Podcast Transcript
[00:02] Enoe Aracely Brown: Hi, this is Holistic Edge Radio, and I’m your host, Enoe Aracely Brown. Now, today’s guest is Jason Earle, who will be speaking to us about what to do when we find mold in our homes. This is an odd topic, but I think I’ve had this topic before, and the invisible impact mold can have on our health. Now, I’m going to give you a little short bio on Jason. Jason Earle sees himself as a man on a mission, but an adoring father of his two boys in diapers, as he puts it.
[00:35] Enoe Aracely Brown: He is also an incurable entrepreneur and an indoor air quality crusader, who today is the founder and CEO of GOT MOLD, and the creator of GOT MOLD Test Kits. As an adult, Jason came to the realization that his moldy childhood home in New Jersey was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma and other health issues. He was so inspired, he left behind a successful career as a stockbroker on Wall Street, and took a job in a remediation company, which we’re going to find out what that is, to understand the process of mold removal.
[01:16] Enoe Aracely Brown: His experiences in this industry were eye-opening, which pushed him to design a new kind of company. Now, over the last two decades, Jason has personally performed countless sick, what they call sick building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way, helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind. He has been featured or appeared on Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired, and more.
[01:51] Enoe Aracely Brown: He specializes in affordable, professional-grade mold testing, providing solutions for homeowners concerned about indoor air quality, and GOT MOLD is headquartered in New Jersey. So welcome, Jason Earle.
[02:10] Jason Earle: Thank you for having me.
[02:11] Enoe Aracely Brown: Yeah, it’s great. I mean, as I go on, I just wanted to tell you based on some of your history, I will not tell you, but ask you, your mindset seems to be a very positive person, a very strong person. Where did that come from?
[02:29] Jason Earle: That’s a great question. Well, I think that you either emulate or rebel against your primary environmental factors when you’re a child. So my parents were certainly not positive or optimistic. On the contrary, but I think they did embed in me a sense of possibility. But it was a strange contradiction. It was like, we’re not good enough, but you are. And I’m like, well, you’re the gods, you’re my parents, you’re so big.
[03:04] Jason Earle: How are you not better? And so it was a little, I still think back to that kind of contradiction. But for some reason I was, and I’ve often thought about this, why if you deal 100 people the same cards, the perception of that hand is very different in all 100 people’s experiences, you know? That’s true. And so it’s not glass half full versus half empty, it’s really both. I like to think that I see both.
[03:36] Jason Earle: And so for me, the vision, my wish or prayer, if you will, is to see things as they are. Not to try to make things as I want them to be. And that had to be a freedom from having to be optimistic or pessimistic. Because if you just take it for what it is, life as what it is, then you are not reacting to it. And life is just, it’s a lot easier to be positive and optimistic when you don’t have a primary filter that says the life is dangerous or life is this.
[04:12] Enoe Aracely Brown: So you’re the Oprah effect in the world of coming out of somewhere and then boom, hitting the world. Yeah.
[04:20] Jason Earle: I mean, I do think that life circumstances, I had a lot of what people would call early trauma. I don’t see it that way. But I do believe-
[04:28] Enoe Aracely Brown: Exactly. That’s what I mean. You don’t see it that way, but other people see it that way and they end up in ruin.
[04:35] Jason Earle: True. And I wish I knew under, I’ve asked myself this many questions. I’ve written about this in my journals. I don’t know what it is that sets some people up for resilience versus not. Because that’s what it comes down to. It’s, and I think it’s mindset. By the way, this also dovetails really well into the conversation we’re having. Because beyond my experience here, the experience of others going through a mold problem, where your home is instead of protecting you, is now a source of disease potentially, or at least the concern is that it could be.
[05:07] Jason Earle: This is very unsettling for people, especially if they already have a world view that says, this is a dangerous place. So if you already have that world view, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then when the factors that are real around you, that the house is in fact, you feel better when you leave, and wow, my largest investment, the thing that I trust to protect my family, suddenly now instead of protecting me as the source of disease.
[05:33] Jason Earle: That is very, I think that will validate a very pessimistic world view. That’s the danger zone here is that, and also the mistreatment of people through the process of getting better, because the industry is filled with charlatans and snake oil sales.
[05:47] Enoe Aracely Brown: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. You went to work, here you are on high end, everybody goes, I wish I were, and you were a stockbroker on Wall Street, and all of a sudden you say, I’m going to go work for a mediation company and learn the ropes about mold removal. What did you find there?
[06:06] Jason Earle: Well, first of all, the transition there wasn’t as elegant as it might seem in a bio. So what had happened was I had spent nine years on Wall Street and I was started in the early 90s. And so I started a month before, month after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, by the way, and I was community-oriented. And then I quit a month before September 11th, so bookends for me, you know.
[06:26] Jason Earle: And so I quit largely because I had spent nine years doing this very, what people will call a high-stress job, and I had fun every single day. I loved my job. It was an adventure. And I loved the challenge of it. I had failed my way to success. You had to make 400 calls a day to get one guy to say yes, and you failed 99.75% of the time to become successful.
[06:44] Jason Earle: So that was a hell of a training ground for business. And so you talk about buoyant optimism. You’re like, I collected no’s. That was my favorite thing. I was like, how many no’s in a row can I get? Because that was going to be the inevitable. So you know, I cultivate that optimism. Because it’s like the old story that Ronald Reagan used to tell about these two young boys, twins, who were very different.
[07:06] Jason Earle: One was a pessimist, one was an optimist. And the father was so disturbed by this, their son’s completely diametric worldviews, that he decided he was going to take them to a therapist and see if he could get them some help. And so he takes the two boys and he separates them. And he puts the optimistic boy, he takes the pessimistic boy, puts him in a room full of toys and really fun stuff, like just all sorts of games and you name it.
[07:29] Jason Earle: And before you know it, the pessimistic boy is gone. These games suck, they’re the wrong color. You know, all these, he can’t find anything that he really likes. But the optimistic boy, he puts him in a room full of horse manure. And five minutes later, they go check on him and he’s digging, he’s having the time of his life. And the therapist can’t figure out what the hell’s going on. He says, why are you so happy?
