The Building That Made You Sick Can Also Heal You with Jason Earle

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Wellness Rebel Show, where you reclaim your health and tap into your body’s healing power. I’m your host, Fatima, here to empower you with the knowledge and tools to take charge of your well-being. Whether you want to boost energy, improve mindset, or unlock vitality, this is your go-to source for practical advice and inspiration.

 

It’s time to step into your power and live a life of health and freedom. Welcome to The Revolution. Welcome back to The Wellness Rebel Show.

 

Today, I have Jason Earle, founder of GOT MOLD, and we’re going to talk all things mold today.

 

Absolutely.

 

Hey, Jason.

 

Great to be here.

 

All right. Why don’t you start by… Tell us a little… 

 

 Not a little bit, but a lot of your story. Like, how you got here. Why did you decide to create GOT MOLD and all these things?

 

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. And I, you know, I’m kind of the accidental mold guy. I don’t think this is, you know, the kind of thing where, you know, my little boys are not aspiring to be mold guys.

 

I don’t think that’s a career track that’s, you know, in the top 10 list. And it’s certainly something that, in retrospect, I don’t think I… I think this is just exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

 

And it’s just the way life unfolds sometimes. You can make sense of it in retrospect. It’s, you know, the breadcrumbs go backwards, not forwards, right?

 

So when I was a little kid, about four years old, I suddenly lost a lot of weight in a three-week period. And so my parents were, you know, notably concerned. And they took me to the pediatrician who said, you really need to take him to Children’s Hospital. 

 

 He’s very ill. And so the initial workup, based upon the symptoms I had in my family history, was that I had cystic fibrosis, which was a death sentence back then. And fortunately, six weeks later, they got a second opinion, and they actually found out that I had asthma, compounded by pneumonia, and I was allergic to every single thing they tested me for.

 

So it was grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, soybeans, all this stuff. And I was growing up, living on this little non-working farm outside of Princeton, New Jersey, where I was surrounded by all those things in great abundance. And so I lived on inhalers and struggled with just the weight of asthma for most of my childhood.

 

But then when my folks split up, which was good for everyone involved, moved out of that moldy farmhouse and all of my symptoms went away. And no one thought about it, including myself for a number of years. In fact, at the time, it was chalked up to what they call spontaneous adolescent remission, which is, I think, a fancy term for we have no idea what the heck happened there. 

 

 And my grandfather had grown out of his asthma too. So it was just kind of dismissed as this thing that was just going to happen anyway. So about a year later, my mom suddenly died actually by her own hand, which is relevant to the story.

 

She committed suicide in that house. She did not move out. I moved out to live with my father.

 

And I’ll explain why that’s relevant a little bit later. And then a year after that, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Still unclear whether I actually had Lyme, but I did have the diagnosis and I did have the treatment.

 

And I was presenting with symptoms, but the Lyme is the great masquerader or the great mimicker. So it’s hard to say in retrospect. But the antibiotics probably did more damage to me, honestly, than was ever expected.

 

And that also is relevant to the story. Then through a series of crazy circumstances, I ended up having to drop out of high school. And I started working full time at the gas station. 

 

 And that’s where I met a guy who I fixed his tire, and he recruited me to come work on Wall Street. And it’s a fairy tale story. I ended up going at 16 years old up to New York City.

 

It was my first real job. And a year later, I ended up being the youngest licensed stockbroker in history. I’ve got a Guinness World Record on the wall there.

 

Total fairy tale. I was the least likely to probably end up on Wall Street, my high school. And I did it for about nine years, and I had a great career, and I was having fun until I wasn’t.

 

At which point, I decided to just walk away, and I put 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack and went traveling. And while I was away, I spent some time in Hawaii, and I was reading a local newspaper about a guy who had gotten sick, an article about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he was an employee. He blamed the mold in the building. 

 

 And at the time I was there, the building was in the middle of a remediation. Turns out it was the biggest mold remediation in modern history. It was a 50 million mold problem.

 

They had gutted the whole building and rebuilt it. It was a 90 million new construction and a 50 million remediation. So clearly there was some problems there.

 

But his story was so remarkable to me because he had developed adult onset asthma, something I had never heard of before, and all these allergies to things that he had never had a problem with. And so I had this deja vu moment where I thought, jeez, I wonder, I was brought back to my childhood. And jeez, I wonder if that’s why I was so sick and why I’m no longer allergic to anything. 

 

 I haven’t had to use an inhaler since I left that house. And so the pieces of the puzzle just really came together for me. And it was like a light bulb went on, and I became immediately fascinated, not with mold, as fascinating as it is, and it really truly is, but really the idea that buildings can make you sick.

 

That was a huge idea for me. And thankfully, 20-something years later, it’s become a big idea for any many millions of people, hopefully, who are listening to this podcast. But it was a new idea for me, and I think it was very much a new idea then. 

 

 And in recent years, I’ll circle back to what kind of got me to the recent years, but in recent years, I’ve become more fascinated by the idea that buildings can actually help you heal. So when a building is, in fact, in balance, that it is free of mold or moisture problems, and I emphasize moisture problems, because that’s what the basis or the root cause of all of this stuff is, is moisture issues. And also free of a high chemical burden, then the people who are living in those buildings suddenly have more abundant health in general.

 

In other words, their autoimmune disease will tend to simmer down. And other ailments that are not directly tied to mold, in an obvious way, suddenly seem to go by the wayside. So, but between those two awarenesses, the idea that a building can make you sick and the idea that they can heal has been quite a journey. 

 

 And it’s been a journey of awareness for me as I learned more and more about how buildings work. And so just really quick, sort of the arc of it was that I came back from Hawaii armed with curiosity, took a job working for a mold remediation contractor and quickly saw that they were a bunch of thugs and realized that there was actually probably an opportunity to help protect the consumer from these guys and to also learn in the process. So I began doing free inspections at night to help people and also see really what that was like.

 

And people started offering me money. So I decided that that was probably a good path for me. And right around that time, I discovered that a guy who had been training mold sniffing dogs in Florida and trained a mold sniffing dog. 

 

 And so I thought that was brilliant. And so I went down to meet him and ended up coming home with one of the world’s first mold sniffing dogs. My family thought I’d lost my mind.

 

My friends all thought I’d lost my mind. Here’s the youngest licensed stop worker in the history of the mold sniffing dog. So there were some questions around that.

 

But it turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. So we ended up with a lot of national press. The press descended upon us.

 

They were so curious about this dog who could go into a building and in a few minutes find all the hidden mold. And so we had Channel 6 Action News try to debunk us. They hid a bunch of mold in the house. 

 

 And they had us go in and we found it all in three minutes. So instead of debunking us, they endorsed us. And so that just created this onslaught.

 

And so it never stopped. It was Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover Home Edition twice. All these shows and I’ve got boxes of books and magazines and newspapers and just like it was, I never had to advertise.

 

And that company became 1-800-Got-Mold?, the mold inspection company. And so we helped thousands of families restore their health and peace of mind through this process.

 

But I was largely taught how to do this by my dog. In fact, she kind of drove, she showed me where mold hides. And then I started teaching other people based on what she taught me. 

 

 And so in many ways, my mold education came from Oreo, my four legged mold detective. And then in recent years, I became more and more frustrated by the fact that people, most people couldn’t afford a professional inspection through us. And this is a major problem in the industry because it is in fact, the gold standard professional inspection does not, you cannot replace a professional inspection by qualified, qualified inspector.

 

So I then took my resources in terms of industry relationships and sort of embedded knowledge to create an at home test kit that let people use the same device that the professionals use, but without the cost or hassle of trying to find an higher one. And so that’s why we created the GOT MOLD Test Kit. And that brings us here to today. 

 

 Yeah.

 

And it’s amazing because I know that it captures samples from the air, right? And it compares the amount you have outside. That’s obviously, it’s naturally occurring.

 

We lit, you know, we’re in an environment with mold, but we don’t want it inside the house where there’s extra moisture and growing and causing health issues. And I loved it when I got it. And I love the concept of how you can reuse that unit that captures the air.

