Podcast Transcript
But my story began really when I was about four years old. I actually had asthma, compounded by pneumonia. A year later, my mother died suddenly to suicide.
About a year after that, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Reading a story about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he was an employee. He had been working there for several years, and they found a mold problem.
So I called my father from a pay phone, and asked him if we had mold, and he just laughed at me. He said, of course, we have mushrooms in the basement, why do you ask? It was the idea that the buildings that we live and work in can make you sick.
Healthy buildings can allow you to heal, and that to me is an even bigger idea, right? Which is that when you get the environment straight, you don’t need to be nearly as vigilant as many of us are.
Well, I am here today with a very, very fascinating individual, Jason Earle. And I just can’t wait to get into the conversation because you got some serious golden nuggets to share with myself and the audience. And in this whole thing about Got Mold and your brand, your research, all the stuff that you brought out that helped very large numbers of people.
And so we just want to get into the real deep golden nuggets today. But if you could give a quick snapshot, Jason, on where you came from, where you are today, what your mission is, so we get a handle around that.
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. I always love our conversations.
And in fact, I have often thought that I wish we had recorded them anyway. So it’s about time that we did.
Right. For sure.
So I’ll give you sort of a large arc with the major salient points, and you can stop me anywhere you want, or we can rewind and dig back in. But my story began really when I was about four years old, where I suddenly had difficulty breathing and lost a lot of weight in a three-week period. My parents took me to the pediatrician who said, you should really take him to Children’s Hospital.
This looks serious. And so because of family history and the symptoms I was presenting with, they initially diagnosed me with falsely, thank goodness, cystic fibrosis. It was in our family.
My father had lost several of his cousins, cystic fibrosis before the age of 14. So this is their worst nightmare coming true. And so they spent the next six weeks crying while they waited for a second opinion, which thankfully contradicted the first one.
I actually had asthma, compounded by pneumonia. And when they tested me for allergies, I was allergic to every single thing that they tested before. And I grew up on this little non-working farm, surrounded by allergens, grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, soybeans, all that stuff.
So my clothes were itchy. It was just, it was an uncomfortable childhood, to say the least. But intuitively, I knew it was, I felt better outside, even though I was around all these allergens.
Indoors was just not, it just wasn’t for me heavy. It was, my eyes would get really itchy and swollen and things like that. And so, back then kids spent a lot more time outside anyway, but that was really my body really felt better outdoors.
And so, I just lived on inhalers, and there wasn’t even a bunch of avoidance of allergens back then. My parents both smoked indoors. It was just 70s parents, it was just kind of suck it up.
So fast forward when I was about 12, my folks split up and I moved out of that moldy house, and all my symptoms went away. And it was chalked up to what they call spontaneous adolescent remission, which is a technical term for we have no idea what the hell happened. And then about a year later, my mother died suddenly to suicide, which is actually relevant to the conversation, which we can dig into.
And then about a year after that, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I’m still not sure I had it, but I do know I got the thermonuclear antibiotic regimen, which messed my gut up for a while. So that began my, all of this stuff was cumulative, but also began a healing journey that I was completely blind to at the time.
It was just this sort of avalanche of things that occurred. This forced me to actually drop out of high school because I had missed so much school that I had violated the attendance policy and I was not qualified to wrestle, which was really why I wanted to go to school anyway. And so I began full-time hours at the gas station where I met a guy who recruited me to come work on Wall Street.
It’s a fairy tale story. I was 16 and I ended up becoming a stockbroker at the age of 17. And so that was just sort of one of those things that no one would have ever predicted, especially me.
I did that for about nine years. I had a great career, owned my own firm for a couple of years at 22 years old. And then when the.com bubble burst, the firm that I owned the branch office collapsed.
And I realized that I was no longer having fun anymore. And I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. My mom was a nurse and she had really imparted on me the value of service and contribution to the greater good.
And I volunteer in her hospital when I was a kid. And I really found that that was incredibly satisfying. Even when I was young, we did soup kitchens and we did all sorts of stuff like that.
And that was so fulfilling to me. Of course you can’t make a living doing those things, or at least I thought the profit and purpose needed to be mutually exclusive. But I went on a mission
I went traveling after Wall Street, went backpacking, and I brought a journal and some books and a really very scant. And I was really looking to see what I wanted to do when I grew up. And while I was in Hawaii, I was reading a story about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he was an employee.
The Mold Revelation
He had been working there for several years, and they found a mold problem, which turns out to be an historic mold problem in the Hilton-Kalia Tower on Waikiki Beach, the one that’s got a big rainbow on it. Still does. I was just there a few months ago, stopped by to say hi.
Hadn’t been there for 25 years prior. And he had developed adult onset asthma and all these allergies that he had never had before. And it was like a light bulb went on, you know?
I thought, geez, that was like my life in reverse. I wonder if we had a mold problem. So I called my father from a payphone, which probably isn’t, what I know isn’t there anymore, because I went to go look, and asked him if we had mold, and he just laughed at me.
He said, of course, we have mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? You know, it’s just this dismissive thing.
And I said, well, do you think that’s what made me sick? And he said, well, I couldn’t have helped. And in that moment, I remember just being like fascinated with the idea, not fascinated with mold, per se, as fascinating as mold and fungi are, fascinated with the idea that the buildings that we live and work in can make you sick.
That was a very new idea for me. And it was a very new idea back then, although we were kind of on the heels of sick building syndrome, which is largely chemicals and too much CO2. But this whole idea that a building can make you sick was so big to me.
And also this idea that if we had a mold problem, I know everybody, I mean, there’s so many people in my hometown had the musty basement. How much of human disease was being caused by this? And that led me on a mission to really understand this nexus of buildings and health.
Over the years, what’s happened is I’ve gone from thinking so much about how buildings make you sick to really the idea, the obverse, which is that healthy buildings can allow you to heal. And that to me is an even bigger idea, right? Which is that when you get the environment straight, you don’t need to be nearly as vigilant as many of us are in our health journey.
But if you are vigilant about all these things, you do diet, nutrition and meditation, you got your mindset and all that stuff right, but you have a lousy environment, it will undermine all those efforts. And so, you know, it’s taken me a few years to really, to have this thing turn from working against something to working towards something. But really, I’m in the business of helping people regain control of their environment so that they can get control of their health.
And we do that by providing people with tools and knowledge they need to better detect and also to educate. But this all came out of really, when I came back from Hawaii, I came back armed with a lot of curiosity, took a job working for a mold remediation company that wasn’t really mold remediation, it was more basement waterproofing, but they happen to be doing mold treatments. And it was within a few months of that, I was looking for all these different ways to detect mold, because I saw these guys were really doing harm.
