Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Virginia Consumer Podcast, where we focus on regulatory policies and how they affect the lives of the citizens of Virginia.
Today, I’m Virginia Consumer. I am happy to be joined by Jason Earle. Jason is an adoring father of two boys, an incurable entrepreneur, and an indoor air quality crusader.
He is the founder and CEO of Got Mold and the creator of the Got Mold Test Kit. Jason himself is a survivor of a moldy home, and after realizing that his childhood home was the cause of his extreme allergies and asthma, he left Wall Street to start his first healthy home business in 2002. I don’t want to tell you the whole story just yet because it’s part of the journey, but Jason himself has personally performed sick building investigations and helped thousands of families uncover the cause of their misery illnesses and recover their health.
He’s been featured on Good Morning America, he’s streamed Makeover Home Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired, The Huffington Post and more. It’s quite the resume. So let’s get into it and get all the information we can out of today’s expert and guest, Mr. Jason Earle.
Could you just give us a little bit of a background of your early childhood and how it affected you as a person?
Sure, sure. When I was about four years old, I suddenly lost a lot of weight in a three-week period, and my parents were notably concerned, and so they brought me to the pediatrician who said, you really should take him to Children’s Hospital. This looks pretty serious.
So about an hour away in Philadelphia, that’s what they did. The initial diagnosis based upon symptoms in family history was cystic fibrosis. So it was a worst nightmare coming true because my dad had this on his side of the family, and so they talked about this as a risk.
So they spent six weeks crying because my father had lost four of his cousins to CF by the age of 14. Oh my gosh. So it was just a very, very front and center concern that they had, and I was their only child.
So six weeks later, they got a second opinion which fortunately refuted the first, and I don’t have CF, never had CF. But I did have asthma compounded by pneumonia, and allergy tests revealed that I was allergic to every single thing in my environment. I mean, it was ridiculous.
Grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, like my clothes were itchy. And I grew up in this little non-working farm outside of Prince, New Jersey where I was surrounded by all those things in great abundance. And so I lived on inhalers and spent most of my time outside, which was strangely and sort of counter-intuitively much easier for me.
I didn’t understand the built environment nor did anyone at the time. But intuitively, I just felt better outside. And I’m sure there was a lot of reasons for that, but mostly I was not re-breathing that same moldy air 20,000 times a day.
And so when I was about 12 years old, my folks split up, which was good for everybody involved. And I moved out of that musty old farmhouse and all my symptoms went away. It was not instant, but it was quick enough that in retrospect, it should have been identified as the smoking gun was just right there in front of you.
But instead it was dismissed as spontaneous adolescent remission. Fancy term for it, we have no idea what the hell happened there. And so we ended up just dismissing it.
My grandfather grew out of his asthma, and so they just figured that was the same thing. And so a year later, my mom died suddenly, which is actually relevant to the conversation. She actually had a suicide, and it’s strangely relevant to this conversation.
If we want to go down that rabbit hole, which I think is very relevant.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Totally not. It turns out probably one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me really was her early departure. Of course, I’d do anything to have her back for a hug, but I wouldn’t want to rewrite any of it because many of the insights I got from her struggles have helped me to be a better person, and also have led me to insights related to this, because it turns out that there’s a heavy psychiatric component to mold exposure too.
That’s something that I did not understand until, candidly, I’ve been doing this 23 years. I didn’t understand that until probably about six or seven years ago. People think about this as a respiratory issue primarily, or an immune issue primarily, inflammation issue.
But, you know, inflammation, psychiatric illness is now widely regarded as an inflammatory disease, depression and anxiety. They find the same inflammatory markers in people that are clinically diagnosed with depression and anxiety. So you start looking at this stuff and you realize how pervasive its effects are.
So my mom died suddenly and then I was diagnosed with Lyme disease a year later, which also has a Venn diagram, sort of impact overlap with mold-related illness. So I in turn missed a lot of school and I was actually forced to drop out of high school, which turned out to be another gift because I ended up working at the gas station, got rescued out of the gas station by a stockbroker who trained me and I ended up becoming the youngest licensed stockbroker in history with the Guinness World Records. Totally fairytale kind of a thing for a different podcast another day.
But did that for nine years and then one day woke up and I wasn’t having fun anymore and realized I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I went backpacking and while I was away, I read a story about a guy who was sick from the hotel where he’s an employee. He blamed the hotel.
He blamed mold in the hotel. It turns out it was the biggest mold remediation project in history. It was a $50 million mold problem in Oahu in the Hilton Clea Tower.