 

You just have to get the cassette tapes. Is it called cassette tapes?

 

Just the cassettes, yeah. It’s just cassettes. 

 

 Because I remember we were trying to buy a house in Lake Tahoe in 2020. And, you know, obviously I wanted it to be checked for mold because it’s Tahoe. And a lot of the houses there, every time we looked at it, it’s like full of mold on the windows.

 

It’s their vacation homes and no one’s really maintaining them, especially in the wintertime. But then someone had told me that the ERME was the gold standard. So I got myself, I also got myself an ERME and collected my own dust while the other guy, the mold inspector did the cassette testing, which his, I don’t think, I think his, the cassette showed like it was, there was nothing. 

 

 Then my ERME was like, there’s mold, blah, blah. And, but there were signs of mold, like it smelled messy. But we ended up not getting the house, even though the lady was like, we’re going to, we’ll cover mold remediation.

 

And I’m like, well, we don’t even know like that, you know, the extent of the mold damage or whatever. Because once you take, right, once you take a wall apart, it’s like, oh, you’re going to keep taking walls off.

 

It can be Pandora’s Box.

 

Yeah. Yeah. So, so tell me, like, you mentioned one, you guys owned, you did 1-800-Got-Mold or something like that. 

 

 So how is that? Do you guys like take off walls and like, how’s that process when you do like mold inspection and the remediation?

 

So right, right now there’s, it’s kind of like the wild, wild west. People just do whatever they think is, I think honestly, it’s profit driven mostly, and there’s no standardized inspection method, but there is an IICRC S530 inspection standard coming out, believe it or not. So this is an industry standard that’s put out by the Institute of IICRC, which is the Institute of Inspection, Restoration, and Cleaning Contractors.

 

So they have a water damage standard and they have a mold remediation standard. So that’s very much established, those two things. How do you handle water damage when it happens?

 

What are the timelines? What are the procedures? What are the dos and don’ts? 

 

 That’s very well established. There’s the rules of the road, right? I’ve got the books right here.

 

Same thing with mold remediation. But there’s never been a Britain standard for how to do an inspection. So when I first started doing this four years ago, which is crazy, it was the wildest of the Wild West, right?

 

Because there was no such thing as a mold inspection company, quite frankly. We were one of the first pure mold inspection companies out there. So the goal was always to be highly effective, but non-destructive, minimally invasive.

 

And so the worst we ever did was drill the hole in the wall five sixteenths in diameter, and then we patch it afterwards. So there was no concern about quote unquote cross-contamination, which is really not that much of a concern, as it turns out. But people were worried about that. 

 

 So our process was to do a very comprehensive intake. Sit, first of all, the phone. We talk for half an hour and then oftentimes sit at the kitchen table for half an hour to an hour in some cases.

 

You know, it was a real, you know, we were going to learn about the building history and also the healthy occupants. You know, buildings don’t call you, people call you. People have problems.

 

Buildings have issues that need to be addressed. But the people are the ones with the problems. That’s why you’re there.

 

And so we need to understand why they’re having a problem. And because sometimes it isn’t the mold and sometimes it’s just one piece. And so it’s not a one size fits all.

 

All of this is very unique. It’s bespoke. Nobody’s, this is biologically unique, but I should say a bio individual. 

 

 And everybody interacts with their home in a different way. In fact, five people living in the same building will have five different responses to an environmental concern. In some cases, some people think that they’re not having a reaction at all until it gets cleaned up and suddenly they feel better and they realize that they were sick too.

 

So, you know, really spending a lot more time talking about the health and the building history and whatever we can gather. And then a physical inspection, which is a very comprehensive, detailed, I mean, we would follow a very, a search pattern doing a visual inspection throughout the entire house on a circular, sort of spiral fashion from the bottom all the way to top. We do an outside walk looking for defects that could lead to intrusion, looking for any signs of mold or moisture problems indoors. 

 

 You know, obviously recording all of it. And then we would also use infrared thermal imaging cameras, laser particle counters, and of course mold sniffing dogs. And so the combination of those things, we would layer on these different screening methods so that we could get a better idea where the moisture problems were.

 

I want to make this clear. We were calling it a mold inspection. People were calling us for a mold inspection, but we were really doing moisture inspections.

 

And so all of our tools are really geared around, with the exception of the dog, finding moisture, moisture meters, infrared thermal imaging, all that stuff. And so the testing came at the end. And this is a really important point.

 

Everybody wants a silver bullet, whether it be for their health or for their building. They want to have one test. They want to have one supplement. 

 

 They want to have one affirmation. They want to have one magic wand that just solve all their problems. And just after being on this planet for a few years, I realized that that is just not the way things work.

 

These things are cumulative and complimentary, if all goes well. And so it’s a series of good decisions done on a consistent basis, usually, that gets you to where you need to be. And so when it comes to inspection and testing and all that stuff, a lot of people want to have the cart lead the horse and they want to do the testing in the absence of or to the exclusion of a professional inspection.

 

And that’s really where the mistake is. So the same thing goes with a professional inspection. As we would go through this process, doing all these screening methods, to get to the point where we could actually tell people where we wanted to test. 

 

 So we’d hone in on areas that had a musty odor, visible signs of moisture issues, symptoms that seemed to be more pronounced in those areas, right? So these are the things that we tell people to do as a consumer in your own home. Tune in to your senses, you know?

 

Think about where there’s been leaks, floods, dampness, condensation on windows, water bugs, these kinds of things. Rust might show up in places, right? Pull the corner or the carpet away in a room that has a moisture problem, you’ll often find that the textures are moldy or rusty, right?

 

So anytime you see moisture that can create rust, it can create mold. And so you’ve got, all you have to have is a little bit of dampness. And so in terms of fun facts here or like quick things for people to be aware of, mold grows really quickly. 

 

 In as little as 48 hours, a moisture problem can turn into a mold problem. And why is that? Well, it’s because you have to have the five things, really.

 

You have to have spores, of course. You have to have a food source. We build our houses out of mold food, okay?

 

Mold spores are everywhere, as you mentioned earlier. So we already have mold spores everywhere. In fact, current research has shown that all the sheet rock that’s on the market has mold spores embedded in it.

 

It comes pre-inoculated with some of the most virulent spores ever. So you don’t even need to have them wafting in from outdoors. They’re already there. 

 

 All you have to do is get something, get your sheetrock wet and stay wet for more than 48 hours. And so you got to have spores, which are abundant. You got to have a food source, which is abundant.

 

We’re building our houses out of it. You’ve got to have oxygen, right? Because believe it or not, mold requires oxygen.

 

And you’ve got to have the right temperature. Molds like different temperatures just like we do. And you have to have moisture.

 

And so, of all those things, we can’t, we, we, we, we’re, they’re already here, right? Mold likes the same temperature. The food’s everywhere.

 

The, the oxygen is obviously here. It likes all the same stuff that we do. And it likes moisture, but just a little more than we do. 

 

 So whenever there’s a moisture problem, the stars just go into alignment. It’s like a combination lock, right? And then the metabolic process begins and mold begins to grow.

 

And so that happens within 48 hours. If the conditions are just right, 72 hours is really considered to be the threshold for insurance companies. Look at water damage that’s more than three days old and call it mold, whether it’s molding or not.

 

In fact, they won’t pay for water damage repairs that are more than three days old because it’s considered mold. So it’s very important that if you have a moisture problem, you act very quickly. And so when we’re doing an inspection, we’re looking for signs of moisture, past and present, and also anything we could do to prevent it. 

 

 And then we’re going to go do the testing in areas, both air sampling, surface sampling, or in cases where we believe there’s mold in a wall, we’ll drill a hole into a wall. And then we take a lot of information from the observational data, from the customer’s testimony. You know, what did they tell us about the building history?

 

And we stack all that up. And then we also use the testing to help us map out where remediation needs to be done, or in some cases where investigative demolition may need to be done. And so that’s the point where you might actually bring in a contractor and say, let’s cut some holes in the walls.

 

And we’re going to do this under specific conditions. We’re going to put a tent around that workspace so that the dust that’s created during that work stays in that work area, doesn’t contaminate the other space. A lot of people just say, I’ll just cut a small hole. 

