The Story of Got Mold? with Jason Earle

Podcast Transcript

Your Health. Your Story

Tue, Mar 28, 2023 5:39PM • 1:04:41

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

mold, mycotoxins, musty smell, building, problem, spores, chemicals, vocs, fact, called, air, remediation, produce, dampness, testing, microbes, day, home, water, lyme

SPEAKERS

Caspar Szulc, Jason Earle

 

00:00

I had a very strange childhood had the worst case any doctor had ever seen, my job is to keep healing. So that is the story. 

 

Caspar Szulc  00:10

We all have remarkable stories within us. Stories of adversity, challenges, trials, and ultimately, of healing. This is your health, your story, the podcast.  When the cause of ill health is a result of environmental toxins like mold, it changes your perspective and the responsibility to get well. Our guest today spent most of his early life suffering from toxic mold exposure. He’s now an indoor air quality Crusader, and has reimagined Mold Testing. This is the story of Got Mold? with Jason Earle. Jason, so happy for you to be here. 

 

Jason Earle  00:46

So good to be here. 

 

Caspar Szulc  00:47

Tell us because you know, it’s your health your story, you obviously have a story that led you to creating this company and being such a man on a mission. So could you start there, because you had your whole own health problems that led you into this? So what were they, what was your story?

 

Jason Earle  01:04

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on your show. I’ve been looking forward to this. The mold industry, or I would say the career path that led me to where I am, is not one that is essentially an academic track, right? There’s no, you know, there’s lots of sub specialties. But this is a really multidisciplinary field. Because you have to really have a grasp of not only the biology of the body, but also the biology of the building, right? How buildings are built correctly, how they’re built incorrectly. And some most of the people that are doing great work in this space come from a very personal experience. And so I’m no exception to that. So I initially became aware of this actually, after a successful career on Wall Street. So a little bit late in the game by some measures, but I was still pretty young at the time. I had decided after the.com bubble burst, I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. And so I threw 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack, and I went traveling, and it was just after September 11. So I tried to stay, you know, pretty close to home. But I ended up in Hawaii, which is not a bad place to end up for a while. And I was… I had a lot of time on my hands. So I was reading local newspapers and magazines and stuff. In fact, I was reading this one particular story, while I was in Oahu in the shadow of the Kalia Hilton Tower, which at the time was shut down for a major mold problem. And I had, I was completely unwitting to the historical significance of this particular thing. It turns out it was the biggest mold problem in history at the time. And the one story that really popped out at me was and by the way, this story was all over the news it was it was not isolated to one magazine, it was it was it was big, big news, because it was Hilton Kalia flagship building, Hilton’s flagship building. In any case, the story that really jumped out to me was about a 40 year old, former employee of a hotel who had been otherwise healthy but it developed adult onset asthma, as well as all of these allergies and sensitivities to things he had never had a problem with before. And it was like a deja vu moment or like a time machine, I was immediately brought back to my childhood where when I was about four years old, I suddenly lost a lot of weight in a three week period, about 30% of my body weight according to my parents, and I was having difficulty breathing. So they took me to the pediatrician who said, you know, you really need to take him to Children’s Hospital, this looks serious. And so they did, they took me to, you know, chop, which is the world renowned respiratory clinic in Philadelphia. And based upon family history and the symptoms that I was presenting with the initial diagnosis was cystic fibrosis, which at the time was a death sentence, right? I’m 46. So that was a, you know, a very short life that I was looking towards my parents were devastated for obvious reasons. But my dad in particular, because he’d lost four of his cousins to CF before the age of 14. So this was their worst nightmare, you know, coming true. So they cried for six weeks as they described, and while they waited for a second opinion, which fortunately contradict the initial diagnosis. Actually, it turns out I didn’t have CF don’t have CF, but I did have asthma compounded by pneumonia, which is my first big dose of antibiotics by the way. So that’s part of the part of the whole story. And I was also subjected to this allergy testing which was a you know, it’s one of my formative memories you know, they put you in a papoose or like a straitjacket for toddlers with an open back and then draw a grid on your back and then expose you to all these antigens and all these allergens. And so my dad said, you look like a ladybug. Just big red swollen back with dots all over it and I essentially tested positive for every single thing that they tested me for. So you know in summary grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton. So my clothes worst itchy, soybeans, and I grew up on a little nonworking farm hobby farm were I was surrounded by all those things in great abundance and literally with soybean fields to the right cornfields across the street, you know, and dogs and cats everywhere. And my parents had a very unique concept around hygiene, so needless to say they accumulated, and so and both of them smoked indoors as well as in the car with an asthmatic kid because you know, that’s what you did in the 70s and the 80s. You know these days children, I’m sure Child Services would have… that but that was the de facto standard. So, and it wasn’t for lack of love, it was just lack of awareness. And so, but the bottom line is I lived like that until I was about 12, at which point my folks split up and I moved out of that that very damp house. And all my symptoms went away, as did my grandfather’s by the way, they call it spontaneous adolescent remission, instead of looking at what might have actually been a root cause, shortly thereafter, my mother passed away suddenly, to the suicide actually, which is relevant, believe it or not, to the mold story. And then a year later, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease where I got my next big, you know, fistful of antibiotics. And that was that was potent, cuz that was before they ever really had an established regimen. So it was very experimental. And so it was like 30 pills of Biaxin, and stuff like that per day, for three days and then it was off for three days. This pulse therapy thing that they were doing, and then I ended up dropping out of high school. Long story short, and got… actually working full time in a gas station where I met a guy who recruited me to come work around Wall Street, which is a story for another podcast, I think. But in any case, the story in Hawaii was this transporting thing where I immediately became fascinated with the concept because I called my father on payphone and said, hey, do you think we had a mold problem on Old Trenton Road, and not knowing anything about mold, right? I was a stockbroker and read this article, that was the totality of my knowledge about mold. And he goes, course, we had mushrooms in the basement, why do you ask? So typical of my father, so flippant about these things. And I said, so do you think, do you think that was, you know, part of the reason why I was sick, and he goes, couldn’t have helped. So, ya know and so it was it was literally from that moment on, I had the kind of like this epiphany, or this lightbulb moment, where all the pieces of the puzzle kind of, you know, became clear to me, which was that I became fascinated with not mold, per se, although it’s fascinating, and the more I know about it, the more fascinating it is. Actually, the impact of buildings, the buildings that we live and work in on our health. And this is a blind spot in the world. It’s a blind spot, certainly in the medical community, but unfortunately, it’s also a blind spot with the people who live in these buildings that people that you know, because, you know, it reminds me of the… this The Commencement Address by David Foster Wallace, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, but he talks about this is water. And he talks about the two fish swimming along two little fish, young fish, rather. And their swimming along minding their business and an older fish passes them by and says, morning boys, how’s the water, and they go, fine. Look at each other a couple minutes later, and like, what the hell’s water, you know, and that’s what we are. We’re like fish in the water that we call air. And it’s anything but empty space. It is, in fact, the blind spot of all blind spots, you know. So I became fascinated with that, I came back to New Jersey armed with curiosity. And some time on my hands, I was looking for a new career anyway, and I took a job working for a mold remediation contractor, actually, the basement waterproofing contractor that was doing mold treatments, because there was no such thing as mold remediation, or standards or best practices or even government guidance for that matter at the time. And these guys were doing everything wrong. And I knew that intuitively, they were using a lot of chemicals. And they’re ripping stuff out without proper controls. And so I, I quickly saw that there was an opportunity here to protect the consumer. So I started an inspection company at night. And I was basically doing free inspections until somebody started saying, you know, I should really pay you for this. And then I heard about a guy that trained mold sniffing dogs, who trained most of the dogs and thought that was just crazy enough to be brilliant, and got one of those and that began a cascade of press, you know, it became a channel detection news thought they were going to debunk us by adding mold in the house. And instead, they endorsed us, because we found it in like three minutes. And then we got a bunch of doctors started referring patients to us. And then we that some of those patients, their healing became was so profound that it became Good Morning America episodes, and then Extreme Makeover Home Edition, and on and on and on. And that company became 1-800-GOT-MOLD?, our mold inspection business. And then over the years quickly, to where I am right now, is that we, over the years, it was difficult for me to stomach, the fact that most of the people who needed mold inspections, and even Mold Testing couldn’t afford it, including my own parents, right. So to bring this full circle to actually really build something that would have solved the problem that my parents went through, I had to come up with an affordable solution. And so it took years to develop but we launched last March, the Got Mold? Test Kit, which is the first and most the most affordable, reliable, scientifically valid, do it yourself test kit on the market. And so it’s been a it’s been a long road, you know, it’s been 20 years, I’ve been doing this learning every single day. Because this is just a it’s a it’s an area where there’s tremendous research emerging. And there’s also it’s just riddled with myths and misconceptions. And all of these wives tales and all these things that the average consumer, even the average physician is so mired in that, you know, it feels like almost every interaction is an education session, you know, and that’s okay, that’s what I signed up for. But at the end of the day, you know, this has been an accidental I’m an accidental expert, right? It was one of those things where you know, it’s just the way sometimes life gives you a path and you follow it and next thing you know you’re, you know, where I sit right here.