I happened to be there in Oahu while this was happening. I was in the shadow of the building. It was total kismet.
I read the story and I was like, wait a second, this guy had asthma and developed allergies? Wait a sec. That’s like my life in reverse.
I called my father and asked him if he thought we had mold and he just laughed at me. He’s like, of course, we had mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask?
It’s like typical 70s parent, right? Like, mulch mold wipe it off, you don’t need a seatbelt.
Get some bleach.
Yeah. Just hop in the back of the pickup truck. You don’t need a seatbelt.
That’s what really got my awareness to the point where I recognized that this is a major issue and that it was under the radar for most people. And so, that became, my fascination at that point was not so much mold, but the people, but the buildings can make you sick. That to me was such a crazy idea.
Like, these things that are designed to protect us from the elements and from, you know, other threats, can actually be a source of disease. Mind blowing. And now, fast forward 20 something years later, I’m now fascinated by the idea that buildings can actually facilitate healing, right?
So like a healthy building is more than just a healthy building. It’s not neutral. A healthy building facilitates health.
And see, I haven’t even gotten there yet. I’m still in the space of of almost trauma from how bad the house has affected our family. And I mean, it’s impacted everything, even down to my speech, which is problematic considering what I do, you know?
Yes.
But the neurological effects are long term and long lasting. So I’m still in that space of trying to figure out, how do we get to a healthy home?
Well, we can skip ahead for a second because I’m going to do a little plug for a friend, by the way, who also is one of the most amazing people on my summit. Her name is Kat King and she runs a company called Primal Trust. I highly recommend that you watch that video next.
So Kat King is a doctor of physical therapy, I believe, but she ended up having her own exposures, mold and Lyme and things like that, and ended up with sort of like every, sort of like the garbage can filled with symptoms and diagnoses, and couldn’t figure out what was going on, and ended up getting into stumbling upon neural retraining, which is a series of techniques that allow your limbic system in your brain, which is sort of this, it basically the fight or flight mechanisms within the brain, that overact and respond disproportionately to environmental threats, concerns, not necessarily real exposures, threats. And so her program is designed to help get that tamped back down, because in fact, you did have a trauma, your nervous system experienced a trauma.
And so as a result of some high alert, and it’s not something you can think your way through. It’s not something you can logic your way out of or affirm your way out of or any of that kind of stuff. It has to be done in a very, a very methodical way where you expose yourself to small, even just the concept of it, before you actually expose yourself to the real thing.
And it’s like allergy shots for the nervous system. And what you see is, I see when people get their, when they get their air straight, they get their building straight, they also have to clean up their diet, by the way, which we can dig into, because a lot of people are diagnosed with mold related illness based upon mycotoxin urine panels, which is by the way, total junk science. And I talk about them.
So this is a problem, but it does reflect food based exposures, which is in fact an issue. Eating food with mycotoxins in it is not good for you. And it is in fact a mold exposure.
So when you’re getting better, you have to deal with air, food, and attitude. Air is of course mold and chemicals. Food is getting rid of the mycotoxin rich foods, which is like sugar grains, imported seeds, spices, nuts, coffee, tea, dried fruits.
There’s a list that’s very long, and conventional meat and dairy, which means your cup of Starbucks, okay, is probably got mycotoxins in the dairy, as well as the coffee. So it’s difficult, but anyway, you have to reduce or eliminate exposures in the building and in your food, and then you have to deal with your nervous system. What I see is people get better when they take care of all three.
If they choose pick and choose, they tend to linger indefinitely. And so it’s imperative that you do all three, air, food, and attitude. Primal trust is that last piece.
It is the piece that allows for people to regain a sense of normalcy in their lives once they’ve gotten their environment and their diet under control. So that’s a big plug for probably the most important missing element in most mold related healings, is the nervous system and caring for that and recognizing that it is doing its best to protect you. It’s just a little out of order, you know?
Does that make sense?
I’ve been getting to the mental health aspect of it. My youngest daughter, who’s nine now, the way that we kind of figured it out was she started having night terrors. So it was every single night, it was being trapped inside of a nightmare and it was this fear and this inability to breathe, like this gasping for air.
That’s kind of how we started going down the rabbit hole and trying to figure out what is this actually? It’s not just she needs antibiotics, something else is up. It does create almost a sadness.
For a long time before we started really cleaning up the food, the environment, we had remediation. She was sad, all of a sudden. A happy-go-lucky kid, just really sad.