 

 It’s a little hole like that. I mean, if you cut a one square foot hole or even a six inch hole, you can contaminate an entire house that way. So you want to be cheap on it, cheap people pay twice.

 

So mold inspection business, unfortunately, most of the mold inspection companies out there right now are either tied to a remediation contractor, which means that they have an ulterior motive, or they’re in many cases working with functional docs that are referring patients to them, and they’re high on ERMI because it creates so much fear and panic, and it creates a follow-up inspection or follow-up remediation, detox protocols. I mean, there’s avalanche of money being wasted on unnecessary and often harmful interventions, both in the building and in people’s physicality. Based upon ERMI tests and these mycotoxin neuron panels, it’s a big scheme.

 

I mean, I stopped short of saying it’s a scam because I don’t think many of the people that are doing it know it, but it’s a big money grab, and unfortunately, I think more people are being harmed than being helped. Yeah. 

 

 So what is the problem with ERMI testing?

 

Oh, it’s a long list. In fact, you know what I’ll do? I mean, it really is.

 

It’s like every problem you could have with a test. I’m going to drop this into the chat so you can put it in the show notes. I wrote an article about this because it is such a massive problem.

 

So ERMI was created 20-something years ago by Steve Vesper at the EPA. He’s an EPA staffer, good guy, researcher. The idea was to create a dust test to help evaluate whether the moldiness of a home had an impact on asthma.

 

So they had the asthma measured, whether they were uncontrolled and to what degree, and there’s quality of life assessments, all these things to assess the asthma conditions, health care utilization, things like that. Then there’s this other piece which is the dust in the home, being the specimen to analyze. They use a technology called PCR, which we all know of from COVID, and it’s a very specific DNA-based technology, which allows you to target organisms based upon their DNA. 

 

 And so at the time, it was a very new thing. So they went, first of all, everyone talks about 1,000 homes being used to create this. It wasn’t that way.

 

They sampled 32 homes in Ohio, which is not exactly a geographically diverse data set. And then they found these common molds that they determined to be background. And then they also found molds that tended to be more abundant in homes that had uncontrolled asthma.

 

And so they created what they call a panel of 36 molds. And some of them were background. I think 10 are background and 26 are considered indicators.

 

And so there’s a ratio, there’s some math to figure out whether or not there’s a quote unquote alert condition. And then there’s this numerical output, which is what they call your ERMI score. And it’s a gradient number. 

 

 What we find, first of all, it’s a 20 year old genomics test, okay? I can’t think of anything that’s advanced more in the last 20 years than genomics. The fact that we’re still using a quote unquote test that’s that old, that only looks at 36 species when there’s 100,000 known to science, roughly, that have been identified and described.

 

This is extremely narrow. This is like driving down the highway using a laser beam for headlights instead of your high beams, right? It’s just like you’re gonna run into something or you’re gonna miss a lot.

 

And so it’s like it’s unbelievable. Also, the test itself, if you Google ERMI EPA, it tells you right there. If you Google EPA ERMI, the website shows up, epa.gov, should I use ERMI to test my home?

 

And it says unequivocally no. ERMI is a research tool developed by the EPA for the program I just described, and it is only to be used as a research tool. It’s so bad that a grant was given out by EPA to develop a new test because it’s being so badly abused. 

 

 So everyone says it’s an EPA test. It is not an EPA test. An EPA staffer developed it, by the way, and got paid royalties, which I think is a conflict of interest.

 

I don’t think he should have got it because he developed it on EPA as much. So I think the US taxpayers should be getting those royalties instead of Steve Vesper. But the point is that it is a test that is not a test.

 

It is a research tool, and it is wildly prone to false positives. In fact, so many people use it, and whenever I beat up ERMI, they go, oh, I don’t use the score. I’m like, that is ERMI.

 

It is Environmental Relative Moldiness Indexed. The number is the ERMI. The method is PCR. 

 

 You can use PCR if you want, but the score is what actually makes it ERMI. And so it is also the standardized testing method. So where do you grab the dust?

 

They tell you, oh, just grab it from here, grab it from there, use a Swiffer if you want. That’s not the way it works. If you go to the doctor and get a biopsy, you have a standardized method.

 

They grab one piece and they send that off. One piece. If you took a biopsy from the back of your calf and from your forearm and stuck them in the same sample and sent it to the lab, and it comes back with melanoma, you’re going to say, what?

 

You know, and Ermi is like, no, just grab dust all over and send it, you know, like it’s extremely nonspecific. I mean, it’s specific in the sense that it actually, by definition, finds the molds that it’s targeting. But it is a wildly inaccurate tool when it comes to diagnostics. 

 

 It is not a diagnostic tool. It is a screening tool at best. But again, the index is so wildly prone to false positives.

 

And the reason for that is because it actually takes the PCR. This is kind of technical. But the PCR targets the genetic material.

 

And so if there’s a spore that’s been broken up into a bunch of pieces, because it’s old and it’s been turned over in the dust, because that’s what happens. It just breaks down into, you know, smaller, smaller bits, PCR will take, count all of those pieces as organisms. And so you can end up with a Stachybotrys spore, which is the black mold that everybody worries about, which by the way is worrisome, because it’s indicative of major chronic water problem.

 

But it’s not the only mold to worry about. It’s just the one that’s got the big bad name. If that spore breaks up into 20 pieces, it shows up as 20 spores, it’s not 20 spores. 

 

 And so it’s very, it counts very poorly. And so as a result, it amplifies the outcomes in a way that creates a lot of fear and panic, which walks you right into the mouth of predators, honestly. And so there’s a million reasons why ERME is a problem.

 

And I actually think it’s a tool of abuse. It’s not a test.

 

I don’t get why they call it the gold standard now.

 

Because it’s been hijacked. And it’s more, it’s got more of a cult following. And you know, you can tell how inaccurate it is.

 

If you bring it up, people get mad. You know what I mean? It’s not, it’s not objective.

 

It’s more like, you know, it’s like challenging religion. You know, don’t talk about religion or politics or Ermi. Because, you know, people will get all hot under the collar. 

 

 Similar by the, similarly, people will say that the Petri dishes, you should use these Petri dishes. Did you see these? They’re very common in the hardware store, you know, but also a lot of doctors or providers use this.

 

I’ll drop another piece. I just wrote this. I just published this about these.

 

We call them the mood rings of mold testing. It’s like a novelty. But people are making very important decisions based upon these tests that are not tests.

 

They are, in fact, glorified science experiments at best. What I will say is this. My test, which uses the same device that the professionals use but makes it simpler and easier to do, or any test, even a mold dog, you do not make important decisions based upon one data point. 

 

 You do not immediately call a remediator because you have got a high ERME or a Petri dish or even a mold sniffing dog or even high spore counts. And also, because you need to have contacts, you need to have more information, you need to be able to paint a picture. And that picture is the presence of a moisture problem past or present.

 

You have to find it. Mold grows on surfaces. If you do not find mold growing on a surface, that is the bottom line.

 

Mold does not grow in the air. Does that make sense? So you have to find a moisture problem.

 

If you do not find a moisture problem, you probably do not have a mold problem, especially if it is not showing up in air samples, and you cannot find a moisture problem. Chances are you do not have one. That being said, if you have symptoms that do not improve when you leave the building, you can still have a sick building and not have a mold problem.

 

Okay. 

 

 And that is a very common issue with chemicals. We build modern buildings with, first of all, paper mache, very mold-friendly, and then we layer them. We just put, we line them with petrochemical finishes, polyurethane, paints, adhesives, varnishes, and then we order our furniture from overseas, and it comes in from Aldehyde and stain-resistant coatings, all this kind of stuff.

 

And so, and then the buildings are very, very tight. And we breathe 13 to 15 times a minute, which comes up to 20,000 times a day. And little kids breathe a lot more.

 

Little babies breathe up to 100,000 times a day. And that means that they actually have five times the exposure per pound of body weight than we do to the same pollutants. So your baby next to you, breathing the same air, has five times the exposure to the same pollutants. 