[07:50] Jason Earle: And he goes, well, with all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere.
[07:55] Enoe Aracely Brown: Okay.
[07:56] Jason Earle: And so, you know, there’s this sense of sort of, you know, what’s going to come, there’s good that’s going to come, right? And so sometimes that’s even during challenging times. And I think that that worldview is something that is so.
[08:08] Enoe Aracely Brown: But that’s exactly the same example that I think you showed when you saw, you said it was an unethical industry. Yeah, and it’s a huge problem. What do you mean by unethical? What were they doing?
[08:20] Jason Earle: Well, so when I left, I actually went backpacking. So let me just fill in a little context and then I’ll explain what I saw. So first of all, I left an unethical industry where it was just money for money, right? Like it’s purely, Wall Street is an extraction business masquerading as wealth creation. And so it is purely against your client. Make no mistake. And with the exception of wealth, you know, firms that just do the passive wealth management, it’s different.
[08:46] Jason Earle: But the transactional stockbroker’s business is very much kind of a zero sum mentality. And so when I left, I left because I really wasn’t having fun anymore. And I had this call to do something meaningful with my life. Here I was nine years on Wall Street, only 25 years old. I was the youngest licensed stockbroker in history, by the way. Side note, just fun fact of the Guinness World Record. And that was a total fairy tale thing because I dropped out of high school, rescued out of a gas station.
[09:09] Jason Earle: So that’s a story for another podcast. But the motivation was really driven by the fact that my mom was always getting me, she was always imploring me to contribute to the Greater Good, volunteer soup kitchen, hospital. My mom ran a hospital and so I volunteered there during the summer mostly because I would burn the house down. But she had me involved in community and stuff like that. And so Wall Street was just so hollow for me.
[09:34] Jason Earle: I made a lot of money and it was great. But towards the end, when I had lost most of my during the.com bubble, and I just thought, do I want to do this again? All these soulless people I work with, none of them have what I want. And so anyway, I went backpacking. While I was away, I read a story about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he worked.
[09:49] Jason Earle: He blamed the mold in the building. And he had developed adult onset asthma and all these allergies that he never had before. And I, in retrospect, I had severe respiratory issues. And then when I moved out of my childhood home, all my symptoms went away. And so the dots suddenly connected. Yeah, suddenly I was like, holy crap, mold, wait, I never even thought about this. This is such a new idea. And so I took that knowledge, that awareness, because we had a very damp basement, very musty.
[10:13] Enoe Aracely Brown: You were in an old farmhouse, correct?
[10:16] Jason Earle: Yeah, and it was, you walked down, man, and we literally, my mom once came upstairs screaming because there were snakes in the basement, garter snakes. It was damp, right? It was very, you know, and it was not, knowing what I know now, of course I had asthma, allergies and pneumonia. Give me a break. Plus they smoked indoors. It was 1976. So, you know, so it was a whole different world back then.
[10:40] Jason Earle: But I immediately, when I was in that, in Hawaii reading the story about the guy who was sick, and by the way, it was in Hawaii. The story was in Hawaii. It was a local newspaper. I happened to be in the shadow of the building, which was shut down for mold. So I was there at Ground Zero for the mold remediation project, which was this huge historic problem. It was a $55 million mold problem in Hawaii.
[10:59] Jason Earle: So I was there at this seminal historic event, and it was this eye-opening thing about the idea that buildings can make you sick. It was mold, mold fascinating, yes, but the idea that buildings can make you sick was a big idea for me. The idea then has 25 years later, I’m still here, and the idea now is more interesting to me, which is that buildings can help you heal. And so it’s not just a source of disease, sick buildings, healthy buildings are the basis, the foundational element in thriving.
[11:30] Jason Earle: And if you really want to do well, reduce health care costs, big picture stuff, or even just extend your own health span, number one thing you can do is get your environment straight because it’s foundational. Everything else works better with a great environment. But when you have a compromised environment, nothing you do will work well. Nutrition, meditation, a lot of stuff won’t matter. It all gets undermined by every breath you take.
[11:52] Jason Earle: And so that’s the big compressed 25-year takeaway is that I got into this curious because I was like, wow, this is a new idea. And now I realize now that it is probably the number one health burden that we carry as a nation, which is the quality of the air in our homes.
[12:07] Enoe Aracely Brown: And you don’t think that this is true for other nations as well?
[12:11] Jason Earle: Funny you should ask because actually the Blue Zones, which is probably the most famous meta-analysis of longevity or health span, probably more accurately, and they identify these places all over the world. And one of the things that was really remarkable is that if you look at the Blue Zones, and I’ve pored over this, they talk about environment, but not about the built environment, not about indoor environment. They talk about environment in the sense of, circadian rhythms, the way the light, they do talk a little bit more about diet and exposure to outdoors, but they don’t really talk about the way the building is built, about the chemical load, about ventilation mold problems, none of that stuff.
[12:52] Jason Earle: So indoor air quality is a complete blind spot. And you know what, that’s so perfect though, because this is the great blind spot, and it’s a natural blind spot for humans, because we’re deletion creatures. Our brains are designed, or our brains operate best, by deleting all the things that are not immediately a threat or an opportunity, something to move towards or something to move away from.
[13:14] Enoe Aracely Brown: Or visible.
[13:15] Jason Earle: Or visible, right? But the things that are closest to us, including relationships, we often take for granted. And so if you look at the four or you can go five basic human needs, air, water, food, shelter, and sunlight, if you look at shelter, we can live without for weeks, maybe depending upon the climate, almost indefinitely. Food, few weeks, water, few days, air, few minutes. Sunlight, you also need that. You will atrophy quickly without sunlight.
[13:44] Jason Earle: But the point is that the one thing you need for the shortest period of time and one thing we’re most dependent on is the afterthought, which is air. And you don’t think about air until it’s too dirty, too smelly, or there’s not enough of it. And so think about the irony of this is that literally this is a foundational thing. We breathe 20,000 times a day, which is the equivalent of a 2,000 gallon above ground swimming pool.
