Debunking Mold Myths & How Mold is Impacting Your Health with Jason Earle, Founder & CEO of GOT MOLD? l The Mold Mistakes Everyone Makes: Why Bleach Doesn’t Work, How to Identify Hidden Mold, and What Actually Fixes Indoor Air

Podcast Transcript

If you’re worried about toxic mold in your house, the last thing you want to do is get into chemical warfare with something that is evolutionarily superior to you when it comes to the weapon set that they have, right?

Welcome to the Biohacker Babes podcast with your hosts, Lauren Sambataro and Renee Belz. We’re sisters, and we’re here to empower you to take control of your health journey, optimizing your wellness with the latest science-backed tools, expert interviews, and personalized insights. All simplified and ready for you to take action.

If you’re ready to discover your true health potential and the greatest version of yourself, it’s time to dive in. Welcome to episode 336 of the Biohacker Babes. My name is Lauren, tuning in from Providence, Rhode Island, by my sister Renee in Las Vegas, per usual.

What’s up, Renee? Hey, what’s happening, everyone? Well, I’m in a hotel room, so I am thinking about this topic very deeply.

Every time I travel, we are talking about one of maybe the most confusing topics in the personal health and home health realm. There’s a lot of noise out there, a lot of opinions from like very reputable sources. And I just think people can get really confused very fast.

So we’re gonna break down some misconceptions and really hopefully deliver you some good education. We have a fabulous expert, Jason Earle from GOT MOLD. We had him on two years ago.

And I’m still confused. Like I wanted to have him back because I still hear these myths. And sometimes I’m like, I think I know this.

But it’s just, I find it to be a very confusing topic. So we’re gonna kind of break down what is mold? What is its biological purpose, right?

Because it’s something that is natural on this earth. So if we can understand it and why it’s here, I think we can have a better relationship with it. But myths around testing, myths and misconceptions around remediation, I find one of the biggest myths that I still hear that I’m a little shocked about is using bleach on mold.

Just kind of a scary thing and Jason’s gonna explain why that is not an ideal choice if you have mold in your home. And just some really cool takeaways, like thinking of your house as an extension of your lungs and your health. And just really taking this holistic purview where we see mold is a natural thing.

Why is it here? How is it interacting with our environment? How can we create more of a symbiotic relationship where we are honoring that species and not trying to shoot dark guns at it and be on the offense?

There’s another way here. And Jason just is full, full, full of knowledge. Yeah, I love chatting with Jason.

He makes the topic of mold somewhat entertaining, I would say. He has a lot of fun little one-liners and analogies that are really helpful. But yeah, just I think, like you said, how do we live with mold?

Like mold has been here forever. It’s not just like kill, kill, kill. So really, really appreciate his insight here.

So a little bit more about Jason. Jason Earle is a man on a mission and adoring father of two boys, incurable entrepreneur and indoor air quality crusader. He is the founder and CEO of GOT MOLD, and the creator of the GOT MOLD Test Kit.

The realization that his moldy childhood home was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma, led him into the healthy home business in 2002, leaving behind a successful career on Wall Street. Over the last two decades, Jason has personally performed countless sick building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way, helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind. He has been featured or appeared on Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired and more.

And if you want to take an even deeper dive on mold after this one, make sure you go back and check out Episode 227, when he was first on our show, that was January 2024, and we will link to that in the show notes below. All right, let’s bring Jason on. Welcome back to the Biohacker Babes.

We always love having repeat guests because we get to dive a little bit deeper. Thanks for coming back.

It’s always a pleasure seeing you lovely ladies, always.

We have a very long list of topics we want to get to today. Probably get it right out of time, but we’re going to, we’re going to at least cross some of them off the list today. For anyone that did not hear our previous episode, go back in here because we talked a lot about mycotoxins in food, we talked about building health.

We’re going to go a little bit deeper into some myths around mold that I’m still hearing all the time. I’m surprised that people are still talking about this. So we’re going to pick your brain on mold testing, remediation, but maybe the most common that I still hear is using bleach on mold.

Can you tell us what happens to mold when we expose it to bleach?

I have an article I wrote about this, which I’ll-

Of course, you do.

There’s a link to. So this is one of my favorite subjects. In fact, I think it might be one of the first articles I wrote 25 years ago.

That’s how long I’ve been pounding this drum. Well, first of all, the purpose of remediation is to fix the water problem. That’s the definition of remediation, actually.

Remediation and Bleach Effects

Remedy is the root word. When we’re thinking about mold, we have to think about the root cause, which is always moisture. Mold doesn’t grow in the absence of moisture.

So what is a mold problem? A mold problem is a moisture problem. Remediation is really remedying the problem and then cleaning up the mess.

We fix the moisture problem, turn up the spigot, so to speak, and only then, then you can begin doing the cleanup phase, which means removing building materials that can’t be cleaned, so sheetrock, carpet, carpet padding, insulation, these porous things that hold moisture and also support fungal growth. Once you’ve removed all those materials, and generally speaking, a little bit more, so people go like a foot or two depending upon how stringent they are, from the damage materials. Once the structural elements are exposed, that are not damaged, are not structurally compromised, then they can be cleaned, and they’ve cleaned using HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaners and damp wipes and air purifiers.

So as you’re cleaning, you’re stirring stuff up, so you’re also cleaning the air, and this is all being done in a way where you’re ventilating the outside. My point is that remediation, what I just described, is stop water, remove mold, and clean. Notice I didn’t say anything in there about killing.

There’s this idea, human ingenuity revolves largely around our ability to kill things. Almost every major innovation has been turned into a weapon. You can look at obviously nuclear, you can look at antibiotics

It’s crazy, weapons of mass destruction. You start looking at all these things, our ability to kill things is really what we specialize in. When it comes to the microbial world, we tend to think that if we just kill something, that it will somehow or another go away.

But even a mobster doesn’t leave a dead body in the building, he takes it away, he gets rid of it. The bottom line is when you’re going to get rid of the bad guys, and when it comes to mold, you don’t need to sneak up behind it and snuff it out and then remove it. It’s not going to fight you, you just can remove it.

Adding chemicals to it is an unnecessary step, number one. It adds a cost and it adds time. The second thing is that it’s not necessary.

If you’re going to remove it in the first place, why kill it and then remove it? The third thing is you’re adding a chemical burden to the building. You’re actually adding chemicals.

This is the other thing is we think we add more to our OB-NIC, another pill, potion, powder, protocol, whatever it is and we’re going to get better that way. But the proper healing usually happens through a different process called via negativa, improvement through subtraction. What do I need to remove from my life that is currently preventing me from finding equilibrium?

What do I have to remove from my life that’s causing inflammation, right? Via negativa is not the American way, but it is usually the most effective way. What we need to remove is obviously the moisture problem, and we need to remove the mold itself on the materials that are supporting the growth.

Then you remove the dust that, again, haven’t had to kill anything. In fact, you don’t even need to use cleaning agents. If you’re removing the dust from the home, guess where all the spores are?

They’re all in the dust, right? So just a dust, a free, like a white glove clean is really the idea. But here’s the fun part about bleach.

This is the part that I love the best. Bleach will make the surface look clean. And then also there’s a Pavlovian type response that we get when we smell bleach.

It smells clean, must be clean, right? So like we’re so easily, like the new house smells, smells like, oh, you’ve arrived, the new car smell. I smell cancer, I smell autoimmune disease, but that’s just me.

But when it comes to bleach, you know, I smell, I smell, yeah, okay, someone’s, you know, scared of microbes. But what’s really happening there is, bleach is 97% water and 3% sodium hypochlorite, which is the bleach, the actual bleach. This evaporates, it’s a volatile organic compound.

It evaporates quickly, leaving behind what? If it’s 3% sodium hypochlorite and that evaporates and it’s 97% water, what if we, when that, when the-

Oh, some more water?

You just added water to the water problem.

Eee, oh, that’s crazy.

Right, and now check this out, it’s better. When you spray something onto a surface where there’s mold, mold is designed kind of like dandelions in the, you know, in the late spring. They’re designed to break free and go forth and prosper.

When you spray at mold colonies, the air around the water droplets hits this colony before the water does and disperses it. The same way when you’re driving on the road on a bicycle, on a tractor trailer comes behind you, you feel the air way before you feel the tractor trailer, right?

Yeah. Right?

Same kind of dynamic there where the actual air moves before the liquid, and so you can disperse it. So spraying directly onto mold actually spreads it. But here, here’s the best part.

There’s research out there that shows that the toxigenic molds, now I don’t really subscribe heavily to the toxigenic molds, and you need to worry about these guys as much, although they’re good indicators of a chronic moisture problem. So they do serve as a forensic diagnostic tool. Those molds, if they’re around, it’s been going on for a while.