She couldn’t get out of bed, she was very tired. And then we started to notice the tics and those kinds of issues. And then my older daughter, who’s my middle kid, she’s 17 now, she struggled a lot with the feelings of depression for another happy-go-lucky kid, and not knowing what was wrong with her.
She just felt like there was a dark cloud.
Okay, let’s unpack this. So the first awakening that I had regarding my mom and my own experience in moldy buildings, including my childhood. I was depressed teenager and I thought it was circumstantial.
And after moving out of that house, which by the way, I love and adore. In fact, I went back 30 years later recently. Yeah, 35.
Yeah. And the guy who took the house over after, because it was sold by a state sale. And I was able to walk through the house and go down to that musty basement.
And it was very healing, very cathartic, to be able to go through there. Strangely, I’m helping him get his environment straight. The home that made me sick.
It’s beautiful. So, but the dots started getting connected for me when Brown University did a study, or released the study in 2008, which was 6,000 people, a huge study. And they found a very strong correlation between mold and dampness and dorsal depression.
And they stopped short of saying why, because that wasn’t the purpose of the study. But they did play around with a couple ideas. One of which was that if you have a mold problem, they basically interviewed 6,000 people and said, how do you feel, and the quality of life questionnaire?
And then they asked them in parallel, do you have any mold or moisture problems that you’re aware of? Do you see something, smell something? Are you aware of anything that is unresolved?
And they found that people had unresolved mold problems who were much more likely to be depressed. And so of course, you can immediately assume, well, someone who knows they have a mold problem hasn’t fixed it, probably has some other stuff going on. Financial issues, they’re maybe renting, they’re disempowered, they’re unable to take action on it because of whatever.
And so that’s a really good recipe for depression, right? Feeling disempowered. Fast forward, one of my good friends, Dr. Joan Bennett, who’s a fungal geneticist and mold researcher at Rutgers University.
It’s funny, she actually saw us on TV on Channel 6 Action News, and she reached out to my office and she said, I heard about your dog because by the way, I pioneered these mold sniffing dogs when I came back from Hawaii. That was our first inspection company was built on mold detection canines. And so she had seen me on Channel 6, and she said, I’d like to meet your dog.
It’s okay if you come too. She invited me up to her offices and we did a demonstration and she was just enamored. It’s hard not to be enamored with Oreo.
She was spectacular. And so she showed me her research and her research revolved around testing fruit flies, exposing them to the musty odor. So she had an experience where she had a house in New Orleans which got flooded and she walked in with a respirator.
She was going to take samples and do what a fungal geneticist would do in a moldy building. It was her own building, but she was like, I’m going to make the most out of this. So she went in and she had a respirator on, but it was just an N95, which as we know from COVID, it only takes particles out.
It doesn’t take out gases. So she walked in, she still could smell that really strong, dank smell, and within minutes she began feeling ill, and she had to leave a few times to get a breath of fresh air. And then eventually she had to cut the whole thing short and she said, Jesus, what was that?
Because she had never really thought about the musty odor as a source of disease. It was always based on mold, spores, and mycotoxins, which we now know are a very small percentage of mold-related illness. And so she came back to the lab, curious about the musty odor, began doing research on it and found a few compounds that she could actually order online, which was kind of amazing.
And then she began exposing these fruit flies. And what she found was that they, by the way, the fruit flies are special fruit flies. They fluoresce when they produce dopamine.
This is pretty cool trick. So she began exposing the fruit flies to the musty smell, and guess what? They stopped producing dopamine.
They stopped reproducing. They fly down and set it to the light. They develop locomotor disorder.
So in other words, and Parkinsonian-like symptoms. So you see where I’m going with this? Tremors, tremors.
So if you look at these diseases, a lot of these are dopaminergic dysfunctions, and so that’s something worth looking at in your particular case, right? Because this is a neurotransmitter issue, at least in the animal studies. And so her subsequent studies have found that they develop mitochondrial damage, and premature death, of course.
And she also found that it adversely impacted some plants, some plants that actually made them grow better, some plants that made them wilt. So kind of an interesting contrast there. But the bottom line is when you start looking at these two really interesting separate studies about the correlation between dampness and dorsum depression, and then the actual mechanisms that may be underlying it, it’s pretty hard not to look back at my own childhood and say, jeez mom, I know you had a lot of problems, but boy, that house did, I was able to get out of there and thank God.
But when I moved out, she stayed and that was probably part of her undoing. So this is part of the reason why I do what I do, because it affects people in such a pervasive manner. It is not just upper respiratory, sinusitis, asthma, all that stuff.
