Are You Living with Mold? A Frank Conversation with Jason Earle from “GOT MOLD?”

Podcast Transcript

[00:02] Jim: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to A Functional Approach. I’m Dr. Jim Chialtas, and today I’m talking to Jason Earl. I’m very excited about this topic. I had my mind blown kind of several months back listening to this man speak. He is a founder and CEO of the company Got Mold, which is an at-home mold testing company, and I believe there’s more to the story than that, and he has over 25 years experience working with mold, and has performed just countless numbers of sick building investigations, and solving a lot of medical mysteries along the way, because these environments in which we live can be that factor that oftentimes gets overlooked.

[00:46] Jim: So people like him are just an essential part of this quest for wellness, in my opinion. Helping thousands of people recover their health, or even just give them a piece of mind. You know, that mold is a big topic. It’s a big, sticky topic, and people will bring that to me constantly. You know, it’s one of the heavy hitters in functional medicine that everybody is convinced that they have. Some have, some have not.

[01:12] Jim: But this type of testing can be just really instrumental in that. Jason has been featured on Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired, many, many podcasts, and is just a man on a mission. I’ve heard him described as a man on a mission. I recently, about, I don’t know, a few months ago, I think, heard him speak on a little webinar through Quicksilver Scientific. And I think, like I said, I kind of had my mind blown and expanded on this topic.

[01:44] Jim: Because to be quite honest, I knew that mold was a real big weak spot in my knowledge base. And, you know, it was concerning at the least for me clinically, but kind of worrisome at worst, because I work with a very delicate population. And I just understood that this was a blank spot. And so when I saw that little two-hour seminar pop up, I made sure to commit that time because, right, we keep learning.

[02:13] Jim: We always keep learning and adding to our knowledge base. And so with that, thank you, Jason, for coming on today. And more than that, just doing what you do. So welcome. Welcome to the podcast.

[02:25] Jason: Thank you very much, Jim. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[02:28] Jim: Awesome. So I would love to just start out the conversation just hearing a little bit more about your personal history with Mold and how you came to launch your Got Mold company.

[02:41] Jason: Yeah, well, you know, I think like many of the people in this space doing important work, I think they, you know, I came to this from a personal experience. This is a multidisciplinary field, to say the least. And so because of that, you don’t really have like an academic track for this, for this particular career. It tends to be something that people discover along the way during their own health journey. And unfortunately, the sign posts are mostly pointing in the wrong direction.

[03:16] Jason: So it becomes a journey where you have to really dial in to things that are outside of the scope of what’s being fed to you. And what will you find on Google, for example, which we didn’t have when I first got started, by the way. So we didn’t have the luxury of relying on on restated misinformation. So basically, I had a blank canvas. And so in essence, when I was about four years old, I suddenly fell ill, lost a lot of weight in a three period, which prompted my parents to take me to the pediatrician who said, you know, this is pretty serious.

[03:52] Jason: You should take him to Children’s Hospital, which was my mom’s, you know, my mom was immediately, you know, she’s being a nurse, a career nurse. She thought, Jesus, this is not good news. Went there, initial diagnosis based upon family history and my symptoms was cystic fibrosis.

[04:08] Jim: Okay.

[04:09] Jason: And so that was exactly what they had been worried about. My father had four cousins who died of CF before the age of 14 and he witnessed that. And so they talked about this before they had kids. And here I am their first kid. You know, I happen to have a five and a seven year old. And so, you know, it being my story is one thing, but putting myself in their shoes now, wow.

[04:33] Jason: I just can’t even get my mind around it really. So, they cried for six weeks, understandably. So while they waited for a second opinion, which thankfully contradicted the first one and evidenced by the fact that I sit here at 50 years old, I did not have CF, do not have CF. And in fact, what I had was asthma compounded by pneumonia. And I was allergic to nearly everything in my environment. So it was grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, and soybeans.

[05:03] Jason: And I grew up in a little non-working farm surrounded by all those things in greater abundance, literally hemmed in by corn and soybean fields. So it was allergen soup.

[05:11] Jim: And what part of the country were you in?

[05:13] Jason: I was in New Jersey, in central New Jersey. And so it was a challenging childhood in many ways. But what I intuitively always remember was that it felt better outside. And it was interesting because I was allergic to all the outdoor allergens too. And the indoor allergen wasn’t really part of the primary conversation. It wasn’t part of the conversation at all. In fact, my parents both smoked indoors, which was sort of the hallmark of the 70s with an asthmatic kid.

[05:45] Jason: And so it was just, it was a different time, right? I mean, seat belts, optional. And so we had a different level or standard of care. Anyway, long story short, when I was about 12 years old, my folks split up, I moved out of that musty old farmhouse and all my symptoms went away. And it was not an immediate thing, but it was in retrospect clearly a dividing line. But not revisited for another 10 years because my grandfather had grown out of his asthma.

[06:19] Jason: And so it was chalked up to a technical term, spontaneous adolescent remission, which means we have no idea what the hell happened. And so I moved on with my life. Anyway, when I was about almost 14, my mom died suddenly to suicide, which is relevant if you want to dig into that. And then in that same house, which is why it’s a good conversation for us to circle back to. And a year later, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which, as many people listening to this are aware, is paired up, it’s like peanut butter and jelly with mold, right?

[06:53] Jason: It really, or I should say, it’s just an amplifier, same inflammatory pathways. And so it’s like two tractor trailers going down a one-lane road. And so that forced me to miss a lot of school, which I was already kind of inclined to do anyway at that age. And so I ended up dropping out, essentially being forced to drop out. I ended up getting full-time hours at the gas station. There was a guy there who recruited me to come work on Wall Street, which is the subject for another podcast.

[07:20] Jason: And so I ended up doing that at a very young age and had some really nice early success. But I always had this deep hole calling for something meaningful. Wall Street never scratched that itch. I would volunteer for Operation Smile missions occasionally. I did a couple of years. I was a youth volunteer, a youth sponsor. So I would do keynote speeches and stuff for the organization, but I also did some international missions.

[07:44] Jason: I always came back even though it was exhausting. And there’s so much travel, so much work, so much attentiveness. And I came back so fulfilled from that stuff. But yet, I went on a five-star vacation, I’d come back hungover and needing a vacation from the vacation. And so that signal was pretty strong in me. My mom always encouraged a life of service. And her voice echoed in my mind for a long time.

[08:10] Jason: So after the.com bubble burst, I owned my own firm for two years. And the firm that I owned the branch office of went out of business during the.com bubble burst. And so I just looked around. And one day, I wasn’t having fun after nine years. And I decided to go backpacking and just walked away from everything. And while I was away, I ended up in Hawaii. This is right after September 11.

[08:37] Jason: And I was reading a story in a local newspaper about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he was working. He blamed the mold. He had, at 40 years old, developed adult onset asthma and all these allergies that he had never had before. And I thought, wow, you know, it was like a light bulb went on. It was like suddenly, I thought, geez, that was like my life in reverse.

[08:57] Jason: You know, I had all these allergies and asthma, and I don’t have any of it now. I mean, I haven’t had to use an inhaler since I left that house, nor am I allergic to anything. I don’t have an allergic profile. I got a mosquito bite the other day, though, by the way. I must confess. That was never on the allergen list, but my foot blew up.

[09:14] Jim: Oh, no.

[09:15] Jason: So, yeah, so I can’t say I’m fully allergy-free, but none of the primary violators of my childhood are present in my current allergic profile. So, I immediately became fascinated by the idea that buildings can make you sick. So, you know, everyone thinks about mold. I wasn’t actually looking at it. Mold, yes. Okay, sure. We had a musty basement. I called my dad, I remember, after reading the article, and said, hey, do you think we had mold at Old Trenton Road?

[09:43] Jason: And he’s like, yeah, we had mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? Oh, boy. And so, it was just, you know, like I said, mulch, mold, wipe it off. It’s a generational thing. It’s up to any property maintenance guy who’s been around for 30, 40 years, and he’s going to say, yeah, throw some bleach on it and paint it with kills. That’s mold remediation up until, you know, 1999, when people began starting to say, yeah, maybe there’s a different approach.

[10:07] Jason: And then, you know, some standard starting, it started to form around that. And I was involved in the very, very early stages. So I came, that initial inspiration to, and when I say inspiration, by the way, the word spirit means breath, a spear in Latin. And inspiration is the spirit within. It’s when the spirit comes into you, right? But it’s also breath, right? When the breath, it’s this whole breath and spirit thing, chi, prana, all that stuff is synonymous, breath and life force.

[10:35] Jason: It’s the first thing you do when you’re born, it’s the last thing you do when you die. It is the signal, primary signal of life. And so inspiration is the most apt term for what came from that experience. So I came back to New Jersey armed with a lot of curiosity, and took a job working for a mold remediation contractor who was early inning. So they didn’t really have, there was no guidebook for it.

[10:58] Jason: But I saw quickly that they were causing more harm than good. They were ripping out way more than they needed to. Contractors are paid by the pound, guys. So don’t ask for a free inspection. Just like you wouldn’t ask a barber if you need a haircut. The contractors who are left unsupervised oftentimes take liberties. And so I was working with a company. The first company I worked for showed me that the ethics in this industry are abysmal.

[11:27] Jason: And it turns out that they were not alone. It’s the majority of the industry, unfortunately, are opportunists. Mold is Gold was very popular back then. It was because of lawsuits and insurance industry was starting to get their mind around mold and water damage claims. There were some big lawsuits and some big awards. And so there was just a complete carpet bagger showed up in droves back then. And so I recognized an opportunity to be a buffer in the industry, to really serve as an advocate for the consumer.

[11:56] Jason: I was learning, but quickly learning that I knew more than the consumer more than most of the contractors and I didn’t really know anything yet. And so I could still serve a function there. I was doing free inspections at night really, while I was working during the day for this remediation and contractor company. And eventually people start saying, you know, I should really pay you for this, you know, because I was still learning.

[12:15] Jason: And around six months into it, I read about a guy who trained a mold sniffing dog down in Florida. And I thought, mold sniffing dog, cool. Yeah. So I thought that’s just crazy enough to be brilliant. And so I went down, met him, met the dog, and unexpectedly came home with her. And that’s $14,300 later, I’ve got a mold sniffing dog. And everyone thought I had lost my mind. But then Channel 6 Action News knocked on my door.

[12:38] Jason: And they said, we’d like to do a demonstration. We’d like to see how this works. And so they set up a house. And I didn’t know it at the time, but they were actually trying to debunk me. They were as a consumer alert show. I, you know, pre-internet, right? It was early internet, I should say. So there wasn’t a lot of research being done. And so they hit some mold in the house.

[12:58] Jason: And instead of debunking us, we found it in three minutes and said they endorsed us. And I had not even set up a company yet. And that began an onslaught of a demand that we had a hard time dealing with for a very long time. And it was doctor, local doctors with problem patients that were not responding to traditional treatments. They were primarily pediatric, primarily asthma as the base diagnosis, but with all sorts of really outsized dysregulations, you know?

[13:23] Jason: So like anaphylactic responses to environmental exposures, and you know, just real, real immune breakdowns. And so, and the doctors have historically said this can’t possibly be mold, this can’t possibly be environmental. And then we go in and we find hidden mold in the house and they get it remediated and suddenly that kid’s fine. And so, you know, you start to get to this point where science begins with observation.