But the molds that do produce microtoxins, there’s evidence that when you spray chemicals on them, you piss them off, and it amplifies their chemical response. So if you’re worried about toxic mold in your house, the last thing you want to do is get into chemical warfare with something that is evolutionarily superior to you when it comes to the weapon set that they have, right? So there’s about a dozen reasons that I can lay out, and that’s just a short synopsis.

Sounds great. On why bleach and antimicrobials in general. And then by the way, a lot of antimicrobials, by the way, you’re also leaving behind dead mold.

Let me just emphasize that by doing that, you’re leaving behind dead mold, which is still allergenic, still potentially toxigenic. And so you’ve just added a chemical, you just added water to a water problem. And then the best part is that you haven’t actually reduced the fungal load in the building.

You’ve made it worse. And you’ve actually potentially even amplified it by leaving water on it. By the way, leaving dead mold behind, dead live mold likes to eat dead mold.

So you’re actually feeding it, you’re giving it water, the whole thing. You might as well just start a mold farm. I mean, it’s like literally the exact opposite of what you need to do.

By the way, similarly, painting mold adds nutrients because mold loves to eat paint, even with antimicrobials in it. That dissipates in about six months. And if there’s a moisture problem there, then it will just grow and it will eat that.

So there is no additive, there’s no treatment. There’s no thing that you put on mold or on a moldy house that makes it better. The only thing that makes a moldy house better is stopping the water and removing the affected materials, cleaning it so it’s restored to a normal condition, which is kind of like the outside.

And essentially it’s clean and dry. So anything that you’re using to spray is working against you. Okay.

And are some people just spraying bleach on there and calling it a day?

Some people, yeah. I mean, that’s all they do.

Yeah, I hear this all the time.

Oh, wow.

Okay, okay.

Yeah. Bad landlords will often spray bleach and then paint over. That’s a common, that goes back to, that’s like the old wives tales.

This is ancient mythology when it comes to the way to handle mold.

So same thing with natural solutions like hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, I mean, they’re all water-based. So same issue?

Well, same issue is that you don’t need to kill it. You only need to clean it. You can use those things if you really feel like you need to because, you know, your mom did that and that’s the way, whatever kind of story you have to tell yourself about why you need to use peroxide or bleach, that’s fine, but you don’t need to.

All you need is a damp cloth. Seriously, it’s dust. It’s dust.

There’s no killing necessary. You don’t need to break free the bio, you don’t need to treat the biofilms or any of this craziness. It is very, very simple.

Now, if you want to use bleach, the way bleach really is beneficial is if you are smart, it’s concrete that’s got paint on it. Concrete, not sheetrock. Sheetrock, this molding needs to be removed.

But concrete that’s got paint on it, yeah, you could bleach that if you wanted to because it’s got a stain on it. Keep in mind, mold’s probably going to come back because the dynamic that caused it probably hasn’t been fixed. But there are tile in your bathroom.

You don’t want to remove all that grout. You want to use a bleach pen? Awesome, do that.

Grout, mold in your grout is not going to get you sick. Any more so than mold growing underneath the lid of your toilet, which a lot of these crazy lunatic inspectors that are overzealous, that will remain nameless, that are hoisting $10,000 inspections upon unwitting public, they are looking at the underside of toilet tanks. If this has ever happened to you, you might be getting scammed because mold growing on the underside of a toilet is normal because no one looks under there and moisture accumulates and spores are ubiquitous and so you will get some degree of mold, means nothing.

Normal vs. Problem Mold

Mold growing in your grout.

Why is mold in your grout not a problem?

Because it’s not an exposure issue. The volume of it is so small and it’s growing literally on the soap scum. It doesn’t actually eat the grout.

It doesn’t actually penetrate. It’s a purely surface thing. It’s an aesthetic thing.

I feel like I see that not really here in Vegas in my shower, but like every hotel I stay in or every other hotel, I’m like, oh, that looks like mold. That looks like mold. And I’ve always wondered.

But that’s not really a problem.

It’s not really a problem. If people are upset about it, they can get in there with a bleach pen. And if you really want to fix it, go in there and you get buy grout sealer at Home Depot.

Now, that’s toxic stuff. So you want to make sure you ventilate it really well. But grout sealer and there are pens.

You can put them on pen applications too. And what that’ll do is it’ll make the grout less porous. And so it won’t get the soap scum in the pores of the grout, which is really where the moisture then gets in and you got a bit of a microbial party in there.

So if you get it bleached, get it dry, and then you seal that grout, it won’t happen again. You can just wipe it off after that. So grout, but household mold, the difference between a mold problem and mold in buildings is kind of that.

You’re going to have mold in every building. You’re going to find little pockets of it in little places around the grout on your fridge maybe, or freezer, certainly in areas like garages where climate is questionable and you may have like a freezer in the garage. You’re going to see stuff like that.

You’re supposed to more mold outside in one breath than you would be ever in a bathroom that has a little mold in the grout. And by the way, mold exposure is a normal part of a healthy environment. In fact, every breath you take, you’re breathing in spores.

And they are like little chemical messages or little biological messages that are teaching your immune system what’s normal. If you live in a home that has no mold spores, that you’ve gotten to sanitize because you over-hepa vacuum and you over-hepa filter, you are doing your immune system a disservice. You will have higher likelihood of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, and things like that.

And this is well documented. A diverse microbiome where there’s a lot of different microbes, but none growing in your home, which means no moisture problems, much lower cases of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease and cancers, by the way. And so, you really look at this and you think, we need to be part of nature, because we are.

And we talked about this on our previous shows, you know? Like we have a nature deficit disorder, more so than we have a systemic mold problem in our buildings.

Yeah, it’s adaptive immunity. We have to teach our immune system to adapt and be resilient.

Yeah, we’re part of nature, guys. You know, like this, we, humans comes from the word humus, which is soil.

That’s cool. How do we know when?

Right? Earthlings. I mean, this is not a, this isn’t.

It’s not far-fetched.

Yeah, but only in the last, like very tiny little part of our, humans have been on planet for hundreds of thousands of years. And we’ve only done this indoor experiment for a couple hundred years. And then this chemical box, moldy chemical box experiment for the last 50 years.

And then suddenly we have 100 new autoimmune diseases in our ICD-10. It’s insane, right? So now what’s the common element here?

And it’s this building experiment thing that we’ve done that’s gone badly wrong. And it’s mostly separation from nature. We no longer are part of nature.

We separate ourselves with the rubber at the bottom of our shoes and this triple plain glass and all this kind of stuff. And so my call to arm is get your house clean and dry, and then open your freaking windows.

I love opening my windows. But, you know, when it’s 4 degrees outside, that can be quite difficult. But we did talk a lot in our last episode about how your home should breathe, right?

It’s like the lungs, similar to the lungs in your body to filter. So how do we know that mold, if mold is a problem or not, is it the stuff that we can’t see that is worse than what we can see or potentially wipe with a damp cloth?

Well, first of all, any mold of significance. And, you know, the EPA guidelines are three foot by three foot, which is roughly 10 square feet. That’s what they suggest as a maximum for a homeowner.

If I see three foot by three foot mold, I, who train people to do this, do not do that work myself. If I see one square foot of mold, the chances are behind that’s much worse. I would limit my, again, I’ve even got the tools.

I’ve been navigating this for 25 years for other people. I’ve got, I won’t do it myself. I’ve been humbled enough to know better.

So, in a case where more than one square foot of visible mold exists, I would say that’s above any rational, responsible homeowner or renter’s skill set. Even if they’re, you know, even a bold remediation contractor that has that happen is gonna call on a crew, you know? Because if you’ve seen it enough, you know that that’s probably Pandora’s box.

So now, when it comes down to porous, sorry, that’s porous materials, non-porous materials, glass, metal, plastic, things like that. Generally speaking, that stuff grows because there’s a high humidity problem in the building. So oftentimes you will see mold on surfaces, but you won’t see it where it’s growing on other, it will be growing in other places that you maybe can’t see.

So in those cases, a proper assessment is really important. Because if it’s growing on the, on the, on your dad or back of a dresser or like on the arm of your chair or something like that, that moisture problem is not just the chair, that moisture problem is probably much more widespread in the building and you probably need to get it. Now that’s one of the reasons why our test kit would work.

That’s a perfect example of that where there’s visible mold in a breathing space. That’s where you’d start to see is it airborne in this room? Is it airborne in the fall in the other rooms?

That’s a really good use case for the GOT MOLD test kit or any air sampling for that matter. And so yes, I mean, I would say that the size of the mold problem dictates how you handle it. Number one, it’s a decision tree, right?

But oftentimes mold strikes when you can’t see it at all. So what I would say is if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something. And so seeing is any sign of moisture, any sign, that means blistering paint, staining, trim, separating from the walls, that kind of stuff where there’s expansion, contraction being occurring because things swell up and then shrink back.