 

 And so, and our pets are also similarly overexposed. And also, by the way, they’re also closer to the ground. So all those pollutants will settle, and then they’re directly exposed.

 

And then there’s something called incidental ingestion, by the way, where they eat that stuff accidentally. And some estimates are that that’s upwards of 100 milligrams a day, which is like a couple of capsules, you know? It’s like, it’s not nothing.

 

So when we’re looking at a building, we look at, you know, is there new construction? Have there been recent renovations? You know, do we have any significant changes?

 

Have you gotten a lot of new furniture, new carpet? You know, what kind of chemicals are you using, if any, for your cleaning? Do you have unventilated kitchen exhaust?

 

You know, these kinds of things. And that’s why we spend so much time sitting at the table, talking to people about their building history. It’s not just about mold, it’s about healthy buildings and eliminating things, because mold is very scary. 

 

 And it’s a four-letter word, right? It’s a bad word, but it’s also, and it’s affecting 47% of homes, according to Lawrence Berkeley Labs. However, I just don’t, I think it’s gotten, I think everyone seems to be mold sick these days.

 

And I think we need to sort of dial that back down. It went from nobody understanding it when I first started to suddenly everybody has it. I think there’s probably somewhere in the middle.

 

But then we, this also is kind of the gateway drug to indoor air quality, which is really good for me, because I think that once we start having the conversation about mold, we can say, okay, mold makes musty, mold makes gases as well. And guess what? We have a lot of manmade ones too.

 

And so if you really want to talk about indoor air quality, you basically have to talk about mold and dampness. And you have to talk about chemicals. And there’s an overlap because the chemicals mold produces are very similar to the manmade chemicals, which is why we end up with cross sensitivities. 

 

 Mold sensitivity becomes a chemical sensitivity. Chemical sensitivities create mold sensitivities. And so we can’t really in good conscience have this conversation about mold and health and not talk about VOCs, volatile organic compounds, which are the chemicals we’re talking about.

 

Yeah. That’s a good point. Because I know every time someone, like all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, my kid just won’t stop coughing.

 

Everyone’s like, oh, you might have mold. You have a mold. And then they’re like, oh, what should I do?

 

What should I test? What test should I get? You know, all these things.

 

And but I like you said, it’s kind of like a good, I guess a good way to kind of give them that awareness about air quality and how it affects their health and just mold is the gateway. 

 

 It is. It is. I mean, I hate to say it that way, but, you know, we, my job is to create awareness and to help people understand the impact of indoor air quality.

 

You know, there’s a big movement with Make America Healthy Again. And I love that. And I’m a big fan of the whole, you know, let’s get our food supply clean.

 

You know, it’s, you can’t go out to dinner without eating glyphosate. You know, like it’s really disgusting what’s going on right now. It’s, it’s, it’s, I, you know, these are my two big passions, really.

 

And I, and I always say, if you really want to get healthy, it’s air, food, and attitude. But the Make America Healthy Again is exciting to me because it, it’s, we need to, for the nation to heal, we need to heal our soil and we need to heal the food supply and all that stuff. And that’s foundational.

 

But we only eat three times a day. And if you’re intermittent fasting, maybe less, right? But the thing about breathing is that you’re breathing all day. 

 

 You can control what goes in your mouth, but you really can’t control what goes into your lungs unless you’re in your own home. And even then, you’re not aware of it unless you’ve done the testing and you built this house from scratch and you spec’d out the materials and all that stuff. And guess what?

 

That’s like browning air, right? So most people are not aware of what they’re breathing and they can’t control what they’re breathing and they have to breathe. So you can go three weeks without shelter.

 

You can go three weeks without food, three days without water and three minutes without air. And so you start looking at how disproportionately we focus on food and water and how we ignore air. And this is the thing that I am most passionate about because you breathe 20,000 times a day, it comes out to 2,000 gallons, which is enough to fill a swimming pool. 

 

 And by the way, that’s also 30 pounds of air. If you can imagine that, 30 pounds of air every day that you breathe, which means that it’s your single largest environmental exposure by orders of magnitude. And yet it’s an afterthought.

 

And so because we also, by the way, don’t even leave our buildings anymore. We used to spend 90% of our time indoors, but we’d commute between buildings. And so we’d kind of go from building to car capsule to another building.

 

So we’re kind of indoors the whole time. Now we’re just in the same capsule, breathing the same air. So you could call that a repetitive stress.

 

If that air is not pristine, you are the filter, right? And so my father used to say, buy a filter or be a filter. And I like that because it’s true. 

 

 So these things are cumulative. And you may not have a lot, but if you do anything 20,000 times, take 20,000 grains of sand and put it on your desk. You’ll end up with a nice little pile there.

 

So that’s what’s happening on a cumulative basis. It’s this Sorati’s principle, this little bit they add up. So it’s extremely important that you have that foundational baseline so that your home can actually allow you to heal from the other things.

 

The other offenses and insults that the outdoor environment brings us, right? Our indoor environment should be a sanctuary.

 

Yeah, it should be a safe space. So what would be, can you share some strategies that we can use inside our homes? Let’s say we can’t do the task, we can’t do a remediation.

 

Are there ways for us to still be able to live in our homes? Because we can’t move out, you know, like all these things, right? Are there ways that we can make the building more livable even though there’s some mold in there? 

 

 Sure. Well, there’s a couple of things. First of all, the biggest predictor of a mold problem in a building is the way the outside is maintained.

 

So a lot of it has to do with maintenance. In fact, there’s a study that showed with a high degree of predictability that you could assess essentially the wellness of an asthmatic in a home based upon visual indicators of the exterior of the building. So it really is a very telling thing.

 

So maintain your building. This is the kind of thing where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. A little bit of caulk at the windows, so water doesn’t get in.

 

It costs you 10 bucks to buy a tube of caulk. Maybe it’s 20 bucks now, who knows? But inflation.

 

But it’s things like that. You want to make sure that you’re maintaining the building as best you can. And if you’re not able to move out, at least take care of your home. 

 

 Listen, your building is an extension of your immune system. Let me just say it this way, okay? It’s an exoskin or an exoskeleton.

 

When a building gets sick, you get sick. When the building heals, you heal. It is a direct symbiotic relationship.

 

This is you are the immune system of the building. Okay. And if you look at the building like a body, it’s got an HVAC system, which is lungs, and you got an electrical system, which is like the nervous system.

 

The plumbing is like the circulatory system, and you are the mitochondria. You are the immune system. And if you fail to do your job, the building will not do well.

 

And if the building doesn’t do well, you don’t do well. It’s a loop. It’s a feedback loop. 

 

 And you take care of that building, it takes care of you. I mean, it seems weird, but it’s this inanimate organism that we live within, that we are inhabiting, that doesn’t do well if we’re gone, right? Uninhabited homes fall apart.

 

And we don’t do very well without our building either, without our shell, kind of like hermit crabs in a sense, right? So, you know, we really need these shells. So, this is a really important relationship, probably, I would say, the most important relationship you have in terms of your health and longevity.

 

And yet, it’s this thing we take for granted, because this is what humans do. We take for granted the things that are closest to us, our relationships, air, buildings. You know, this is what humans do. 

 

 So, I’m asking people to zoom out and zoom back in and refocus on this in a way that actually puts it into perspective, the vast importance. And also, the fact that a lot of this has to do with being attentive enough to take care of things when they’re cheap or free. Instead of waiting and then, you know, mold is very expensive and the more you’re exposed to it, the sicker you get, the less inclined you’re going to be to do those repairs.

 

You know, so get ahead of this stuff or get to the mold before it gets to you, you know? But, so, what are the things that people can do? First of all, maintain the building.

 

That’s key. If you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something. So, that means moisture issues, if you see any signs of dampness, if you see a leak, a flood, you got to clean it up immediately. 

 

 If you smell a musty smell, that means something’s growing. So, you need to find the moisture source. That’s imperative.

 

If you don’t know how to do that, that’s why you hire a professional, to find the source of the moisture. And if you feel something, then you want to take action immediately too. The things that you can do for an indoor air quality problem are limited to three options.