Big deal. That’s a big deal by itself. But when you start looking at all these other downstream effects that are not recognized by the AMA or by any medical institution, any significant medical institution, you start to think that, boy, we may be looking at a true underlying epidemic in our nation that is completely unrecognized or it’s just starting to get some recognition.
So it’s a pleasure to be here talking about this because this is the kind of thing that, this is what we do. We try to use this opportunity to raise awareness about this because there’s so many people out there that are experiencing symptoms that are completely, they may seem random or they’re not being taken seriously by their husband, wife, doctor, boss, whatever. And so I hope that people listen to it.
Especially not in kids too, right? Because kids, if they’re acting up, oh, it’s ADHD or it’s, you know, they’re not disciplined enough. No one stops to think, why are they suddenly in a mood and why is it lingering and why did they seem to have this cluster of symptoms?
So trying to bring awareness is really important. And I know like in our situation, we had a remediation done and we were great. I mean, it was like all the clouds had left the sky, we were amazing and now it’s, you know, had in the other direction.
And what we found was our roof had another leak. So now you’re predisposed, you know? So we did all the things, we had gotten healthy, we started to think we cleaned it up and then everything came back.
And I did have a hygienist come through and do some mold testing. And what kind of made me lean towards getting the kit that you created, which really helped us a lot, was the fact that he came in the house, and this is someone who’s certified, and said, it’s fine, leave the windows open, leave all of your air filtration systems running, and we’ll just do the test because whatever’s there has to be there how you live, right? So I’m like, oh, I was like, are you sure?
Because that doesn’t sound like I have heavy duty air filtration in my house. We knew we had a mold issue. I really filter the air, and he said, absolutely, that’s fine, and he did the mold test, and when you know it, it didn’t come back with anything.
But here we are symptomatic. We know something’s wrong. We know there’s been a leak.
So I did, I went ahead and I got your Got Mold Test Kit. I’ve got my little, I mean, it’s so simple. I just want to show it because it’s so simplistic, right?
You get your little cartridge and it did what the hygienist couldn’t do. And not only that, your instructions were so clear. It was keep the house closed for two days.
You want to be able to say you haven’t diluted the air, you know, to think that opening the windows is going to be conducive to an accurate test. Just kills me. So that’s my next question.
Why is it that there is no standardization in these air testing systems or between hygienists? It almost seems like there are different schools of thought and there’s no camaraderie to just get at the mold problem.
There are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I could do an entire podcast just on why there’s so many inconsistencies and why there’s no standardization, partially because the labs analyze things a little differently. Even though there’s a standardization on the, there’s an accreditation standard for how these things are.
Even within the accreditation standard, there’s still a lot of variability. There’s also a lot of, at the analysis level, there’s also a lot of inaccuracy because humans are doing this. By the way, we just introduced AI-based analysis to eliminate this.
We’re literally transforming the entire industry. We brought the number one AI diagnostic platform into the mold industry. They’re right now doing stuff with Mayo Clinic and Beckton Dickinson and Zoetis and Veterinary Labs doing tissue samples.
We’re borrowing that technology to do spores. We brought them into MLab, the biggest lab in the world, which is our lab. We’ll eliminate a lot of inconsistency.
But in terms of the way that data is interpreted, that’s another thing. You have to follow the money. Oftentimes, these people have a conflict of interest.
So if they’re in the business of selling something else or in their business, because on the scheme of things, a $1,000 mold inspection, you have to do a lot of inspections to make money. But I tell you, you do a few remediations for $20,000 and you’re doing okay. So the $1,000 is like a lead generator for a lot of these guys, because they’re working and they’re in cahoots with a lot of the remediators.
So there’s a lot of conflicts of interests, which of course leaves a lot of room for abuse. Then there’s also just honestly a lot of, it’s a very ignorant industry. The people within it that pretend to be professionals, the cost of entry is very low.
You buy a few air sampling pumps in a van, you can get started tomorrow. All you need to do is know more than the consumer, which it doesn’t mean much. And so, you know, like, and just, you know, say toxic mold and microtoxins a few times, then people are, well, you can scare a thousand dollars out of just about anybody.
And so that’s basically the method that’s being used. And it’s, so, and it tends to attract people that are more opportunists rather than people that have a servant heart. And so what I, my experience has been that probably, I don’t know, I hate to say it, but half or more of the industry shouldn’t even be in the industry.