[14:05] Jason Earle: If you do the math on this, by the way, check this out. You only eat about four pounds of food a day if you eat three square meals. You only drink about four pounds of food, four pounds of water if you drink that full eight ounce, eight ounce glasses, right? And but you breathe 30 pounds of air a day, and yet it’s an afterthought. So what I’m saying is that this is the your single largest environmental exposure by orders of magnitude, whether you look at weight or volume doesn’t matter.
[14:30] Jason Earle: And yet is the thing that we oftentimes forget when we’re talking about people that are sick, for example, if you had a sick fish in an aquarium, you would maybe treat the fish, but you would certainly address the aquarium. And yet we take people out of their environment, measure them up, sequence their genome, develop nutritional programs, create all this wellness around them, then stick them back in a sick tank and go, why isn’t it working?
[14:56] Jason Earle: And this is the problem. This is the great blind spot. In fact, I’ve been talking at longevity conferences and you know what’s amazing? All these longevity guys are all that are talking about upstream, we gotta go upstream. They’re talking about genetics. I’m like, there’s an upstream that sits on top of all that switches environment, which affects your genetics epigenetically. All these switches are turned on and off based upon your environmental exposures.
[15:15] Jason Earle: Our environment is not just the buildings that we live and work in. This environment is an extension of your immune system. The buildings you live and work in are an exoskin or an exoskeleton. And when the building gets sick, you get sick. And when the building heals, so too can you. There’s a symbiotic relationship here, right?
[15:34] Enoe Aracely Brown: Well, I think indigenous people had the same idea. And that’s why things like, well, the Chinese, for example, think about Feng Shui. That was indigenous work about where you live and how healthy it is for you. Now, the first time I heard about a mold problem was going back in 2003, when you had Ed McMahon, who was Johnny Carson’s guy. And all of a sudden, he put in a lawsuit for $7 million because he said, a pipe blew in my house and these contractors ruined my health, killed my dog.
[16:08] Enoe Aracely Brown: That’s right. Yeah. And exactly. I remember very well. So this became like the first big story that I remember about this topic. Yeah. Moving it in that direction. But the whole point being that the contractors were not very good people. Yes.
[16:27] Jason Earle: And so that circles back to the whole ethics thing, right? Which is really been the foundational part for our approach to the industry. Which is that when we first started, I worked at the remediation company. I took a job working for a remediation company because I wanted to earn while I learned.
[16:41] Enoe Aracely Brown: What is a remediation company, though?
[16:43] Jason Earle: Gotcha. Okay. So for basic definitions here. So in every environmental hazard, whether it be lead paint, asbestos, mold, whatever, you’ll have essentially two different roles. One is assessment or inspection, and then you’ll have remediation, which is the removal and cleanup. And so remediation, by the way, by definition, the root word is remedy. So it’s not kill, it’s not eradicate, it’s not sanitize, it’s remedy. And so with remediation very specifically, what is a mold problem?
[17:18] Jason Earle: Mold is a byproduct of dampness. Dampness, without dampness, there’s no mold growth. Mold spores themselves, the individual little sort of reproductive seeds, they’re ubiquitous in our environment. They’re actually the, kingdom fungi is the most, is the largest producer of biological particulate on the planet. So mold spores are everywhere. But it’s when conditions in the building become conducive to its growth. In other words, the right dampness, the right level of moisture, the right temperature, which is basically our, with the way we like to set our thermostat, it’s the same temperature mold likes.
[17:51] Jason Earle: And the right amount of oxygen, they like oxygen too, by the way, and time. And so dampness that goes on for more than a few days becomes mold. And because we build buildings out of mold food, this is an epidemic problem. So remediation, by definition, is the actual fixing of the water problem and the cleanup of the mess.
[18:12] Enoe Aracely Brown: The cleanup, it has to be really excellent cleanup.
[18:15] Jason Earle: Yeah, it’s a microscopic cleaning. So think about this, you’re cleaning up something that can’t be seen without a microscopic, when you see them growing on a wall, that’s one thing. But when it breaks free, all that stuff is airborne, completely non-visible to the naked eye, completely indiscernible to the naked eye.
[18:32] Enoe Aracely Brown: Is that about things like asbestos and all that, that they used to put in tile back in the 40s, I think?
[18:38] Jason Earle: Yeah, I mean, asbestos was in all sorts of stuff. It was even in some plaster, it’s in all sorts of stuff. So what I saw early on, because there was no, when I first started doing this 25 years ago, there was no regulatory oversight, there was really very little in terms of guidance on best practices. There was certainly no licensing requirements. It was wild, wild west. These guys that I started working for were using a lot of chemicals instead of cleaning.
[19:00] Jason Earle: They were also doing huge amounts of unnecessary demo because contractors, they get paid by the pound, right? They don’t get paid to do- How expensive were they? $10,000 to $20,000 on average.
[19:11] Enoe Aracely Brown: You’re talking, this is a homeowner that would have to show up and that’s the price they would get.
[19:16] Jason Earle: Yeah, and they weren’t getting the kind of cleanup that I would say was commensurate to that kind of price. And then I saw that this was not unique to these guys, that the industry was very much like Wall Street, it was extraction. And so this was not a business that was built on people trying to help people. It was built on a business of people masquerading around as trying to help people, but really extracting as much as they could.
[19:38] Jason Earle: And this I thought was like, why did I leave Wall Street to go do it? So I don’t want to be on that side of business. Plus, it’s a horrible business. The labor issues, the remediation side, terrible liability. So instead, what I would do is I realized that there was a huge opportunity because all environmental hazards eventually bifurcate into two spaces. Right in the beginning, they’re always doing butter and butter on both sides, conflict of interest.
[19:59] Jason Earle: My uncle owns a remediation company while I do an inspector, and then he’ll pay me a 10% on every job. And all this financial entanglement creates a lot of room for abuse. I decided early on because I was involved on Wall Street financing some environmental companies, and I saw that they all divided up. Eventually, law said, you got to make a decision. Which side do you want to be on? And I figured I’m going to plant my feet firmly in one place, which is where I can be an advocate to the consumer.
[20:19] Jason Earle: I can protect them from the contractors. I can learn while I earn. And also, I don’t have to have all the staff. I don’t have to have all this rolling steel, all these vans and equipment and all this stuff. I can go out there and actually help one family at a time. And that’s what I did. And I would do-
[20:32] Enoe Aracely Brown: You were doing inspection?