 

You can either fix the source, which can sometimes be cost prohibitive. You can filter the air, get yourself a really good air purifier with a lot of carbon. Austin Air is one of our sponsors.

 

And they’re one of our sponsors because I love the filter. I don’t love the filter because they’re one of our sponsors. And they’ve got a lot of carbon, probably the densest carbon in the industry next to IQ Air, which is another really great air purifier. 

 

 Not such a great company. Great, great, great, great air purifier. And so you want to make sure that you’re running at 24, 7, 365.

 

And you want to swap out the carbon filters at whatever cadence that the manufacturer suggests because they get saturated. That’s what takes the musty smell out. The emerging science is that the mycotoxins, which everyone worries about, are probably responsible for a small percentage of our mold-related illness.

 

And the musty smell, the chemicals that are in it, are probably responsible for most of it. So we want to get that musty smell. And the VOCs that are from the building will also be captured in that.

 

And so the carbon filter is a key investment. And they range from a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks. But you can get a really good air purifier from Austin Air for between $500 and $1000. 

 

 And I highly recommend them in bedrooms and areas of where you spend the most time. Also doing things like getting humidity gauges and putting them in places like basements and crawl spaces and places that are outside and keeping your humidity between 40% and 60%, which means that in basements you’re probably always going to have to have a dehumidifier, especially during the summer months. That’s a small investment that you can make that pays big dividends.

 

And do yourself a favor. Have it set up so that it automatically drains because no one ever, ever goes down and empties it out. So like, don’t fool yourself, you know?

 

Like you’re just not going to do it. And so you’re going to get down there and smell the messy smell and go, oh, I should have done it. Well, just there’s a hole in the back, attach a tube to it, put it in the sink or in the sump up and call it a day. 

 

 So modern humidity, keep it between 40 and 60%. So the other thing you can do is you can dilute. You can bring fresh air in.

 

And unfortunately, it’s not really practical because you’ve got hot air, cold air, humid air throughout the seasons. So bringing fresh air from outside can sometimes actually amplify the problem. And if you live in a place where there’s a lot of background pollution, like near a gas station or near an industrial facility or something like that, opening the windows is not a great idea.

 

So in those cases, there are things called energy recovery ventilators and heat recovery ventilators that are less cost-prohibitive than a mold remediation project. And they exchange air for you. So they expel the stale air and they bring in fresh air.

 

And then they transfer the energy from heat and cold so that you don’t actually just spew. It’s not like having an exhaust vent. You’re actually transferring thermal energy from the inside to the air coming in so that the air coming in is actually warmed or cooled depending upon whether you’re heating or cooling your house. 

 

 And those can be extremely effective at dealing with an air quality problem when you don’t have the capacity or the finances to do a full remediation. So, but in all cases, if you cannot afford to do remediation, you must find the money to fix the moisture problem. Because it will compound, it will mushroom, no pun intended, and make it turn into mushrooms.

 

And that means that your building is rotting. Congratulations. So you can go from mold to rot.

 

So if the mold problem mushrooms, literally, your building just went from being inflamed and sick to having cancer. You know what I mean? And so to use the building as a biology metaphor.

 

And so just to reiterate that, there are three things you can do with a mold problem. You can fix the source, which is remediation. Sometimes, often cost prohibitive, not always possible or practical, especially if you’re renting. 

 

 Number two, you can filter the air. This is something everybody can do and everybody should do. We live in buildings that are shedding particles, the paint and all the little bits from stuffed animals and carpet and all that stuff.

 

Where does it go? It goes into the dust and then it gets retrained. You’re breathing all that stuff.

 

It’s not just mold spores. It’s not just parts of the building. It’s parts of all the synthetic stuff that we have in our homes.

 

Air purifiers are a necessary appliance in every home. Get ones that have good carbon filters and then replace them on a regular basis. The third thing you can do is dilute the air, which is open the windows whenever possible. 

 

 I highly recommend that people do that anyway if the weather allows because if you clean your house too much, actually believe it or not, you’ll end up impacting your immune system in an adversely negative way. We need the microbiome in our building and the data on that is very strong that homes with a highly diverse microbiome have lower cases of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease. And the opposite is also true.

 

So homes that have low diversity, where there’s a lot of antimicrobials being used or they over clean with sanitizers or even just over clean, too much HEPA, but too much HEPA vacuuming. Those homes have much higher cases of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, and they’re even saying autism now. And so I think it’s important that we clean, keep things clean and dry, run your air purifiers, and then whenever possible, open your windows.

 

I’m doing good then because I don’t over clean.

 

Well, that’s one of the side benefits of having four kids. You don’t have time. 

 

 I have to tell my brother that because I have a brother who’s very OCD and then his kids have asthma. And I’m like, yeah, because you’re microbiome. People also, yeah, people tend to forget, like they over clean, they get obsessed with using all the full of chemicals, antimicrobial, cleaners.

 

Fragrances.

 

Yeah.

 

Bad stuff.

 

Yeah, yeah. We need to remember that our homes also have a microbiome just like us.

 

That’s right.

 

It needs to be balanced.

 

I think about it like matryoshka dolls, you know, those Russian stacking dolls.

 

Yeah. 

 

 It’s like the microbiome in us, on us and around us. And there’s a downstream and upstream effect when you start messing with them. And so it has to be respected.

 

We are microbial. Our buildings have this, most of the microbes in our building, only about 100 of the known bacteria, 100, 100, 100 of the known bacterium in the world are responsible for major human disease out of the millions of species. You know, it’s 100.

 

It’s insane. And, you know, so we have a very funny view, it’s actually not so funny, a skewed view on the way the microbial world works. And we think that all bacteria is bad and that mold is all bad.

 

In fact, most of it is benevolent or at least benign.

 

Yeah, that’s so good to know. Right, I wanna pedal back a little bit. You mentioned about how with your mom passing and all that stuff, let’s circle back to that one so we can share.

 

Yeah, good call. Thank you for closing that loop. Okay, so when I was 14, my mother committed suicide. 

 

 And that was not a surprise because she was mentally ill and she was also an alcoholic. And so you can’t really pin the tail on the donkey and say this causes that. But as I got into the mold space, I was really, and I still am obsessed with reading research and seeing what people are learning.

 

And there was a big Brown University study that came out in 2008. They had initially been questioning or trying to debunk a study that came out of Oxford University that found that the suggested mold and depression were related. And they put together this 6,000-person study, it’s huge, where they also did the same kind of thing, where they had a quality-of-life questionnaire.

 

Basically, like, how are you feeling, you know?

 

Yeah. 

 

 And then they inquired about the conditions in their home. And they found that there was a very high correlation between mold and dampness, doors, and depression. And they stopped short of saying why, because that wasn’t the purpose of the study.

 

Subsequent studies have gone further. But pause at some questions. For example, is it possible that there’s a chemical thing, that mold makes you depressed, you know, that alters your chemistry in some way?

 

And recent research with animal studies showed that, in fact, that there is a relationship there. I’ll talk more about that in a second. The other thing was that maybe it’s just that people who are saying, I live in a building with a mold problem that I haven’t fixed, that’s depressing by itself, right?

 

The disempowerment of having a mold problem that you know of, that you haven’t fixed is probably because you can’t fix it. You’re either renting or you’re otherwise financially challenged, maybe you’re the husband or wife or doesn’t care. There’s a million reasons why people can’t or won’t get that stuff done. 

 

 But needless to say, a good percentage of those people probably are pretty depressed about it. That was fascinating to me and that gave me some insights into my mom’s troubles. Then a few years later, I was introduced.

 

Actually, I got a phone call from Dr. Joan Bennett at Rutgers University. She’d seen me and Oreo, my mold dog, on, I forget, one of the maybe New Jersey 12 or something like that. And she said, I’ve heard about your mold sniffing dog.

 

I’m a mold researcher and I would very much like to meet her. And it’s okay if you come to. Drove up from Princeton, New Jersey, where I lived at the time, up to just one exit up to Rutgers, New Brunswick.