And more than half of them are probably compromised in some way because they’re either too lazy, uneducated, they don’t do any continuous, continuing education. You know, the true professionals in this industry are far and few between. And that’s the problem, it’s the inconsistency.
And the education is inconsistent. It used to be from one source, basically IAQA. Actually, there was no education.
And then an industry association popped up called IAQA, the Indoor Air Quality Association. And then that was riddled with, they had some, the executive director embezzled money. And then people came in and tried to fix it and save it, and they couldn’t.
And so it’s just flagged. And so now that’s created a space for other people that have opinions about how it should be done. And they created an industry, they created trade associations that push forward contradictory information.
So it’s really confusing for the consumer. It’s also equally confusing for the professionals. Professionals, generally speaking, even the ones who are doing the right thing, have significant material disagreements about the way the data is interpreted, about what matters and what doesn’t matter.
And then the last thing is that spore traps and air samples, this data is transient in many ways, right? You sample the same area five times, and you’re going to get different results. And so it’s hard to pin that kind of variability on something specific, like symptoms or a disease state or healthy versus not healthy.
You know unhealthy when you see it in a report, but if you don’t have high spore counts, you can still have a moldy environment, FYI, and you can still be sick from it because the musty smell will come right through the walls. And so you can get low spore counts and people say, oh great, I’m clear. Maybe, maybe not.
And so you have to look at this from a multifactorial perspective. In other words, you have to say, do I smell something? Do I see something?
Do I feel something? And then do I have lab data? And any of those that have a positive, that are affirmative.
In other words, if I smell something, then you have it. If you see it, you have it. If you feel it, you may very well, especially if you leave the building and you come back, and if you feel better when you leave the building.
And if you have lab data, but if your lab data says you don’t, but you have visible mold and a musty odor, that doesn’t mean that there was a failure in the lab data. It just means that it wasn’t in the sample you collected. And that’s just the reality of it.
So the inconsistencies around the way these samples are collected, just the environment itself. Air is like weather. It’s not the static thing.
The particles and the gases and the pollutants that are in air float around in swirls. And given enough time, they settle out. And then you walk through the room and it spins back up again.
And you need to turn on the fan or the HVC system. But the one thing that’s consistent, and this is what’s really interesting about what you talked about with your daughter developing night terrors, is that the musty smell, which is an area of great interest for me, it comes through sheetrock. Now, if you paint, if you got layers and layers of paint and wallpaper, you can reduce that.
But most latex paint, the average light frame construction home where you got half-inch sheetrock and a layer of paint or a layer or two of paint, the musty smell will come right through. The musty smell has been found to be the source of most mold-related illness in emergency rooms.
That’s interesting. And that smell, it’s funny, because we are now working with like a rehab group that will buy your home, rehab the home and sell it again. And we had realtors come through and they were like, it’s an animal smell.
And I was like, no, that’s a mold smell. You know, they don’t even recognize it for what it is. It smells like wet towels.
You know, so it doesn’t matter how many crews I’ve had come through, you can smell it. So I know that leak has now permeated and we’ve got to go through the whole process again.
Yes. And if you smell it, you are like the fruit fly, you know, you will expect to experience symptoms from that. Fatigue is the number one symptom that most people complain, headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating.
This is classic musty smell symptoms. VOCs, which is these are microbial VOCs. Microbial mean, you know, of course, from bacteria or from fungi, and VOCs are volatile organic compounds.
Most people know VOCs from the gas station or the IKEA furniture.
That’s that phthalate smell. Yeah.
That’s what you know, the, the, the, the, the, or like freshly, fresh, fresh paint or floor finish, you know, that stuff, which is very toxic and it’s something that, that, that people who are sensitized, once you’re in this club and you, and you’ve got, you’ve got, you had a mold exposure, you’re often also chemically sensitive. And so it’s no surprise that when you become chemically sensitive that you then react to the airborne chemicals, not the, the, the, the gases, essentially forgive the crudeness, but these are mold farts, you know, these are digestive byproducts of mold, mold growth. And, you know, I used to call them mold burps, but it doesn’t have quite the same oomph, you know?
So, so, you know, if you’re sucking on the tailpipe of any living organism long enough, you’re not going to feel well. And that’s really what, what’s going on here. And so, you know, you’re breathing in the byproduct of decay.
And so, and so this is, and it has a significant impact on you. So, so when you start thinking about, you know, how, oh, by the way, so the VOCs and my microbial VOCs, my number one symptom when I’m in a musty hotel, because that’s just about the only place I get exposed these days, is night terrors. I have a really hard time with sleep disturbances.