Got Mold Approach
And they were leaving homes often worse than they found them using chemicals instead of remediate, instead of cleaning, and charging outrageous prices to rip out sheetrock and insulation, and really, I think, leaving a wake of destruction. And so I realized that I had a place in this industry to help protect people from that. So I got into the inspection thing kind of accidentally, I would help people out at night for free, I would do free inspections, and eventually some people said, you know, I should really be paying you for this, right?
And how much would you charge, you know, how much would you pay me for this? And so I actually got some feedback from these, you know, people that I was helping out sort of for free. And then I read about a guy who trained mold sniffing dogs, actually a mold sniffing dog down in Florida.
And I thought, wow, this is just crazy enough to be brilliant. I mean, I grew up with dogs, and I just that would have been so amazing to find a way to use their unique talents to help people. And I went down to Florida, I met the guy and came home with a mold sniffing dog.
And so my family thought I had lost my mind. But before you know, we had all this national press all like we, they descended on us because we’re the first in the world to professionalize the use of mold sniffing dogs. And so my dog Oreo and I just had this amazing amount of tailwind, no pun intended.
And we ended up with thousands and thousands of inspections without any advertising at all. And I got this education by immersion, right? So I was suddenly forced, I had no idea what I was doing.
I mean, I didn’t understand the building science yet. I didn’t understand really how these things work. But I did know how to find mold.
And once I found enough of it, I found how these things fail. And I understood the building dynamics really by virtue of detecting where these things, where they fail. Then I figured out how they fail.
And meantime, I’m doing building science courses. I’m doing all this multidisciplinary field if there ever was one, right? And so I’m learning about buildings and biology and mycology and all these things in my spare time, which was scan.
And so that company was called Lab Results because we use Labrador Retrievers and laboratory testing. And then that became 1-800-GOT-MOLD. But over the years, especially the last six or seven years, I became very frustrated by the fact that most people can’t afford a professional inspection.
And also, there’s lots of conflicts of interests. There’s a lot of people out there. If you invite them into your home, it’s like inviting a vampire into your home.
They’re going to take the data they’re going to use against you to manipulate you into an expensive remediation, or even worse, these sometimes unnecessary detox protocols and using a lot of fear. And so we decided to create products that would allow people to test their air without having to deal with the costs or hassle associated with trying to find and hire a qualified professional. And that’s really the Got Mold Test Kits mission.
And we packaged that with a lot of education so that people can navigate this early on. Doesn’t replace a professional inspection, but it does give people a stepping stone, gets them out of apathy, gets them out from Ostrich syndrome with their head in the sand. You know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step and we like to offer that step.
And so that’s really what brings us to today. And we’re now working, we can dig into this a little bit more. We got some really exciting new tests coming out that will replace some of the more problematic tests like ERMI, for example.
We have a new dust test coming out, very exciting, that I licensed from Yale. And we’ve got a new mold sensor coming out, and some blood tests, and some really, really exciting stuff. So the Got Mold test gets really sort of our flagship product, but it’s kind of, it was really sort of our go-to-market, so that we can establish ourselves as a credible, benevolent company.
And what we’re doing now is really upleveling the industry overall, because there hasn’t been much innovation in the last 25 years, let’s just put it that way.
Buildings and Human Health
Right, yeah, that sounds quite the story. I’ve been through a similar, not physically, personally, my body is not sensitive to mold. I don’t know why.
And I think that’s part of the tricky thing with all this, because some people are ultra sensitive, some people are not. I’m sensitive to other things that people are not. And it’s just, it’s a phenomena.
So a friend of mine, his name is Craig, I won’t give his last name, just to protect him. He’s considered one of the top 10 scientists in North America. And he was commissioned by the DOD.
This is going back to 2018. And he was given a very large budget and a certain amount of time, which he finished the project in there. And it was to provide a little snipping device for picking up the off gassing from whatever mold there is.
So he would not only know what the mold is, but what the concentration was. And that was completed for the DOD, for all of the people within the person that was in there. He then realized, hey, I could take this to market.
So he built it out, he raised several million dollars, got it going, finished all the prototypes first so that you and I could have, it was about the size of half a deck of cards. And he got a visit one day. And this is down in Austin.
And it was from a government agency. And they just said, hey, you know, Craig, we understand that you’ve got this rollout of a mold detection device that’s extremely sophisticated, similar to the one you developed for the DoD. He goes, yeah, that is correct.
And they said, do you think you’re gonna be allowed to bring this out? He goes, yeah, why not? There’s mold everywhere.
Like people go to work, there’s mold in their workplace, there’s mold in a house they may be renting. I think it’s very important that people can be able to sense that. And they told him, look, just look downtown Austin, see all these skyscrapers here?
It’s in the wind and the weather over the years, and some of them have been here 40, 50 years. They have cracks in there. Those buildings are full of mold.
They’re full. The average lawsuit could be up to $150 million. These are sequestered.
They’re not even published in court. They won’t even allow this to be published in newspapers when people have a lawsuit with mold. This level of mold detection is not happening because it will cause massive problems across the nation with people without level of sophistication.
So no, you are not taking the technology that DoD paid you to do to the public. And that was the end of it. And you shut it all.
That was the end. We’re talking 2018, right? So that was interesting.
Then I ran into a thing in Canada called conchrobium.
I know conchrobium. Yeah, they sell it at Home Depot now.
Yep. And it’s inexpensive. And what is your experience really?
Because I was told and we’ve used it. You can literally drink this off as non-toxic. And if you spray it and let it dry, it crushes the mold and kills it.
What is your experience with conchrobium?
Well, so I’m going to I’m going to kind of put it all into one bucket. So I have I’m pretty staunch against the use of any anti-microbials in general, unless there’s concerns about sewage in a building where there’s or, you know, a acutely pathogenic bacterium. Fungi do not become less farmful in an environment by killing them.
They’re actually still allergenic and potentially toxigenic. So one of the big problems is, and this is one of the reasons why I was in the, that’s one of the reasons I decided to be on the assessment side to protect you from contractors back 25 years ago, was because I saw that, and just knowing that first, it’s a first principles kind of thing. Dead mold is still allergenic and toxigenic.
So if you’re going in and killing it, you’ve done two things. You’re, first of all, adding a chemical load potentially, or at least a fragrance in many cases, right? So, and many people who are mold sensitive are also chemically sensitive or sensitive to fragrances.