 

Did a little demonstration for her. And then Joan showed me her lab and showed me the work that she’s been doing. And she had had her own mold experience, which was that she had a house in New Orleans that got flooded during Hurricane Katrina. 

 

 And so she had evacuated and then she went back down to see the damage. And so she brought a bunch of sampling equipment, went into the house wearing a respirator, thinking she was protecting herself. And the musty smell was very strong coming through the respirator.

 

And so she was, within minutes, she was feeling ill. She left and she went back inside and she felt ill again. The smell was overpowering.

 

And so she kept saying, as a mold researcher, I knew I was protecting myself, but something was in that odor. And the science on this is very scant up until that point. So she immediately realized that she didn’t want to go in any further, and she abandoned that. 

 

 But she realized that she needed to study the musty smell. And so she came back to New Jersey armed with a whole bunch of curiosity, not to mention some mold samples, and began looking into the compounds, the chemicals that are in the musty odor. And she found that one chemical, in particular, called the mushroom alcohol, one octant, it’s abundant in a lot of moldy buildings.

 

And it’s kind of the distinctive musty note within the musty potpourri of chemicals. And she began testing that one, she’s a basic scientist, so she’s doing simple experiments to characterize things in nature. And so she began exposing the musty, this one compound, to, there were plants, I think, I want to say pea shoots, the other one was drosophila flies, fruit flies, and these are special fruit flies, they actually fluoresce when they produce dopamine. 

 

 It’s an amazing way you can buy online. And so she began exposing these fruit flies to the musty odor, and she found out that they stop producing dopamine. They start flying down and set into the light, they stop reproducing, they develop locomotor disorder, which basically their arms and legs start acting independently.

 

And eventually what she characterized as Parkinsonian symptoms, neurological dysfunction, and premature death. And so subsequent animal studies have gone back and confirmed that and found even more degradation. And they also found out that on a cellular level, that that one particular compound is 40 times more toxic than toluene, which is a group one carcinogen.

 

And so it’s not just that it causes all these neurological issues, it also is patently toxic, highly toxic on a cellular level. And so she decided that these compounds, which we call microbial volatile organic compounds, are masking, the term masks, the toxicity. We call mycotoxins mycotoxins, and everyone’s scared about that. 

 

 But there’s other components that MOLD makes that are equally toxic, if not more toxic, that are not called toxins. They’re not classified as toxins. And so she has decided that there should be an examination of the naming convention, essentially, to call these things volatoxins, combining volatil and toxin.

 

And so I’m a big fan. She happens to be on our summit, GOT MOLD Summit, which I highly encourage anyone. And I would love for you to share this with your group.

 

Go to gotmoldsummit.com. And she’s one of my favorite interviews. There’s 34 of the top experts in the world there.

 

And most of them are researchers with nothing to sell. In fact, many of them were very sheepish about even being on it because they’d never been interviewed before. So it’s quite a cute bunch.

 

But brilliant people doing great work. And Joan is one of my favorites because she’s really brought a lot of awareness to the idea that the musty smell, long-dismissed as simply an aesthetic nuisance, is actually a health hazard. 

 

 Yeah.

 

Yeah. And impacts our neurological state, impacts our mental health. And there’s also mold rage.

 

There’s all sorts of emotional dysregulation that comes from mold exposure. And inflammation, you know, mold is an, is an, is an inflammatory gene. Yeah.

 

And that, that’s indisputable. We, and many of the psychiatrists these days are looking at mold, rather, depression and anxiety as an inflammatory disease. You find very specific inflammatory profiles with cytokines and, and other markers in people that are diagnosed with depression.

 

And so, you know, the idea that mold might be linked to depression is kind of obvious at this point. Although, although I don’t think necessarily widely recognized, but it should be. And so, you know, I, now looking back at it, I, I obviously dodge a bullet by moving out. 

 

 And, you know, and who knows whether or not my mom would have gotten better had she moved out, but I certainly couldn’t have helped.

 

That’s very fascinating about the musty smell and the chemical compound it releases. Can we tie this back to why you say that the mycotoxins, urine tests are not really that useful or, I don’t know, because I know, like, I don’t ever really use that test either, because I know you kind of have to do like a, you have to take something to make sure that the mold, whatever mold in you is releasing, like, you know, releasing their waste in your body and that it will be seen in your own waste, right?

 

Yeah, they want you to, sometimes they want you to take a binder or what they call a, you know, a glutathione, something to provoke. 

 

 Yeah, provoke, that’s the word I was looking for.

 

So, they’ll, but my understanding is that, and there’s some conflicting opinions on this, it shouldn’t be an opinion thing, but it is, because these things are very poorly researched. You know, this, we’re talking about veterinary medicine. I just want to be clear.

 

The, my, none of these tests are validated by any public health agency. Not to say that public health agencies have a great reputation these days, but certainly they’re better than just like, hey, we’re just, a little company makes a test, and then we start making major life decisions based upon that, that data. I’d rather have some, some degree of validation. 

 

 At least sell it for informational purposes only, and let people make their, their, their, their, make, understand where it is in the, in the hierarchy of, of data that you can, you would base your decisions upon. Mycotoxin urine panels are based on veterinary medicine. Veterinary medicine is based upon food exposure in farm animals.

 

Farm animals eat moldy food, they get sick, they don’t reproduce, they develop cancer, they have short lifespans, they, they, they, you know, so they’re very important for farmers that are interested in their assets to test their animals and to treat them. Binders are developed by vets for the treatment of mycotoxicosis in farm animals. All of that stuff is based on veterinary science.

 

None of it is based on human research. Note that I said that the exposure is food, right? So they’re testing animals for this and they’re not saying that these animals are living in moldy barns, so we’re gonna test them. 

 

 They’re eating moldy grains, which by the way is why you shouldn’t eat conventional meats and dairy anyway, because that’s where you’re gonna get all your mycotoxins. So what happens is, we then do cut and paste and go, veterinary medicine, mycotoxins, blah, blah, and then we go, okay, we can do that. And so the human tests were created along with the same, as if it’s cut and paste.

 

And then they’re saying, well, this will tell you if you’re breathing it. Well, here’s the problem. Mycotoxins do not become airborne easily by themselves.

 

They have to be stirred up and they have to have a carrier particle. So basically, if you look at the old Petri dish from Alexander Fleming, when he discovered penicillin, for those of you who are not watching this, you remember there’s a Petri dish and the Petri dish was covered with streptococcus, strep, the bacteria that causes strep throat. So look, the white patches. 

 

 And then in the middle of it, there was a little green colony, a fuzzy colony. A spore had landed on his dish. He had left for lunch and forgot to put the lid on it.

 

He was a notoriously sloppy scientist. And so when he came back, you know, the next day he saw this colony that had developed and there was a little moat around it. And that moat is penicillin, which is a mycotoxin.

 

I might remind people that mycotoxins are a term that are interchangeably used with antibiotics. Antibiotics and mycotoxins are the same when it comes to the fungal species. And so it’s just a matter of whether it’s killing something you want or something you don’t want, which is a classic human thing, you know.

 

Kill something you don’t want. That’s a good thing. Kill something you do want.

 

That’s a good thing, right? Kill something you do want to kill. It’s a good thing. 

 

 Kill something you don’t want. It’s a bad thing. Same chemical.

 

And it just depends on whether it’s your preferences, really. So he called it mold juice, which is that was the technical term, I think, at the time for what we know now is mycotoxins are at the time or it became an antibiotic. But if you look at that dish, you can tell a lot about mycotoxins.

 

So if they just spewed out the way Facebook will tell you the way, right, the way that these support groups say the mycotoxins just spewing out, then that whole dish would be clear. There wouldn’t be any of the bacteria on it, right? But it doesn’t work that way.

 

It oozes out onto the surface. And because mold is a water-loving organism, it’s resistant to washing away. It’s kind of sticky.

 

And it’s protecting the surface. It’s creating a little bit of a mode. It’s saying, don’t eat my stuff. 

 

 I’m eating here. You know, leave me alone. Give me some space.

 

So it’s not trying to kill anybody. It’s not trying to hurt anybody. It’s sending a chemical message out to its cousins, saying, I’m eating.