Identifying Mold Issues

Obviously, any visible mold or textures that pop up that are kind of geometric, especially if you use a flashlight at an angle, you can see the textures of it and that’s a really nice, sometimes you can’t see it until you go to the side and then you’re like, oh wow, you can see the colonies. So if you see any visual clue of a moisture problem in a modern building because they’re all made of sheet rock is likely going to have a mold problem if it’s more than 72 hours old behind it. If you smell something, the musty smell is not just an esthetic nuisance, the musty smell is the first sign of mold growth.

It’s the digestive byproduct. It’s mold burps or some people call it other things, but you get the point. It’s effluence.

It’s the byproduct of digestion. If you suck on the tailpipe of any living creature long enough, you will not feel well. And that is basically what you’re doing.

And so the musty smell is neurotoxic, according to a lot of recent research, including Joan Bennett’s work at Rutgers University. So it is like I said, it’s a health hazard in and of itself. It’s also a very potent clue.

We chased those musty smells for almost 20 years with mold dogs. It’s very effective at determining the likelihood of a building’s problem. Also, very effective at finding the source.

And so the musty smell is not something you should dismiss. Oftentimes people need to leave the house for a little bit to come back to let their nose clear, their olfactory is clear. And then if you feel something and-

Can I ask you a quick question about the musty smell? I recently pulled my humidifier back out. I live in Vegas.

It’s very dry, dry skin, potentially higher respiratory rate at night because of the dry air. So I pulled my humidifier back out that’s like old, years old. And I opened it and it had that musty smell.

Yes.

Should I throw it in the trash?

Okay. Here’s a good place for peroxide. I would stay away from bleach because it will react to the plastic.

But this is where, so humidifiers, this is a fun little detour. Humidifiers, first of all, when you use them, you should put a cap full of peroxide in every time. That will keep it clean because it will keep it from developing the musty smell in the headspace in that really damp space above.

When you’re finished with them, open it up and let them dry out thoroughly and don’t put the cap back on. If you want to tape it on the outside or something like that, that’s a good practice. You want, you know, like the reason that’s that.

Also, distilled water, right? Because I know some people just put regular tap water in there.

Yeah, reverse osmosis or distilled, because what happens is you get a lot of minerals that get, you know, you’re boiling this off and you’ll get all the stuff that’s left. All the non-water elements will stay at the bottom. Oftentimes, they have these like mineral absorption pads that get kind of crunchy and crusty.

If you use distilled water and if you use that, you’ll eliminate that plus also, of course, you’re aerosolizing all sorts of other stuff, depending upon whether you’re using an ultrasonic or whether you’re using a warmer, cold mist, cool mist. If you’re using an ultrasonic one, you’re aerosolizing lots of stuff that you don’t want to. You’re also pumping chlorine and all sorts of other weird stuff.

And then there’s all sorts of chloramines, these things that are caused by the chlorination of the water, that are all sorts of health effects associated with secondary byproducts of that stuff. And then there’s also mycobacteria that survive the chlorination. And there’s all sorts of weird stuff.

So purified water, not boiled water, but distilled or reverse osmosis is important.

Okay. I use RO for it.

Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s one of the best things to use RO for, because RO is so aggressive, you have to mineralize it to drink it. But it’s best if you use RO for humidification.

And again, I would throw a cap full-

Okay, so maybe I can just clean it out a little bit, not toss it. Okay.

You can clean it with a peroxide solution. You can get in there and rinse it, let it sit for a bit, and you’ll smell it again after it dries and it’ll probably be fine. Okay.

Great.

Thanks for answering that. So if you smell something, which is what you- So the musty odor is a big deal, and the research has historically been circumspect around it because the chemicals occur in such small quantities in the parts per billion range, like a baby’s teardrop and a 55-gallon drum type of dilution.

They’ve always said, well, this can’t possibly be causing so much, this can’t be causing illness because the dose isn’t large enough. Well, the emerging research on this is that once you become sensitized to chemicals and mold, which most people who are sensitive to one are sensitive to both, you’re actually sensitive to the VOCs, the manmade VOCs and the microbial VOCs. The VOC is the Venn diagram, this is the overlap, that’s what causes that sensitivity.

The pathway for that is actually neurosensory, it’s not toxic. So there is a trigeminal nerve in the eyes, mouth and jaw that actually detect heat, pain and cold, but they also have chemical sensors in them, very, very, very sensitive chemical. This is your spidey sense, this is a primal safety mechanism.

And so once you become sensitized and your nervous system is tuned and it’s afraid of the environment, the trigeminal nerve is very hypersensitive and it will become irritated by pungent VOCs. In fact, this is the same function that occurs when you cut an onion in your eyes water, okay? So that’s why that happens.

So once you’ve become sensitized and you get exposed to the musty odor or you go to the hardware store or the dry cleaner and you’re like, ah, and these people, you know, these people blow up right away and they have panic attacks and you’re like, what is going on there? Their spidey sense kicked in and it’s got a straight shot to the brain and it creates a neurogenic cascade, which includes cytokine storms. So again, it looks like a toxic response, but it’s actually a neurogenic inflammatory cascade

This is fascinating stuff. And it also turns on its head, this whole toxicity model, which is what’s being pushed forward with mycotoxin urine panels and Hermes and all this kind of stuff, which is this whole detox protocol thing, which may help some people, but it doesn’t get to the root cause. It doesn’t get to the root issue, which is the neurosensory irritation and the hypersensitive nervous system, which often is dealt with with limit retraining.

But once you become the canary in the coalmine, that musty smell is a powerful trigger. It often causes people to fall off balance, and that is the thing that keeps knocking you off balance. What’s really crazy is that the exposures can occur and trigger that irritation below the odor threshold.

You don’t have to smell it. If you do, you’re for sure going to be triggered. But the sensory nerves are so sensitive that they can detect these things below the odor threshold.

So, it’s very important, it’s not enough often to relocate, as many people have found out, or to clean up your diet, or to do it all together. Oftentimes, you need to get in there and do some really important work around your limbic system and your nervous system.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of retraining, which we can share some more resources. That’s great, that’s really interesting. I want to get into the dust versus the air sampling.

Testing Methods Compared

I want to just throw this debate on the table because I’m still hearing people go so hard saying that air sampling is basically bogus. How could you possibly in five minutes capture a real exposure? Or if you do capture anything, there could be false negatives or then we don’t know where is the problem.

If it is positive, it doesn’t tell us where is the mold. Give us your, I won’t even say two cents. I know you’ll give us more than that.

But I got a couple of dollars.

What is the benefit of air sampling? Where do we even begin this debate over air versus dust?

All right, well, let’s go back to, let’s go to, I like first principles. I also like just taking the concerns and just like, let’s look at those. Okay, so it doesn’t tell you where it is.

How does an ERMI tell you where it is? Seriously, you take two cents. It doesn’t.

People always tell me the ERMI found the mold. No, no, no, no, the ERMI found spores and interpreted that into mold problem.

Just for the audience, the ERMI were just, that’s analogous to a dust test, correct?

Okay, so ERMI stands for Environmental Equality Moldiness Index. It was developed by some EPA staffers 25 years ago based on originally 17 homes. Everyone says 1096, it was actually 17 homes in Ohio.

And then they made a panel of 36 species. It was like 80 and 90 that they initially thought might be good. And then they found 36 that they thought were more indicative.

And then they rolled that out in 1096 homes in an EPA HUD study. And then that became this, it’s a research tool, never was designed to be a commercial product. But because there’s an absence of quality testing in the marketplace, Schumacher, Schumaker, Schumacher came out and said, well, this could be really useful because it’s DNA based.

Of course, DNA means sexy or something like that.

Sounds fancy.

25 years old, DNA technology is like ancient history in genomics, okay? So this is like stone age stuff in terms of genomics. And there’s never been anything that’s really come out of it, except for some derivatives, like Hertz Me2, which is another Shoemaker thing where 36 species wasn’t good enough, we had to make it five.

It doesn’t make any sense. Go narrower instead of going broader, right?

Versus how many species of mold are on the planet?

Yeah, so our new test, spoiler alert, looks at 400,000.

Holy cow. Versus 36. 36.

That one came out of Ohio, which Ohio is its own problem.

Not exactly. It just grabbed the reverse data set. And so our database is national.

It’s actually global. We’re doing a study in Australia right now. And then, but we use next generation sequencing for our new test, which we could talk about more in a little bit.

But it uses AI machine learning to make sense of the data. So we’re not trying to make up rules. We’re letting the data speak for itself.

And so, but when it comes down to any test, testing doesn’t tell you where it is unless you’re drawing holes in walls. That’s when you can actually, or if you actually identify it visibly, then you don’t need to test to do that. So there is no test that’s going to tell you where it is.

So air versus dust, it’s the same. It’s who’s looking at it, who’s analyzing.

These are indicators. Let me just back up and explain that if you have to treat the building like a body, the bodies are complex. You would never just do one test to determine if a person is healthy, right?