So oftentimes the antimicrobial being used actually leaves behind a residue that can sometimes be worse than the mold and harder to remove. So there’s a problem with that, especially products like Benefect, which is a time oil-based one. Very effective antimicrobial.
Make no mistake, but your house smells like time, and it’s very strong. And yes, it dissipates, but it’s still, no matter what, you walk in the house, three years later, it still smells like an herb, and it’s a very potent smell. And then the fact that you’re leaving behind dead mold means that if you want to properly finish that job, you’re still gonna have to clean, which means you’re gonna have to use HEPA vacuums and damp wipes and all that stuff.
So killing it doesn’t make it easier to clean either. And so as a result, what you’ve also done is added a line item to the remediation in terms of a cost for the chemical or for the cleaner, a line item for the application of the cleaner or the biocide, and then there’s stuff to clean anyway. So what I say is just clean.
And if you just remove the building materials that are supporting the growth, like sheet rock, porous stuff, carpet, carpet padding, insulation, ceiling tiles, these kinds of things, and then once those surfaces, once the remaining unaffected surfaces are exposed, then you HEPA wipe HEPA. So HEPA vacuuming all the surfaces and then wiping them down and then HEPA vacuuming again, because stuffs will settle on them after you do the initial vacuuming and wiping down. So there’s this HEPA wipe HEPA cycle.
And that’s all codified, by the way, in the IICRC S520 mold remediation standard, which is behind a paywall, so most consumers won’t have access to it, but it’s the only consensus accepted industry standard put forth by the OGs, people who have been in this industry longer than me, and there aren’t many of those, but those guys that have put this together, and most of them are very good friends of mine, it’s a very well traveled path, but it’s, like I said, it’s behind a paywall. And also the cost associated with having guys come in moving suits is a real, I mean, it’s a kick in the pants. The average remediation is probably almost $10,000, and it’s a cash pay, insurance won’t pay for it.
And so many people will do anything in their power to avoid having to hire those guys, which often means that they go to Home Depot and use concrobium or they get an ozone generator or any of these things. And ultimately, at the end of the day, they still have to ultimately do remediation. They still have to do the removal to restore the property to a normal condition.
And the definition, by the way, of remediation, is first of all, fix the water problem, remedy, but that’s really what we’re fixing, right? A mold problem is a moisture problem. So the first part of remediation, remedy, is fix the water, and then to clean up the mess.
And that’s surface cleaning, removal, surface cleaning, and then air cleaning. And then the purpose of remediation is to restore the property to a normal fungal ecology. And that’s an important point.
It’s not to sterilize the building. It’s not to remove all the mold. It’s not to get spore free.
It’s not any of that. It’s mold free. This is a false narrative.
Spores are the most abundant living particulate on the planet. They’re literally, Kingdom fungi produces 50 megatons of spores annually. Now, this is macro fungi and micro fungi.
So that’s mushrooms and micro fungi. 50 megatons is the equivalent of 500,000 blue whales, okay? Five, that’s the production, annual production of spores in the world.
Most of them land on the plains and the oceans, but we find them 13.7 miles above the earth’s surface in weather balloons, right? They influence weather, literally causing precipitation. So these are very important spores.
They’re not going to get away from them. So the idea of remediation is to restore the property to a normal fungal ecology, which looks a lot like, believe it or not, the outside, a high diversity of spores and other microbes, but none growing in your home and no concentrations, which indicates that there’s growth in the building. So that’s a long way of saying that we don’t need to kill mold.
What we need to do is stop the water, starve it of its primary resource, and then to remove the materials that are supporting the growth that are porous, and then to clean up the surfaces. And that is the goal. If you do that, then you will have remediated properly, regardless of whether you use a professional or not.
Yeah, that’s cool. So it’s more of a common sense mathematical approach that just is kind of obvious. You’re talking about the porous surfaces and houses about a lot of that in them for years.
So carpet and things like that are pretty nasty, right?
Nasty, nasty stuff. If you really think back to 19, pre-World War II, when you’re old enough and I’m old enough to have been in houses that were a little older than that and when we were kids, and they were made of plaster and stone and concrete and old growth timber and brick and these kinds of materials. And they didn’t have insulation in the walls in many cases until they were retrofit, right?
So they were hard to heat and cool for sure, but they had a low chemical load. And when they got wet, they dried out, right? And they didn’t have materials that supported fungal growth.
And then in the 60s, we ended up building, starting to really be concerned about energy. So we started closing things up, stuffing fluffy insulation in the walls, that’s got formaldehyde in it, and all sorts of lovely Class 1 carcinogens. And so now when the water gets in the walls, it stays in the walls, right?
And then because of the demand for faster, cheaper housing, next thing you know, we’re using sheetrock and asphalt shingles and all these things that are both cheap, environmentally irresponsible, very mold-friendly. And then we do the best thing is we slather the inside of walls with toxic chemicals in the form of paints, finishes and varnishes and things like that. While we’re literally re-breathing the same air 20,000 times a day, and we wonder why we’ve got this skyrocketing rate of asthma, autoimmune disease, cancer, maybe a hundred new autoimmune diseases since 1947.
Come on, what is going on? I can tell you what’s going on. What I just told you is the built environment, food is a distant second, the built environment in my estimation, we’re working on a meta study for this, about this too, is the underlying cause or aggravator of most of the chronic illness in America.
And you can even go to heart disease. The breathing particulates is very, very, very closely, very well studied in terms of cardiac disease. Now we know that mold, especially the microbial VOCs, which I have now concluded is the primary cause of most mold related illness.
It’s not the spores or the mycotoxins, it’s the musty odor of the triggers, a neurosensory inflammatory cascade through the trigeminal nerve, which we can unpack. And this explains the rapid onset of symptoms, rapid offset of symptoms. So we start really looking at the way we’re handling our buildings, which are an extension of our immune system, right?
The word shelter comes from shell. And with animals, that’s part of the anatomy. With us, it is essentially an extension of your immune system.
It’s an exoskin or an exoskeleton. Sick buildings, sick people. Buildings are healthy.
People have a chance to heal and be healthy, right? There’s a direct relationship. And so it is, and by the way, buildings don’t do well without us.
We don’t do well without buildings. There’s a symbiotic relationship with our buildings, right? We are essentially living within these living homes, right?
You could really argue that homes are an organism, right? A system of organs that are life-sustaining. And we’re like the mitochondria in that building, right?