[13:47] Jim: That’s it.

[13:48] Jason: Right? And yet observation is not generally calibrated the same way as a published paper. But if you have enough observation, you know, anecdotes are the basis for the scientific method, right? It’s where you start to get, it’s where curiosity starts to form into patterns. And those patterns are the basis of observation and therefore insights. And so, it was very clear to me that this is a path that needed to be opened up.

[14:14] Jason: And I thought people were going to be very, I thought people were going to jump on. I thought people, everyone would see this, right? This is 25 years ago. And it was not the case. So, long story short, and it’s a very long story, but the point is that these things, the awareness is for me, in fact, I’m working on a book called Building Awareness, about building awareness, about the awareness of our buildings and our relationship with them, but also about the building awareness that I went through and that the society has gone through in the awakening of the relationship that we have with our buildings.

[14:44] Jason: And this symbiotic relationship that we really have, right? Our relationship, buildings are here, we built them to protect us. And yet in many cases, now they’ve become a source of disease, but also it’s our job to protect them, it’s our job to maintain it. Maintenance is a form of self-love. And so this whole building awareness thing is, as you begin to see in real world how the built environment impacts people, you start to quickly realize and the data supports it, it is the single largest blind spot in the conversation around health.

[15:17] Jim: I am to interrupt real quick, I liked what you said when I heard you speak last time about, you kind of made an analogy with fish swimming in water. And they’re not of course aware of the water, just as we’re not aware of the air that we breathe. I mean, unless there’s a fire somewhere, you know, and this is really obvious. But like some staggering numbers, I forget what you said exactly, 20,000 breaths a day, but we move more air in weight than we eat in food per day.

[15:43] Jason: Yeah, so it’s 20,000 breaths a day.

[15:45] Jim: Yeah, so that’s 20,000 opportunities to keep re-triggering an immune reaction potentially, or a neuro, you know, inflammatory reaction.

[15:53] Jason: Totally, yeah. And when you look at the numbers, 20,000 breaths a day, but 17 to 23,000, but roughly 20,000, it comes out to roughly the equivalent of an above ground swimming pool, right?

[16:06] Jim: That’s amazing.

[16:06] Jason: Daily. And then if you do the math, it’s 30 pounds of air. And I’ve done the math, by the way, with balloons and stuff with my kids, so I can, you know, it’s real. And so, and by the way, we’re not just breathing air, we’re consuming it, okay? So we’re removing essentially what many people call a nutrient, oxygen, and at least it’s a cellular nutrient, right, it’s required for all of our processes, clearly.

[16:35] Jason: And then we’re also, by the way, taking in many of the other things that come along with it. And so my father used to say, buy a filter or be a filter. And it’s true, right? So every breath you take is a dose. It’s a dose. And so air doesn’t have, air is either healthy or unhealthy. There’s no neutral. It’s either, it’s either rejuvenative and detoxifying and energizing and fueling, supporting health, or it is toxifying and it’s inflammatory and it’s actually deleterious.

[17:08] Jason: And so there really is no neutral. And that’s, I think, probably one of the most important things is that it’s, it’s fairly binary. It’s a gradient scale, yes. But there’s no neutral. And so, so yes, we are, we suffer from a very clear cognitive blind spot as humans. And, you know, David Foster Wallace tells this story at the beginning of one of his commencement addresses where these two little fish, two young fish are swimming along and they pass by an older fish who, who nods them and says, morning boys, how’s the water?

[17:40] Jason: And they, they kind of go, oh, okay. And a couple of seconds later, one looks at the other and goes, what the hell is water? And so, you know, this is, this is the blind spot. Whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish. And, and so we are not only blind to air, but we’re also blind to buildings. Buildings are essentially boxes that where we live, work and store our stuff. That’s the way people think about them.

[17:59] Jason: They don’t think about them. They think of, and the only numbers that you really think about with your home is the address that you have on the, on the mailbox, the number on your thermostat and your monthly housing payment. Essentially, those are the three numbers that people think about. But quantifying your built environment, just like many people actually have some pretty good idea now with aura rings and things like that, what their biometrics might look like, some of their physical.

[18:20] Jason: Well, the building environment is equally important. It’s foundational. I would also say, and this is one of the calls to arm that we have right now, calls to arms, is that all of the interventions that are discussed in medicine are external exogenous and require some degree of compliance. You have to take it, do it, pay for it, whatever. There’s something, a pill, potion, powder procedure, whatever it is. These require compliance, and adults are historically not very compliant.

[18:56] Jason: What we’re proposing is that here we have this foundational pillar of health, this thing that all of the research, by the way, I’m more involved in the Global Exposome Project, which is all of our exposures. The data on this is pretty strong. Ninety percent of chronic disease is impacted by environment. The cause are aggravated by environment.

[19:15] Jim: What? How does that quantify 90 percent?

[19:19] Jason: Ninety percent of chronic disease. Chronic disease. I will send that over to you in follow-ups for the show notes.

[19:27] Jim: Because there’s the external environment and there’s the stressors, and then there’s perhaps the genetics. Let’s just say genetics that might launch autoimmunity, that’s now triggered by the external environment, what have you. So yeah, it’s an interesting number. I’d love to read that.

[19:42] Jason: Yeah. All you have to do is look at the chronic disease states and say how much of that is inflammatory.

[19:47] Jim: Yeah, all of them.

[19:49] Jason: So you look at air quality and environmental irritants, what’s the primary symptom is inflammatory. And so you take an inflammatory condition, you add inflammagens and then you end up with an exacerbation. So whether it’s causal or an aggravator, it sticks in one hand, half a dozen in the other, you end up in the same place. This is all cumulative. It’s all allostatic load. It’s all, at the end of the day, people want to pin the tail on the donkey.

[20:10] Jason: They want to know what is it that got me, what species, what toxin, all this stuff.

[20:15] Jim: Right, reduction.

[20:15] Jason: But you know what, this is like a snowball that starts at the top of a hill. By the time it gets down, man, you want to take that thing apart and figure out which stick hit you. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got this cumulative exposure, that snowball, and that snowball does not have to accumulate so many toxins because, unlike the outdoor environment, where we have zero control, zero. I mean, really, everyone wants to clean up the oceans.

[20:42] Jason: Great, let’s do it. Please, I love it. I’ve got kids, let’s go. Clean up the oceans, clean up the air. Let’s do all that stuff. But we have no control. And we waste a lot of time and energy worrying about that, especially in the context of health. The indoor environment, in contrast, is this area where we have enormous potential for control, if we choose to accept it. Even with budget constraints, there are very cost-effective interventions that can be done that have been demonstrated to be highly efficacious, create tremendous cost savings in terms of health care utilization and improve quality of life.

[21:17] Jason: And I’ve lived through this. We had a house in Australia, we lived for six months last year, and we rented it sight-on-scene, showed up, it was moldy, musty, smell, always. And we had Austin Air, who sponsored my last summit, send us down some units, and they fed us some down to me, they changed the outlets and everything, it was the plugs for Australia. And within two days, my family got better. Not to say that we didn’t have some symptoms, but we were no longer debilitated by it.

[21:41] Jason: And so ventilation and air filtration and stuff like that, a couple thousand bucks changed our lives. And it was necessary, it was not a solution, but it gave us time. And my point is that this doesn’t need to be this all or nothing thing. Better is better. And these cumulative effects, every day, if you just become more aware of these things and start to take the actions that we can unpack a little bit here today, you’ll start to see some.

[22:07] Jim: I think it’s worth noting too that the triggers for individuals can be very, it can be a moving target. I mean, somebody can tolerate, what’s your immune resilience to something? That’s very different person to person. These conditions that might not even be so dramatic, where everybody’s going like, oh dear God, the stink, that might be a triggering for them. If they have a broken down barrier system and their glutathione pathways aren’t up to snuff, and they’re not detoxifying well, then heaven forbid they might have an autoimmunity in their brain or brain injury that’s already inflamed and triggered.

[22:45] Jim: Yeah, so sometimes the triggers can be ridiculously small from what I’ve seen.

[22:50] Jason: Yeah, and that’s a great segue into sort of the contrast of what the science currently shows versus the MO of the standard functional medicine practice.

[23:06] Jim: Yeah, let’s dispel some myths, I love this.

[23:08] Jason: Yeah, yeah, so first of all, just let’s talk about mold really quickly. Mold, kingdom fungi, it’s one of the micro fungi. There’s macro fungi, macro fungi are mushrooms, micro fungi are yeasts and molds. One you need a microscope with, one you don’t. But they’re generally spore-based, and they require moisture to thrive and survive. They also need a food source, and they like oxygen just like we do, so they like to hang out in the similar conditions that we do.

[23:41] Jason: And they also need a certain temperature range. Every species has sort of a combination lock, temperature, moisture, food, all that stuff, and then when those are in alignment.

[23:49] Jim: I’ve heard if you can keep your humidity down to below 50% in your home, that goes a long way. Would that be true in your community?

[23:57] Jason: Yeah, so humidity control is fundamental. It is, literally a mold problem is not a mold problem. A mold problem is a moisture problem. And so if you have a mold problem, past or present, you have or had a moisture problem. And so humidity control is key. So the ASHRAE, which is the Association for HVAC Contractors and HVAC Sciences has guidance for 40 to 60% as the target range. We call that the Goldilocks range.

[24:25] Jason: And we like to target 45%, but moving to target, wow. I mean, in every climate I’ve lived in, you get a huge shift between winter and summer. You know, we get 75% for summer. And where I live in Minnesota right now, it can be 20% during the winter. And there’s no way to humidify the building properly without creating moisture problems in the walls because we can get into a psychrometric conversation. It’s very, very nerdy.

[24:51] Jason: But the way temperature and relative humidity work together, they’re inverse. So when temperature goes up, humidity, relative humidity goes down. You end up with dew point really easily. So you end up with condensation forming inside walls, if you’re not careful, if temperature drops a lot outside. Extreme climates need to be handled a little differently when it comes to what the target humidity range is. So I wish it were simple. That’s part of the reason why professionals do have a really value, a qualified professional has real value if they understand the physics of moisture in a building.

[25:24] Jason: Building science really focuses on how moisture moves through a building. Because air is the conveyance, but moisture is the operative variable that ultimately creates issues. So yeah, moisture control key, I always recommend that people monitor humidity with digital humidity gauges if you can set alerts. So above 60% for more than a few days is big time danger zone, because that’s where you’ll start to see condensation forming in places that you would never look, behind bookcases, under drawers, in corners, especially closets, especially exterior corner closets where people pile too much stuff.

[26:04] Jason: Those places tend to get moldy really quickly, even in elevated humidity conditions without an actual water event. By the way, so mold, micro fungi, when it grows, essentially you have three different buckets, spores, mycotoxins, which I would love to unpack, and then microbial VOCs. These are very oversimplified. Mold produces thousands of chemicals, but for the purpose of this conversation, it’s really spores, which are allergens, can carry trace amounts of mycotoxins. The mycotoxins, which are produced by some mold sometimes under specific conditions, and how they move through the building is really important, and it’s misunderstood, and it is the basis for much misunderstanding, or a lot of unnecessary treatments and things like that.