What are you going to choose, a lipid panel or an inflammation marker panel? What are you going to do? Which one?

You’re going to do the function help, the whole thing? It doesn’t matter. That one test doesn’t tell you.

Anyway, you still need the context of health profiles, symptoms, family history, lifestyle, all that stuff. Houses have the same kind of thing, right? So there’s a building history, there’s an occupant history, there’s so many different pieces that you need to take into consideration when you’re doing an assessment.

There is no one test that’s going to be able to tell you, equivocally or unequivocally, that there is a problem or not. Yeah, you can see if there’s a problem, but a not detected does not mean you don’t have a problem, because mold manifests in lots of different ways. The same way you could take a blood test and have skin cancer and it doesn’t show up, right?

Or you can have imaging done and it won’t show up, right? Or you can have a physical, physical and not do blood testing or imaging, and they can miss the giant tumor on your spleen, right? So like you have to look at this as multi-factorial, and the most important data you’re going to get when you’re assessing your home is actually from you.

Again, see something, smell something, and then we didn’t really go in to feel something, but the symptoms that tend to get better when you leave the building. They get worse when you come home and then they get better when you leave. That is that you are the best test.

You are an exquisite array of precision sensors. You have learned to not trust your environment or trust your intuition because you’re so used to training. You want doctors to be the answers for these things.

You want Facebook to be the answers for these things. We intuitively know when something’s wrong with our building if you can learn to trust yourself. But oftentimes people are knocked off balance by this.

Their adrenal systems are whacked out, their nervous system is whacked out, and trust is the first thing that goes. But you still have these little experiments and I call them tests. Do you see something?

That’s a test. Do you smell something? That’s a test.

Do you feel something? That’s a test. Then you collect data.

By the way, those are all data. Science begins with observation. Observational data is meaningful.

Most studies begin with observational data. Why people poo poo that is amazing to me. Then you collect samples that are analyzed in a standardized way so that you can start to get insights into things that you wouldn’t normally do.

I look at sport traps like an X-ray. If you broke your leg, you’re still going to do an X-ray. You know it’s broken, but you want to see how badly it’s broken.

Where are the breaks? Then we’re going to use that to help reset it. Sport traps are really useful to determine, is it broken and how much is it broken?

How far did that break go? Now, it is not a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet.

If you grab a dust test, what you’re also getting is a lot of historical data that may or may not be relevant. Old homes index very high. Buildings that are in wooded areas, buildings that don’t have air conditioning because they open the windows a lot.

They get a lot of infiltration from outside and the particles settle in. ERME doesn’t index for those things. It doesn’t have any sort of normalization for the data.

But those dust pushers will argue that those contain the ultrafine particles that really get into our lungs and make us sick.

Fair enough. You know what? That is largely true.

Then here’s what I want to suggest. When it comes down to mold in dust versus mold in the air, the people who say air samples don’t work, by the way, often are taking lots of air samples.

I want to know about that too. Why would they say they’re not?

I would love to see the people who say air samples don’t work. I would like to see their last 10 reports because they’re using them.

I believe you.

What they’re saying is that it doesn’t always line up with the mold problem. That is true.

Sometimes you find mold that you wouldn’t expect. I’ve been in buildings where there was no visible, but there was no actual detectable mold problem. The support counts were outrageously high.

It turns out that the people’s stuff had gotten moldy in the basement. They moved and they just moved all the moldy stuff out. The people moved into this house and they had disturbed all of it, but the only mold was actually on their contents before they moved.

Then we moved it, they disturbed all of it, and so the numbers were high. We knew it because they had left a pool table in the basement that was moldy. Everything else was clean.

They had a concrete basement. So we knew that their stuff had gotten moldy and they had moved it out. So there was no visible detectable mold problem in the building other than the legacy problem.

Sport Trap solved that problem. You would never have been able to really figure that out, because we were able to see where it distributed throughout the building. It is a perspective into the mold problem.

A dust test, a proper dust test, not one that’s based on 36 species and the always index is high. By the way, I sold 35,000 or so Hermes. My first test kit ever was an Ermi test.

So I saw all the data and I said, well, jeez, how can they all be high? It doesn’t make sense, so we stopped selling it, even though we were doing well with it. We sold them quickly.

But the panic and fear I got from my customer base was so disturbing to me. The fact that I had all that data, everyone tells me about the Ermi. I’m like, how many have you done?

Two, I’ve done two in my house. I know Ermi. I’ve done 35,000.

So I can tell you.

Yeah. These were false positives in the sense that catching stuff that’s not making people sick.

I’m saying that when it says that it’s a 30 on an Ermi score, and by the way, I’ve gone in physically into hundreds of homes after higher Ermi, using mold dogs and thermal imaging back when I was in the field. I was able to validate and verify the conditions that were commensurate or proportional to the Ermi in five or maybe 10 percent of cases. That means 90 percent were unverifiable.

Now, there are certain circumstances where a spore trap is going to yield more data than a dust test. There are certain circumstances where a dust test is going to yield more data than an air sample. It’s the interpretation of the data.

It’s also looking at it all. There’s no silver bullet, people. There is no silver bullet.

You know, if you see mold, that is an indicator, right? That trumps all other tests. There’s no such thing as a false negative.

Let me just make this clear. There’s no such thing as a false negative because we’re not actually able to prove a negative. There’s no such thing as a false negative.

The negative says it wasn’t detected in the sample. That’s a data point. That’s not telling you everything is clear, okay?

There is no false negative, okay? It’s meaningful data. It means that there’s spore counts are normal in this building.

Now, if you sample after remediation, they may not be, right? Because these dynamics change. It’s useful to get a snapshot into the before and the after.

But there are false positives, and false positives are the most dangerous kind of wrong because they lead people down crazy rabbit holes, right? Especially if it is not supported by the context and the actual conditions in the building. So if you got a high ERMI, but there’s no moisture problem, you brought people in and they cannot find an active moisture problem.

I’m not talking about spores people. I’m talking about an active moisture problem. You probably don’t have a mold problem.

Quick question. You’ve noticed how many people are suddenly talking about GLP-1 medications for appetite and weight, right? Because in my world, it seems to be everywhere right now.

But a lot of people we talked to were also wondering, is there a way to get these benefits without jumping straight to injections? Renee and I were so curious about this. When we heard about Calocurb, we leaned in hard.

We had founder and CEO Sarah Kennedy on the podcast to talk about Calocurb and this patented extract derived from the Amerisate plant. We learned that it is designed to activate the body’s own endogenous GLP-1 signaling. Instead of forcing our systems with a drug, we actually have the ability to support our physiology, to help regulate our appetite and cravings in a much more natural way.

What I find the most interesting is that it doesn’t try to completely shut off your hunger. The goal is more about helping our bodies to recognize fullness sooner, so eating feels more intuitive again. By activating bitter taste receptors in the gut, calocurb stimulates the body’s natural satiety signaling, which over time can help normalize how hunger and fullness are perceived.

We think this is such a fantastic option for people looking for a natural and long-term solution without the downstream side effects of things like Ozempic. And it’s a really great choice for anyone trying to come off of a GLP-1, which we know now triggers a lot of rebound weight gain. So if GLP-1 meds have piqued your interests or maybe a friends or a family members, we have such a great natural approach you can feel confident about sharing.

Definitely check out our interview with Sarah, episode 331, and you can check out calocurb at calocurb.com and get a discount with code RENE10. That is www.calocurb.com with the discount code RENE10 for 10% off. All right, biohackers, most of us are wearing trackers that tell us after the fact how stressed we were.

But let’s be honest, knowing you were stressed out or you slept terribly doesn’t actually help you improve the situation. And that’s where Apollo Neuro changes the game. Apollo Neuro isn’t another tracker.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the trackers. There’s a place for that. But Apollo Neuro is actually an active nervous system tool.

The Apollo wearable paired with SmartVibes AI, it doesn’t just collect data, it responds to your body. Using gentle clinically studied vibrations, it calms your nervous system in real time, helping your body shift out of fight or flight and into rest, focus, or recovery when you need it most. Built on over a decade of research, SmartVibes actually learns your patterns, helping you fall asleep faster, and it prevents wakeups before they happen.

Apollo has done a ton of really cool research, including that they found thousands of users are getting up to 60 extra minutes of sleep per night. Yes, that’s seven more hours of sleep every week. And that’s actually over two times more than prescription sleep aids and six times more than melatonin.

But it’s not just about sleep. Apollo can also reduce stress by up to 40%, boost focus by 25% and speed recovery by over 10%. So if you’ve ever felt tired or running on empty, which I think most of us have, you know, this is great.

You could be a parent, a professional, an athlete, a biohacker. This is really great for everyone. And if you want to take a deeper dive on the science behind Apollo and why vibration is so helpful for the nervous system, check out our recent interview with the founder, Dr. Dave Rabin.