That’s how I know. And I have since done Primal Trust and worked through that, and I no longer have that problem, FYI. So you can, you can reverse this.
This is, this is, this is not, does not have to be, it may be your past, it doesn’t have to be your future. Maybe you’re present, it doesn’t have to be your future. But you have to believe that you can get better.
I’ve never seen anybody get better in fear, and I’ve never seen anybody get better than believe they could. So part of it is belief systems. And, and, and, and, and sometimes that’s why the Primal Trust, and not to keep talking about that, but she has a community attached to this.
And the community allows you to see people that are in your recently where you are much further along. And that builds encouragement, right? The user, you start to see that there’s hope, and hope is invaluable in this situation, because you get down, you get beaten up by this stuff, and it weakens you.
It’s like kryptonite, right? It weakens you physically, it weakens you emotionally, and then it makes your nervous system feel as if you’re under a constant attack. And, and so, and that’s exhausting.
It defines exhaustion. And if you really want a rabbit hole to go down, look up cell danger response. Kat Kim talks about this quite a bit.
But your cells can only make energy through, the mitochondria makes energy. And, and your mitochondria, when it’s not making energy, it’s doing cellular defense. It can only do one or the other.
So when it perceives a threat, and your mitochondria breathe really fast, it’s actually, they’re breathing fast. They’re the ultimate sensors in your cells. Each cell has at least one mitochondria, many, many, many, many more if it’s a healthy cell.
And that’s breathing constantly. And so it detects a pollutant in the environment, it will close down the cell wall. And so if the cells close down, that means that it’s not producing energy.
It’s also not sharing information, it’s not sharing energy and you experience fatigue, torpor. So this is why fatigue kicks in.
And then you get nutrient deficiencies too to boot. So it’s just this vicious cycle of feeling like garbage.
That’s right. And so the first thing to do is get out of the environment, you either remediate or relocate. But the main issue here that we’re really kind of circling around here is why are our buildings so sick now?
And you talked about construction and it’s my firm belief that it’s all based upon the fact that we use sheetrock and we have wall cavities. If we could get rid of paper-faced gypsum wallboard and wall cavities, we’d eliminate 90% of our mold problems. And that is the problem, is the fact that we build for speed and profit, not for health and longevity.
And so it’s really a function of the fact that we started building differently after the World War II. Before World War II, we had all plaster houses that were made with old growth timber and concrete and tile. And we didn’t build the way we build now.
And then there was demand for the baby boomers, created a need for faster and cheaper building materials. And so there you go, sheetrock, asphalt shingles, you know, all that stuff.
And I live in new construction now. I mean, they leave the studs exposed to the elements for weeks, you know, and then immediately saran wrap it in that plastic house wrap, you know, and all that moisture.
Soon as they get a sunny day, right?
Woo, right in. Yeah. So, you know, let me just ask you one question.
If you could change anything about the way homes are constructed, whether it be HVAC systems or drywall, what do you think would have the biggest improvement?
That would be the number one thing would be to ban sheetrock. But first of all, the first thing to do is you ban all carcinogenic chemicals from indoor environments. Like why?
Why? Why? Why?
Just explain to me why that’s even like a concept that would be allowed. But our system is set up in such a way that it’s guilty until proven innocent. I would say that when it comes to materials and products that are used in human environments, it should be, you have to prove it’s safe before it’s used.
That’s the way it is in Europe. It’s the way it is in a lot of other places where they don’t have these problems. The first thing is banning carcinogenic chemicals from building materials.
That’s just a fundamental, and hazardous air pollutants. Anything can be deemed hazardous, whether it’s carcinogen or not, should just not be involved in modern buildings. The other thing is that we need to have more air exchange in our buildings.
We now have these things super tight. That means I think that we should have energy recovery ventilators or heat recovery ventilators. They’re very similar in the sense that they create a mechanical air exchange.
You get some fresh air in your building, but without having to raise your energy bill. Because the idea is you could just get fresh air by opening your windows, but if it’s too hot, too cold, or too humid outside, you’re going to create an imbalance in your building. You don’t want that.
These special devices allow for that. Then of course, the bigger dream is the eradication of drywall, the eradication of paper-faced drywall. By virtue of doing that, you also hopefully get rid of wall cavities.
There are really cool materials now that are emerging, that have been around for a long time, that are allowed for that. One of them is called AAC. In fact, I speak with Bob Cofelt about this in my summit.