[26:52] Jason: And then the microbial VOCs is a blind spot to within our space, and that’s the musty smell. It’s blind, but not to your senses, until you’ve been in it for a long time, and you can become nose blind. And nose blindness stops a lot of people from knowing that they’re actually in it. They can not see anything. They actually can become familiar with the musty smell, and actually have it become sort of nostalgic, or even appealing to them, because it was their mom’s house, or the grandparents’ house, the vacation home.

[27:24] Jason: There’s an associative conditioning to the musty smell, which actually yields a positive connection. And yet it is, the science on this is that it will break you down. Even the hardiest of the bunch will eventually become weakened, kind of like kryptonite. And everyone is different, to your point. Five people living in a house can have five very different exposure symptom profiles. One usually is the reason that the phone call is made, right?

[27:51] Jason: We need to do something here because I’ve been sick and this is the only. And then the other four or five are kind of, Bap, she’s crazy, he’s crazy, you know? And then you go through-

[28:00] Jim: Meanwhile, they’ve got allergies and they’re like, you know, headaches and yeah, go ahead.

[28:04] Jason: Yeah. But they claim they’re asymptomatic because they’re not like that, right?

[28:08] Jim: It’s normal to have headaches. Yeah.

[28:10] Jason: Yeah. And it’s normal to wake up feeling tired every day.

[28:12] Jim: Yeah.

[28:13] Jason: And so then you get the mold fixed and get the building straight. And then you come back and talk to these people, which we did for, I was in the field for 18 years before I got started on product, self-solving some of the problems of the testing side of things, and using the mold sniffing dogs. And so we had a really, really high degree of success. I mean, like, if we couldn’t find the mold, nobody was going to find the mold.

[28:36] Jason: So we were able to really be the folk, we were often four or five consultants in. We were called in last, because we were usually more expensive. And if they’d called us in first, boy, they would have saved a ton of money. But the bottom line is that you see these five people afterwards and they sit down at the table, and first of all, you can see that the tension between the family has dissipated.

[28:56] Jason: The person who’s sick suddenly is validated. It’s also they’re not feeling sick anymore. And then you talk to the people who weren’t sick, and you find out that they’re not blowing their nose, they’re not coughing, sneezing, they’re not kicking their dog, they’re feeling excited about work again. You know, their hair loss stopped, those fleeky things on their skin suddenly, you know, that’s just not. So they had accepted a lower baseline because this is our environment, right?

[29:27] Jason: We are part of our environment. And so it normalizes very easily. And so my suggestion is that we should not allow a low baseline of health to become normalized. If you walk outside and you feel better, guess what? You might have an issue inside.

[29:45] Jim: That’s it. Yeah. I mean, I was really fascinated to hear about the VOC specifically, because I’ve experienced them myself, not really knowing what they were at the time. Like I spent the night in a basement in Wisconsin one time, and ended up with like really nasty anxiety, like in pretty short order. And I’m not an anxious person, I don’t have anxiety disorders, I don’t take Xanax, but my heart was thumping, and like I was, it was hard to sleep, and I felt brain foggy and headache until I get the fuck out of there.

[30:20] Jason: Yes.

[30:21] Jim: And it stank, it stank down there. Yeah.

[30:25] Jason: It’s an assault.

[30:26] Jim: I don’t know, like there might have been mold spores present, but maybe not, right? They could be hiding in walls and those VOCs can permeate through the wall.

[30:33] Jason: That’s right. And I think this is the most important aspect of what we learned from the dogs and what we learned from doing thousands of inspections and lots of different kinds of testing and all that kind of stuff, is that it’s a multi-factorial assessment.

[30:47] Jim: Yeah.

[30:48] Jason: Diagnosing a building is just like diagnosing a body. You have to look at many different things. You can’t just look at labs. You have to look at the actual conditions in the human, when it comes to diagnosing a human. When it comes to diagnosing a building, and by the way, they have to be done separately. You cannot diagnose a person based upon a building test or a building based upon a person test.

[31:09] Jason: This is not a good idea. What you need to do is establish a map. We talk about the territory, not confusing the map for the territory. The person and the building are the territory. The map is the diagnosis, and the points on the map are the different key data points. What are the symptom profiles? What’s the building history? That’s a point on the map. It’s a coordinate. Is there dampness? Is there a history of leaks, floods, etc.?

[31:40] Jason: Is there any visual indicators? These are all non-lab tests. Do you see something, smell something, or feel something? Do you have symptoms that get better when you leave the building? Those are key to this whole thing. Then you do testing. Testing is not to tell you whether you have mold or not. Generally speaking, you know. If you smell it, see it, or feel it, you generally do. The question is, testing helps you determine what the extent of it is and what the manifestation of it really is.

[32:05] Jason: In other words, let’s characterize the nature of the problem. In a case where there are normal spore counts, we saw an at-home test kit uses spore traps. It’s one tool that gives you a perspective into kind of like an X-ray, only shows you bones, right? If you want to see soft tissue, you’re going to have to go with MRI and you’re going to have to go with, right? So it’s a view into the conditions in the building, one particular facet.

[32:32] Jason: If you have a musty smell and normal spore counts, well, chances are, mold is growing in the walls, and what’s happening then is the microbial VOCs, which are like people call them mold farts, because they are. I mean, it’s the digestive by-product of a microorganism. Think about this for a second. If you suck on the tailpipe of any living organism for very long, how are you going to feel? And that’s really what we’re doing.

[32:57] Jason: And it’s also decay, right? And we viscerally know the decay. You walk by an animal who’s decomposing or something like that, it’s visceral. Mold is not dissimilar. This is an evolutionary partner of ours. And so we get that signal and it tells us to leave, or it wears us down. And I really do think mold is trying to make us leave so we can finish eating the rest of the house. And it does this in nature.

[33:24] Jason: It does this very beautifully. It cozies up against a plat partner, for example, in soil, and then convinces it that it’s a friend, and then it gets in there, and it takes over. This is what fun to deal with. They’re brilliant, brilliant, brilliant organisms. And so we have to respect that. And we build buildings. Here’s the problem, is that since 1947, this was not a problem when my dad was born in 1947, because we built buildings out of brick, stone, concrete, old growth timber, things like that.

[33:56] Jason: 1947, World War II, baby boomers, huge demand. We need to build faster, cheaper housing. Next year, you know, we’ve got sheetrock, asphalt shingles, fiberglass insulation, years later, due to the energy crisis, which then forced us to close the buildings up tighter. Now we’ve put insulation in our walls made with class one carcinogens from aldehyde. So we wrap our buildings in class one carcinogens, make buildings out of cardboard, right? So, and we live on a water planet for anyone who’s not paying attention.

[34:24] Jason: So this is probably not the best strategy for durability. And then also no air exchange. And then we wonder why if you look at the chart, and I’m doing a meta study on this right now, and you look at the emergence of autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammatory conditions, it tracks directly with the 1947 event of essentially shifting from built to last to built for speed and profit. And so now we look at this and we go, gosh, we need more drugs for this.

[34:50] Jason: We need more treatments. We need more, we need to go upstream. I was just down at A4LI in DC last week meeting with policy holders and policy makers, rather policy holders, policy makers, policy holders is next week, policy makers and politicians and biotech executives and stuff like that. And they keep talking about going upstream in the chronic inflammatory condition space. And they keep talking about genetics. And I’m like, guys, you got to go upstream from there.

[35:17] Jason: And that is what’s our habitat? We wouldn’t take a sick fish out of an aquarium, put it on our microscope, sequence its genome, do all, weigh it, take its heart, get all its vitals and never test the water.

[35:30] Jim: Yeah. Yeah.

[35:32] Jason: We wouldn’t do that, right? That would be insane. But we do that with humans all the time. And we wonder why we’re, most of the interventions, by the way, I think most of the interventions are necessary. And then the ones that are necessary would be way more effective if we got the baseline in the building.

[35:45] Jim: You got to clear the smoke screen first in the environment, and then interventions work better. Absolutely.

[35:51] Jason: Absolutely. Yeah.

[35:53] Jim: So we can have mycotoxins, which are literally toxic compounds, proteins found within these organisms, or we can have the VOC situation, which is basically a clear gas. Do we see differences in how that presents symptomatically between the two? Is there ways of knowing, oh, you know, that’s more of a mycotoxin thing versus a VOC thing? And then also, it should be noted here that we can get mycotoxins in our food, not just in the walls.

[36:24] Jim: So this starts to get complicated, right?

[36:26] Jason: Yeah, it’s a Venn diagram. So I always say that the path to healing is air, food, and attitude, and air being more than mold, it’s mold and VOCs, and which includes, by the way, fragrances, non-organic also, so there are hazardous air pollutants that are technically not organic, they’re inorganic. But the point is that hazardous air pollutants, mold, VOCs, chemicals.

[36:55] Jim: Benzene.

[36:56] Jason: Benzene, yeah, and cleaning products, personal care products, all these things are cumulative. Furniture that you get from Pottery Barn or wherever that’s coming in from China, that stuff’s made to dry fast. Well, guess what? What’s drying? It’s glues, it’s adhesives, it’s things like that. And that stuff off gasses, also lots of, there’s other things that are sitting in the background, phthalates and stuff like that. We won’t bother with some of the more subtle endocrine disruptors.

[37:20] Jason: But on a more acute basis, the stuff that you’re breathing that really triggers your nervous system. And actually, this might be a good time to pause and just go backwards a little bit, which is that we are taught when we’re discussing mold, at least we have been taught for the last several decades, that it affects you across four primary pathways, which is allergies, inflammation, toxicity, and infection. Allergies are pretty obvious, you know, hay fever, et cetera.

[37:49] Jason: And of course, asthma is inflammatory and allergic, right? So the inflammatory aspect of it is very important because it’s an inflammatory gene. If it does one thing, it causes inflammation. And then of course, the toxicity part is really where the industry has honed in on. But toxicity is a very complex conversation. And toxicity is also a misnomer in what it comes to most mold-related illness, and I’ll explain why. And then there’s also the infection.

[38:24] Jason: And the infection, infectious mold issues, it’s also a common misunderstanding. People say, I’ve got mold in my body, because they get a microtoxin panel or an oats test commonly, where they’ll say, oh, aspergillus, you know, I’ve got to clear this aspergillus. And I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing colonizing in your gut that’s showing, and environmental molds are obligate aerobes. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, with very, very few exceptions, they’re obligate aerobes.

[38:51] Jason: And so what that means is that they require oxygen. You don’t have enough oxygen in your gut to support fungal growth, colonization. And people say, well, that’s not, it’s not an infection, it’s colonization. If you have the organism proliferating within your system, it is not an environmental mold. It is not. And so what you’re seeing there are the metabolic byproducts of mold doing its thing, generally in the food that you eat.

[39:22] Jason: So like, for example, oats tests, you’re picking up what’s known as carry over effect. So animals that eat moldy grains, and by the way, also can eat moldy grass in the field. So it’s not just conventional, conventional meat and dairy is the worst, but there are plenty of microtoxins that grow in, in the wild roughage that cows and bovines and pigs and stuff like that eat in the wild. So it’s not completely isolated to conventional meat and dairy, but conventional meat and dairy is where they’re feeding all the non-human-grade food.

[39:56] Jason: And then we eat the non-human-grade.

[39:57] Jim: And those toxins can saturate into the fatty tissue of that animal, and then we eat a nice ribeye, and it’s delicious.