We’re the energy, we’re organizing things, making sure. So we’re kind of the immune system for the building, but the building’s also an extension of ours. And I think we need to start really looking at what we’ve done in the last 80 years and really ask ourselves, well, I mean, is this the best we can do?
We’ve done, we’ve gone a long way with food in some places, and we’ve come a long way with water. Air is the final frontier of environmental exposure, and it’s our single largest environmental exposure by orders of magnitude. So it’s a little bit over time that we take this seriously.
Healthy Home Design
It is really. And people building a home, there are so many different fossils that you’re talking about. Do you have any kind of schematics or protocols on an eco-friendly home that is going to be an extension of our immune system and support us?
I love the mitochondrial analogy of us being in the home, taking care of it. That’s a really big one. But I think the homes that are being built today are still really messed up with microplastics and all kinds of stuff, right?
Yeah. In fact, you know, so I’ve got kind of two passions, right? It’s detecting and assessing mold in a cost-effective, accurate and affordable way.
That’s sort of our mission at Got Mold. And then I also have a parallel path, which is how do we build buildings in a way that you don’t need me? And that’s my dream, is that ultimately we can put ourselves out of business by becoming obsolete.
But we got 114 million single-family homes. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. So what I do is I very strongly encourage anyone who’s looking to build new to consider some materials that don’t get a lot of love right now.
My favorite one and the one that our next home will be made of is called aerated concrete. And in fact, I happen to have a little piece here. It’s like concrete pumice, aerated autoclave concrete.
This is beautiful stuff. It’s one sixth the weight of concrete. If you held it, you’d say, what is this stuff?
It feels like a space material, like a lunar material. So what they do is they make it with, you make us pour like a slab into this giant tray and they can do blocks or panels. And then they throw a little bit of aluminum powder, a little limonene in there, a little pixie dust, and it foams up and then they slide it into an autoclave and it stops that catalytic reaction at a specific density.
And so this stuff is beautiful because it is insulation, it’s structural, right? It’s very, very, very quiet. It’s mold-proof, fireproof, and pest-proof.
But it’s also a little bit fragile. I can sit here and pick this apart in front of you, you see dust will come off of it. So when you put stucco and things like that on it, it can still be a little bit fragile.
One of the companies I’m working with has figured out how to graphinate anything cementitious. So they infuse graphene into any cement-based product. And so we’re building homes right now in Austin, Texas, in a neighborhood called Sanctuary.
Go to sanctuary.co, where we’re building out of this stuff with the graphinated stucco mortar, even the Venetian plaster, which makes it almost bulletproof. We’re doing ballistics testing on this right now also. And so we, and by the way, also EMF dampening, and there’s beautiful stuff.
And if you put it in a slab, we haven’t done the full study, but there’s good reason to believe that you can have a slab that’s grounded. You can walk barefoot on a slab and actually have your slab be a ground, indoors grounding. And so we’re working on getting this kind of a product into more homes in the North American continent.
And one of my friends is opening some factories to do this. So that we can start, by the way, because in LA, for example, all those homes that burned, they’re not allowed to build back with stick. They’re not allowed to build back with light frame construction, which is two by fours, the way we build now with She-Ra.
Basically, we build out of cardboard. We build paper mache homes, right? And it’s no wonder they all go poof like that.
So what we’re trying to do is really take advantage of the fact that the timing is now right to build homes because the demand and the insurance regulations are changing. And then if we get out of these homes up and running, then what we can do is start getting data from that and start looking at what do the health profiles look like of people who live in these kinds of homes, right? Especially by the way, we’re also working on some sensor technology, much like the one that your friend developed.
So we can monitor these things in real time. This is an electronic nose based on graphene also that detects the musty odor. And so the idea here is really to get buildings built so that they aren’t causing harm, so that they’re at the very least neutral, if not actually beneficial, and then be able to start tracking these things in a way so that we can demonstrate that the buildings, the built environment, the indoor environment has a direct impact on healthcare costs and longevity.
Now, that’s cool, and you’re totally figuring this out. I love the concrete thing. That’s fascinating.
For heating and cooling, what are the best systems to eliminate the movement, or does it matter anymore if you’re moving air when you have a nice environmentally friendly health?
Well, movement of air is good. Annihilation is great. It’s necessary, right?
We need to have fresh air. I also happen to have, at my desk at any given, I carry these on the plane with me. This is a CO2 sensor.
And so I have hotel rooms. So I’m always monitoring these things because poor ventilation leads to high CO2, which impacts cognition. And ultimately, if you’re starved of oxygen, you’re not going to do well.
But also that lends to moisture conditions developing because we’re constantly breathing and cleaning and things are evaporating into the home. So CO2 is really important. So ventilation in general.
Air movement is important, but bringing fresh air from outside is your ideal situation, right? I always say a clean house is clean and dry, right? It’s not just clean.
It’s not just dry. It’s clean and dry. And so that means normal humidity.
By the way, this is also humidity buffering. So this will absorb moisture when it’s really humid inside, and then it will also release it back into the environment when it’s dry. So it acts like a moisture battery, if you will.
Now, when it comes to heating and cooling, I really love geothermal. So what that does is you run a loop down into the earth, and it uses the ambient temperature of the earth to bring it back into coils, which then allow you to blow air across those coils to heat and cool the house. And when it’s hot out, that cools the air, and when it’s cold out, this warms the air, right?
And so that’s a beautiful way to do it. I also love radiant, radiant heat for sure. I mean, there’s nothing better than that.
Air conditioning is tricky. I generally don’t love full HVAC systems, the full blow up. If you have to do it, those mini-splits are pretty good, and they tend to be useful, especially in a retrofit.
But a lot of heating and cooling has to do with how you manage the building during construction, if you have the ability to do that, right? How you orient the building, whether it’s south facing, whether you’re glazing on the windows, and these kinds of things. So part of it is kind of keep some of the radiant heat out in the first place.
But again, with a building material like this, if you take a blow torch on the other side of this block, you won’t detect the heat on the other side. So it’s incredibly thermally resistant to transfer, which is what our value is. It’s resistance to heat transfer.
And so what we really need to do is remember that how we got here, which is mass wall construction, the healthiest buildings ever, adobo buildings and rammed earth. These are naturally cool buildings. Because they absorb a lot of thermal load outside from the sun.
Think about the environments in which we build mass wall construction. It’s Arizona desert, right? It’s these really hot, dry climates.
And so the big, fixed earthen walls, when they’re getting solar loading all day, they warm up and then guess what happens? They release, 12 hours on average, it releases the warmth into the building at night when the sun goes down. And then as that cools off overnight, it reaches equilibrium again.