[20:33] Jason Earle: At night, I was actually for free while I was doing daytime work with these guys. At night, I was helping some of these customers who were in need of a better assessment. Do we really need to rip up the whole basement? It’s just in this corner. And so I would at night study this stuff. I was chasing down PhDs and building science professionals and taking classes and doing all sorts of stuff wherever I could learn.
[20:59] Enoe Aracely Brown: Did it involve equipment?
[21:01] Jason Earle: Yeah. So eventually what happened was I began with a moisture meter and a flashlight and just these really basic tools. And by the way, no one else showed up at the moisture meter. Like I was defend, it’s just so simple, right? And then I began doing research on different technologies for this and that’s when I read about a guy who trained mold sniffing dogs, a mold sniffing dog down in…
[21:20] Enoe Aracely Brown: Oreo, I remember.
[21:22] Jason Earle: And I thought, wow, that is just crazy enough to be brilliant. So I flew down to meet him as I am known to do. I will typically find something interesting and just go. And so I went down and met him and I was like, oh man, this is crazy. But next thing you know, $14,300 later, I have the first certified mold dog in North America. And we flew home. And before you knew it, I had the local press to send it on me because it turns out they were trying to debunk me.
[21:49] Jason Earle: But instead they hid mold in the house, Channel 6 Action News out of Philadelphia, hid mold in a house. And on live TV, by the way, they were satellite on top of the thing. And we found mold in three minutes. And so instead of debunking me, they endorsed me. And so it was consumer alert. They were literally out there to prove I was a fraud. I did not know that. I probably would not have gone.
[22:12] Enoe Aracely Brown: Never trust reporters.
[22:14] Jason Earle: Yeah, exactly. Really. They were way too friendly. Now I know. But then again, that was also like early 2000s. And you got the press you wanted. If you got press coming up, you take it. And so that became a whole groundswell of interest from local doctors. And that led to the Good Morning America episode, the reference of my bio, and then that Extreme Makeover Home Edition and all these newspapers and magazines.
[22:35] Jason Earle: And Oreo was in a college biology textbook under old factory senses. It was a cute picture of her. So we really had a lot of fun, a lot of books on working dogs and stuff. We were interviewed for a bunch of those. And she was actually an instructor at Rutgers. We did a course on mold detection and we were invited and she got an instructor badge, Oreo instructor. We just had so much fun.
[22:56] Jason Earle: It was really the best time of my life. I mean, short of having kids, that was the most satisfying thing because I got a chance to really go into homes. And we found problems that five or six inspectors before us failed to find. And we could find it in minutes and then surgically extract this to reduce the size of the remediation to the smallest possible dimensions so that the remediation cost was low.
[23:17] Jason Earle: Contractors loved it because we protect them too. Hey, it begins here, it ends there. Take this out. And then we’ll test at the end and then you get paid. It was bookends. And so we built a really nice business that I did for 18 years in the field. Thousands and thousands and thousands of homes. And we grew to a fleet of dogs and we had franchises.
[23:39] Enoe Aracely Brown: What’s the strangest medical story you got when you went to a home?
[23:42] Jason Earle: You know, probably, well, there’s, so there’s, I have a few of them, but one of them was really fascinating. This gentleman was in his 70s, otherwise seeming a very vibrant guy, but he suddenly got ill and was having all this degeneration. And he developed leukemia. And then suddenly having all this bone density issues. And he was spent all this time in this basement room, next to the laundry room that was right beneath the bathroom.
[24:12] Jason Earle: And he would sit down there and watch TV, and it was kind of like a quiet space for him. And one day he got up from his chair, and both of his ankles broke. His bones just broke. He stood up and he literally had to crawl up the stairs to get to the phone, so that he could call, and they picked him up. And the funny thing was, and this is kind of, he’s a really funny guy, very dry.
[24:37] Jason Earle: He would never understand that he’s telling a joke until you really listen. And so he called 911 and of course they came and picked him up, and when they wheeled him out, they said, you know, how did you do this? He said, he said, skydiving, you know? And so he wrote that down, skydiving. And so even they wrote that down. And then he went through all the treatments for it and something like that, and then he got this huge insurance bill, and he said, wait a second, I thought I had insurance.
[25:06] Jason Earle: And he said, we don’t cover skydiving accidents.
[25:11] Enoe Aracely Brown: That’s pretty good.
[25:12] Jason Earle: So anyway, I was called in because the wife was very concerned, the wife, his wife was very concerned about his respiratory health, and they had been declining, and it seemed like she thought there was a problem in the basement. And so we went in there, and with the dogs we found a problem in the bathroom above where he was, that was running down the wall. So there was an affected area that was adjacent to this space that he spent a lot of time in.
[25:34] Jason Earle: And then behind the washing machine, they’d had a series of problems with Maytag. The Maytag washing machines had failed them several times, they’d flooded a bunch of times. There’s all sorts of mold behind there that was not visible unless you really looked. And so he was sitting in a complete active mold factory, and he was breathing 20,000 times a day, this thing which makes you weak.
[25:56] Enoe Aracely Brown: For years.
[25:56] Jason Earle: For years and years and years. And so we had this all remediated, and he was he was he also started, he was wasting away, and he moved back in after it was fully remediated, cleared, put air purifiers in there. We went back to several assessments afterwards. And he bounced back so fast. It was incredible. I mean, I think he lived another five years, but he was given something like 90 days. And it was a remarkable example of what the building can do as a supporter, as a passive supporter of human health.
[26:33] Jason Earle: Whereas the opposite is if it’s not healthy, there’s no neutral. It’s either an active source of disease, or it’s a passive supporter of wellness. And so this is the call, right? It’s not just mold either, it’s chemicals. We built since 1947. We went from building to last, made stone, plaster, old growth timber, concrete. These are materials that get wet and dry out naturally by their own volition. They also are inherently low in chemicals, right?