[40:04] Jason: That’s right. It’s just like mercury with fish, right? It rolls upstream, and we’re at the top of the food chain. At least we are until, you know who’s at the top of the food chain is microbes. But before they get to us, we’re at the top, right? And so these things accumulate in us. And so the primary exposure route from mycotoxins contrary to popular opinion is food. And the data on this is really strong.

[40:29] Jason: A group of food scientists a few years ago looked at the UN numbers, which claimed 25 percent of food stuffs are contaminated with mycotoxins. And they said, where’s the number? Where’s the data on this? And they really didn’t have strong numbers. So they put global meta study together. And they found that the numbers at port on the way to destination were much lower, more like 10 percent. But at the time they got to the port of destination, they were between 60 and 80 percent with as much as seven different mycotoxins per sample.

[40:58] Jim: They sit, right? I did a podcast episode with a fellow from a Kava company for Kava, Kava, Kava.

[41:06] Jason: Sure

[41:07] Jim: He said exactly the same. He said, the stuff sits in these ports and these places that are at far reaches of the planet, and they sit and they mold.

[41:15] Jason: That’s right. You don’t see it because it’s in the boxes, in the bags, in the chips, in the breads, and all of this.

[41:21] Jim: In America, our grains sit in silos for like three years or something like that as compared to maybe Europe, a little bit more farm to table.

[41:27] Jason: Yeah. What do we do? To counteract that, we spray poison on our food. We literally spray antifungals onto food, now keep in mind that we, and that if you look at the tree of life, when we split off from single cell organisms, fungi went one way, bacteria went the other, we’re off of fungi, right? So we are very closely related to our fungal friends. As a result, antifungal drugs have a very acute potential for risk.

[41:54] Jim: They’re rough.

[41:55] Jason: You got to check liver enzymes.

[41:56] Jim: Yeah.

[41:56] Jason: That’s right. So things that kill fungal tissue also kill human tissue.

[42:01] Jim: Yeah.

[42:01] Jason: So these things have to be used very cautiously, and there’s a Dr. Campbell at my Mycolab who happens to be a friend, but he and I are very, very much in opposition on this. He claims that food is not an issue. I have the data. He does too. He’s an editor on all these medical journals. There’s a willful ignorance for some reason within this space to assume that buildings are the only source.

[42:25] Jason: However, and I challenge anyone listening to this to prove me wrong, go on ChatGPT now. We have access to all of the journals. It’s no longer something about you. You don’t have to say, I heard from so-and-so. Go get your own information. Find one reputable study. One reputable study. I’m not asking for a replicate study. I’m asking for one reputable study that shows that you can find significant mycotoxins in residential, indoor environmental air in moldy buildings.

[42:57] Jim: Interesting.

[42:57] Jason: It doesn’t exist. And the reason for that is manifold. Number one, Dr. David Krauss, who is the former state toxicologist for Florida and a PhD, and he wrote his thesis on mycotoxin production in fungal contamination of building materials. So she kind of knows a little bit about it.

[43:17] Jim: He knows a bit.

[43:18] Jason: He knows a lot more than any 10 people. And I know a lot of people in this space that know a lot about this. And he knows more than any 10 of them combined. And he posits, asserts and defends the first principle that the building materials that we build with do not have enough nutrition to support the metabolically intensive function of creating mycotoxins. So paper, bleached paper, gypsum does not have enough nutrition in it.

[43:46] Jason: Contrast that with a grain silo. It’s all nutrition. And as a result, they also don’t have, there’s not a lot of competition within our spaces. We don’t have a huge diverse mycobiome, meaning the mold, the fungal mycobiome, the fungal microbiome, which is the mycobiome. And so the lack of competition also does not stimulate production of mycotoxins because it’s really about protecting its food source. And then further, what they see in the studies on how, why farm animals get so much mycotoxin exposure.

[44:25] Jason: And that’s where all the mycotoxin research comes from, by the way, from veterinary medicine because veterinary medicine, I mean, mycotoxins have a huge impact on profitability of farms. Yeah. Animal reproduction, cancers, weight, mycotoxins, they’ll lose weight. So it’s really important. So these guys, anyway, they end up, you start looking at the way that these things are being described as being airborne and through inhalation. And then you start to do the math on what indoor environments actually have.

[45:00] Jason: Oh, sorry, let me back up. When it comes down to the indoor environment versus the outdoor environment, there’s huge temperature swings outside. So you’ll have on a damp spring day, for example, it might get very cold at night and then it might get very warm during the day. And those temperature swings are correlated to mycotoxin production. We don’t have those kinds of swings, generally speaking, in indoor environments. You’ll see that kind of stuff in a garden shed or an unoccupied building, maybe.

[45:26] Jason: But what we’re talking about is direct exposure in residential environments where there’s water damage. And so there has not been any study that shows, and this is important because the tests that we’re using have not been validated as human diagnostics. There is not one of those tests that would be covered by insurance or be reimbursable or even be considered a valid medical expense. Because they have no human study, and this is not that hard to do, really, if you can find the buildings and you can get a cohort together, and you could actually say, hey, listen, we’ve got these levels indoors and these levels, and we do a food log.

[46:04] Jason: And the problem is that it doesn’t track. And Dr. Mark Filaday at Amen Clinic, who’s a friend and was on my summit, he’s the guy who helped get Great Plains to start the mycotoxin panel because there was not a human diagnostic. And they said, sure, let me go take a look. And they pulled out, they created this panel. And it turns out they cut and paste from veterinary medicine. So, but what’s the route of exposure for veterinary medicine?

[46:28] Jason: For a route of exposure is food.

[46:30] Jim: It’s all food, quality feed.

[46:32] Jason: So you take the same method, but then you say, well, the route of exposure is different. Is that really a valid, is that even a fair cut and paste? Probably not. And yet, and yet we’re being diagnosed entirely based upon this idea that it’s food, that it’s air, that it’s air base and it’s not. So, so that’s, that’s important. I mean, all that stuff, there’s, there’s a rat’s nest of contradictions within that.

[46:51] Jason: You know?

[46:52] Jim: Yeah. So am I hearing you correctly? I mean, we were in a basement in Wisconsin and besides the stink, we test and there’s molds, there’s spores everywhere. Are you saying that the spores have small amounts of mycotoxin, but not enough necessarily to cause all the problems as compared to what we’re exposed to in our food supply?

[47:13] Jason: Yeah, so air is primarily gasses and micro fine particles. There’s also things like beta-glucans, which molds produce, that there are receptors that trigger all sorts of downstream effects. I mean, this is well established. That’s a particle that tends to be in the background. It’s like mold dust, if you will. It lives right alongside this whole mellu of spores and hyphal fright, all the little bits of fright. That stuff can trigger all sorts of symptoms, but it’s not toxicity.

[47:48] Jason: This is important, right? Toxicity is different. That being said, the gasses that are in the mold produce and many VOCs can lead to neurotoxicity. This is different, right? This is not a mechanistic dose response thing, where I have mycotoxins and I’ve got, boom, it’s a billiard ball that comes in and hits this thing, and I’ve got this. It’s actually quite the opposite. So dose response is, the more I get, the sicker I get.

[48:23] Jason: The research done by Claudia Miller down at University of Texas, she studies multiple chemical sensitivities, which is foundational to this stuff, because you see many people with mold exposure end up with chemical sensitivities, and people with chemical exposure end up with mold sensitivities, and the connection there is the-

[48:39] Jim: Immune dysregulation.

[48:40] Jason: Breakdown of the nerves. The connection there is the gas state, because the body doesn’t know the difference between a microbial VOC, a musty smell, and a man-made VOC. So once you become sensitized to one, the body goes, boom, and so the way this works is there’s a nerve in your face called the trigeminal nerve, and it is the fifth cranial nerve. It’s got nerve endings where tissue meets air in your eyes, mouth, and jaw, and it’s got a direct line.

[49:07] Jason: It’s about this thing, but the direct line, big high-speed line right to your brainstem. When you’re sensitized, the nerve endings become easily irritated, and then they will become specifically sensitive to pungent VOCs. If you’ve cut an onion, you know what the trigeminal nerve does. That’s really what that function is. It also detects heat, pain, and cold, so it’s your primary environmental sensor. This is your nervous system’s interface with the world in terms of basic exposures, and it’s got this chemo-sensory component to it, which takes over sometimes.

[49:48] Jason: When it does, that’s when you’ll see people with these really outsized responses. They blow up really quickly. They, it looks toxic. It’s highly inflammatory, and it’s complete dysregulation. You talk about anxiety, the trigeminal nerve, there’s a study that showed that the trigeminal nerve, when it’s irritated, it does lead to anxiety. But then if you take a person and you create anxiety within them, and then you expose them, that trigeminal nerve is more hyperreactive.

[50:22] Jason: So the sense becomes overreactive this month.

[50:26] Jim: To wind up, yeah.

[50:26] Jason: So it’s a complete vicious cycle. And so the way to get out of it is you have to break that cycle, and so that’s through neural retraining, and we’ll get there in a second. So really that trigeminal nerve and the entire downstream effect is blamed on mycotoxins. And the reason, here’s how you challenge this. Toxicity is a slow accumulation, usually. I mean, yeah, you can have a big, a huge exposure and have a toxic response, there’s no doubt.

[50:56] Jason: But generally speaking, what we’re talking about is a slow accumulation. And so it’s a slow onset and then a very slow offset. But what people experience most of the time when they’re dealing with a mold or a building-related illness is that it’s a rapid onset. They walk into a building and they immediately have a reaction. And then generally, the reaction offsets with a similar arc or a similar curve, so acute exposure tends to be acute symptoms.

[51:24] Jason: And then chronic exposure tends to lead to chronic symptoms. And the longer you’re in a building, the harder it’s going to be for your nervous system to readjust. And if you stay long enough, it does change you. But here’s the good news, not permanently. It doesn’t have to be permanent. And so the path of air, getting your air straight, you either need to remediate or relocate, but it’s not just mold, it’s VOCs.

[51:48] Jason: Food need to get rid of the mycotoxins from your diet. Mold exposure comes in two forms, air and food. And so mold exposure via food is still mold exposure. And we have adapted to this, so we pass through a lot of these things, even though these toxins are hydrophilic. So in other words, they are afraid of water, so they don’t excrete well through urine. And they’re also hydrophobic. And the lipophilic aspect is that they get stuck in the fat cells.

[52:18] Jason: And so that means that if you’re excreting them, guess what? Here’s the good news, you’re detoxing. So mycotoxin urine panels are being misinterpreted in my professional opinion. If you are excreting them, congratulations. You are a normal American. Because everyone does. There’s a huge sampling bias on this stuff. People show up with symptoms, pee in a cup, see? But take 10 people asymptomatic that are in the same circle, in the same place, in the same house, ideally.

[52:44] Jason: And you’ll find them pee in a cup, or even in a neighbor’s house. I find them pee in a cup, and they’ll oftentimes, especially if you’re eating at the same restaurants, you’ll find very, very similar mycotoxin profiles, except the difference is how you’re methylated. People who are not excreting mycotoxins in a urine panel, those are the people in America that I would actually look at their detox pathways. Because there’s not a shot, if they stop at Starbucks a couple of times a week, that they’re not excreting.

[53:13] Jim: Coffee beans are notorious for mold.