 

Leave me alone. You disturb that stuff that it will, alongside with particles from the building, the sheetrock paper, skin cells, spores, becomes airborne, which is what our tests test for. You can inhale little bits of these microtoxins, but they’re not by themselves airborne.

 

They’re not gases. The musty smell is a gas. You are inhaling those.

 

They are toxic. You could call it a mycological toxin, the musty smell. See what I mean? 

 

 It’s not a mycotoxin, but you could call it a mycological toxin because it is in fact a toxin coming from a mycological source, mycological meaning mold or fungal. But the mycotoxin urine panels are picking up what we’re eating in our modern diet. And the research on this is pretty clear.

 

60-80% of imported grains are contaminated with upwards of 5 mycotoxins per sample. According to a 2018 study that was done by a bunch of food scientists that were trying to debunk a UN figure that was claiming 25% were contaminated and they came out with 60-80%. So they thought the number was low.

 

It turns out to be, they thought the number was high, came out to be way low. And, you know, you just have, there was in fact a great study that just came out, like literally two weeks ago, showing that they found mycoestrogens in 80% of women’s placentas from what is one particular xeralinone, which is a very potent mycotoxin. And one of the chemical analogs that’s actually allowed to be put into conventional meat that behaves like a, well, it’s estrogenic. 

 

 And so they found this in, and they found it in 94% of their blood. And so, you know, we’re all washing these things. If you’re, if you have to cut out to get healthy from this, you have to look at this and think, I’m getting mold exposure in my food.

 

We all are, unless you’re growing it yourself, in your yard. Okay. You’re, if you go out to a restaurant, you’re eating, there’s some degree.

 

Any, we’ve globalized this thing. Our food supply needs to get localized. Local, seasonal, grass-fed, pastured, we just need to get closer to our food.

 

You have to look at mold exposure as food and air.

 

Yeah.

 

Not one or the other. And they amplify each other. So if you’re having, especially if you’ve become sensitized, and you’re eating this stuff, sugar, grains, conventional meats and dairy especially, not seeds, spices also, so you have to be cautious about anything that’s been stored and dried, dried fruits, minimize those things. 

 

 You don’t have to eliminate them, just minimize those things. And then the environmental exposures. And so when you get hit with both, because one of them is kind of a default setting, and then you get hit with the airborne exposure, you know, the body can go into high alert.

 

And you end up in cell danger response, we end up with fatigue and all these other issues, you break down, then your nervous system gets tuned up. So that’s why I say air, food and attitude. And attitude is kind of a, it may sound dismissive, but what I mean by that is nervous system dysregulation.

 

And so many people don’t get better, even if they’ve gotten their air straight, molded chemicals, they’ve gotten their diet straight, basically ketogenic, paleo, local seasonal, no sugar, no grains kind of a diet. And then they’re still messed up and they’re like, what’s going on? And then they have to pursue, in many cases, something like primal trust or DNRS, re-origin, group demethod. 

 

 These are the methods that are very successfully used to help people re-regulate their nervous system, find a way to make peace with this thing that we call mold, which is a fact of nature. It’s like being scared of gravity. You’re not going to get away from it.

 

So you need to have tools that allow you to, or that show your nervous system, that you can be exposed to it and not be harmed. And so those methods, I have a particular affinity for primal trust. And again, I’ll point people back to the GOT MOLD Summit because Kathleen King, primal trust, is one of my favorite interviews there, too.

 

She also happens to be a sponsor. But again, she’s a sponsor because I love her technology. I don’t love her technology because she’s sponsored. 

 

 I highly recommend that. She’s a force and she makes it very affordable, very accessible. And so anyone who’s on this journey, I would actually suggest, I always say it last, but I always think, I don’t know why people don’t do it first.

 

Do that first, it’ll make your whole thing easier. But that’s not the way it works. That’s not the American way.

 

We react to everything. So we try to do the pills and potions, powders, and then we do the hard work later. So it’s just the way we are.

 

So the mycotoxin urine panels are unfortunately also tools of abuse. And when they’re paired with ERMI, they become extremely destructive because you get the initial test. I’m showing up to a doctor.

 

First doctor actually will listen to me. All the other doctors told me that I’m crazy or that I’m making whatever, a mulch mold. So I finally go in to a functional doc who says, they’re mold literate, I’m literate, whatever. 

 

 And then they sit down with me and they say, you know, what you have here is potentially very real. And so just pee in the cup, you know, we’ll see. Numbers are through the roof.

 

Oh, well, see, you got to go do an ERMI and, you know, you got to call this group, like WeInspect, who, you know, for example, Notorious. And they go in there and they do all these swabs and wipes, they swap toilets and they’re looking for, you can find, you can find microbes on every surface. So that doesn’t prove that there’s a problem.

 

Presence is not equal exposure and presence is not equal a problem. We are, we live on, you know, we are microbial, our buildings are microbial. And so then they, so then you got a high mycotoxin urine panel and you got a high ERMI and you go, Whoa, I mean, like, see, they were right.

 

Well, I mean, do that anywhere. And you do that in buildings that are absolutely healthy, that everyone is doing great. And you’re going to have a high mycotoxin urine panel and you’re going to have a higher ERMI. 

 

 And the driving force behind that is someone needing validation. And they’re not getting it from the modern medical institutions. So they get it from someone who actually has a $10,000 protocol to sell them.

 

And then an $8,000 inspection behind that. And then $100,000 quote unquote remediation, which is really investigative demolition. And then oftentimes people are told to relocate a million times.

 

And relocating is necessary in many cases. But these people are running away from ERMI scores in perfectly normal buildings. Oftentimes, hopping out of the frying pan into the fire, living in hotels, which are notoriously chemically laden and moldy.

 

And so, you know, you just, the whole thing is a mess. And everybody, it’s just, it’s an extraction scheme. I see people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars without any positive improvement, without any improvements in health. 

 

 And so I just want to ratchet it back down and get people to actually look at the conditions in the building and get to know the building instead of relying again on this one test and this one thing to the exclusion of other meaningful data and turning over their entire process without any self-advocacy. To a team of people that are all working together to maximize revenue. Make no mistake.

 

And nobody wants to talk about it because they’re ashamed. Because they’ve just gone from not being validated to finally being validated and then they get scammed. And then they’re so ashamed they can’t tell the people who wouldn’t hear them before because they’re crazier now.

 

And so these people have, there’s no, there’s just no, I mean, that’s, I see people getting more devastated by that than anything else, where they literally, they realize later that they probably got scammed. You know? So adding insult to injury, literally, you know?

 

So my, that’s my, one of my missions here is to raise awareness around that whole thing and simplify this because it’s not nearly as complicated as people think. It is complex. It is difficult. 

 

 It is confusing, but it’s not nearly as complex as they want you to think it is because it’s within that complexity that they’re able to take away your power. Yeah.

 

So would there be any, so the best way to really kind of assess if you’re, you’ve been exposed to mold from moisture in your home would be symptoms, right? Like, we don’t need to do tests. Like, we assess your symptoms.

 

Like, how was your health before? And then maybe after you found out, like, or there’s like, when you suspected that you, there might be a leak or something like that.

 

So I, my, my suggestion is, is that you primarily think about this as a clinical diagnosis. And what that means is, what are the actual conditions that you can observe? And then, and then also, what are the, what are the signs and symptoms within, I mean, conditions within the building? 

 

 And then, and then what are the signs and symptoms with the people, right? And do they line up? That is there, is there, are there conditions here that show that there’s, there’s reason to believe that the conditions in the building do not support ideal health?

 

You don’t need to know the name of the toxin floating around in your body. You don’t need to know the name of the burglar that broke into your house. You don’t.

 

It doesn’t matter. You don’t need a social security number. You know?

 

Like it doesn’t matter. It’s meaningless data. So this idea that we’re going to find out what mold is producing what toxin, and we’re going to trace it back, and we’re going to do this whole like forensic thing.

 

We just don’t have the science for that. And not only that, it’s a fool’s errand. It’s just going to cost money.