I spoke with a couple of people actually about AAC, and what they call mass wall construction, so where you don’t end up with a, there’s no wall cavity. We used to build this way with mud, and like true traditional building methods use solid walls, but it’s usually earth, and it manages the moisture in the building, and it allows for very slow thermal transfer. It doesn’t get too hot, too cold, kind of stays within a certain kind of like a cave, like the way we grew up for thousands of years.
This thing that we’ve done with this human experiment, where we, this human building experiment, is really interesting if you just zoom out a little bit. So we’ve been on planet earth for how many thousands of years? It’s debatable, but it’s thousands and thousands of years, right?
And we’ve only been living in these chemical boxes that get moldy really quickly when they get wet for like a hundred. Not even, really, 1945 to 2025, right? And I would say we’ve been living in buildings, you know, for a couple few hundred, you know, like really just buildings where you could actually close up to the elements.
So that means that we’ve spent 99.99% of our time on planet Earth as a human, as a species, outdoors. And only a tiny little percent of the fractional rounding error indoors. And suddenly we have these huge spikes in asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, cancers, autism, all that stuff.
And we’re like, it’s gotta be in the food. Maybe it’s actually hiding in plain sight in a much more nefarious way, which is that the thing that you trust to protect you is actually the source of disease. And the fact that we’re really experiencing here is not so much that the buildings are making us sick, but that we’ve been disconnected from nature.
And what we’re experiencing really is a nature deficit disorder. And so it’s a combination of, yes, this unbelievable concentrated, we re-breathe the same air 20,000 times a day. 20,000 doses is what we take every day when you breathe in a building.
And if you take 20,000 doses of anything, it better be freaking pristine, right? Because otherwise it’s cumulative and that’s a repetitive stress. And so this is why I always say, HEPA filters, HEPA vacuums, get your house clean, all that stuff, and then open your freaking windows, you know?
And get out. That’s right. It’s crazy.
But this is a very recent phenomenon. You know, we think humans think in very short human scale timeframes. And just because your mom did it, your dad did it, and your grandma did it, and her great grandmother did it, that is so, so short in the scheme of things.
And it’s time to zoom out and think, you know, what did we do when we weren’t so sick? You know, and what was life like then when we were not so sick? And that meant usually we were outside a whole lot more.
And our buildings allowed the indoor, the outdoor environment in, you know, so that we weren’t having this hyper-concentrated exposure to things that we were not designed to be exposed to. That is the, so there’s three things there, really. So it’s just get rid of the chemicals, you know, get air exchange, mandatory air exchange and the banning and the elimination of paper-faced drywall.
Which is a bold statement, but I love it. I love it, because I don’t recall mold issues as a young kid. It all started when we started factory building, you know, and just popping out these drywall boxes, so.
Totally, totally. And you know, we talked about this before we got rolling, but you know, the crazy thing about drywall, and again, this is, I interviewed Brigetta Anderson at, she’s from Alport University. She studies building materials, and she couldn’t figure out why stachybotrys kept popping up, which is the notorious toxic mold kept popping up in all chronic water damage issues.
She’s like, well, it’s not that abundant in nature. I mean, it is, but it’s not. I mean, it’s, you know, you collect air samples outside, and you may see one stachybotrys spore here and there, unless you’re doing it near like a gully where there’s a lot of like dry grass that’s dead, that’s gotten, you know, like that’s what it likes.
It likes to eat dead, dry grass. So unless you’ve got that kind of environment, why is it on all of our sheetrock? Well, she began doing research and she found that it’s actually in the drywall paper.
The stachybotrys and catomium spores, which are black from the melanin, which protects it from ultraviolet light, but also tends to be a very protective shell, so that when they’re processing old cardboard from the recycling plant to make paper for the drywall, somehow these spores survive that process and they end up in the paper. And so we build self-composting homes now, just add water, right? It’s incredible.
And so that’s one of the reasons, one of the big reasons why banning sheetrock is just a common sense thing, because it is literally the, it is like ground zero for mold, and it has nothing to do with contamination from the outside. It is coming, it comes, it comes pre-hinted.
It’s in the house, it’s in the house.
The coal is coming from inside the house. Yeah, it totally is.
And that’s exactly what showed up on all our tests. I know that it’s happened to millions of other people. So we know that this is, is the issue.
And I think insurance companies know, because they were on the phone saying, you better remediate within 48 hours. How do you know that if you’re not aware?
Well, they won’t pay if you see, here’s the, this is, this is a PSA. Ready for this? Okay.