[53:14] Jason: That’s right. Coffee, tea, nuts, seeds, spices, any imported grains, but also domestic if they’re not properly handled. I often recommend people have a no sugar, no grains diet while they’re going through this process to find equilibrium. And also no conventional meat and dairy, so you’re going to want to do things like wild-caught and grass-fed and all that stuff. There’s no perfect solution to this because shelf life is everything. And so we live in a commerce-driven society, and so shelf life matters.

[53:46] Jason: And so unless you’re going to grow all your own food and raise all your own animals, you’re not going to get away from this. So air, food, and then attitude is where, and I say that because it rhymes, but also because there’s a combination of mindset, which means willingness. A lot of people get invested in this, it becomes part of their identity, which is very dangerous. And so if you’re a mold survivor, if you’re carrying that moniker, we maybe need to reframe that because mold is really not the enemy here.

[54:15] Jason: And making mold or your building or any of these things, nature, an enemy, is a problem. And so this in fact is the problem. Hold on a second. Sorry, my kids are trying to make it, and you can add that up.

[54:35] Jim: Yeah, I like we’re going with that too. I mean, it’s easy to find something like this and think that the world is ending, and this is the biggest issue. And you get stuck in that dark psychology cycle of defeat, perhaps, or what do I do now? Overwhelm. But I think what I heard you say last time I heard you speak too is, no, this is the opportunity. This is the great stepping stone out.

[54:59] Jim: This is good stuff. We know where we’re at, we know where we need to get and we have a pathway to go there.

[55:04] Jason: So, that’s right.

[55:06] Jim: But those little clinically speaking, those little things matter, and there’s us doctors that are like awesome brainiacs who can explain every mechanism to you. Historically, I’ve kind of fallen into that category. And then there’s like the coaches who kind of like walk people through things. I’m getting better at that. But yeah, I think that these little tweaks in how we look at the case really matters. And just having that lighter feeling when you’re, let’s say you’re sick, you’re gonna bounce back quicker.

[55:35] Jim: You’re gonna have better resilience.

[55:37] Jason: There’s no doubt.

[55:38] Jim: That’s the idea. How do we regain resilience? Because we’ve lost it in a case like this a lot of times.

[55:43] Jason: Yeah, it makes you less resilient, environmental exposures. Like I said, listen, buildings should be here to protect you and to support your health. As I was saying before, all of these things are all active interventions. They require compliance and they require consistency. When you’re weakened by the stuff, you’re not going to be complying. You’re not going to be getting up and you’re not going to be taking what you need to take and doing, getting outside.

[56:05] Jason: By the way, taking your shoes off, taking out. There are so many things you can do. Take barefoot outside, get your morning sunlight, sauna when you can. These kinds of things are proven. There’s 22 peer-reviewed studies on grounding, by the way, and no one talks about it because there’s no one in it. Grounding, yeah. Grounding, yeah. I mean, this is not woo-woo stuff. This is real. The world’s covered in negative ions from lightning, and we’re loaded with positive ions from our electrical world.

[56:32] Jim: It’s not so woo-woo. It sounds it, but it’s not.

[56:34] Jason: It’s electrical. It is very provable. And like I said, there’s 22 peer-reviewed studies. So don’t believe me. Go do the research. Yeah. So I think we have an opportunity here. And I think that the mindset part is, I say it last, but it’s primary. If I could get people to do the attitude part, the problem is, first, then most people would be much better off, wouldn’t even need to be as vigilant with the environmental stuff.

[57:03] Jason: Resilience is the byproduct of a healthy nervous system. And so a healthy nervous system, you cannot have a healthy nervous system if your environment is a threat. And so the first thing you do is you remediate or relocate, right? You got to get your environment straight so that you got equilibrium. And that’s the goal, is a building should provide that equilibrium. A building should be a source of healing and rest. That is its intention and design.

[57:31] Jason: And so if the building is your enemy, unfortunately, that’s a scary place to be. And it may be that your building is working against you. But oftentimes if we take responsibility and ownership, we realize that we’re not doing the things we need to do. We’re not maintaining the building. Yes, budget constraints, fair enough. But we’re just not taking the actions we need to take. And this is where we have to, we have a locus of control here that’s incredible.

[57:55] Jason: And it is a door that you have to open. That effort, you have to be willing to say, hey, listen, I’m going to take control of this thing. I’m going to take control of the environment. I’m going to create a safe space for myself. I’m going to understand that Mold didn’t do this. We built buildings and invited them in. And this is a global problem with a highly concentrated issue here in the United States.

[58:17] Jason: This is not a personal thing. Mold is not trying to attack you. If it wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already. It’s got better tools, better weapons, more time. Trust me. So really, what we’ve done is we’ve created a cohabitation relationship with a very dysfunctional partner.

[58:32] Jim: Makes sense. I finally did your test right after your appearance on the Quicksilver webinars, I guess a couple months ago. My wife and I have been talking about it for a while. I have some blood labs from a couple of years back that suggested I’ve had exposures, and we happened to rent our home. We’ve been there for 17 years or something like that. I raised our kids there. We live in San Diego, and rents here are crazy now.

[59:04] Jim: I mean, literally crazy. We are getting a good deal because we’ve been there for so long. This notion of finding mold in the home might just mean we have to leave the home, right? And that sense of insecurity was apparent. And she was like, you know, she reluctantly agreed to let me do it, and I did it. So let’s get into with our final little stretch here if you have the time.

[59:32] Jim: I want to know about your particular test, how it differs from what other people are doing, because that’s where I think a lot of misinformation is. And then if we have time, I wouldn’t mind going over my results with you.

[59:45] Jason: I think that would be great. So let me also say that when it comes to renting, I think it’s important that people know that as a renter, especially in California, you have a lot more rights than you know. And it’s tricky because the rights that you have are codified within something called the Implied Warranty of Habitability. I wrote an article about this. I’ll send you a link and you can put in the show notes.

[01:00:07] Jason: But basically every residential lease in 49 out of the 50 states, and let Arkansas be the outlier here. And you have very distinctive rights when you’re renting. The legal doctrine, so it’s called the Implied Warranty of Habitability because it’s implied. It’s foundational. It’s a legal doctrine that underpins residential leases. And so the idea here is that a landlord’s obligation is to provide safe and clean housing. That’s it. So safe and clean, that could be a little nebulous, right?

[01:00:39] Jason: But someone who’s got an environmental sensitivity, who’s got any sort of compromised immune system, which is like 30 percent of the population if you include diabetes and all these other things. So it’s a huge number, right? The very young, the very old. I mean, almost every house has someone who’s in the high risk. And so clean, it’s pretty hard to agree that a moldy space is clean.

[01:01:02] Jim: And some of that’s our responsibility, right?

[01:01:04] Jason: Yeah. So safe and clean. And so, but California dials it even further, that if you have a broken appliance, if you have a window broken, if you have any sort of compromise or dysfunction within the building envelope that can allow for a leak, either air or water, you can then invoke this implied warranty of habitability, which is that you notify your landlord that they’re in violation and that you, depending upon what municipality you’re in, you can begin to pay rent into escrow, and then it will be released to them upon satisfaction, your satisfaction, which means that you set the tone.

[01:01:46] Jason: What kind of inspection, what kind of remediation, what the specs are, you have to tell them that industry standard, IIC or CS520, you have to tell them how it’s supposed to be done, you have to inform them of what they’re not doing and what needs to be done, and then set a timeframe. And then you send a series of letters, you keep all the notes, and again, this is all in the article, and at the end, if they don’t do what they need to do here to restore the property to a safe and clean environment, you have the right to do something called a constructive eviction, which is where you break the lease without penalty.

[01:02:16] Jason: Now, that’s not ideal for most people, right? But the lever there, many landlords don’t want to lose a tenant. Some of them actually do, and they’re actually trying to get you out. But in most cases, I hate to say it, when mold shows up in a rental situation, oftentimes the best thing to do is in fact move out. Oftentimes, you have to move out for remediation anyway, but oftentimes, it is best to move out because if you do have any claim, talk to a lawyer about this, until you leave, you can’t quantify damages.

[01:02:43] Jason: You can’t actually demonstrate that you had to upend your life. Hey, you’re not leaving, it can’t be that bad. So, right, there’s some tricky stuff there. But that being said, the landlord still has an obligation to disclose that when they rent it again, so they have to fix it anyway. And so depending upon how invested you are and what your relationship is like, it’s a lever for pressure that can often get you what you need.

[01:03:05] Jason: And California is particularly effective because if you have a musty smell, which is such a good piece, I’m so glad they have that, that is enough. You don’t need actually lab tests, believe it or not. If you have a musty odor, that alone is enough to trigger the implied warranty. So the really important bedrock stuff that most people don’t know, most people feel sheepish about telling their landlord they’ve got a mold problem, as if it’s their fault, and sometimes it is.

[01:03:29] Jason: But even so, you need to take this forward and surface this stuff, because mold does one thing better than anything else that grows. So while you’re thinking about it, it’s doing pushups, right? It’s getting stronger, bigger, it’s more exposure, more expensive to remediate, the whole thing. So literally every passing day, it’s growing geometrically. It’s very important that you take action on it quickly when you notice that there’s a problem.

[01:03:51] Jim: Wonderful. Thank you for that.

[01:03:54] Jason: Okay.

[01:03:54] Jim: So you’re a test.

[01:03:55] Jason: Yes. So the Got Mold Test Kit, which we offer at gotmold.com, it’s also available at Amazon, is my answer to a common problem within the industry that I noticed back 20 years ago, which is something called pump jockeys. These guys that run around and collect air samples and send people a report without any observations or recommendations, no context. Oftentimes, it’s paired with a very high remediation proposal, very high, and here’s the fix.

[01:04:25] Jason: We’re going to fog the place and we’re going to spray stuff, and we’re going to do all these things to treat the mold. By the way, there’s no such thing as mold treatment. There’s remediation or there’s kicking the can. You’re either removing it and stopping the water or you’re just kicking the can. There’s no fogging, spraying, all that stuff is all junk science. Bottom line is that the guys that were doing that, I think were doing it to service.

[01:04:49] Jason: I said, well, I can create a kit that lets people test their air for a fraction of the cost of one of these clowns that’s going to come out and give people a lousy report without any interpretation. We took the air cassette that’s standard in the industry, it used to be one company called Aerocell, and we built a professional air sampling pump at a consumer price, which is, for anyone who’s watching, this is our air sampling pump.

[01:05:17] Jason: This duplicates a professional air sampling pump exactly. If you were to hire a professional to come in with a $1,000 device that does the same thing this thing does. The cassettes that are in our kit are called spore traps. We actually had to reinvent the spore trap line because the company got bought by private equity and the quality went down and all these problems. The inventor is a friend of mine, he and I went off and we created a whole new sampling line, so we created these things called air traps, which is the same function as the Aerocell, but it doesn’t have some of the unfortunate user feature, so it just opens up like that.

[01:05:50] Jim: Open the ports and plug it in. It was remarkably easy to use.

[01:05:54] Jason: Yeah, it’s really easy. I mean, my seven-year-old could do it.

[01:05:57] Jim: I think it sniffs for like a five-minute cycle, right? It pulls air through it.