[27:08] Jason Earle: They’re inert largely. They also are really durable and resilient. They last for hundreds of years, you know, if maintained even in this very basic way. But they’re hard to heat and cool. So as time went on and we, you know, we began burning, you know, more, we’re having more control over the fuel that we burn. And not necessarily trees start having electric bills, start closing these buildings down for energy efficiency. In 1968, ASHRAE, which is the Association of Heating and Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, they came out with guidance.
[27:41] Jason Earle: They’re the ones who really provide guidance to the EPA and these other groups about how we should manage our HVAC systems and energy systems. And they came out and said that we should cut our energy, our fresh air intake by 15%. And you see the chart when that happened, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases. Since 1947, we have 100 new autoimmune diseases on the books.
[28:05] Enoe Aracely Brown: What year did this start?
[28:07] Jason Earle: Well, 1947 was when…
[28:09] Enoe Aracely Brown: The authorities were horrible at changing American health to the worst.
[28:13] Jason Earle: Totally. It was World War II. You know, World War II, suddenly baby boomer demand for faster, cheaper housing. Suddenly, next thing you know, we’re building out a cardboard. And then also, then closing buildings up. And then we also started stuffing our walls with fluffy insulation, which, by the way, was made with a Group 1 carcinogen, with formaldehyde. What are we thinking, right? And then, even better, then we start doing all these really great renovations, making our houses beautiful, but sick, because we’re using all these chemicals, all these drying agents, all these finishes and furnishings that are all imported from China.
[28:47] Jason Earle: So they evaporate into your house. They’re basically curing in your building. And you’re inhaling all this stuff 20,000 times a day. And we wonder why we’ve got chronic fatigue and all, like I said, a hundred new auto…
[28:56] Enoe Aracely Brown: That means those houses still have it right now.
[28:59] Jason Earle: That’s exactly right.
[29:00] Enoe Aracely Brown: If you’re occupying this house that you just bought, that it’s an old-fashioned house from the 20s, beautiful and all, but you don’t know that that’s in there because you have to have it assessed.
[29:10] Jason Earle: That’s right. So I have, there’s four, really five questions now that we call it the Fast Five. We used to call it the Fast Four, but we added one. And so if you want to do a quick assessment of whether your building is causing you a potential harm or whether there’s a problem that is worthy of an assessment, right? So we went back, so remediation. Then there’s assessment. Assessment guys should never be part of the remediation process, except for to design it and to oversee it and do the testing before and after.
[29:35] Jason Earle: They’re paid for their advice and their expertise and their ability to sort of be the warden on the way out, right? They’re the gatekeeper on the way in and the warden on the way out. So they’re your advocate. A great environmental consultant is worth more than his weight in gold and also will do more for your health than your physician, because where the rubber meets the road is in your house. You cannot treat, there’s no external treatment for mold sickness.
[29:58] Jason Earle: The only treatment for mold sickness is a healthy environment, is to re-calibrate your immune system, okay?
[30:03] Enoe Aracely Brown: Wait a minute, say that again.
[30:04] Jason Earle: There’s no treatment for mold related illness, no matter what anybody says. You’ll hear detox protocols and all this kind of crap. That’s not true. What you need is space from the space. You need to either mediate.
[30:13] Enoe Aracely Brown: You mean you need to remove yourself from that.
[30:14] Jason Earle: Mediate or relocate, yeah, absolutely. You need to either fix the problem or find a space that doesn’t have that problem. Then you get better. Usually people get better pretty quickly too, but depending upon how long their exposure was. So in acute exposure, generally kind of acute symptoms. Chronic exposure or chronic symptoms, and it can change you, it can shift your immune system, it can hypersensitize you and make you susceptible to chemical sensitivities and other things like that.
[30:36] Jason Earle: So when I talk about this assessment process, this selfless, this initial screen, it’s not just mold. You can’t talk about air quality or mold in good conscience without talking about chemicals, volatile organic compounds, which is like all the stuff we talked about from the building materials, all of that new house smell, the new car smell, that’s VOCs. The gas smell at the gas station, VOCs. These things are carcinogens, they’re inflammigens, they cause all sorts of downstream inflammatory effects.
[31:08] Jason Earle: We know this from VOCs. In fact, we all know the most popular VOC is alcohol. And what does that do to you? It impacts your cognition, right? And so the VOCs impact cognition. That’s the number one complaint from people is fatigue and brain fog. And so when we’re talking about this, mold produces VOCs. This is very important. There’s manmade VOCs and then there’s microbial VOCs. That’s what the musty smell is. The body doesn’t know the difference between the two.
[31:36] Enoe Aracely Brown: How does someone tell if they’ve got mold in their house?
[31:39] Jason Earle: That’s where I’m going. So the VOCs that mold produce, that musty smell is usually your first signal. This is like a pain signal from the house. There’s something wrong here, right? You get a pain signal, you pay attention to it. If you ignore that, it becomes chronic inflammation in the building. That becomes a major mold problem or potentially rot, which is cancer for a building if you think about it. So what we look for, we got five questions.
[32:04] Jason Earle: Do you see something? Is there any visible sign of dampness, condensation, blistering paint, trim pulling away from the walls, warped or buckled paneling, things like that? Rusty tack strips. You pull up the corner of your carpet and you’ll see the tack strips. If those nails are rusty, you’ve got a moisture problem. These kinds of things are the key elements to the beginning of a mold problem. So do you see something? Number one, do you smell something?
[32:33] Jason Earle: Is there a musty or earthy odor, a biological odor? Sometimes it’s sour if there’s a bacterial component. But bottom line is, it’s an odor that doesn’t smell like healthy home. So that earthy musty smell is not just a signal, it’s also a health hazard. Animal studies have shown that some of the components of that musty smell are, in fact, neurotoxic, and they create downstream inflammatory effect called a neurogenic inflammatory cascade that triggers all sorts of hallmark symptoms, like cytokine storms and mast cell activation, things that anyone who’s been through mold will tell you that they’ve heard.
[33:07] Jason Earle: That’s all neurogenic, and it’s also from the musty smell, but it’s also triggered by the man-made chemical. So if you smell new building smell, that’s another red flag. So see it, smell it, and then feel it. If you have symptoms that get better when you leave the building, that’s a huge red flag, especially if they come back on when you return. The fourth thing is, is there a history of water damage?