And so the building naturally will heat itself during the cool cycle, and it will cool off during the heating cycle. And also, there’s no wall cavities for water to get into, and there’s no materials to support fungal growth. And so, in many ways, you think about our health care system, or where we add things when someone gets sick.
We add a pill, potion, powder, protocol, whatever it is, or procedure, and we all know intuitively that that’s probably not right. We need to probably figure out what’s wrong instead of just adding a layer, another cream, or another steroid, or another whatever it is. We do the same thing with our buildings.
We have these buildings that had wall cavities, and the brick, stone, plaster, old-growth timber of the 1947 and pre-1947 buildings. We knew that it wasn’t right, so we just started adding stuff. Hey, we’ll add some insulation, we’ll add a vapor barrier, we’ll add another layer of this, we’ll add another layer of that, we’ll add another plastic thing, another rubber thing.
And we’ve added these Frankenstein buildings that are basically wrapped in plastic. So I believe in via negativa, which is improvement through subtraction. And this is true with health, this is also true with our buildings.
So by building like this, you get rid of the trades, you get rid of a lot of the, lots of layers, and you also simplify the process. And it’s much like that when it comes to air quality and health. We get better in this environment by removing the things that are causing harm instead of adding something like a biocide or a chemical or even a zapper or any of these kinds of things.
It’s really usually removing things that gets us further along at this stage.
Fungiʼs Benevolent Role
Right. And one of the things that I’ve focused on personally was back 22 years ago, I had a tumor forming in my perineum and it took seven years to get rid of it. I wouldn’t let anybody touch it surgically or biopsy or anything like that.
But it turned out that that was a series of fungal infections, Z-server growth, chemical sensitivities because I was in the old field for 17 years, heavy metals, lead, hadmium, mercury, all that crap. And that combination, just by detoxing that stuff, allowed my body to recover and get away from that without surgery or any intervention. And so then I thought, okay, what’s going on with that?
How did I get there? And is that really was causing all these illnesses out there, or a lot of them, from heart disease to who name it? I don’t know.
I’m not some expert at that. I just knew that those things caused me a big problem, and I had heart disease symptoms, and I had a liver problem. So all that stuff got cleaned up.
And just recently, I found out about xylitol. Have you ever used xylitol for internal fungal stuff?
Yeah, no, I’ve used it for oral dysbiosis, if you will. That’s what it’s most popular for. I’m really hesitant because of my experience with antibiotics and my respect for the balance of nature to do a lot of heavy-handed stuff.
I used to do a lot of oil, oregano, and a lot. My favorite anti-fungal, honestly, is a whole clove of garlic. You want to really reset your gut.
If you just take a clove of garlic and just chew it slightly, not all the way, and swallow it whole, you’d be amazed. If you ever have a skin issue, like a zit or a boil or anything like that, it goes down very quickly. These kinds, it manages fungal dysbiosis very, very well, especially yeasts.
So I tend to go more food is your medicine as a function of healing. And it’s been my experience that that is low risk, high reward. But I’ll tell you, when you start talking about tumors, you start talking about the relationship of fungi with cancer.
There are several famous examples of doctors who have pursued this and also gotten marginalized, to say the least, Dr. Simonici, Italian doctor, wrote a book called Cancer is a Fungus. A little bit of an over simplification, because you can find fungus in most tumors, apparently. I’m not an expert in this.
I’m not an oncologist or a, and I’ve never done a biopsy myself, but I have read all the books that these two, the other person is Dr. Holda Clark, who was a Canadian health researcher. She worked for the Canadian Ministry of Health. And she concluded that, much like cimanici, that there’s cancer, there’s fungus involved in all cancers.
Usually it’s a biofilm. And fungus is very good at that. It’s also very good at finding nutrients and pulling it away and sort of sequestering it for itself, and becoming very selfish, extractive, if you will.
And then also fungus has this amazing ability to mask itself from the host. It does this with trees. By the way, did you know outside in the natural world, just out here in your yard, and this is a recent discovery, all but 8% of plant species have a fungal partner that grows not just in the root system, in the mycorrhizal, helping to support its nutrient exchanging and all that kind of stuff, but also up within the plant itself.
And they’re just discovering this, right? Which is fascinating. So they used to think that when the needles fell off, the pine needles fell off onto the forest floor, and they became black immediately, and became fungal and immediately degraded, that that was just because they were on the on the needles.
And turns out that it has come up through the roots, up into the tree, out all the way into the branches to the needles, right? So it’s a full fungal and anatomical, anatomically integrated partner, and all the 8% of plant species have this. So there’s a relationship that we have with fungus, right?
In general, whether it be micro fungi or macro fungi. And I believe that fungi is actually the Earth’s immune system and the Earth’s communication network. And it’s doing really great work.
Recycling and cleaning soil and in many cases, on our skin, protecting us from pathogens inside our gut, digesting things we can’t digest without their help, all that stuff. So fungi gets a bad rap, it gets, you know, so does bacteria. Only about 100 species out of the many millions that are known are actually related, are actually a causal issue when it comes to major human disease.
And so there’s this really, you know, people really do throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the microbial world. And I’m here to tell you that we are microbial. You know, we’re more microbial than we are human, at least in terms of the number of cells that we have.
And by the way, you’re also more of your mom, because you got more mitochondria in you than you do have human cells. So you’re actually more of your mom, but that’s a different conversation. So, you know what, I just think that what we have to do is really kind of right side, put this into perspective and realize that mold isn’t really attacking us.
Mold’s not trying to harm us. What we’ve done is created an environment that’s conducive to mold. And then we’re mad at it because it moved in.
But we invited it, it’s part of our world. And then we build buildings that essentially are made of mold food. And then we’re surprised that it grows alongside of us.
And then I think it’s actually trying to get us out of the house. I think honestly, it’s saying, if we can get you out of the house, I’ll eat the rest of it, right? It’s not trying to harm you, it’s just trying to eat the rest of the house.
And so it releases these chemicals, these microbial VOCs and other byproducts. Notice I didn’t really hammer mycotoxins because that’s actually a very small part of the story, so I’m glad to open up because it’s a very important part of the story. It’s a lot of misunderstanding around that.
But I do think that we over personify this stuff. We anthropomorphize mold and we make it into the bad guy. And really, it’s our irresponsible behavior that’s created this situation.
And we had to find equilibrium because it’s always like overgrowth or infection or whatever you want to call it. Like with my situation, it took seven years for that tumor to be dissolved out of my body. It wasn’t going anywhere to start with.