[01:06:01] Jason: It pulls air through this cassette and inside the cassette, if you spin it open, and I don’t recommend anybody do this, but for my purposes, I’ll show you. You can open up and you can see there’s a little glass slide in there. That glass slide captures the airborne particulate. That’s spores, pollen, skin cells, fibers, all sorts of stuff. Then the cassettes get put back into the prepaid return mailer that the kit comes with.

[01:06:27] Jason: Again, like you said, each sample is five minutes. There’s an outside sample that gives you a baseline reference, if you will. Comparative analysis is the basis for the spore trap methodology. We compare the indoor to the outdoor and then we compare the rooms within the space. What we’re looking for are different kinds and concentrations. If we see a high concentration of any one particular type or significant quantities, then what we want to see is the indoor air being very similar to the outdoor air.

[01:06:56] Jason: When we see these divergences, that’s a clue that there’s an imbalance in the building. But again, this is one view. It’s like an X-ray in the building. Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the air at that moment. The results are, once the lab gets the samples, they’re analyzed microscopically, initially, and we’re in the process of onboarding an AI company called Sporesight, that actually does the analysis with incredible accuracy.

[01:07:24] Jim: They’re not growing them, they’re observing them.

[01:07:27] Jason: Yeah.

[01:07:27] Jim: Because the petri dishes that grow on agar, for example, are very selective, correct?

[01:07:32] Jason: Yeah, we could talk about that. Petri dishes are very popular back in the old days, still popular.

[01:07:37] Jim: Yeah, I had a patient send me pictures recently for them, and they were a zoo of growth, of course. But I don’t know what that was.

[01:07:47] Jason: So molds, like we talked about the combination lock, they need the right temperature, food source, moisture levels, all that stuff. So if you look at petri dishes, the old school way was we will sample on one dish. Usually it’s malt extract, which is a sweet, sugary kind of. So fast growing molds, primary colonizers, the ones that are abundant in the environment. These are the weeds, okay? They colonize very quickly on that.

[01:08:14] Jason: So normally you’d send that plate in and get diluted, and then you’d wash it, and you’d put this in, you’d wash it, you’d dilute, and you’d go into different plates, and you’d grow the different dilutions on different plates because there’s gonna be a cellulose agar, which is what most of the toxin-producing molds that we talk about, staccumatric and ketomium, those like cellulose, they won’t grow on that first dish. Meanwhile, everyone’s worried about the toxin mold and the black mold, they won’t grow on that first dish.

[01:08:40] Jason: Interesting. And the data that we’ve got from DNA sequencing, and by the way, we’re about to launch a DNA-based dust test, which we can talk about briefly, but the way this is discussed is that the everyone wants to find the black mold, the toxic mold, but they’re never going to show up in this because petri dishes lose 80% of the species that are there. Literally 80%. So all we get are the fast-growing molds.

[01:09:09] Jason: It would be like taking a flamethrower to your yard.

[01:09:12] Jim: Yeah.

[01:09:13] Jason: And then what’s going to grow back? It’s all weeds. So there’s just really, and especially if you have a fertilizer on it, and then just wait for a little bit, what’s going to grow? Lots of stuff is going to grow. Is it meaningful to you? Is it relevant? No, it’s not. Because mold spores are normal in every environment. So I wrote an article about this too, about Petri dishes, and I can send you a link to that too.

[01:09:34] Jason: Yeah, that’s great. This is extreme.

[01:09:36] Jim: Because they’re keeping easy, right? And people do them, yeah.

[01:09:39] Jason: And they also lead to secondary transactions. They lead to detox protocols, they lead to remediations, they lead to these things that are very expensive. They are lead generators. Most mold tests, we do not sell our leads. We do not do any, but most, and we’re not involved in remediation, repairs or solutions. Awesome. And so, and we’re very, very clear about that have been for 25 years. So, and the reason for that is because we’re not going to be accused of, of creating something that generates secondary transactions.

[01:10:08] Jason: We’re interested in creating accessible, verifiable, reliable data. Thank you. You know, that’s important. It’s, it’s, it’s critical because the Petri dishes, Ermey’s Ermey is that’s probably a good segue. Ermey is the most popular dust test right now. Ermey and hurts me too, which is the derivative. Ermey is 36 species developed by the EPA staffers, not the EPA, EPA funds, but EPA staffers, Steve Vesper developed it, gosh, almost 30 years ago. And 36 species, 26 indoor, 10 outdoor, consider background, uses MSQPCR, mold specific, quantitative polymerase chain reaction.

[01:10:46] Jason: So PCR, which is used for COVID tests.

[01:10:50] Jim: Yeah.

[01:10:51] Jason: Very old technology. And also has a lot of problems with counting. It’s good at saying, is it here, but it’s not good at actually saying how much is here. It will actually count broken particle, broken spores. So if a whole spore gets broken down over time into little bits, it counts them as multiple organisms. So it’s very bad at counting. But it is good at saying that the DNA is there. So that’s been what they call the gold standard.

[01:11:14] Jason: It’s not a gold standard. The EPA actually says very specifically, do not use this. It’s on their website. It is a research tool. It should not be used for human, for building diagnostics. It is specifically not recommended. And the only people I know who use this are ignorant of this reality or using this specifically because the index is very high. So my first test ever was an ERME-based test and we got the data.

[01:11:39] Jason: I mean, I stopped selling it because there’s no way that all the houses are moldy. And so they were just really, and people were calling us up scared. They want that one number. They want that one thing that’s going to tell them everything. But that doesn’t happen in human diagnostics either. There’s no one test for the body. There’s no one test for the human. So and because it indexes badly towards false positives, it’s a real problem.

[01:12:03] Jim: And there’s no test for VOCs currently other than our snout, or a cool dog or something.

[01:12:08] Jason: Yeah, dogs are the best for detecting and locating the source of microbial VOCs. We are working on a new sensor technology. It’s funny that you should ask that. This is an electronic nose. Oh, awesome. And so this is actually a graphene based nose inspired by my experience with the dogs. And this is trained to detect the musty odor. And so, in addition to carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, a whole bunch of different target molecules, as well as, it’s a moisture sensor, so the wall that it’s mounted to, it detects moisture in that temperature also, and then also temperature relative to the humidity in the room.

[01:12:44] Jason: And what that means is that we can detect dew point, like we talked about earlier in the conversation, where you start to see, oh, that wall is cold. This is a north facing wall. So it doesn’t get a lot of light. That’s cold. Ambient humidity is 70%. That wall is 50 degrees. It’s gonna get dew point, right? And so you end up with a mold risk, but also it detects the odor of mold growth before the ideally below the odor threshold.

[01:13:08] Jason: So we’re working towards better tools for detecting those things in real time and tracking them, because this is data logging. This is not just an alert. You get a dashboard and you can see all these things in real time. And you can see where your cleaning activities and personal care activities and bringing in new furniture and actually impacts your environment. And eventually, we’re going to pair it with biometric data, like where you can have your aura ring and your environment all feeding into the same place.

[01:13:32] Jason: You can see, hey, by the way, when the CO2 goes way up when I’m sleeping, because I’ve got no ventilation in my bedroom, which by the way, happens all the time. And that’s why I love these Aranet CO2 meters, by the way. This isn’t the best. As I’m sitting here talking, the number is going up. At 1,000, you get cognitive impairment. In hotels, I bring this everywhere I go. Airplanes, it gets to 2,000.

[01:13:54] Jason: Easy wear on the tarmac. When you’re in hotels, I often wake up and see a 1,500, 1,600. And people wonder why they wake up tired. It’s not always mold. It can be simply you are oxygen deprived. You’re literally just steeped in CO2.

[01:14:05] Jim: That’s it. Fascinating.

[01:14:07] Jason: Yeah, so monitoring those things is really important because we start to get an idea. You start to see your HRV drop and CO2 go up. That’s a stressor. So I’m being stressed while I’m sleeping. This is important stuff. And we’re not looking at these.

[01:14:20] Jim: Yeah, that’s subtle, yeah.

[01:14:21] Jason: Anymore, right? And then we also, on the ERME side of things, on the dust test side of things, because this has been a big bone in my craw, and I’m very outspoken about ERME, having had the experience of going into homes with dogs and only being able to verify maybe 5% or 10% of the cases, and then also having… And so I initially had a lot of reservations around that, and then our first test kit was ERME-based, and we did it for less than a year, and I said, this is causing harm.

[01:14:50] Jason: So I was approached by Richard Shaughnessy, old friend, top researcher in the country for indoor air quality, sort of the expert’s expert. He had developed in partnership with Jordan Pescia at Yale, a new kind of dust test, and he uses swabs that collect dust above doorways. The initial study was 70 homes, half moldy, known confirmed moldy, half known to be not water damaged or moldy, and they collected the dust. They trained an AI model on it, and then they went back and verified and blind tested it, and it was 100% right on the moldy houses after only 70 homes, and 90% right on the moldy ones, and now the database is like 780 homes, and we’ve got a global component too now.

[01:15:34] Jason: We’ve got 500 samples in my freezer downstairs from Australia, so we’re getting this really good granular understanding of what’s going on in the fungal ecology because this test doesn’t look at 36 species, it looks at the entire fungal mycobiont all at the same time. So we’re literally looking at every single known fungi, looking for it. Yeah. 230,000 taxa in total. And then the machine learning engine looks at this and says, what’s normal, what’s abnormal, based on the outdoor sample that you collect, also a component of our test, and this database, which is now, I think we’re in 11 cities and I forget how many microclimates.

[01:16:18] Jason: And so that will continue to get better and better and better. That’s called the Mold Classification Tool. That was what Yale patented and published and peer reviewed. By the way, we just got an ARPA grant, ARPA-H, which is a huge federal program for moonshot technologies. So Yale just got $5 million from an ARPA grant to create a microbial index for healthy buildings using this tool. So this will build the bridge into allopathic medicine using this.

[01:16:54] Jason: There’s also an ICD-10 code for mold exposure for NEMDs listening to this. And so you can recommend things like interventions, testing, diagnostics, based upon that ICD-10 code. People don’t know that.

[01:17:07] Jim: Which is like, yeah, that is how our medical system works. If you don’t fit into this coding system, you don’t really exist in the system.

[01:17:14] Jason: That’s right.

[01:17:14] Jim: So yeah, it could be a good and a bad thing, but in this case, a good thing.

[01:17:19] Jason: Yeah, no, it’s good. And here’s the thing, guys, is that there’s no test out there right now that can be used with the ICD-10 because it doesn’t hold up. There’s no validation. And so the insurance industry and the medical industry will not look at any other tests, but the MCT has a validation. It’s Yale published peer-reviewed patent pending and also being studied right now with a federal grant. So we are over the hump on that stuff.

[01:17:49] Jason: So what we’re going to see here, and I think in the next three to five years, is a shift towards the traditional medical system starting to recognize the environment as a fundamental role. Because the data on asthma, COPD, sinusitis and that stuff is irrefutable. People with an ICD-10 code, by the way, interestingly, for mold exposure are six times more likely to have asthma and seven times more likely to have chronic sinusitis.

[01:18:17] Jason: So it’s a very clear indicator of high risk.

[01:18:23] Jim: But let alone like what you mentioned about your mother, and also what I’ve experienced in my own home with one of my children, a very similar scenario. Luckily, he made it out. But living his best life as a mule packer in Wyoming in the fresh air.

