All Podcasts / The Jordan Harbinger Show / 1246: Mike Feldstein | How Bad Air Hijacks Your Brain and Body
The Jordan Harbinger Show
The Jordan Harbinger Show

1246: Mike Feldstein | How Bad Air Hijacks Your Brain and Body

November 25, 2025 • 1h 10m

Summary

⏱️ 17 min read

Overview

Mike Feldstein returns to discuss air quality in the aftermath of the LA wildfires, revealing the unprecedented contamination from burning homes, cars, and thousands of lithium batteries. The conversation explores the toxic reality of indoor air, the misleading mold industry, how synthetic fragrances hijack our sense of smell, and why CO2 levels in closed spaces impact cognition and sleep. Mike also shares his mission to create the healthiest school in America and make clean air accessible to everyone, especially newborns and children.

LA Wildfire Aftermath: Unprecedented Toxic Contamination

Mike traveled to LA six weeks after the Palisades fire to assess air quality in what he calls an unprecedented disaster. Unlike typical forest fires that burn organic material, this fire consumed 15,000 homes and 20,000 cars, including thousands of electric vehicles with lithium batteries. The combination of melting aluminum, burning paint, insulation, and thousands of lithium batteries created a toxic soup unlike anything previously documented. Even weeks after the fire with rain, contamination persisted in people's homes through carpets, furniture, and clothing.

  • The LA wildfire was unprecedented - no one knows exactly how long contamination will last because we've never had a fire where 15,000 cars burned, many of them Teslas with hundreds of lithium batteries each
  • When homes and cars burn together, you get toxic chemicals beyond typical wildfire smoke - every can of paint, WD-40, insulation, and drywall materials create cancer-causing compounds
  • Six weeks after the fire in mid-February 2025, air quality was still fluctuating dramatically throughout the day depending on wind patterns
  • Molten aluminum from cars created literal rivers of metal running down streets, showing the extreme temperatures reached
  • Nature is the best air purifier - LA's coastal location helped as winds brought contamination out to sea, unlike fires in landlocked valleys
" Most fire restoration companies have experience with a kitchen fire, a house fire, not like giant regional fires where a whole city is infected. We've never had a fire before where 15,000 cars burnt down. "
" Imagine that bag of s'mores burning at a campfire that smells like cancer, well imagine that times 15,000 homes, 20,000 cars and thousands of those cars were Teslas. What happens when you burn 10,000 lithium batteries? We don't know. "

Real-World Air Filter Effectiveness: The Single-Variable Test

Mike conducted a revealing test in Santa Monica apartments just two miles from the fire. Two identical units, one floor apart, provided the perfect natural experiment. The unit with a Jasper air filter maintained nearly perfect air quality, while the unit one floor above with no air purifier had toxic, uninhabitable carpet contamination. This single-variable comparison demonstrated the massive impact of air filtration in protecting against wildfire smoke and particulate matter.

  • Two identical 800 sq ft apartments in Santa Monica, one with Jasper and one without, showed dramatically different contamination levels despite being only one floor apart
  • The apartment without air filtration had carpet so contaminated it was uninhabitable, while the filtered apartment remained almost perfectly normal
  • Jasper was specifically designed for wildfire smoke based on Mike's background in wildfire remediation and disaster cleanup
  • The difference between little store air purifiers and industrial air scrubbers is massive - Jasper was built to bring commercial-grade air cleaning into homes
" This one lady had an 800 square foot apartment, one Jasper, one floor above exact same unit no Jasper. The air quality and his carpet was uninhabitable, completely toxic, and her place was almost perfectly normal. "

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