier, the size of a tennis ball or less. Like it's really good in theory. I do believe that there are other health benefits of having pet plants in your environment.

[00:46:03] Mike Feldstein: But. If I put a plant in the room and I'm monitoring the air quality, you don't see the needle move. 

[00:46:09] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm wondering, I'm looking at this filter behind you and it's like kind of sizable. I'm trying to compare it. It reminds me, it doesn't really, but I'm trying to compare it visually for someone listening.

[00:46:19] Christa Biegler, RD: It reminds me of the size of a diaper genie, right? It's like that special garbage can. That's the only thing I can think of. 

[00:46:24] Mike Feldstein: I got thoughts on 

[00:46:25] Mike Feldstein: the diaper genie too. 

[00:46:26] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:46:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I have no thoughts. Don't care. Never had one. But, it's a similar size or footprint. And we're talking about how filters, if just generally larger will do a better job.

[00:46:37] Christa Biegler, RD: That's one thing we're talking about, right? It has a sensor. So it ups, it goes up and down. How do you really like, how do you make a better filter other than Just really improving the filter quality. And then how do you, so you were in this industry where you had commercial filters and then you got to test air.

[00:46:52] Christa Biegler, RD: So you probably geeked out a little bit when you were playing with this. But I'm just curious how that goes in 

[00:46:57] Christa Biegler, RD: there. 

[00:46:57] Mike Feldstein: So I made a little chart and I said, what annoys me? Because before I got into this business, I was a prosumer of air purifiers. I bought the Dysons and the Honeywells and the Levoits and all the Best Buy, Home Depot, Walmart stuff.

[00:47:09] Mike Feldstein: I believed in air filtration. I was a customer first. I moved into a condo at in Midtown Toronto and instantly had allergic symptoms in the morning. Not horrible, but it was there. My house was clearly making me sick and there was construction all around. I put an air purifier in my bedroom.

[00:47:27] Mike Feldstein: And I was a lot better off. My grandmother at the time was in her mid eighties. She was having sleep issues, tried everything. Little air purifier actually helped her a decent amount too. Luckily she had a smaller room and a smaller room is a good thing. Cause it's a more controllable environment. So I got to have good experiences on the other side of it first.

[00:47:46] Mike Feldstein: But ultimately I created a category that says, What annoys me why it matters and what I'm going to do about it. So I still use this old graphic It's basically like sticky note quality graphic I created so what annoyed me was Ambient lights. I hated having an air purifier in my bedroom with a big annoying light that I would have to duct tape So that bothered me and a lot of them had a sleep button that you push the sleep button and that would turn the lights off However, it would typically also turn the fan speed to 5%.

[00:48:19] Mike Feldstein: So it's like you buy this air purifier for your bedroom and you want to turn off the light. The only way to do that is to push the sleep button. I joke. The only thing that you're putting to sleep is the air purifier because it's hardly running. It's hardly working. It's not helping you anymore. So I hated the light.

[00:48:33] Mike Feldstein: I hated the way the sleep mode worked. That annoyed me. I hated that they were all made from plastic. I wanted to make one out of steel. that could last for many decades and easily be refurbished and repaired and not be pollutant, polluting and not have a short lifespan. Cause I'm like, I bought this cheap air purifier with a two year lifespan.

[00:48:51] Mike Feldstein: Am I actually doing a negative good thing? If I clean my air in my room a little bit and I deeply pollute outside, I didn't feel good about that and not recyclable. I just didn't like this. So I didn't want to make it out of plastic. A lot of air purifiers blow their air forward instead of venting up.

[00:49:09] Mike Feldstein: That was a big problem as well. Some blow up for sure, because what happens is if it's blowing forward, this was really big deal during COVID. And most of our customers then were doctors and dentists. So what would happen is droplets would get aerosolized if you blow on them and dust would get re kicked up back into the air.

[00:49:27] Mike Feldstein: You don't want to blow air on surfaces. It also didn't feel very good to walk by. You want to vent, blow your air up into the breathing zone. Another thing that really annoyed me was air purifiers that had one side for an intake or two sides. So you can't put them in the corner, you can't put them against walls.