I mean, it stopped the heartbeat because it started in 2004, 2009 because I was sitting on it because of my perineum. I didn’t feel the heartbeat anymore. So that went on for a year and I thought, oh, maybe that’s just going to be there for the rest of my life.
I don’t know. It wasn’t hurting and it wasn’t no more heartbeat. Otherwise, it was painful.
And then I took this very unique stuff that you’re not really to ingest. It’s non-toxic, but I just ingested small amounts of it. And then it blew up like half the size of a football over the next two weeks.
The hardcore was still inside there, the rest of it was all puffy. What the heck is going on? And then I realized, and I can’t prove it, but I decided it must have been there trying to help me as a detox pathway because my body was so loaded with an excess amount of stuff, that it’s just like a lung going off saying, hey, you need my help, and I’m here to help you.
And if you don’t pay attention, I’ll probably eat you alive. It was going to get worse. And after two weeks of taking this stuff, it deflated back down to the hard core.
It was still there. And then over the next year, it just slowly dissolves out of my body. It was like happy to go.
I didn’t kill it. Right? It just left and there’s no trace of it at all.
It was significant. I mean, it had a satellite that grew a third testicle. It was brutal.
But at any rate, doesn’t matter that it was gone by the summer of 2011. There was no sign of it left at all. So that was just this little thing.
Like it wasn’t my enemy. It was showing up to say, Hey, you need help.
Yes.
You need attention.
Yes.
And then I just did a whole ton of detox stuff, probably some that was too harsh and whatever, because I did suffer quite a bit. But yeah, anyway, it’s just this whole thing. I think what you’re talking about here is a dance of equilibrium, right?
And finding that beautiful, you know, whatever, not a balance, but a dynamic.
Yeah, there’s two things here that kind of stand out. Number one is that human ingenuity largely revolves around our ability to kill things, whether it be a rock when we first, when we’re cavemen or a spear. And then you look at antibiotics, you know, hey, it saves some lives, but also weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, you know, great, cheap, clean energy.
And yet, you know, we blow up cities. And so, so, so we do this thing, humans, every time we have a major innovation, it becomes a weapon. And so, or we anthropomorphize it and make it into an enemy, you know, this is what we do.
And so I actually am encouraging people to think about this as a more cooperative thing, like we cohabitate on planet Earth, you know, fungi was here before us, it’ll be here after we’re gone. And by the way, it’s smarter, it’s actually super useful. What we’ve done is invited it, like I said, into our buildings, and they made buildings on mold food, and then we get mad because they’ve moved in.
And so what I actually have come to the conclusion of is that there’s actually a benevolence to mold too, even the mold that’s growing in your home. So check this out. So if you think about, again, the building is an organism, and you think about how buildings fail, buildings fail to shed wind and water.
That’s their primary goal, or the primary purpose of a building is to protect us from wind and water, right? So, and if the building fails, it first fails to shed wind and water. And so when it does that, water gets into the walls, and because of the building materials that we now use, the first thing that grows is mold.
Within 24 to 48 hours of a moisture problem, mold will begin to grow on anything that’s porous and absorptive that has anything organic in it. And 72 hours is pretty much a guarantee. And that’s why the insurance industry won’t pay for mold remediation, won’t pay for water damage that’s more than 72 hours old.
And so 72 hours is a big deal. But anyway, the point is that once you get a leak, and the mold begins to grow, it releases, it begins to produce as it’s digesting your building, it releases a musty odor. Now, this musty odor has been studied very well in recent years, and we now know it’s neurotoxic.
In fact, several of the compounds are more toxic than toluene, which is class 1 carcinogen. And this stuff comes from actively growing mold. All molds produce these, by the way, not just the mycotoxigenic species, right?
The 100 or so that produce mycotoxins? No, all actively growing mold produces this. So this whole black mold thing is, is the toxic mold thing is a false narrative.
All mold growth of indoors of significance has the potential to be toxic. So that’s an important point. But the odor itself, when you get that, that you can think about the building as having aches and pains, right?
You can think about mold as inflammation in the building and the musty smell is the pain signal, right? And so yeah, you’re being communicated with, right? It’s letting you know that there’s a problem in this building.
If you ignore that pain signal, just like if you ignore pain in your body long enough, that’s inflammation can become chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is his own disease, right? In a building, that’s where you start getting into this idea of real degradation, real sick building.
If he keeps going, you end up with rot. That’s cancer in a building, right? Where the tissue literally begins to degrade.
And given enough time, a moisture problem will kill a building. Buildings have a birthday and a death day potentially, depending upon how well you care for it, that determines its longevity, right? And so this metaphor plays all the way through.
And so I really do think that when mold is growing in our building, it lets us know. It lets us know, hey, there’s an imbalance over here. There’s something that needs to be attended to.
And what you had in your perineum was a signal. And that signal, we get signals all the time. We don’t always know what they mean or we don’t always heed them.
But that signal showed you that you had an imbalance. And the way you handled that was patient and brave. But at the end of the day, I do think that we have to sort of look at this and say, it doesn’t have to be us against them.
We have to learn how to cooperate with nature and recognize our place in it.
Healthy Indoor Environment
Very true. Yeah, that’s the whole thing. That’s the golden elixir of hell and really finding out where, because if you fight against something, it will fight against you.
If you want to go with things and understand them deeper, I think everything is ultimately wanting to be benevolent. You know, in the plenum where we live, from the ground as high as you can see and all the air and the sound and the magnetic frequencies and the light, and it’s to our benefit. But when we mess with things and we do manmade stuff that is not in equilibrium with nature, we’re gonna lose.
Every time.
Right, so your mission is to really find the truth without like no radical stuff. What’s true? What’s the real thing?
What actually delivers the results? And getting rid of the mildew and the black mold and the musty and whatever is kind of like your alarm going off.
Yeah, I feel like more than building related illness, what we suffer from is nature deficit disorder. So let’s say you have a building and you’re really fastidious, right? You’ve got this, you’re like you’ve had a mold problem.
You’re not going to go through this again. You’re going to be super vigilant. You know, you’re going to have your humidity gauges everywhere, and you’re going to clean like crazy, you got to have a vacuum everywhere, you’re going to sanitize, you’re going to you’re not doing this ever again.
Well, what’s interesting about homes that are so clean like that, where they’ve literally separated themselves from nature completely, right? Now, this is the same, you know, you’re going to walk outside with rubber on the bottom of your shoes, make sure your vegetables are perfectly clean, there’s no dirt on those, right? This is the same mindset, right?