[33:30] Jason Earle: Leaks, floods, anything like that? Then fifth, have you had any recent renovations or new construction? Because that release is a whole bunch of stuff. It’s not just mold.
[33:40] Enoe Aracely Brown: You point out to the presence of water bugs and spiders.
[33:43] Jason Earle: Yes.
[33:44] Enoe Aracely Brown: Because when you see those, you should be aware somewhere there’s mold?
[33:48] Jason Earle: Moisture.
[33:49] Enoe Aracely Brown: Moisture.
[33:50] Jason Earle: Yeah. So like bugs won’t, but all animals need water too, right? So the question is, where are they getting it? If you’ve got spider webs up, guess what they’re doing? They’re actually catching droplets in the air. You know, like the dew drops in Charlotte’s Web, right? Come on. So that’s where this is coming from. So if you’ve got enough to have spider webs, you have enough condensation to form mold growth eventually.
[34:11] Jason Earle: And so when you have that whole ecosystem, mold spores is kind of like that old nursery rhyme. So the mold spores, there are little mites that eat the mold spores, and then the spiders eat the mites, and then you get the larger bugs that eat the spiders, and the whole thing goes all the way up.
[34:27] Enoe Aracely Brown: The whole thing goes up, yeah.
[34:29] Jason Earle: And so you have a whole ecosystem. When you have a dampness problem, it’s like a pool party, everyone got the invitation.
[34:34] Enoe Aracely Brown: Somebody told me, put vinegar on the boards, out of the floor where you just got that water because you don’t know where the water is going. I’m saying, is the vinegar doing to do it? No, it’s not. But one of the most important things that I came across here was that mold on or in the brain is a major danger sign. I had an environmental doctor here, and she heard Lisa Naji is it, she’s an MD.
[35:03] Enoe Aracely Brown: She was very ill for many years, and until she met environmental doctors, I didn’t know that it was my environment. That was her thing. But she pointed out about a family. That was Show 43, everyone. She pointed about a family, a married couple, and the woman, after a year of mold in that house, I guess they finally got rid of it, she committed suicide. And I keep hearing those stories and I wonder what it’s doing in the research.
[35:35] Enoe Aracely Brown: Are they finding how mold acts on men and women differently or it doesn’t matter?
[35:41] Jason Earle: Okay. Well, this is a fun one. So, and I talked about this very openly because I think it’s extremely important and it’s often brushed on the rug. So, everyone thinks about mold and even without knowing anything, you’re like upper respiratory, right? It’s gonna be sneezing, hay fever, sinusitis, asthma, all that stuff. That’s just obvious, right? It’s an allergen, it’s inflammatory. These things are allergic inflammatory disease. So, yes, true. But what we’re seeing is also that the same inflammatory markers that are present in mold-related illness are present in people that have psychiatric issues.
[36:14] Jason Earle: And so, in fact, many people in the psychiatric world are now referring to mold and anxiety as inflammatory conditions. So, this is very important. So now, backing up to my story, I was four, I had a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, lived in this moldy house, moved out when I was 12. When I have time, and the conversation is relevant, the next part of this was that my mother committed suicide in that house.
[36:38] Jason Earle: She stayed behind. My father, I moved in with my father and his new wife. And when I was almost 14, she committed suicide. She had attempted several times. This was the third time, so it was no surprise. And the interesting part was that she was also an alcoholic, and so it was largely chalked up to clinical depression, chemical amount, that was the whole thing back then, chemical amounts, and she wasn’t taking a med right, and all this other stuff.
[37:05] Jason Earle: And my mom kind of medicated. She was a nurse, so she knew better than anyone. She had the PDR, she had all the meds in her. She knew better, so she would medicate herself. She was probably too smart for her own good when it came to these things. And also, some people are happy to be miserable, you know, like she didn’t like the drug, but also didn’t like without it, and it was just a very, it was back early prozac days.
[37:27] Jason Earle: And anyway, fast forward, I get into this space. You know, 2008, a large study comes out from Brown University, where they, 6,000 people in this study, and they had initially done it to disprove a study which found a correlation between mold and dampness and depression. They actually went out and did a much larger study, and they came back and said, no, it’s actually there, right? There’s a strong correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression.
[37:56] Jason Earle: What they stopped short of was saying why, because of course that wasn’t the purpose of the study, it was just to say it was a relationship there. And they did sort of come to some initial potential conclusions, like, hey, people who report that they’re not feeling well and that they have active mold problems probably are disempowered because of budgetary constraints or lack of agents.
[38:15] Enoe Aracely Brown: They don’t know what to do, really.
[38:16] Jason Earle: Yeah, or they may be renting and they don’t have, they’re not aware of their rights or they’re just not able to execute on it. Because by the way, mold makes you weak and makes you, it makes you tired. It literally disempowers you from being able to take action.
[38:26] Enoe Aracely Brown: And you don’t have money.
[38:28] Jason Earle: And you’re also, yeah, and also a lot of people lose time at work and it takes you out of the game. And so therefore, you are not able to execute on things to even get you back to baseline often. It’s very, very, it’s a negative, it’s a vicious cycle. And so that really hit home with me. And I thought, geez, you know, it makes a lot of sense. And knowing, having been in so many homes at that point, seeing this pattern.
[38:53] Jason Earle: But then really interestingly, a few years later, I was fortunate to meet a woman named Dr. Joan Bennett, who’s a famed mycotoxin expert. And the National Academy of Sciences, just genius research scientist. And she, in her 60s, had opened her second lab doing this research because she had been affected by mold at her home, which was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. She went down to investigate the home. She was in the ninth ward.
[39:24] Jason Earle: It was completely moldy, completely overtaken by mold. And she went in and she was wearing a respirator, thinking she was protecting herself from the spores, but the odor kept coming through and it made her ill. And so she went and said, this is something, something here that I have not researched. I don’t know anything about. It’s not in the literature. What is in this stuff? Because I thought I was protecting myself from the spores and the micro toxins.
[39:47] Jason Earle: And she was, but there was a component to it. So she went back to the lab and began studying the musty smell, what’s in it. It’s a potpourri of chemicals. And she found this one that’s really prominent in most musty situations called 1-octan-3-ol, which is a mushroom alcohol. And you can buy it online. In fact, it’s the same chemical that they use in the mosquito magnet, you know, in your yard. So it’s what they call the semi-ochemical.