That was episode 334. So why just track your sleep and your stress when you can actually master it? Now, for a limited time, you can get $90 off the Apollo Wearable Plus Smart Vibes bundle with code biohackerbabes.

If you scroll down the show notes, you’ll see the link there too, but it’s apolloneuro.com/biohackerbabes.

Spores in your environment, airborne or in dust or whatever, does not equal a mold problem. You need to find the source. And you don’t just do that by ripping walls apart.

There are mold dogs. There’s all sorts of really cool ways to do this. And you don’t need to hire someone for 10 grand to do an inspection and $100,000 to rip your house apart.

Just, you don’t need to do that, guys, if you don’t need to, okay? There are better ways, I promise you. Save the $200,000, okay?

Yeah, do something fun with that money, please.

Seriously, invest it in some of my gold.

If you see something, smell something, feel something, you buy the air test, it comes back, I know there’s a gradients and how it’s reported. And it looks like there’s a mold problem. What’s the next step?

Find the moisture.

With a moisture meter, and do you want to talk about your next?

Yeah, well, so there’s a couple of different things. So first of all, we sell a test kit, but I want to make this really clear. What we sell is really a Self-Directed Mold Assessment Program.

If you use our resources, we have an e-book that we give away. It’s on our website. There’s a QR code in the instructions, right where we tell you to check your house, inspect your house, and we should probably emphasize this more.

But there’s a 46-page e-book with inspection checklists and what to look for. If you take this book and you inspect your house, you will see things that you never see because you’re too busy paying the bills, getting your kids to school, all these things. You will start to see the moisture problems if you have them.

You get a flashlight, you get a moisture meter, you do an inspection, get comfortable in your home. Your home is not just a box where you live and store your stuff, it’s an extension of your immune system. When the building gets sick, you get sick.

When the building heals, so too can you. We have a symbiotic relationship with our buildings, and you are the immune system. It’s your responsibility to take care of your building.

By the way, I would also say I talked a little bit about love versus fear before we turn on, hit record. Maintenance is a form of love, and more importantly, it’s a form of self-love. The same way self-care is, but when you take care of the building, it takes care of you.

It comes back to you. I’m encouraging people to reframe buildings as the most important relationship you have when it comes to your health and longevity. It’s important that you get to know your building.

It’s important you make the necessary investments because it impacts every breath you take. I think this is becoming more hands-on. We outsource everything.

We don’t even go to the grocery store anymore. Don’t outsource this. This is so intimate.

This is your opportunity to create a sanctuary. Unlike the outdoor environment, unlike almost everything in your life, where you have no control if you’re honest with yourself, the indoor environment offers us a chance for unbelievable control. It’s not that expensive to get good air purifiers and HEPA vacuums and moisture meters and humidity gauges and just be in tune with it so that when things are out of whack a little bit and you smell that smell, you’ve got your awareness, you’ve got the tools and you know to act quickly on these things and not to spray bleach on them and these basic things.

This is, I think, table stakes for being a human being in modern world. We all live in buildings and breathe air. And so you need to know how to manage buildings, especially when it comes to moisture problems because mold happens, right?

And so what we want to do is give people the knowledge, e-book, things like that, so that they’re not just expecting a test to do the whole thing, right? The knowledge and the tools they need to make better decisions, be well informed. And so along those lines, I know that was a bit of a lead up, but along those lines, one of the things that’s always bothered me is that we only sell one test, which implies, incorrectly, that is the test.

And that has never been the case. We made a better test because we didn’t want people to get taken advantage of by these guys are charging $1,000 to do the same thing that we can do for $300, right? Just to grab some air samples, take a walk around your house with a flashlight, you know, like you don’t need to spend $1,500 for that folks.

That’s why we created the GOT MOLD Test Kit. But we also did it to show the industry what we could do in terms of improvements and innovation. And so along those lines, we’ve been brought a couple of recent technologies, recently brought a few technologies that will uplevel the industry.

So one is, everyone knows I’m outspoken about ERMI, which is 36 species using PCR, very old technology. I just got a global exclusive on a new Yale patent that was developed by Dr. Richard Shaughnessy and Dr. Jordan Pescia, who are both chairmen of the International Society for Indoor Air Quality, president and or chairman of the International Society for Indoor Air Quality. Both top researchers in their space, they’re using a HUD grant.

They developed this new method that uses next-generation sequencing which is the same method that used for gut microbiome tests. But we’re looking at the entire fungal spectrum, so up to 400,000 taxa, for that 100,000 types of fungi. All known fungi is the best way to say it.

It runs the data through AI machine learning, and it runs it through an algorithm that was developed by Yale. We expect to launch that in July 1st, and that should really be the answer to this concern that I have, because it’s designed specifically not to over-index or under-index. It’s designed specifically to just look at, we also have a giant national database of outdoor fungi, and so we’re fusing this in, so we’ve got the Yale algorithm and AI tool above, and then we’re bringing in this huge database of outdoor fungal data, and so we’ll have the most robust, essentially fungal microbiome test in the world in about six months or so, and so we’ll be coming out right around the same price as Army.

Wow, awesome.

That’s very impressive.

That’s so cool. It’ll work well together with the air test, so what we’ll suggest people do is test your air and grab these dust samples. And it’s a little swab, by the way, we’re creating a whole new swab too, that’s got a little paddle on it, so it’s got a nice strong stem built into the cap, and it comes in a tube that will come just like this with the agent, the buffer in it, and then you just swab it and you put it back in, so there’s no breaking swabs and all the craziness that you see with a lot of these kits.

So we’re going to do this in a really consumer-friendly, you know, like we did with our air test, but we’re going to do a really cool new blood test. And then we also have a new sensor that, for anyone who’s watching this, this is the first ever mold sensor, true mold sensor, electronic nose.

Home Assessment and Sensors

Yeah, I want to hear about the sensor in just a sec, but so if you’re testing the air and then you also have the dust swab, what would you expect to see and be able to compare between these two results?

Well, we’re actually doing some studies on that right now to see what the correlation is between the essentially the fungal microbiome or the fungal community and the air. I initially think there will be very little correlation between the two because the dynamics are so, I think it will depend on the building type and how much use there is. See, the thing is that dust settles, gravity works and things fall out of the air.

Because something is in dust doesn’t mean you’re exposed to it. These are not radioactive particles that harm you at a distance. They have to become airborne, you have to have direct exposure to them.

What about that personal cloud theory that when you walk you kick stuff up?

You do, but if that’s the case, then grab an air sample while you’re walking around. If there’s high support counts around you, then you need to take action. The point is that people who say microtoxins and dust and all these fine particles and they tell you all these things about how this is causing all this exposure, they’re the same people that say air samples don’t work.

If air samples don’t work, how are you being exposed? If you’re breathing it, you’re being exposed to this dust that’s got all this stuff in it, and yet you collect an air sample and it’s not there, I don’t understand. So, and people who say there’s high, I got mycotoxins from inhalation.

Well, mycotoxins don’t become airborne by themselves. I would encourage anyone listening to this that disagrees with me, go on, ChatGPT, Croc, whatever your LLM of, you know, your preferred LLM is and ask, are there any reputable studies that have shown that mycotoxins become airborne in sufficient amounts to yield in mycotoxin urine testing? And if you can find one, send it to me at Jason at gotmold.com because I have been pouring over research for 25 years.

I know the researchers who do this work and you know what they say? It doesn’t exist. There’s one paper by Dr. Jack Thrasher and I can’t hesitate to say doctor before his name.

But also Dennis Hooper, who I didn’t say doctor before his name. He’s the former founder of Real-Time Labs. These guys have had so many of their papers completely just thrown into the waste bin.

This is the only paper that actually showed a correlation between airborne microtoxins and it’s never been replicated. Both those guys are highly questionable. I would say that to their face because I have.

Bottom line is that you have to follow the money. Dennis Hooper just sold his lab for many, many millions to Biotech and so it’s a very lucrative business. By the way, Dr. Mark Filladay, who was on my summit, he’s the Director of Functional and Integrative Care at Amen Clinic was the one who got Mosaic, the Great Plains at the time, to create this and they basically use veterinary medicine because microtoxins are very important in veterinary medicine, by the way, which is food exposure.

They use the same exact methods. Then Filladay was using it and saw the same thing I saw with the Irving test where the numbers were always so high. He said, this can’t possibly be right.

He said, I’m going to do it on myself and he did a microtoxin panel every day for five days, kept the food log, kept the building log where he was, did a bunch of environmental testing. His conclusion was that they’re complete bullshit. He went back to Mosaic again at the time of his Great Plains and said, this is a problem, what are we going to do about it?

And they said, what’s the problem? We’re making more money than ever.

No. Mosaic said that?

Not only that, they said, are you crazy? It’s our best money maker.

No. Oh, man. That’s distraught.