[01:18:38] Jason: Oh my gosh. That’s so cool.

[01:18:39] Jim: And feeling a lot better mentally, but emotionally. But yeah, so the rabbit hole runs deep.

[01:18:46] Jason: Yeah. Let me wrap up my mom’s situation here. Sure. Because I think, and then I want to talk about your report. Sure. Because that could be a cliffhanger for people that are, that are, you know, that heard that and then we don’t close that loop.

[01:19:00] Jim: Yeah.

[01:19:01] Jason: So, so my mom was, was, was mentally ill and she was also an alcoholic. Okay. But sometimes that’s a symptom. Sure. And so in fact, I could say, I would argue probably that it’s always a symptom of, of, of something. But the, but the, the, the question about whether or not the building was part of my health profile, didn’t come up until decades later. And then the question as to whether or not my mom’s issue was part of the building condition, didn’t come up until many, many years after that.

[01:19:37] Jason: And it was because I, I, when I had Oreo, we were doing, we did a course at Rutgers University about mold inspections, a mold assessment. And we were invited to come up and, and, and do this. Oreo got a mold. She got an instructor badge for Rutgers, which was kind of fun. And, and so during the announcement period where they were, you know, getting people to sign up for it, one of the professors at Rutgers saw this and, and she was working on some microbial VOC research, early research.

[01:20:05] Jason: And she called me and she said, I’d like to, I read about your dog. She seems remarkable. I’d like to meet her. It’s okay if you come too. And so, so we went to her office and did this demonstration for her. And she showed me what she’s doing with microbial VOCs. So she was, as a micro toxin expert, fungal geneticist. At the time I met her, she was 65 years old. She had just started her second lab.

[01:20:28] Jason: She was on her second tenured professorship. And she had a house in New Orleans who got flooded during Hurricane Katrina. So she went down to knowing that it was going to be moldy to inspect it and to take some samples and be a mycologist. She had this laboratory opportunity, essentially. And so she walked into the space with a respirator on, but in N95, not a gas phase, just for particles. Like what we learned from COVID is that smells go right through.

[01:20:51] Jason: And so she was in there for a few minutes, began to feel ill, said, I got to take a breath, went outside, got a little, feel a little better, went back inside. After a couple of those, she was like, you know, this is crazy. She left, she was sick for two weeks. And she was completely gobsmacked by that because she had been under the notion, under the mistaken notion that if you protected yourself from the spores and the potential for microtoxins from the particles, you’d be fine.

[01:21:18] Jason: So then she, she went on this wild journey of basic science, of what are the microbial VOCs? What is that musty smell? What is in it and how does it affect us? And so she began studying fruit flies that fluoresce when they produce dopamine. They actually glow when they, and pretty cool party trick. And then, and then also one octan-3-ol, which by the way is the same chemical we use in mosquito magnet.

[01:21:41] Jason: And so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a common chemical in, in the world. It’s a, it, it attracts bugs. It’s a fungal tool, but it’s, it’s a fungal messenger. In fact, you have to look at all these VOCs and toxins, not as chemicals, as much as message, messages. These are microbial emails, if you will. And so the one octan-3-ol, she tests, tests the fruit fly with it. It, it lo and behold, they stop producing dopamine.

[01:22:07] Jason: They develop mitochondrial dysfunction, locomotor dysfunction, Parkinsonian-like symptoms. After several of these studies, she concluded that, that it’s neurotoxic, 40 times more toxic than toluene, which is a group.

[01:22:21] Jim: Which is saying a lot.

[01:22:22] Jason: Yeah. And, and she found that they, and also premature death and all sorts of other things, they stop reproducing. So, so what she found was that they basically become depressed and they develop neurological issues. And this sounds a lot like, a lot like symptoms of people that I know, including my own mother. Now, she didn’t have Parkinsonian like symptoms, but she was having a lot of neurological things before she died. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of issues with her nervous system.

[01:22:46] Jim: And what happens when somebody’s not producing enough dopamine is, is they lose their drive. So that might mean I’m going to sit around more in my area that’s causing me harm and not care as much, right?

[01:22:56] Jason: That’s right. That’s right. And you sit in the very building that creates the disease. You’re sitting in the same thing and you’re stuck on Facebook, reading stories of people still suffering. And you’re stuck in this, the only people on Facebook talking about the stuff of the people who haven’t gotten better yet. The people who have gotten better are out living their life. Stop reading stories about people who are still suffering, they had to throw out all their shit.

[01:23:20] Jason: This is not necessary guys. You do not need to, life is difficult enough. The consequences of ripping your life apart from mold is often worse than the mold itself. By the way, 2018, there was a study, and I met Joan in 2003 or 2004. We’re still very good friends by the way, and she just opened a third lab at 83 years old. She moved back to New Orleans, opened a new lab and we’re starting some research together.

[01:23:53] Jason: But she’s at 83 years old, opening her third tenured professorship and her third lab. She’s just pure joy. And so the Brown University study that came in 2018 was 6,000 people and they found a strong correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression. So that put the sort of the cherry on top for me, right? So here we’ve got the dopamine, the fruit flies, MVOCs, my own experiences going traveling, being in moldy spaces, seeing my own physiological responses, talking to thousands of customers.

[01:24:24] Jason: And you quickly realize that what we’re dealing with here is not a mycotoxin issue. Mycotoxin is exacerbated, and I believe it’s an exposure in food, but the primary exposure issue here is microbial VOCs. And then once you’re sensitized, any other environmental toxin, it could be vibrations, certain light frequencies, EMFs. Of course, micro-fine particles, cigarette smoke, things like that are really problematic, but the VOC gas phase stuff tends to really set people off.

[01:24:50] Jason: Fragrances, hardware store dry cleaner, these kinds of things. If you’re experiencing that, you are tilted, as Claudia Miller says, this is toxicant-induced loss of tolerance. You are now hypersensitive. The way out of that is through neural retraining. Primal trust.

[01:25:11] Jim: I’d love to know how, and this is just a rhetorical question perhaps, but how the cerebellum itself is impacted by these VOCs, because the cerebellum, aside from offering us balance and coordinated movement and things like that, particularly the midline cerebellar structures, are there to gait external stimuli from bombarding our brain stem. It has a choice. Do I go sympathetic or do I go parasympathetic, or do I have a nice balance there?

[01:25:37] Jim: A lot of us just shift into the sympathetic pathway, making things happen that are going to be uncomfortable and send you to a doctor. I see a lot of cerebellar lesion from other reasons, but head injury, of course, but gluten sensitivity, for example, cross-reacts against the cerebellar midline tissues. The antibodies of gluten do that. So does TPO antibodies from the Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, cross-reacts in the cerebellar tissue. This is all Dr. Vujdani’s work, by the way, from Cyrex Labs.

[01:26:08] Jim: So I can see how there’s other things happening now, that just opens the door and now like whammo, these VOCs are just hammering me, right?

[01:26:18] Jason: Yes.

[01:26:18] Jim: Making it all worse. If you’re in sympathetic drive, your barrier systems go down, immune function goes down, cognitive power goes down, right? We got to break the cycle like you said, right? But it’s not just one thing usually.

[01:26:32] Jason: No, and usually it’s a pretty aggressive extraction. So again, external, we have all of our interventions are at a pill potion powder procedure, right? And that’s additive medicine. That’s at, and that’s American, the American way. If little is good, more is better. And we’re gonna fix the problem by layering on. We do this with buildings. Hey, we built the buildings a certain way and then they didn’t insulate well. So we add some insulation.

[01:26:55] Jason: Well, then water gets in the walls. So we gotta add plastic on the outside of the building. We keep doing this thing. And these are building experiments. All of them have cumulatively been wrong. And by the way, the solution is you go back to a mass wall construction, which is how we built buildings back in the old days where there’s no wall cavities, there’s no sheet rock, and there’s no chemicals. But my point is that there’s, it’s additive, additive, additive, additive until we finally get to the point where we go, wait a second, we’ve done this all wrong.

[01:27:18] Jason: We, the best way to fix this is to start over, we go back to first principles. And so when it comes down to what we’re talking about with the built environment, and it’s unlike this active compliance oriented external or exogenous sort of menu of services and products, what we’re talking about here is getting your environment straight, which becomes a passive supporter.

[01:27:42] Jim: Yeah.

[01:27:43] Jason: It’s passive. There’s no compliance except for awareness. Hey, that got wet. We got to fix that right away before it gets moldy, get two days. But the activity is awareness in that situation. Do I see something, smell something, or feel something? If you do, do something. And so what we’re saying here is that the initial investment in this may be overwhelming or daunting at first. Because most people just don’t know what to do.

[01:28:12] Jason: So it’s not even that they have a list of things to do, and they just are like, I can’t do it. They don’t know where to begin. And that’s really what we do. That’s why we have our e-book, our Got Mold e-book, How to Find Mold, things like that, guide people through the process. More than a test kit, by the way.

[01:28:25] Jim: Which is a free download. Yeah. On your website. We’ll give links to that.

[01:28:28] Jason: Okay. Absolutely. Our whole process is education first, teach you how to assess your building, assess your life, assess how these things interact with each other, and then give you the tools to test. We don’t recommend people just test. We want people to engage their senses in their building, become familiar with it. This building is an extension of your immune system. It is like an exoskin or an exoskeleton. To ignore it and just to relegate it as a physical structure around us, that keeps the rain off of our heads, is to ignore the symbiotic relationship we have with the building.

[01:29:00] Jason: Sick buildings equals sick people. Buildings heal, it will facilitate healing too. Bottom line is healthy people live in healthy buildings.

[01:29:08] Jim: Love it. Well, if we have enough time, we could go over my little results here from my personal home.

[01:29:15] Jason: Let’s do it.

[01:29:16] Jim: I feel like it was not too bad. It could have been worse. I will say this. I do not have a musty smell in my home. We do live in Southern California, so we’re not notoriously like rained on or damper or like coastal fog, like when I was up in Santa Cruz, California, real moldy up there in the redwoods. We found, I got like all greens in my bedroom, my master bath, which I had a little concern around.

[01:29:47] Jim: My daughter’s room was the only one that had a moderate exposure.

[01:29:52] Jason: Here’s her list. Now, let’s look at that. Just to give some color to this, no pun intended, our report first page is a green, yellow, orange, red. It’s a very simple indicator. The indicators describe not detected, not everything’s fine. There’s no such thing as mold free. Our goal is to figure out whether there are clues or indicators of an imbalance. The green is slightly evident, sorry, not evident, the yellow is slightly evident, orange is moderately evident, and the red is significantly evident.

[01:30:30] Jason: We’re looking for evidence. This is an investigation, right? It’s not a diagnosis. When you start looking at the numbers here, they’re organized. On the second page, we have these four columns here, outdoor and then the three indoor samples that Jim collected. You’ll see that there’s this total spore counts, which is not generally as important as you might think. The indoor background debris, very important by the way, you need HEPA filters and HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners.

[01:30:57] Jason: It looks like the filtration could be improved here.

[01:31:00] Jim: This is out of a plus four, yeah, one to four, and pretty much across the board, outside and inside is plus three.