[40:11] Jason Earle: It’s actually a messaging molecule put out by the microbial world. And so, but it affects us significantly in high concentrations. It’s highly inflammatory. And so she began studying, which is her jam, is she finds these really cool animals. And this one was a fruit fly that was genetically engineered to fluoresce when it produces dopamine. Cool party trick. And so you expose this fruit fly to the musty smell or to the one-octon-3-ol.
[40:42] Jason Earle: And what she found was that they stopped producing dopamine. And they stopped flying down and set it to the light, which is their instinctive nature. They also began, they developed locomotor dysfunction, weird and parkinsonian like symptoms. Mitochondrial dysfunction showed up in subsequent studies by her and it goes on and on and on. Mitochondria, of course, premature death and all that stuff. So you start looking at this and you connect the dots on this and you go, oh, okay, this is a multi-system affliction.
[41:12] Jason Earle: And so the downstream effects of this is essentially every single system is adversely affected. And my conclusion is after doing much research and talking to all the top people in this industry for the last 25 years is that there is not a single disease state that mold doesn’t either cause poor indoor air quality specifically. That’s right. Doesn’t cause or aggravate.
[41:33] Enoe Aracely Brown: And so there’s a lot of this in the National Library of Medicine. They talk about it.
[41:38] Jason Earle: Yeah, it’s just not been consolidated and it’s not well, well, it’s not well regarded in the in the health space because there’s no validated solution on testing or treatment or anything like that.
[41:51] Enoe Aracely Brown: Isn’t it like football brain?
[41:53] Jason Earle: Yeah, I mean, listen, there’s things you can do for for concussive syndrome, right? At least in terms of helping to reduce ongoing degradation and making life easier. In the least with mold, people can heal. They their nervous system can relearn. A lot of it, by the way, circles back to the original part of the conversation. You know, people get better through this, in my experience, is through air, food and attitude. And I say that because you have to get the air straight.
[42:18] Jason Earle: Either you again, remediate or relocate. It’s not just mold, it’s also chemicals. Food is our primary source of mycotoxin exposure. So if you want to reduce mold exposure, first thing you’re going to do is look in your pantry and get rid of the sugar, the grains, and the conventional meat and dairy. Because all that stuff comes through. All the imported grains, 60 to 80% of imported grains have upwards of seven mycotoxins.
[42:46] Jason Earle: This is a really big deal. All that stuff in the boxes, in the bags, in the middle of the grocery store, that cheap stuff is cheap for a reason. It’s because it’s internationally sourced and there’s no regard for it.
[42:58] Enoe Aracely Brown: They want to get rid of it. You’re it.
[43:00] Jason Earle: That’s right. Also, you have to look at things like anything that’s been ground up into butters and sauces. Tomatoes, they’re not going to take the pretty ones. They’re certainly not going to take the pretty ones. Same thing with applesauce, they’re not going to take the pretty ones. We see a lot of mycotoxins in applesauce, tomato sauces, and of course, peanut butter. What you have to do is really look at this and say mold exposure comes in two forms.
[43:18] Jason Earle: You breathe it or you eat it. If you want to get better because you’re already in the camp, or you’ve already been affected, you already have health issues, and it’s time to start removing things, it’s air, food, and then attitude is recognition that the world view matters. If you’ve never seen anybody get better in fear. That’s right. Then also, there are pathways, there are systems like Primal Trust, which I love primaltrust.org is a neural retraining platform, where you actually learn how to consciously deal with the perceived threats of the environment.
[43:55] Jason Earle: It’s really good for PTSD because this is essentially a trauma, and the nervous system doesn’t know the difference. Dealing with this as a trauma on the nervous system is really, really effective, and I see people become incredibly resilient through that, such that they end up going back out into the real world and end up in a moldy apartment or a moldy hotel on vacation and don’t have symptoms.
[44:19] Enoe Aracely Brown: I want you to talk about the test kit because that’s important before we go.
[44:23] Jason Earle: Yes. So there’s two things on that. Okay. So I got started in the assessment side of things, and I realized that there’s a huge gap in the marketplace for affordable testing. 1-800-GOT-MOLD, which was my service business, our average inspection was $2,000. This is out of reach for most people. So it was troubling to me because my own parents could not have afforded to hire my company that I created to help families avoid going through what we did.
[44:49] Jason Earle: And to bring that full circle, I was charged with this responsibility. I don’t know where it comes from, but I had to solve this problem. And so I put a dream team of scientists, engineers, the original inventor of the Sport Trap cassette, that’s the ubiquitous tool that is used worldwide. We worked together to create an at-home version that allows you to test your air. So for people who are watching, this is an air sampling pump.
[45:13] Jason Earle: This is the one we make. If you hired a professional, they come in with a $1,000 device that does what this does. But anyway, we make a very low-cost, very high-quality at-home air sampling pump that replaces a professional pump. And then the cassettes that go on there are called spore traps, and the air gets drawn through those cassettes. They’re like a little filter. And so the air goes in there, and then it’s drawn through on an air sampling pump.
[45:39] Jason Earle: And then the spores are captured inside this nifty little precision-engineered cassette.
[45:43] Enoe Aracely Brown: And this unit is just for one room in your house?
[45:46] Jason Earle: This is each cassette is for a room. And so you will have upwards of it. You can get a one, two, or three room kit depending upon your needs. And so, and then once you have a kit, you can reorder refills for $50 less. So it’s an ongoing tool. So you can test your house four times. By the way, $299 will get you a three room kit, lab fees, prepaid return mailer, both ways, the whole thing.
[46:14] Enoe Aracely Brown: So you say the microbiologist checks it and then sends it back in a few days to tell you what’s positive or negative.
[46:20] Jason Earle: Once you get the result, once the results come back in three business days, once they’re at the lab. So as fast as you can do them, that’s the results come back. It’s all automated. We partnered with Eurofin, it’s the number one lab in the world. So the results you get are actually AIHA accredited professional quality results, but for the cost at a consumer level. And the report you get, color coded, green, yellow, orange, red, what molds are found, how much, and there’s action steps that are actually generated by the results.