I do see it pushed. I see clients all the time that their practitioners, doctors pushed it to come with those results. And no one’s talking about the food exposure.

And it is a form of mold exposure. But by the way, here’s the best part about microtoxin panels. If you’re excreting these things, they’re hydrophobic, so they don’t attach to the water.

And they’re lipophilic, so they get stuck in your fat cells. This is not a recipe for excretion. However, if you are excreting them, your body is detoxing.

If you are not excreting them and you live in modern America and you eat at restaurants and you eat anything that’s even remotely processed, and you’re not excreting them, you have a detox problem. So if your panel is light, you probably have a bigger problem than if you’ve got a high panel.

The opposite of what people would see at face value. Right. Excretion.

Excretion. Mosaic.

That one. Now, anyone who says that there’s no food-based exposures, which includes Dr. Andrew Campbell, who by the way also is not a doctor anymore, and he has held the My Mycolab blood test, which is an antigen-based test, which shows that you’ve had an immune response to it, which by the way, you have IgG responsive foods and that doesn’t really mean anything. That may very well be indicative of some environmental exposure, because I can see how that would actually manifest as an antibody, with some of the molds from environment and also from food.

Who knows? Maybe you could do a mycotoxin urine panel and then a blood panel, and then you can delete what you find in the urine panel and then say maybe that’s in your building. But it still doesn’t find the mold, which goes back to your question about, hey, it didn’t find the mold.

None of these tests find the mold, folks. You know what finds the mold? A mold dog.

Right? Invasive sampling finds mold. A really skilled inspector that has an idea, that really understands how these things occur and can find the moisture, because the moisture is how you find the mold.

When you find the moisture, you found ground zero. Until you find the moisture, you’re just chasing the tail, the hair on the tail on the tip of the tiger’s tail, right? Like it’s just your way out there.

And so if you really want the tiger, which is the moisture, is the mold, then you got to find the actual source. And no test does that. These are all indicators that give you an idea that there’s an imbalance.

The point of a healthy building is balance. And then once you find those indicators, then you start to be able to hone in on your inspection. But in all cases, people still need to, they need to get focused on the moisture problem.

That’s the bottom line.

Yeah, I just want to say, I think a lot of practitioners use the test because sometimes we glean some information on what types of molds or microtoxins and then how to potentially bind them, detox them, because they all respond to different binders and chelating agents potentially.

Yeah, and I still think that that is really interesting and sounds very expensive and also doesn’t take any consideration, microbial volatile organic compounds, which disperse easily into the air, that you breathe 20,000 times a day. And because those things are not going to be, they’re not binding those things. And so you’re missing out, most of the exposure is not mycotoxins.

And if it is, it’s in diet. And so you can do that by cleaning diet, cleaning up your diet, number one. And then number two, if you’re running KEPA filters, you’re not breathing in spores, which means you’re not breathing in mycotoxins.

And so it’s kind of like this idea of spraying bleach on mold, it doesn’t help remove the mold, right? If you want to deal with mycotoxins in the body, clean up the diet first, because that is, I got to stack this high of research papers about mycotoxins in food. 60 to 80% of imported grains are contaminated with between five and seven mycotoxins.

And this is from a meta study done by global food scientists that all contributed from all over the world because they were trying to disprove a UN report a while back. Instead of disproving it, they actually supported it and put some teeth on it. So this is a very well-known problem in the world.

And so there’s a very simple solution to that. And also, again, find me a study, people. This is a call to arms.

Find me a study that shows the airborne mycotoxins in residential environments. This happens in grain silos and occupational settings, where there’s a lot of biological matter and there’s a lot of activity movement. That is not, and that’s been studied.

There’s mycotoxins in the air in grain silos. In residential settings, they’ve tried to do this. If you can find a paper, please send it to me.

Okay.

I’ve challenged tens of thousands of people to this. I love that. Tens of thousands.

And maybe hundreds of thousands. I don’t even know how many. Maybe even millions and no one has been able to send me a paper.

So I’m still waiting. I’m ready to do wrong. I’m ready to do wrong.

Ready to be wrong.

You know?

Yeah. So with the new sensors, I’m curious, is that something you would kind of keep quite often running in your house versus like doing a test? 24-7, you would just keep it.

Okay. This is a passive. This is a passive.

A fire detector.

This is a smoke alarm for mold. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s an environmental risk monitor. So it’s because we’re not just doing mold, we’re also doing potentially carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide which are surrogates for poor ventilation. So when there’s too much CO2, I happen to have one of these on my desk.

As I’m sitting here talking, it went from 468 which is outside to 1,100, which is about where you start to see cognitive impairment. So if I start to slur, but 1,000 is where you start to see some cognitive impairment. On planes, it goes to about 2,000.

So that’s an indication of re-breathing. In 2,000, you get sleepy, which is why people get sleepy on planes. By the way, they’re pumping oxygen into the cockpit, so don’t worry.

That’s how I know that they do that on purpose and they want you to calm down.

Oh, yeah. Well, the flight attendants always joke. They’re like, all right, everyone, please take a nap.

We’ll see you when we get there.

Yeah, they’re gassing.

What’s going on with the air in your room?

Yeah, well, I’m talking. The more I talk, the more I’m exhaling, and the more the CO2 builds up. You’re rebreathing.

I’ll bring that to Thanksgiving and stuff like that, because it’s fun. We have too many people in the room, and everyone starts to get a little bit, it goes to 2,000, and I open the window, and the number comes back down to like below 1,000, and you start to see the energy come back into the room.

Oh, so keep a window open or in the winter, put an air purifier right in the middle of your party?

A little crack, crack the window, it doesn’t take much. You do may, it’s just a little crack, just to let some fresh air in. So we’re putting a CO2 sensor in too, because that often tracks with elevated humidity, because if you’re too many people, too much activity and not enough fresh air, oftentimes moisture will accumulate too.

So if you see the humidity going up and the CO2 going up at the same time. So it’s an environmental risk monitor that has a mold sensor in it, that detects the musty odor. So this is not a chemical sensor, but it has also chemical sensors in it for the man-made VOCs.

So it tracks all of that in a dashboard, and then it will send you alerts depending upon how you have it set for the different risks. So this is designed to be proactive so that you can get to the mold before it gets to you.

And that’s attached to your phone? So you set like the alerts or?

Yeah, so this attaches to the wall, and then that goes by Bluetooth to a base station. And then from the base station, it goes through global SIM to the cloud, which is where all the data is calculated, because this is AI machine learning interpreted, AI machine learning is interpreting the graphene sensor. And then, so then it does all of its magic, and then it calculates everything on the dashboard, displays it on the dashboard, and then you can set alerts for phone or for email, for SMS or for email.

And so, yeah, it is a real time monitor. You can put as many sensors on as you want on a base gateway. And the idea here is really that it’s kind of like an aura ring for your building, right?

That’s very cool.

You know what I mean? So, you can gamify your own health with this stuff. It makes the non-visible real, and then it also gives you the ability to act quickly when you see these things, and not have to worry about, do I have a good night’s sleep?

I don’t know. Let me go look at my aura. I’ve gone to the point where I’m like, okay, I thought I had a good night’s sleep, but now I know.

Oh, is there something wrong with the building? I don’t know. Let me look at the dashboard.

Oh, yeah. Look at that. The humidity is high.

There’s some VOCs. What’s going on here? Oh, it’s worse on this part of the building than that part of the building.

It creates an informed approach, so that people who are deployed, whether it be property managers or the property owners or what have you, they can actually go back and figure out when did this occur, when did this start. It’s also really good for landlords who are getting mold complaints because a lot of times the moisture problem is caused by lifestyle. In other words, it’s being caused by people drying clothes indoors, not using bathroom exhaust vents.

I mean, that’s a problem if you’re a landlord and your tenants are getting a mold problem because they’re not doing what they need to do to control moisture. You can see that within the data. You can make sense of these problems and determine whether it’s a building-related issue, a lifestyle-related issue.

There’s a ton of applications for it. Food storage, cigar storage, wine storage, because they have to maintain high humidity but not too high. So the applications for it are manifold.

Of course, I’m focused on consumer health. My goal is to provide a framework so that ultimately, this could be something that’s either paid for or subsidized by insurance because I think we can reduce health care costs dramatically and I think we can reduce property damage dramatically and I think the insurance companies don’t have really good levers on that stuff, but this gives them a really powerful lever to create accountability with the occupants and with the landlords and also gives them the ability to reduce claims but still charge the same premiums, really, which is what their game is. And so my goal really is to is at some point to have this be part of the, just like you have a CO meter or CO alarm and a smoke alarm, why would you not have something like this?

Yeah, I always think about people shopping for homes and how can you really know if there’s a mold problem because the realtor may not know and if they do know, will they disclose it? I’ve thought about traveling with an air sampling like a cassette. This sounds like even better.

You could carry the little meter with you in a home?