And the data on that’s very interesting. Homes with a very low microbial diversity, because they’re over clean, have much higher cases of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease. They’re not even saying autism.
And the opposite is also true. Homes with a very wide, a healthy, diverse microbiome, which means fungi and bacteria, lots of different kinds, but none growing in your home, which means you don’t have a moisture problem. Those homes have much lower cases of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease.
And of course, now they’re saying, like I said, autism. And so this is an indication that we are the prop, a healthy breath will contain, whether you’re indoors or outdoors, will contain hundreds of mold spores without any ill effect. It’s when it begins to accumulate indoors in significant ways, where the actual byproduct of decay, which is what mold growth will do.
Mold growth produces the byproducts of decay. And if you’re sucking in the byproducts of decay, you’re gonna have a downstream effect from the microbiome around you and the microbiome inside of you. These microbiomes that we live in and that live in us are like Matryoshka dolls, the Russian stacking dolls, you know?
And so we have a microbiome in us, on us and around us. And when the microbiome around us is imbalanced, when there’s a dysbiosis around us, it will have a downstream effect. We see people with moldy environments often have fungal issues, athlete’s foot, yeast issues, ringworm, these kinds of things are very common.
Acesia, scalp issues and things like that. And so this down, and also gut dysbiosis, very commonly associated with building related exposures. And the microbes are sending out these little signals, which are actually like little emails to other microbes.
And they start getting all sorts of messages and it scrambles their normal order. And so we see this entire thing just go downstream. So it’s very important that we start to do things like, if you’re gonna run a lot of HEPA filters, and I encourage you to do so, and if you’re gonna HEPA vacuum your house like crazy, I encourage you to do so.
I encourage you not to use any fragrances, or chemicals, or cleaners that use any antimicrobial. You don’t need that. Although I do love Force of Nature, hypochlorous acid, great cleaning agent.
You can buy it pre-made, or you can make it Force of Nature. That’s the only cleaning agent we use. Very lightly sanitizing, cuts through grease, great stuff.
And it’s very expensive, and you don’t have to buy the commercial. The big box, bottles from the big box store. But this idea that what we really need to do is get our house clean and dry, and then open the windows.
Let nature back inside. And if we do that, not everyone has time to go forest bathing, but you can, at the very least, invite nature back in once you’ve gotten the building particles, all the stuff that accumulates in your building. Get that stuff out of your house.
Keep your building clean and keep it dry, but reintroduce nature whenever possible.
Right, and don’t let stuff sit on the floor. Like we live in Ontario, and it’s a moist, kind of cool climate, and it’s winter, and you have your four seasons. If we set anything on the floor, like a box or a tote, you’re asking for trouble.
Absolutely.
But you want to have a nice, minimal, just only the necessary stuff. Nothing should be sitting on the floor unless there’s a table with legs, and just keep on obvious stuff, right? Keep the under the bed clean.
And what are your thoughts around bedding for proper health?
Well, so actually, let me back up. So when it comes to stuff, one of the things you want to make sure you do don’t stuff closets, especially on outside walls, because that’s where you’ll get condensation forming. So it’s very common for people when they’re moving after they had stuff in the closet for 20 years, and they go to move and they find all those alligator shoes or the leather and belts and stuff like that are all covered with mold.
And when you stuff when you stuff stuff into the closet, the moisture can still fuse through, but because there’s no air flow, you’ll get condensation behind that stuff and on that stuff. So, so keeping closets, you know, respectfully full stuff off the ground, not against back walls is very important. And so that’s just a word of the wise, especially corners outside corner walls.
There’s something called wind washing and thermal bridging. These two dynamics at the same time allow cold to be those closets. If you look with the thermal imaging camera, corner walls are always the coldest because you can’t insulate a corner in light frame construction.
So that’s really important, especially in colder climates. So when it comes to bedding, listen, I’m organic cotton. I mean, that’s just kind of a default setting for me.
I believe firmly that you should invest in three things. You should invest in a really good mattress, really good shoes and really good tires, because these are the three things that are going to gonna be in or on most of your life. And so I believe that you should step up and get an organic mattress, whatever that means.
Now some people are sensitive to latex and things like that. So you gotta be sensitive to your own known sensitivities, but I’m a big fan of simplicity. And also I don’t like dyes and colors on my bedding, quite frankly.
And I also don’t like any sort of foam-filled pillows. So I actually use a buckwheat pillow. My wife makes fun of me, but I love it.
And it’s just kind of crunchy. Once it finds a spot, it holds that spot nicely. It also stays nice and cool.
And so that’s highly beneficial. I also, by the way, open up the windows at night. Even, I live in Minnesota.
It’s negative 20 degrees here for at least two weeks every year. And I still keep the window cracked because that little bit of fresh air, keeping the CO2 levels down, makes for better sleep, more restful sleep. My body’s not in fight or flight.
My heart rate, you know, if you let CO2 go high enough, your heart rate goes up too. And so I like to have a nice restful sleep. So I like to introduce fresh air.
We don’t have an ERV or an HRV, which is heat recovery ventilator or an energy recovery ventilator, which are very common in Canada and in our area. We don’t have one of those. I just go crack open the window.
So for me, sleep is the sleep environment needs to be as simple, as clean as possible. I also do run HEPA filters in my bedroom, but specifically units that have a lot of carbon in them because to remove VOCs, keep it away from the bed for EMF. Right?
So it’s, you know, and by the way, I happen to have an EMF meter right here. You know, we make sure that any field being generated by any of the devices that we use is well out of range for our bedrooms. So simple, simple, simple.
And also, I’m also, you know, you said bedding, but my main thing is, you know, also we have all orange lights and red lights at night. You know, you go in our room at night, there’s, you know, we have the overheads, but it’s against the rules here to throw those on past 6 p.m., you know? And so the whole thing I look at, I wrote an article about healthy bedrooms once.
And my thing is that, you know, this is your chance to truly rest. And so eliminating all possible exposures to things that will cause your body to have any sort of stress is the key to that. And also, I’m a big fan, I know it’s beyond bedding, but I’m a big fan of mouth taping too, because if you read James Nestor’s fabulous book, Breath, it covered, just read that.
Half the book is about mouth breathing and the benefits of taping your mouth. And that I think has been a huge, in terms of the benefits of breathing the right way and of watching HRV scores and watching these kinds of things, mouth breathing is probably the simplest, most effective hack you can employ immediately today to improve your sleep and restfulness.