[00:49:43] Mike Feldstein: They're not capturing air from all 360 degrees. If it is collecting it from 360 it can and it should collect it from the floor. The dirtiest air is heavier. So it's lower down. So you want that nice airflow pattern. So you want to collect if it's collecting from all three, 360 degrees, you can put it against the wall.

[00:50:00] Mike Feldstein: You can put it in the corner, put it behind a couch. It doesn't really matter. Whereas if it has one side, it's a very limited airflow pattern. It's not collecting as many pollutants as it could be. Sensors and transparency mattered to me a lot. I didn't, it's like a black box or a white box.

[00:50:15] Mike Feldstein: You couldn't actually know if it's working or what's the air quality. So then you'd have to get other gadgets and sensors and wifi's and set all this stuff up. So that was frustrating. And then the warranty was a big deal. I hated one, two year warranty. So I'm like, why don't you just make it a lifetime warranty and.

[00:50:29] Mike Feldstein: And then the biggest thing of all was quiet comes with size, like in a car, first gear is the loudest gear. Once you're on the highway, the car is a lot quieter on fifth or sixth gear because it's has less rotations. Size is really the main thing that mattered here. Like you said, air purifiers are simple.

[00:50:49] Mike Feldstein: They're a filter. With a fan, a motor, a box, and a controller. That's it. There's no crazy rocket science going on under there. It's fundamental stuff. But if the filter, if the surface area is very small, and the fan is small, just think for yourself about a big ass fan or a ceiling fan, versus a dollar store fan.

[00:51:09] Mike Feldstein: The main difference is size. So if it's a little teeny tiny fan, it's not moving much air and more important than even the efficiency of a filter is how much air does it move? So a good analogy would be, would you rather have 99 percent of 1 or 90 percent of 5? 90 percent of 5. So obviously a lot more money.

[00:51:30] Mike Feldstein: So you want more air changes per hour? Cause if I'd rather clean the air five times instead of once, even if we're a couple percentages less per pass, so the efficiencies and the microns and all that stuff, it does matter. It just doesn't matter nearly as much as how much air are you actually cleaning?

[00:51:48] Christa Biegler, RD: You. Used cars in the analogy. And one of my, I have a couple more questions and one of them is about car filtration. We usually don't think a lot about car filtration, but it was on your list of things to talk about. And I'm interested in car filtration. So can we improve, should we change that? Talk about car air quality and how can we really improve it?

[00:52:09] Mike Feldstein: So I get my cabin filters off of Amazon. It's typically the type of thing that your manufacturer might change like annually or twice a year. It's not even an every service appointment. Oddly, I'm not that handy of a guy, despite that construction and restoration background. But, I could change the car filter.

[00:52:28] Mike Feldstein: It's in my car, the cabin filter is in the glove box. It's like you, you pull out the glove box, you pop it out. They cost 12 bucks, 15 bucks. Unfortunately, so car air does suck. And it, but it's at the mercy of the outdoor air. Where you live, it's probably not that bad. Probably pretty good, actually.

[00:52:46] Mike Feldstein: When there's wildfire smoke it's definitely bad. If someone lives in a dense city, I would change it every month. If you live in a wildfire smoke zone, I would definitely change it every month during wildfire season. If you're in your car a lot, and you suffer from seasonal allergies, I would change it a lot.

[00:53:00] Mike Feldstein: There are slightly better cabin filters that you can buy that have some carbon and things like this, but the ultimate problem is the area where you change them is like the motor and the fan is small. So Tesla actually has an incredible cabin filter. If you look, there's a picture of Elon Musk holding up the Tesla filter and holding up like a regular car filter and it's like hundreds of times bigger.

[00:53:24] Mike Feldstein: It's not even like the same thing. We're talking like, yeah, orders of magnitude, larger, thicker, heavy duty. So most cars and most furnaces, actually the little furnace filter that you have, it's not designed to clean the air. It's designed to protect the furnace from large particles. So upgrading your furnace filter typically doesn't do very much.