Yeah. We’re not there yet, so the sensor needs to calibrate for a couple of days in the indoor environment.

A couple of days.

To figure out what it is.

Just hide it in the house. Come back for it next week.

Come back for it. What you could do potentially, although it takes about a week, if everything goes smoothly, the dust test, you could swab above doorways and send that in, but that takes about a week to get the results back when we’re ready for that. The home purchase market is a tough one because they want third-party data.

They want an inspector. I’m sure that’s because the home inspection agency lobbied for that law. The Home Inspection Training Organization, InterNACHI probably had a hand in that.

But they generally want to see data come from third parties because otherwise you have conflict of interest. That being said, if you, as someone who’s by a house, has a concern and you don’t want to go through the inspection process and everything else and then you just grab a couple of quick samples and send them to the lab, if you have a week to negotiate, you may very well have enough data to make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to bring an inspector in because that would be the thing, is do you really want to go the distance? Most home inspectors are not looking at mold anyway.

Usually a mold inspector comes in after, you’re already way in, you’re already starting to make investments in this thing. You’re better off figuring out. I always say do a mold inspection first and then if everything is smooth, then you have the guy come in and check the outlets and the water temperature and crap and appliances.

That’s what a home inspector does. But get a mold and moisture assessment because if a building has a mold and moisture problem, that’s numero uno. That is number one problem, most common problem, biggest problem.

That should stop the presses. Until that’s fixed, there’s no negotiation or that is the negotiation. Then you bring in a professional inspector to make sure that the mechanicals work and stuff like that.

Those guys are a lot of the expensive too. But the upfront on the mold, people always do it backwards. They always bring in the home inspector who’s not qualified for mold to find the mold and then bring in a professional inspector to figure out the mold.

It’s all bass accurate.

Yeah. That often happens just so fast. Would you say the 48-page e-book would give people some actionables if they are touring a house?

Totally. Just quickly look while they’re going through?

I’ll drop a link to you guys about that. That e-book is a great guide for people to navigate their own home or home that they’re purchasing. Also, we’re adding in Brantley May.

I don’t know if you know who he is, but he’s a very well-known inspector. He’s a building scientist really. He took our e-book and loved it so much that he decided to make these really nice videos to explain the assessment process.

We’re working with him. We’re going to put those up. We’re creating a new community, by the way, which I’ll also provide a link to a landing page for the Healthy Home Collective.

I’m putting all of our summit videos in there. I’m putting in the How to Inspect Your Home for Mold. It’s several hours of really detailed, beautiful, high-resolution, rich, and just beautifully done work on how to assess your home, how all these things work, how a support trap works, and how a moisture meter works, and all these kinds of things.

We’re going to put all that in the community. Then we’ve also got a bunch of resident experts that have agreed to come in like Karl Grimes who wrote the industry standard and Dr. Richard Shaughnessy, the number one researcher in the world, who’s now our Chief Science Officer by the way, and he helped develop the dust test. We’re getting these resident experts that will be the moderators, but they’re so much more than moderators.

These are the elite within the industry, and they’ve agreed to come in and answer questions and be part of that community. The idea here is to just give people the tools and resources that they need, and then also give them a safe place to have that conversation so that they don’t have to worry about their husband, wife, daughter, boss, landlord, whatever, going, what are you crazy? God, mulch mold, wipe it off, and just dismiss them.

We’ll give them a place where they can go ask questions to real people that actually wrote the standards, who actually did the research, and then also to be supported by people that are going through it too. I think that’s the missing link with us, is connecting the people who feel so isolated. My customers are all isolated, and so I want to bring them together so they can support each other.

That’s great. Please share all the resources. Everyone, check out the show notes.

There’s so much to learn about mold. So thank you for all your years of geeking out on this stuff to help the rest of us. You are the guy.

I wouldn’t know what else to do. I mean, if you said I’m banned from the mold industry, I don’t know what I would be like a ship it out of rudder, you know, like I wouldn’t even know.

You found your calling.

Yeah, apparently.

Yeah. Jason, I just wanted to do a circle back really quick because you mentioned the limbic retraining, but you said something before we hit record about error attitude. Can you complete that phrase and just sort of an actionable that can help people get their mind right around this stuff?

Yeah. So the first issue I have is the toxicity model, which I talked about earlier, right? So toxic responses, it’s an accumulation of exposure over time.

And then usually the symptoms come on fairly slowly and then they stay for a long time until you’ve reduced exposure and then possibly even had some additional detox assistance, if you will. But even if you don’t, eventually it just lingers much slower. What we’re talking about here in most cases is a rapid onset when people walk into a building and then it usually goes away fairly quickly afterwards.

And so it’s a different model altogether. And the reason I bring that up is because there’s so many other protocols, all these other things that are woven into how people are supposed to get better. And I’ve seen after doing this for 25 years and helping thousands of people navigate this, that there is a formula that works consistently and without any intervention usually.

And that if you do what I’m about to say and then still aren’t doing well, then maybe you need some help. Then maybe a detox protocol might really be good because you may have some issues like I mentioned before. Like if you’re not excreting mycotoxins, you might actually need detox, right?

As opposed to if you’re excreting them, you probably are doing okay. So I always say that it comes down to air, food and attitude. Okay, so air is not just mold, it’s also VOC, it’s also manmade chemicals.

Air, Food, and Attitude

So you have to look at, I can’t in good conscience talk about air quality without talking about mold and chemicals in the same breath. No pun intended. Because mold also produces these chemicals, it produces VOC’s again, so there’s gases and there’s particles.

So air in its holistic representation is a potpourri of gases and particles. We have to get that to normal, not eradicate, it has to be normal. We live in a chemical world, we live on planet fungi, you’re going to have some of that stuff.

But we want to get that down to a normal amount. Food, we want to eliminate microtoxin contaminated food as much as possible. And by the way, this is good for you to do anyway, because you know how you do it, no sugar, no grains.

So congratulations to keto, keto community, you nailed it. But it’s no sugar, but it’s clean keto. It’s clean keto.

It’s no sugar, no grains, seasonal organic veggies, whenever possible, fruits, things like that. And then no conventional meat and dairy. So restaurants are a problem, people.

Restaurants are a big problem. This is where a lot of microtoxin exposure occurs. Because animals eat moldy grains, right?

We talked about veterinary medicine. They eat moldy grains. And then there’s something called carryover effect, where those microtoxins actually end up in your mouth.

And so they’re in the fats. Remember we talked about how they’re lipophilic? So the microtoxins are in the fats.

Also, guess what fats they’re in? Milk, dairy, glandular excretions. The number one list, and Dr. Phyllidae put a list up of all the foods that have the most microtoxins.

You know what the number one food was? Human breast milk. Oh.

Ready for a nice little pregnant pause there?

Seriously. Shoot. I was letting that settle.

I’m in shock now.

Yeah. Why? Well, you would think that nature wants to protect the baby.

No, nature needs to protect mom. She needs to be able to make more babies. So that is a survival mechanism.

Mommy’s detoxing. Yikes. So what does that mean?

Well, by the way, there was also a fascinating study that came out about a year ago. There is a xeralinone, a very toxic, estrogenic mycotoxin. It is very heavily regulated in Europe.

It is also on the short list here. But there is a chemical analog of it. I think ZER is xeralinone and ZAL, I forget exactly, but there is a short acronym for it.

But it is the chemical analog of xeralinone, which is banned in Europe, but it is actually not banned here. They use it in significant amounts in place of xeralinone. They use it in significant amounts because it helps weight gain and all sorts of other stuff.

It helps fatten up the livestock. But this is really bad stuff. They just found that, I don’t want to quote the stats, I’m usually really good at this.

It’s something like 100 percent of women had it in their placenta, 80 percent had it in their urine. Pregnant women. Pregnant women.

That’s dietary. That’s all dietary. That’s not in the air.

We need to be really aware of this stuff. It is a big, big deal. We’ve globalized our food supply and that’s the consequence.

We’ve processed everything, even domestically, and you don’t know where that stuff is coming from. You can be sure if it’s big food, it’s coming from the far reaches and it’s cheap, and cheap equals moldy. Cheap equals moldy.

Cheap equals moldy. Air, food, so food, you got your home air cleaning, you got HEPA vacuums, HEPA filters, you got no moisture problems, air smells fresh, there’s no fragrances, there’s no odors in your building. Odors are VOCs, okay?

Even if you like them, they are VOCs. They’ll still trigger your trigeminal nerve, in many cases. And so now we get to attitude.

And I say that, it rhymes, so it works, but, and it dismisses it a little bit, which I don’t like to do, but really when I talk about attitude, I’m talking about your nervous system and your mindset. Nobody gets better if they don’t believe they can, number one. So you have to first get past that threshold.

And the other part of that is that, what happens when you, once you become altered by this, is that your nervous system goes into fight or flight. You’re a constant fight, fight, fight, fight or freeze. Fight, flight or freeze.