If you have a water damage event, act immediately. Do not wait for your adjuster. Do not wait for your dad, who’s a plumber or your neighbor, who knows about these things, or your boyfriend or husband or wife, or any, you act immediately.
You immediately have to stop the water problem. You should, in fact, engage your insurance company as quickly as possible, if it is a covered peril. In other words, if it comes from a sudden and accidental event, usually the best thing to do is actually call your insurance agent and ask if it would be covered, because if it’s not covered, it’s a black mark.
If you try to file a claim that they don’t cover, and if you do that twice, they’ll drop you, by the way. This is kind of a nefarious setup. But anyway, the rule of thumb, according to the industry standard, is that you have 24 to 48 hours to get things dry, to remove the building materials that are wet, and to get everything else dry.
At the 72-hour mark, it is no longer, water damage is not allowed to be treated as water damage. It has to be treated as mold, even if it’s not visible. Okay?
And so, what’s interesting about that is that the insurance industry jumped on that and said, okay, well, if the mold industry, if the industry standard says 72 hours, it has to be treated like mold, well, then we no longer cover that. And so, the insurance industry will pay, homeowners will pay for water damage, almost up to the replacement cost value of the house, quite frankly. But they will not pay, well, usually they’ll cap their mold claims, mold claim payments to $5,000 or $10,000.
But that’s only if it’s related to a covered peril. So if the claim is valid overall, then they might be willing to pay up to $5,000 or $10,000 towards the mold part, but most of it has to be water damage. And so, you have to be very, very careful.
First of all, you have to move quickly. Second of all, you don’t want to sound the alarm unless it is, in fact, highly likely that it will be paid for, because otherwise it can work against you. There’s something called the Clue Report, C-L-U-E, the Comprehensive Loss Underwriters Exchange.
All the insurance companies share data through this, kind of like the DMV database. So, if you have too many points, you go to another insurance company, they’re like, I know who you are. Same thing with homeowners, right?
They keep a record of this and they share data. So, if you have two claims of the same kind, even if they don’t pay on them, you go into like an assigned risk program and you will have a very hard time getting insurance. And so, you really want to lean on your insurance agent to make sure that it would be covered before you call the insurance company and suggest that they send someone over.
But the bottom line is in all of this is, if you have a water damage event, jump on it. Get that to stop the water, get it out of your house, rip out everything that you can. It’s a weekend water kind of thing.
It’s free or cheap if you do that, but if you have to wait till 72 hours, then the mold remediation guys come in. It’s cash pay, it’s really expensive, and chances are you’re going to be displaced from your house for a month or longer.
Yeah. Yep. Wow.
I mean, that was kind of a whirlwind. I feel like you’ve covered 90 percent of the topic in about an hour, so I want to be respectful of your time and let you go, but I really appreciate it. I’ve got so much homework to do, and I really hope that people do follow you and check out the Mold Summit.
I know I’m taking bites of it every day, and it has changed the way that I am approaching the whole situation, and I do appreciate it because as a mom, watching your kids go through it, that’s the hard part. What’s happening to me, I can handle. It always hurts to see it done to your loved ones.
That’s why we’re here.
Very appreciated. I’m sure we’re going to have to have you back on. I have a mountain of more questions, and I really appreciate all of the wisdom.
I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope that everyone checks out the Mold Kits. It’s part of our arsenal now, and we just test as we go.
If you’re going to a hotel room, if you’re going to stay somewhere for a long period of time while your house is getting remediated, you want to make sure you’re not going into another situation, take the test kit.
Indeed. Along those lines, by the way, we created a welcome page for all of your listeners, which is at gotmold.com/virginiaconsumer.
If anyone who’s interested in learning more about mold in general, or want to learn more about the test kits, or want to ask me a question, you can go to gotmold.com/virginiaconsumer, and there you’ll find a free copy of our e-book, which is called How to Find Mold, and it’s 46 pages of inspection checklists and FAQs, and all sorts of really great resources for people that are earlier in their mold awareness journey. We get a lot of rave reviews about that piece. Then we also have, there’s a coupon code there for anyone who wants to buy a test kit, VA Mold Kit, which will give you 10 percent off any of our test kits in perpetuity.
There’s no expiration date on that. Then anyone who wants to ask me a question, you can go to right to our homepage at the bottom. There’s a contact house form.
I don’t answer all of them, but I see them all. If you mentioned that you listened to this podcast, that would be great.
Awesome. I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it too. Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it.
It was great being here.
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