[00:53:44] Mike Feldstein: But you asked about cars. So yes, car air is at the mercy of the outdoor air. The only thing you can really do is crack a window, crack a sunroof. If the air outside is good, check your air regularly, but you definitely can and should change your cabin filter more often. When I shipped my car from Toronto to Texas and it had been sitting for a few months, It's stunk, honestly, I don't know where it was parked and stored along the way and I cleaned the car and detailed and it's still smelt and changing the cabin filter was like a massive difference immediately.

[00:54:14] Mike Feldstein: And the fact that they're like, so it's like we can't really make the filter bigger, because the area is only a certain size, and the car air filter is only a certain size, and there's no really elegant place to put an air purifier in your car. There's some tiny ones that go on the dash or go in the cup holder.

[00:54:31] Mike Feldstein: They're a little bit too small to really be very effective. So yeah that's what's up with car hair. 

[00:54:37] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. I have one last tangent, but it's something I've been thinking about this week because we use a mineral test and it will look at certain levels of certain metals like uranium.

[00:54:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Now, uranium is In the soil, but then it becomes, I'm probably not saying it perfectly, but it can become radon. And so I'm looking into radon, right? You have your read on whatever alarm meter, but then some of the conversation around it is that you just open the windows, air things out, vent them out.

[00:55:05] Christa Biegler, RD: And so my question is, how does that play into filtration? Did you encounter, what do you know about like radon? And can we filter that? What about that as an issue? Cause I have lots of clients that live in high uranium areas. 

[00:55:18] Mike Feldstein: Yeah, it is a big deal. Radon, at least in Canada, is the second leading cause of cancer after smoking.

[00:55:24] Mike Feldstein: At least that's the stat that they use. But it's 

[00:55:26] Mike Feldstein: We don't really talk about 

[00:55:27] Mike Feldstein: it, no, we don't. I used to do radon testing a lot because I had a company called Air Quality Canada. That's a little chapter I didn't get into, but we did air quality consulting not just after disasters, but like to figure out what's making people sick at home.

[00:55:41] Mike Feldstein: Radon, the issue, a big problem with radon is the government and a lot of places started like creating these free kits and Home Depot had these like 20 radon tests. So it killed the professional side of the market. Some states and provinces now have codes, like building codes, where when you build a new home you would install a radon mitigation system, which is a pipe, maybe like a couple inch thick PVC plastic pipe that goes into the ground, it depressurizes the slab, and then that vents Out of the house.

[00:56:11] Mike Feldstein: It's called a radon mitigation system. They're usually about 2500 to put in. But like other things, the race to the bottom for radon testing got low. And really same with all air testing. The problem is usually a guy comes to your house, he waves his magic wand, he tests the air, he sends you the report.

[00:56:29] Mike Feldstein: And while I've been shocked, cause like, where you said, your expertise is on the body side, and mine was on the house. I'm really excited for more convergence in this space. Where there's more of hey we actually used to recommend that everybody would hire a naturopath if they don't have one.

[00:56:41] Mike Feldstein: So we could coordinate with the naturopath. And while they were doing home testing, they could do body testing. I was shocked to learn, my blood test on a Tuesday at 2, and Thursday at 11, could be way different. Alright. And the house was the exact same. So your air quality throughout the week, it's like a crypto stock chart.

[00:56:59] Mike Feldstein: Like it's like going up and down and up and down and all around and it's not static. So we started monitoring people's air for a week. Doing more air monitoring instead of air testing. And often it'd be at 2 a. m. What's going on? Oh, whoa. The neighbor smokes. And or every on Friday after work, there's an issue.

[00:57:18] Mike Feldstein: They're all getting itchy eyes. It's oh wait, the dad works at a farm. factory that uses the chemical that's having a reaction, like it would be these unexpected deep rabbit holes that we got to peel back the layers on. So yeah, with radon, there's mitigation systems, there is radon testing there's maps where generally it's worse in certain states and provinces and regions and stuff like that.

[00:57:39] Mike Feldstein: Air filtration helps, especially because it increases airflow. More than it actually filtering out the radon gas itself. Carbon certainly helps. So like we have a carbon filter. It helps. It's not like a radon mitigation system, but your best friend is ventilation. When the weather permits it and the air quality is decent outside, Honestly, I really want to create a weather app in the next few years, a better weather app that's air quality focused and more optimistic and tells you that the air quality is awesome today.