[46:48] Jason Earle: Right? So there’s actually a launch pad there for you to take next actions. And that’s really what our goal is, is not to replace a professional because it doesn’t. Just like if you were concerned about your heart and you said, well, I’ll go to Everlywell or whatever, I’m going to order a test and you got a lipid panel and you got high cholesterol, you’re not going to immediately call the heart surgeon and say, I need a stent or you would go to your GP and get a workup.
[47:15] Jason Earle: Same thing goes with us. So the idea here is that cost-effective first step, and then if there’s any alert conditions that are found during the assessment, by the way, it’s not just a test. We actually provide them with the education so they can do their own assessment. It’s a lot easier than you think. You just have to follow this beautiful eBook that walks you right through it. So if you do the see it, smell it, feel it, take your building history and then also think about change, renovations.
[47:38] Jason Earle: Then in that context, collect your samples. Now you’ve done the beginning of a self-assessment. You will know more about your building at that point than you ever have. Then you can take the informed next steps. That’s what we’re here for.
[47:49] Enoe Aracely Brown: What is the next step?
[47:51] Jason Earle: If you have an alert condition that’s determined through see it, smell it, feel it, or test it. If any of those tests, because really you have to think tests are not just lab tests. Tests are, do I smell something? That’s a test. Do I feel something? That’s a test. These are important to recognize as part of inextricable components because a professional will do that. Whether you do it or a professional does it, you need to do it.
[48:20] Jason Earle: If any of those alert conditions pop up as an affirmative, any negatives don’t matter. Any positive shows up. Then the first thing you do is you find the source or the sources of that moisture. If that is beyond your capacity, then you need a professional. So it all comes back down to, again, finding the moisture, diagnosing that, correcting that. If you do that, by the way, many people who are suffering from mold-related illness don’t realize that they have an ongoing moisture problem.
[48:49] Jason Earle: And if they stop that, the musty smell will stop being produced. Much of the exposure gets reduced. It doesn’t stop it. It doesn’t eliminate the need to remediate, but a lot of people find reduction in symptoms just by stopping the ongoing moisture problem. And then remediating it can be done…
[49:07] Enoe Aracely Brown: What do you do that, like fans and dehumidifiers and all this other stuff?
[49:12] Jason Earle: Water either comes from inside or outside, right? So it’s either a leak from some sort of a breach in the building envelope or pooling of water because it’s not shedding properly, right? Your gutters are dumping too close to the foundation, things like that. So water either gets in because of some breach in the building envelope or it gets trapped inside because of poor ventilation or an excessive event like a leak or a flood.
[49:34] Jason Earle: And so every single situation for moisture is different. The most insidious ones are the ones you can’t see because it wasn’t a big event. It’s more like a huge problem.
[49:42] Enoe Aracely Brown: Subtle.
[49:43] Jason Earle: And it lingers. So that’s why the scent is a big deal.
[49:46] Enoe Aracely Brown: But it’s the next step to go to an inspector and you recommend where they should look for them?
[49:50] Jason Earle: Yeah. So in our report at the end of the third page, we have links to the trade associations who train and certify professionals both on the assessment side, which is always where you should start. If you call a remediator, by the way, this is where the conflict of interest conversation comes back in. They will come over and gladly give you a free inspection because for them, that’s a sales call. And if they scare you enough, you might very well end up hiring them on the spot.
[50:16] Jason Earle: And these guys are really going to scare the shit out of people. So do yourself a favor, get the buffer. They will save you more than they cost you. And if they’re not in cahoots, and that’s the most important thing is they cannot have a financial relationship. You have to have them explicitly attest that they do not get paid by the contractor. And if you do that, then you have a fighting chance because then you have an advocate.
[50:39] Jason Earle: So when it comes to remediators, this old adage, never ask a barber if you need a haircut. So getting a remediator to come over and assess is-
[50:48] Enoe Aracely Brown: Same deal.
[50:49] Jason Earle: Yeah, it’s like going to the mechanic. Have you ever bought the car to a mechanic and said, hey, I need to get my tire, there’s a low, I’ve got some-
[50:56] Enoe Aracely Brown: But you have this and this wrong with it.
[50:58] Jason Earle: Yeah, suddenly everything is wrong. The whole car, you don’t take your car. You don’t drive your car, do you?
[51:05] Enoe Aracely Brown: No, I want to make sure people know where to find you. Your company is 1-800-GOTMOLD, and you could also write to helpgotmold.com. You guys are open Monday through Friday, nine to five, you’re close on the weekends and major holidays. So anything of any fear that anyone has about this kind of problem, please contact them. I think you guys are pretty great. The fact is that every time you buy a kit, you also plant a tree.
[51:35] Jason Earle: That is true. By the way, we’ve set something up specifically for your listeners, and so this is something for them to write down. So we set up a welcome page for everyone who’s listening to this, and all they have to do is go to gotmold.com/holisticedgeradio. When they go there, they’ll find there’s a copy of our e-book, which is free, and that will guide you through your own self-assessment process. You don’t even need to buy a test kit.
[51:58] Jason Earle: You can begin there. It’s free. Then there’s no strings attached, and people love that thing. We get huge positive reviews on that. Then there’s also a discount code there, which is Holistic Edge10, which will give anyone who is interested in actually buying a test kit 10 percent discount. Then there’s also a contact form there too, so you can ask any questions that you want. That’s our service to your audience. I will also mention that we have a new test coming out in a few months called the Mycobium test.
[52:28] Jason Earle: Anyone who’s familiar with ERMI, E-R-M-I, which is a very popular dust test, we are replacing that essentially. It’s 36 species, the ERMI. Our new one’s coming out to 230,000, so you can go to mct.gotmold.com to learn more about that. But basically, what we’re doing right now is we’re here to make better tools and give people access to the knowledge. More than anything else.
[52:50] Enoe Aracely Brown: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jason. And Jason’s last name is spelled E-A-R-L-E, just in case somebody’s trying to look him up in another way. So I’ll see everybody next week at the same station of Holistic Edge Radio. Okay then. Bye bye.