And so your adrenals are all out of whack, and people go through this, just, it’s an awful, awful cycle of pain and suffering and fear and doom and all this kind of stuff. And there is no pill, potion, powder or protocol that’s going to make that go away. If you get the air and food straight, you may have less symptoms, but you’re still going to be very, very reactive when you get exposed to anything.

And so there are a number of methods that have come on online in the last five years or so. It all began with DNRS and the Gupta method. And so this is essentially what neural retraining to oversimplify.

But the idea behind it is it allows you to teach your nervous system that the world is safe. This is a big idea, right? World view.

Is this a safe universe or a dangerous universe? That’s going to change everything, every decision you make for the rest of your life, your worldview. And if you believe this is a dangerous universe, and that mold is out to kill you, and that your building is not safe, you will never get better, ever.

That’s bad news. Here’s the good news. You can change your worldview.

And you can absolutely use a method like this to become, first you have to be willing. You have to first make a decision, I want to get better and I believe I can. Then you have to be willing to take that first step.

It’s like alcoholism, right? If you’re in denial, you’re not getting anywhere, right? First, you got to make you have a problem, you have to be willing to take that first step forward.

And then if you do that, then you sign up for one of these, DNRS Gupta, they’re the older ones. There’s also ReOrigin, which is good, because Ben Aaron’s project, and he’s got some nice community. Also, my favorite personally is Primal Trust by Kathleen King, primaltrust.org.

I love Kat, she’s the best. And it’s very accessible, it’s 9,000 bucks a month, and you’ll learn how to self-regulate. And for most of these people, I know because I was one, if it’s involving meditation, I don’t want to do it.

Well, guess what? It does. It’s involving meditation.

And it involves learning how to calm yourself down. And if you don’t like meditation, then you need it even more. Whoever, if you don’t want to meditate, you’re the one who needs it.

And so really it comes down to giving your nervous system permission to relax, and then that you expose yourself in these controlled methods to the thing that traumatized you in small amounts, even perceptual, not even real exposures. And then you say, well, I survived. And then there’s a little bit of a bigger exposure, a little bit longer.

And then, wow, I survived. And eventually you do this and you develop a sense of trust, you know, and then you can move through the world. And I’ve had this happen.

In fact, the last hack your health. I booked a room at the Carpenter Hotel because they had terracotta tile, no carpet, no sheetrock. I was like, my place, right?

Set up the booth, went out to a couple of events, showed up at 11 o’clock at night, walk in the room. Musty smells. Call downstairs, they can’t move me, the place is booked.

So I was like, all right, man, here’s what we’re going to do. Because I usually get night terrors and I wake up with my face is puffy. It’s just not good.

So I went and sat and meditated on my porch outside. I said, man, you got this, you’ve been preparing for this for 25 years. And I went through all these affirmations around, you know, it’s all good, mold’s not out to hurt me.

And I’m just going to go in there, tape my mouth shut, go to bed. I’m going to wake up feeling refreshed. And I did.

And I fell asleep almost instantly. And I slept without, I woke up in the same position. I was exhausted, but I was in the same exact position.

And I was like, I woke up, I was excited to go look in the mirror. My eyes were fine. I felt good, pulled the tape off my mouth.

I didn’t have congestion, nothing, no headaches, no cognitive impairment. No, I didn’t have any.

I didn’t have any of the symptoms, right? Not at all. And so I was just, I like to celebrate it.

And I express gratitude to my nervous system and to Primal Trust and to all of the brilliant people who led the way to that kind of resilience. And that’s really, so I often say people should start with that, but it doesn’t rhyme that way. So I can’t go attitude, air and food.

So I have air, food and attitude. But if people did that, then they could actually probably navigate this. The thing is, you do have to be out of an environment that’s irritating you before you can really do this, right?

You have to be able to either remediate or relocate. So you can’t really do it the other way around. But what I see-

Well, yeah, you don’t want to take your body out of danger response if you’re still in danger. That’s not going to be so good.

Primal trust is all based around cell danger response. Robert Navio’s work and all of that. So anyone who wants to dig into something that’s really fascinating around chemical exposures, mold exposures, this kind of-

Viral…. and mitochondrial disorder, look up cell danger response. It is amazing and it explains why people get fatigued when-

why chronic fatigue is such a big issue and a really common problem with the chronically ill or the chronically exposed. So, and this helps deal with all of that because your cells need to find trust. This cell, cell danger is cellular fear, right?

And, and it, but it gets really exciting. Cellular fear means that, you know, that I’ll explain this really quickly. In the cell, the mitochondria are producing energy, right?

That’s their number one job. But, but they also have another job, which is cellular defense. And so mitochondria breathe about 100 times faster than we do.

It’s, it’s incredible. And so, so they’re the canaries in the coal mine. And when they detect a toxin, then suddenly it goes in from energy production to cellular defense.

And in that, in that process, guess what happens? All the ion channels close. There’s no more communication with the other cells.

So we just, they’re not detoxing either, right? So they’re not able to get rid of, they’re not able to take the garbage out. They’re also not able to take any food, right?

So the whole thing gets, you get, and a torpor. And so if you’re not making energy and you’re not communicating with the cells, well, things get problematic. Zach Bush says that when that happens and then the cell actually realizes that it’s only able to survive, if it can extract nutrition from its surrounding, it becomes a cancer cell.

This is, by the way, also a metaphor for humans, right? We close ourselves off, we isolate, we stop communicating, right? We stop, we stop, and then eventually we think that the world is the enemy.

And eventually we think we need to extract instead of cooperate in community, right? Community heals, isolation kills. And this idea that other is bad, and that we need to get what we need from other in order for us to survive, zero-sum game, that metaphor plays all the way through.

So we need to encourage ourselves to communicate. We need to let them know that everything is okay, that we’re going to do our best to protect and support them. And you do that through processes like trigeminal nerve retraining and somatic work and things like that.

It’s super, super powerful. I think everyone should do it, especially if you’ve got environmental illness. And you’re sensitized.

If you can’t walk into a building that’s got a little bit of a musty smell, if you can’t walk into a cocktail party where people are wearing perfume, this is for you.

I love that. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think that’s so overlooked.

I mean, everything from mindset to the nervous system, you know, whether, like for me, I had Epstein-Barr, you know, a lot of people are dealing with now long COVID and Lyme, it’s all, you have to look at this for all of those issues. Absolutely.

It works with PTSD. It works with a lot of things, right? So a lot of patients do really well with this, right?

So like you just, we’re dealing with all sorts of traumas all day long. That’s just human life is trauma. And, you know, and so you have to consciously make a decision here about your worldview and then do the things that you need to do to support an optimal worldview.

This is, again, you don’t have a lot of control over the world, but you do have control over your environment. You don’t have a control over what other people say, do, think, say, do or think, but you have control over what you say, do and think. That is your sovereign, not just right, but your obligation, right?

And so these two things work so well together. This should be a source of empowerment, right? Yeah.

Because you can, and when you can, you must, right? This is super powerful stuff. But the problem is people are overwhelmed with all the bullshit because everyone else is giving them bad advice that you need me to do the detox.

You need me to do the, especially, you need me to do the remediation because I’m the only one. When people tell you they’re the only one, take a walk.

Run.

Yeah.

Yeah. Take a walk. Run.

Yeah. Well, Jason, thank you so much. I love the way your brain works.

And thank you for sharing a slice of it today.

My pleasure. It’s always wonderful spending time with you guys.

Can you share with our audience next steps, how to find you, what to look for on the GotMold website? We’re going to drop the link for the eBook.

Yeah. So what we’ll do is we’ll give you a link to the eBook. I’ll give you a link to the dust test.

We’ll put a little landing page there for anyone who’s interested in getting, you know, maybe being part of the beta testing or some of the pre-release, you know, we’ll send out updates. We’re releasing that very, very methodically. And then, of course, you can always go to gotmold.com.

That’s, you know, where I spend most of my time. And at the bottom of the home page, you’ll see there’s a contact form. I don’t answer all of them, but I do see all of them.

And if there’s a question specifically directed to me, it always ends up getting to me. So feel free to ask any questions there. I, you know, let me know if there’s any clarity.

If anybody finds any of those research papers about airborne mycotoxins, you know, feel free, send them away. I can’t wait.

Best of luck to you all.

But again, I’m prepared to be wrong. I would love to be wrong about that, believe it or not, because it might simplify things, but…

Yeah. You sound like the line in the musical Wicked. I hope you prove me wrong.

 

I doubt you will. I doubt you will.

Well, you would know. Yeah, Lauren, really.

Yeah. Awesome.

All right.

Well, thanks, Jason, for hanging out with us today. This has been super fun.

You guys are the best.

You’re the best. So is everyone listening. We will see you all next time.

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This podcast offers health, fitness, and nutritional information, and is designed for educational purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other health care professional.