[00:58:09] Mike Feldstein: So open your windows and go for a run. They're all just looking at temperature and will it rain? And it's usually negative. It's A little picture of the cloud, even though there's hardly any clouds. 

[00:58:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Something I thought was cool. I have clients we'd like to roll the conversation of mold around because the conversation is like mold's always been around, but then our buildings are more airtight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:58:28] Christa Biegler, RD: So I went on this rabbit hole recently in certain parts of Europe, they do Lufton. I don't know if you heard of this, right? So you open up all the, it's every day you open up all the windows for 20 minutes, but you do it before bed. And I don't care what temperature it is. You like warm up the bed with heating things.

[00:58:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Then you get in your bed and you have this nice cold room, which is better for sleeping. And then you have your nice warm bed in this cold room. And I was like, this is such a good idea. If you live in a good air, which like 

[00:58:54] Mike Feldstein: the F 

[00:58:54] Mike Feldstein: is a big F. 

[00:58:56] Christa Biegler, RD: So not during. Yeah. I think we need to have tools on hand because of wildfire.

[00:59:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I think wildfires have become, I don't know, they feel more and more common and more and more rampant and affecting more and more places. When Canada's got a wildfire down here in South Dakota, I might not be able to breathe for three days. So we have that too. 

[00:59:12] Mike Feldstein: And what you 

[00:59:12] Mike Feldstein: don't know about the wildfire smoke is the smoke that you see and smell is the tip of the iceberg.

[00:59:17] Mike Feldstein: It's all the stuff you can't see and can't smell that lingers for weeks that gets embedded in your home and in your fibers and yeah, I have a whole protocol for people if they have smoke that passes through town that they have to do to detox their house when it's done. Especially if you're not cleaning your air, then where do you think it goes?

[00:59:35] Mike Feldstein: It absorbs into all your surfaces. Yeah, see, and pollen and allergen is also hitting all time highs. Bad allergies because it's a longer growing season and with higher levels of CO2, the plants are feasting on it. So pollen levels, allergen levels are getting much, much worse here in Texas or cedar fever.

[00:59:56] Mike Feldstein: Pretty much there's no part of the country that's not impacted by either really bad allergens, really bad mold, really bad fires or urban city pollution. That's just the reality of the situation right now. 

[01:00:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Interesting. To be continued, especially as we unravel insurance stuff, which I know some people micro conversations about certain things can be very good.

[01:00:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Where can people find you online? Mike? 

[01:00:19] Mike Feldstein: Not super big on the social media. We are at Jasper Co on Instagram. Jasper. co is our website. We have a quiz. I'm not super proud of all of the, it's okay. But the good thing is when people do our air quality quiz. We ask about how often you cook and your pets and your stage of life.

[01:00:38] Mike Feldstein: And then we turn that into a customized educational email flow. Like the reason I'm doing this podcast today is because I don't know how to do little snippets and stuff. But if people want to get deeply educated on air, our email list is by far the best place to do it. Someone visits our website, takes the air quiz.

[01:00:54] Mike Feldstein: We'll send them like really customized stuff, but only if you have a dog. I'm not going to tell you about a cat. If you don't have a pet, I'm not going to tell you about pets at all. 

[01:01:01] Christa Biegler, RD: This is your marketing 

[01:01:02] Christa Biegler, RD: expertise. But where do people get the guide about what they should do if smoke passes through town?

[01:01:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Because now they're going to want that. 

[01:01:08] Mike Feldstein: Actually Jen Pike, me and Jen Pike recorded a podcast, J E N P I K E. We did a wildfire episode specifically talking about detoxing homes from smoke after wildfires. So I haven't turned it into a physical thing. Sing yet, she may have, but it was like a 25 minute short podcast where we did a whole deep dive just on how to remedy your home after wildfire smoke.

[01:01:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Thanks so much for coming on today. 

[01:01:35] Mike Feldstein: My pleasure.