 

And so my feeling is what you have to do is clean up, do the work. Okay, if you have those conditions, then get immediately towards, remember, source control if you can. If not, air filtration and dilution. 

 

 Relocation, relocate if you can. If you can find a safe place, buy yourself some time. This is also a really good test.

 

It is a test. Stay somewhere else that’s healthy and clean, and see if you feel better. If you do, guess what?

 

Go back, and you need to figure out if it’s chemicals, mold or both. And it’s not always just those two. That’s like 95% of the problems.

 

Sometimes it’s EMF. Sometimes there’s other stuff going on, right? So you have to look at, sometimes you have to run it.

 

And I would highly recommend that if you can’t afford a professional inspector, get a building biologist, because they’re usually much smarter, much more well-rounded than a mold inspector, which is often an opportunist. A building biologist had to spend some time. They’ve gone into it.

 

They understand more than just mold and moisture, and they also don’t usually have ulterior motives. I find them to be extremely authentic in most cases, and there’s not a ton of them, but they’re worth their weight in gold. So, as opposed to a mold inspector who just got a 3-day certification. 

 

 So, the clinical diagnosis. Are there conditions in the building? Are there symptoms that seem to line up with it?

 

Do you feel better when you leave the building? If you do, clean up your, get the air straight, get your diet straight. And then here’s the thing.

 

Do simple things, okay? Sauna is great. So, sweat, okay?

 

If you don’t have the energy to exercise, you got kids, whatever, sweat. Red light therapy is very powerful for this stuff. By the way, also go watch Robbie Besner on my summit.

 

Found at TheraSage, he’s got great red light therapy tools. Good friend, wonderful human being. Also got his daughter healthy from mold and lime.

 

And he’s a true warrior in the space. The other thing is, get outside. This may sound so, get outside, take your shoes off.

 

And breathe fresh air. And because you’re going to be exposed to the microbiome of nature, which is what we test. Our test kit looks at outdoor air for a reason. 

 

 We look for outdoor air, because that’s what you’re being exposed to. Those are hermetic stressors. Spores are actually to help you be strong.

 

And so if you’re not exposed to that stuff at all, you live in a bubble, you’re exposed to spores, you’re going to have a reaction. So go outside and breathe that stuff, especially in the fall and the spring, where things are really kind of cooking. And walk barefoot as much as possible.

 

The data is 22 peer-reviewed studies on grounding, the show Direct Reduction in Inflammation, Systemic Inflammation, it’s incredible. And so it’s free. So most of the things that I think should be done should be done first.

 

You know, get no sugar, no grains, no conventional meats and dairy. So you have to that gets expensive, unfortunately. But then go outside, get sunlight in the morning before it gets too bright. 

 

 Drink lots of pure water, grounding, all that stuff. And most people will, if given enough time with that regimen, will detox themselves is what we do. You know, our liver is an amazing, amazing, like genius.

 

Oregon, you know, beyond comprehension, it does a fine job if you support it. And but if you still need help, there are there, there is a place for, you know, glutathione, NAC. By the way, you can take that stuff anyway, unless you got a sulfur sensitivity.

 

You get and you probably should I take it on a regular basis anyway, because it doesn’t just help with mold. It helps you shuttle all that stuff through glutathione is the master, master, master, master antioxidant. And I should mention the precursors to some other good stuff.

 

So the most important thing is getting control of the environment and creating a safe sanctuary, and then doing those free and inexpensive things to reintroduce nature. You know, I’ll leave you with this thought when it comes to this. The word human comes from humus, which is soil. 

 

 And we now live in hermetically sealed buildings.

 

And we put rubber on the bottom of our shoes, and we wash our vegetables so there’s no dirt on them. And we pick up our meat wrapped in plastic, and we’re just completely separated from this idea that we are actually part of nature. And my hypothesis is that we are not part of nature.

 

We are part of nature. We are part of nature. We are part of nature.

 

We are part of nature. We are part of nature. We are part of nature.

 

We are part of nature. We are part of nature. We are part of nature.

 

We are part of nature. We are part of nature. We are part of nature.

 

And my hypothesis, or my theory, is that this is the basis for the autoimmune disease explosion. The 100 autoimmune diseases we now have on the books, which is insane, and probably a new one’s popping up every day. And so, you know, reversing that is a function of reintroducing and embracing nature. 

 

 And you see this happen consistently. People go out, and they start spending more time indoors, and they get sunlight, and they go soak in the ocean, and get the minerals back in their body. You know, something that you care deeply about.

 

And reordering their cell membranes, the chemistry, and the minerals, and the ion channels, and all these things that we just, you know, that we do so beautifully when given, you know, the tools that are provided to us in abundance in nature.

 

Yeah.

 

And so, we live in buildings, and we need them, but we also need to remember our true heritage, which is that we are human animals, and we need to spend more time out in nature than we do. In fact, we probably should spend most of our time in nature, you know? This whole fluorescent, all these lights, we’re under siege really by the creature comforts that we’ve created, and I honestly think that we’ve become sickened by our comforts. 

 

 And so, this is my call to arms is, you know, like I said, keep your house clean and dry, filter the air, clean the surfaces, do all that stuff, be vigilant about mold or moisture problems, maintain your building with love and care, and you care for your building, it will care for you. And then, open the windows whenever possible and get your ass outside.

 

I love that. Yeah, we tend to forget that the most basic things are the ones that will probably move the needle the most, although it’s not as quick as what these, you know, people are searching for. Like you said, like magic bullets, right?

 

All these things. We just need to work on the foundations and have patience.

 

Yep. You just got to, you got, you have to have a little bit of faith. You know, the thing is that the basic stuff isn’t sexy.

 

Yeah. 

 

 You know, and it, but it works, you know, wax on wax off, right? Just carry, you know, chop wood, carry water, you know, the basic things that we need to do every single day, you just do them and they are cumulative. Same thing goes for the bad act, the unfortunate actions, you know, the things that we do every day, the bad habits, they’re cumulative too.

 

So, you know, the idea is to get better with every passing day and make more good decisions than you make otherwise. But when it comes to, when it comes to all the moisture problems, you know, I will also suggest that anyone who’s concerned about this go to, we have a, we created a page for your listeners, which is at gotmold.com/wellnessrebel. 

 

 And it is, there’s a coupon code there for anybody who’s interested in, in our kits, which is kind10, but gotmold.com/wellnessrebel, which will take you to a welcome page where we have an ebook that we produce that I think is a really good place for anyone who’s concerned about this to start. It’s a 46 pages of inspection checklists and FAQs and all the, the do’s and don’ts when it comes to mold testing and it’s free. And if anybody’s interested, there’s also a link there for a discount on our test kits.

 

That’s a thank you for being on your show.

 

Thank you so much. Everything will be in the show notes, all the links, I’m going to get it all from Jason so that we have all the links that he was sharing, like all the studies and stuff, because those are really good. I, I’m even interested in myself.

 

Absolutely. And a lot of that stuff is in, there’s other stuff in the ebook and of course anyone who’s really curious, go to gotmold.com and go to our learning center. We’ve got a ton of stuff there. 

 

 I mean, it’s with research papers and articles that I’ve written, there’s probably a hundred articles I wrote. And so that’s a, that’s a real opportunity. But again, I will point everyone back to gotmoldsummit.com because if you’ve got, if you, if you’re really interested in this, that’s where all the top experts are.

 

There’s a lot to digest. They’re about an hour each. So just like 40 hours of content, but we’re chunking it down into themes.

 

And if you sign up for our newsletter, you’ll get those emails. Also if you sign up for our newsletter, we do offer discounts, but we only do that through the email.

 

Well, thank you so much, Jason, for joining me today. And we’re looking forward to learning more. I’m sure we’re going to have part two maybe and part three.

 

It would be my pleasure. It would be my pleasure.

 

All right.

 

Thank you. 

 

 Thank you. Have a good one.

 

Until next time.

 

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please click the subscribe button, share it with others, post about it in social media or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me or suggest topics, you can follow me on Instagram at Fatima Paktakan or at The Wellness Rebel Show.

 

Thanks again and I’ll see you next time.