Yeah, I used to always use tape until I had a beard. And so the tape doesn’t work great with that. So what I figured out is, you know, like your typical good quality eye mask, I just simply put the eye mask under my chin with the strap over my head, perfectly holds my mouth shut.
Brilliant!
Because I’m not mouth breathing.
Yeah, I am too, if I’m not, you know, I’ve had to really work hard to, I try to do these exercises. I can actually visualize my my sinuses opening when I’m a little congested and they will open up. It’s really beautiful.
You can totally open up your maxillaries if you just envision this opening up and and and I can go to sleep with good air flow. But then in very, I wake up in the middle and I am with a mouth dry mouth. So I’m totally prone to mouth breathing.
And it makes all the difference in the world. It really does. You know, if it’s good sleep.
And by the way, if you have an environmental problem, if you have a mold problem, if you got a VOC problem in your building, every breath you take is a repetitive stress. You breathe 20,000 times a day. I want you to think about every breath you take as a dose, right?
It’s a dose. It’s 5.5 liters, a 5.5 liter dose of whatever’s in that air. If it is not pristine, right?
There’s no neutral with air. It’s either bad or good. There’s no neutral.
And so if it’s not pristine, then it’s working against you. And that’s why it’s very important to have really good filtration. You’re on my really love Austin Air.
I love Jasper. If you don’t have a mold problem or a VOC problem, I love Jasper. I happen to be a very huge fan of Mike Feldstein, the founder.
But Austin Air is probably the best round is sort of Swiss Army knife of an air purifier because it’s really good with the VOC. So if you’ve ever had any renovations recently, or it’s a relatively new build, or if you’ve got a known moisture problem or a known VOC problem, you’ll want to go towards the units to have a lot more carbon.
Right. And one thing I was able to, because I was terrible, I could not breathe hardly to my nose for most of my life. And I thought, well, when I started putting the tape on, well, that didn’t work because I couldn’t breathe through my nose.
So I had to hold my mouth like that, right? Because I just put the tape across the front. So I ran into Perfect Nasal back in 2016, and it took 80 days, three minutes a day to clear my whole entire sinus cavity out 100 percent.
I did it for 90 days, but the last 10 days, nothing more came out. And it’s a special formula, and we’ve improved it over the years. But it is one of those things that is a game changer for people, for their whole head health, as yours no throat.
I can breathe through both sinuses at all times ever since then. And that’s how it’s yours.
Wow. What is it called again?
A Perfect Nasal. You’ll find it on our website. Yeah, there’s not a plug for it.
I’m just telling you, this is something that I think every human being, I don’t care whether you have, think you have sinus problems or not. Like you said, we’re breathing 11,000 liters a bear a day, you know, 20,000 breaths. Come on, we’re filling that.
It’s like a furnace filter in your house that never got cleaned out.
Absolutely.
Right. Yeah.
No, I’m a huge fan of Nettie Pots too. You know, absolutely. I mean, I just love Nettie Pots.
It’s transformational for me. But I too have a tendency to have blocked sinuses. But what I found is by taping your mouth, your body learns that it needs to open up the sinuses.
It’s really fascinating how it will suddenly go, okay, I’ll find a way, you know? And you may need some assistance, but I have found that by taping my mouth, my nose suddenly becomes available, you know?
Right, yeah. So it’s like, you know, if you lose your sight, you’re going to use your other senses more. Yeah, this whole thing is just about getting sure that the furnace filter is totally clean.
And I had like one month into that process, I started smelling maple and oak dust. Why am I smelling that? And then I remembered, you know, I mean, between 1994 and 2002, I owned a small company that did circular staircases, and most of it was maple or oak.
And we were constantly putting things through the processing and sanding and all that stuff. It just, it was like a layer. And that took about a week to come out of that process of that 80 days.
So yeah, we do build it up. It’s a matter of making our overall well-being clean and natural and open again. Just be, the Denny pots, okay.
But to me, it’s like flushing the toilet. This is like cleaning the toilet all the way.
Yeah, no, I’m into it. I’m gonna order some today. I love that.
That’s great. Thank you for the tip.
Yeah, cool. All right. So this has been like super informative, man.
I think everyone is gonna greatly appreciate all the things you’ve shared. And you’ve really, your work on the ground has been a big thing because you’re interacting with things that either work or don’t. You had to go through your iterative process of elimination and adding in whatever to find out what is the simplest way of getting this dealt with and what’s the right approach.
So this is a very mature situation that you’ve now shared with us so that we don’t have to go through, make all those mistakes that people make all the time, right?
Innovation and Outlook
Yeah, I hope so, because the thing is that there’s a huge industry around these kinds of band-aids and shortcuts and things like that. And my experience has been, not just in this area, but in life in general, is that the shortcuts are usually the long way, and the long way is usually the shortcut. And so the reason best practices are the best practices is because they work.
And they’re more expensive up front, but the cheap people pay twice. And so when it comes to mold, there’s a thousand ways to do it wrong. There’s really one way to do it right.
And the good news is that it’s very simple. It’s time tested. It doesn’t require a lot of creativity.
It actually oftentimes, if you get ahead of it, it doesn’t even require that much money to prevent. This is the best example of the old adage, a pound of prevention, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s like this was the perfect application for that truism.
Right. And so before the podcast, we mentioned a thing that we won’t really get into right now, but this little teaser that we’ll both do some research into, which is a thing called Cosmic Death Fungus that ties into yeast. And so we’ll see, we’ll do some deep dive on that.
If you, I’d really like to know what you think about it after, you know, we’ll re-interface again later on with another podcast.
Absolutely. I’m excited. It’s at first glance, it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
And, you know, I do think that there’s, you know, you start looking at the way fungus has been referred to throughout, even back in science fiction, Star Trek talked about the mycelium, right? There was like, there’s, you know, we’ve been fascinated by fungi for, as a human culture, long before we really understood much about it. And so I’m looking forward to having that conversation for sure.
Yeah, definitely. Star Trek. All right, man.
Well, Jason, it’s been a total pleasure. Thank you so much for the share. And we’re going to wrap it up.
Anyone, best way to find you right now?
gotmold.com. That’s really the best way. Yeah, we’re on Instagram at Gotmold.
And if you have any questions about mold, on the bottom of Gotmold, you can go to the contact form, but you can also scroll to the bottom. There’s a form there where people can ask questions, or you can email questions at gotmold.com. And I don’t answer all of them, but I do see them.
And so any questions anybody has about molds, feel free to reach out. We’re here to help.
For sure. And I’ll put a link in the show notes as well, so people can just click on that and get access.
Until next time.