[01:31:05] Jason: Yeah, so it seems to me like you’ve got a lot, you know, probably a high pollen. I don’t know what you’ve got going on out there, but three plus outdoors is pretty high too, dusty. You know, it seems like there’s quite a bit of debris. And then you start looking at the top column is common dominant spores. And so this is going to be ascospores, basidiospores or mushroom spores. Cladopsorium is the most abundant background mold on the planet.

[01:31:30] Jason: Aspergillus, penicillium are actually both common and also water damage indicators, depending upon how many you have.

[01:31:36] Jim: And I had high antibodies to those, IgG antibodies personally.

[01:31:40] Jason: Yeah, pretty common though. You know, you start looking at aspergillus and penicillium, like have like, you know, 800 species in each genus, 800, 900 species in each genus. So they’re abundant in everything. By the way, you want to talk about exposures. Oh my gosh, the number of foods that are made with aspergillus is profound, right? So soy sauce, sake, you know, miso, just so many different things that are made, that are cultured with that.

[01:32:07] Jason: So-

[01:32:08] Jim: Purposefully, yeah.

[01:32:09] Jason: Purposefully, and penicillium is in certain cheeses, and you know, so penicillium roquefort, for example. By the way, interesting little side, penicillium roquefort, which makes cheese, if you, when that grows on corn and cows eat it, it produces a mycotoxin that can kill cows. But yet, when you use that organism to culture their milk, it makes blue cheese.

[01:32:31] Jim: Okay.

[01:32:32] Jason: Funny. So it’s not the organism so much as it’s the function and where it’s working, what it’s working on. But aspergillus out of 1,100, and so you got green and sample number one, green and sample number three, and then you got this orange indicator, which is primarily driven by the 1,100 penicillium aspergillus.

[01:32:57] Jim: Yeah.

[01:32:58] Jason: And that’s a noteworthy number. So can you scroll down a little bit? Let me see.

[01:33:02] Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:33:02] Jason: What my hyphal fragments? Because that’s the other thing that so down here, four hyphal fragments. Wow. Your outdoor environment had four. Is your porch or wherever you sampled covered with a lot of flora? Do you see like?

[01:33:18] Jim: Actually, it is. It is. It’s our little area between a little breezeway between our garage and our kitchen. We have some nice chairs. It’s shaded. There’s an old nasty awning that has covered with vines.

[01:33:32] Jason: Yeah, I see that.

[01:33:34] Jim: Rodents live in there and birds nest in there. It’s an awesome little microbiome up there, I’m sure.

[01:33:41] Jason: So the hyphal fragments right there could be, and this is why we do the outside sample, is because you can see those could infiltrate, and next thing you know, you see them inside. Hyphal fragments are a key indicator of proximity to a mold problem. Four is still a very low number.

[01:33:57] Jim: Hyphae are basically extensions of a fungus. It’s like a way that they branch out, correct?

[01:34:03] Jason: Yeah, think about it, spores are like seeds, and then when the spore lands on a surface in its infinite intelligence, and it really is truly incredible, it will detect, it knows it’s in the right spot, and it sends out, with the moisture present, kind of like a house, seedle Germany, a hyphae will send out a little feeler, and then it finds a spot where it’s like, oh, okay, cool, I’m going to eat this, releases some enzymes, starts to dig into it, and then those roots are hyphae.

[01:34:36] Jason: So they’re effectively the curious little, they’re the roots, they’re the feelers.

[01:34:42] Jim: Makes sense. Well, it’s fascinating, because that outdoor sample, the closest room is my master bedroom. That is a sliding glass drawer right there, and that would be a zero. It just has a little line there. But my room is the only room in the house that I have a hyphae filter, because I have the most symptoms, and I’m like, I just need to do this for myself. My daughter’s room, the only one that flagged, does not.

[01:35:05] Jason: There you go.

[01:35:06] Jim: The sample three was my master bathroom, so that’s basically an extension of my bedroom.

[01:35:11] Jason: Your filter could be knocking that stuff down. The big question is, is there any other indication of moisture in your daughter’s room?

[01:35:23] Jim: The only thing, which is fascinating, she doesn’t have any water source connected to her room, not a bathroom, it’s across the hall. She is north-facing. She has some shutters, and so there’s this window space between the glass, which is like old 1970s construction, aluminum framed stuff, and it does grow mildew and that thing around it. I’m guessing that would be it. We have to remember for her to like, hey, let’s just check those windows and get those wiped down.

[01:35:59] Jim: And she also is more closed in, like we have our door open all the time, hers oftentimes is closed, her window.

[01:36:06] Jason: Yeah. So it sounds to me like you’ve gotten some good confirmation of that concern here. And now you’ve got- Is it that simple?

[01:36:14] Jim: Clean the windshield? I mean, we’re not going to tear open walls necessarily, right? It doesn’t smell.

[01:36:19] Jason: No. What I would do is I would take a high-power flashlight, and I would go along the walls, and you do it at a little bit of an angle. So you can’t- And you look for any inconsistencies on the wall under the windows, corners of windows in particular, and then down by the baseboard. If you see baseboard pulling away, that’s indicating that the things have gotten wet and expanded and contracted.

[01:36:47] Jim: Underneath the back of the thing.

[01:36:49] Jason: Yeah. So whenever you see trim pulling away, you see a gap suddenly, you see whether it’s no longer the paint didn’t kind of hold it. And you see bubbling paint, blistering paint, stains of any sort. These little stain can hide a huge issue. And so, yeah, but oftentimes, aluminum windows, air-conditioned environment, you end up with a lot of condensation forming, building the room that doesn’t have the HEPA filter has a higher dust load.

[01:37:17] Jason: Mold initially colonizes on dust. So if you have a, and by the way, also, if that window is perfectly clean, in other words, if the dust has been removed, and what you can do with HEPA filtered air cleaners, that’ll knock down the dust a lot. But then you wipe it down. If that aluminum window is perfectly clean and it gets wet, it won’t grow mold. However, if there’s enough moisture, it’ll start to grow on the paint around where it drips down.

[01:37:42] Jason: So keeping that moisture, monitoring that moisture is critical, and also creating up air flow around it, so it doesn’t accumulate in the first place. Then monitoring humidity, because again, it goes back down to, is that window still so cold inside? Because the air conditioning might be actually too cold too, and then you end up with condensation because the moisture, because the air conditioner might not be doing its job also, it may be too cold and not dehumidifying.

[01:38:08] Jason: Sometimes what happens is air conditioners go on and off quickly.

[01:38:11] Jim: Yeah, ours does that, short cycles.

[01:38:13] Jason: That short cycle is bad news, and it’s bad news for a variety of reasons. Shortens the lifespan of the unit, but more importantly, because it does this on-off, a dehumidifier shouldn’t really turn off unless it hits its target. An air conditioner unit is not actually an air cooling system. It would be called an air cooling system if its entire job was to cool air. It’s air conditioning, which means it’s there to manage moisture primarily

[01:38:40] Jason: Moisture, if you reduce the humidity in a building, it feels cooler also. And so it’s conditioning the building to… So if it’s running consistently, it’s doing its job of cooling, but it’s also doing its job of reducing humidity. And if it turns on and off, first of all, it doesn’t take out the humidity and then also creates all of these empty spaces inside the system that are cold. And now if you got a humidity problem that the unit’s not addressing, it forms condensation inside the ducts on the registers.

[01:39:14] Jason: And then of course, anywhere where the airflow was blowing against it first, because it dries that, and then when it stops, that surface is now super cold. So like when you’re at a hotel in the tropics and you open up the slider, and you take in the ocean breeze, and then you turn around, you close it, and you walk and the tile is all wet on the floor. You’re like, what the heck, man?

[01:39:36] Jason: Well, that’s exactly what happens inside instantly. As soon as you turn off the HVAC. So the key to HVAC systems is you got to undersize them. They actually need to be, and a proper NAIT certified HVAC contractor can do that for you.

[01:39:54] Jim: That helps.

[01:39:55] Jason: That helps a lot because they can do the whole solar loading calculation and really figure out what you need. You’re much better off with a system that runs all the time, low level, it’s highway miles. It’s not stop and start like a car. An HVAC that runs consistently behaves a lot better for the long run than one that stops and starts all the time. And then you don’t have the moisture forming too.

[01:40:16] Jim: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. I think we did it. I think we did it. I think you won the prize for the longest one yet. So we could talk for this is weekend seminar stuff, right?

[01:40:28] Jason: Absolutely. So yeah

[01:40:31] Jim: So hey man, thanks again for not only your time today, but just for doing what you do because it is that missing piece. Like I said in the very beginning, I work with a very delicate chronic population. A lot of us in functional medicine do that, right? Because we are there. You were there last-ditch effort after millions of inspectors and we’re the same. I have a patient who been to 40, four zero doctors until she found me and we finally were able to get her skin lesions to go away.

[01:40:58] Jim: Yeah, I mean, what an honor, right? But still, I’m humbled but also pissed at the same time. Because my medical license is an acupuncture. I mean, that’s what allows me to do this and who am I? I’m just a peon in the whole hierarchy of things, right? But thank God, I know what I know and I keep meeting people like yourself. So yeah, thanks for showing up on the Quicksilver thing. They’re great.

[01:41:23] Jim: I love their products. Also, there’s too much to talk about here, but I’ll follow up with what I think we can do from a therapeutic sense. Once we get all the remediation or get all this stuff done, of course, that’s a whole other topic, Ben.

[01:41:39] Jason: Yeah, but I’m here to help you on that stuff. So I used to charge for my consulting in between all the other things. I can’t bring myself to do it anymore because if I can help quickly and just send an article or give a little guidance, I do that all the time. Our product sales are, we’re like Girl Scouts in the sense that the Girl Scout cookies sell a billion dollars worth of cookies every year.

[01:42:04] Jason: They’re not really in the cookie business, but they are. They’re in the female empowerment business. So we’re in the human empowerment business and we happen to sell products to subsidize our mission.

[01:42:14] Jim: Fantastic. On that note too, I think we’re going to link to some things here as well. There’s a little discount code if this is calling to you. We can make that all available to you.

[01:42:27] Jason: Yeah. So please. Thank you for the reminder on that. Give me one second. So if anyone who wants to get in touch, can go to gotmold.com/afunctionalapproach. That will take you to a welcome page that we made for you, where you’ll find the e-book that I mentioned. You’ll find a download there. It’s the How to Find Mold e-book. It’s 46 pages of inspection checklists and FAQs, and what to do next, and people are really ready about that.

[01:42:57] Jason: It’s free. Also, a discount code, which is, if you want to just go to gotmold.com, you can just go there and use A Functional Approach 10, which gives you 10 percent off all of our test kits and refills. That does not have an expiration date on it, so feel free to use that. By the way, once you buy one of our test kits, you get to keep the pump, which means you can buy refills, which means you can test the air for less whenever you want.

[01:43:22] Jason: You can test your air four times for the price of one professional inspection. Not to say, by the way, this place is a professional inspection, it doesn’t, but it is a very cost-effective first step, and so oftentimes, it’s the best place for people to start. Also, if anyone wants to post questions to me, you can send questions at gotmold.com. I don’t answer all of them myself, but I do see them all, and we love to get those questions.

[01:43:47] Jason: Please let us know if you have any. We’re here to help.

[01:43:49] Jim: Awesome. What a great resource, man. Thank you so much. All right. I think we did it. Until the next time, everybody. My name is Dr. Jim Chialtas. This is A Functional Approach. Take care.