 

Caspar Szulc  10:01

Yeah, I find accidental experts to be the most proficient ones. You know, they don’t have the ego that goes with, I’ve been doing this my whole life, it’s more of I went through this and had to, for my own life, become an expert. And do it for a benevolent way, of course, for yourself first, but then to pass it along and pay it forward. Now, I find this whole concept really, really intriguing because I even know a lot of people live in Florida and in swampy areas, let’s say, and move a lot nowadays, people rent instead of buy, and you don’t know much about where you’re moving into a renting from what the person before had. And they do get caught up. Yes, I acknowledge that many places I’ve been in have mold. But the testing is difficult when I jump from one year, one year running tests to a, you know, ERMI or something like that. It’s expensive. And here you have this kind of, you know, this solution that is affordable, how did you get it from something that is expensive to make it become affordable and still accurate?

 

Jason Earle  11:01

So we did a hard analysis on what were the problems with mold testing, right? What is the primary problem, there’s a lot of them. Number one is in the do it yourself side of things, just to take that out, most of the time, you have to hire a professional. And so that means that there’s a huge cost structure associated with that, right, the you know, you’ve got to put the human in the vehicle, and they’ve got to have advertising to get to it, they got to pay their rent and the watchers…. It’s just a huge cost structure. So as a result, the the testing in the lab fees have to be marked up extraordinarily high, for it to be sustainable. And then there’s also lots of problems within that model when it comes to conflicts of interest. Because there’s a great propensity in this industry, for people who are taking samples to be doing it with an ulterior motive, you know, to gather data that can be used as a sales tool, as opposed to a tool for healing, as opposed to an investigative tool. And so as a result, it’s used as leverage, unwittingly, you know, to the unwitting public, and then they’re often forced into, you know, into fear based decisions. There’s also a heavy slant we can talk more about this and I would really like to talk more about this, that everyone’s focused on mycotoxins and mycotoxins are only part of the story. Mycotoxins are actually as it turns out a disproportionately smaller part of the story than most people think when it comes to mold and mold related illness, and we’ll dig into that. But the people who love to manipulate this, especially the ERMI, purveyors of ERMI, they’re always high, they’re always high. And so it’s a motor mediators dream, because you can’t pass those. And so the more the more you fail, the more they work, the more they work, the more they get paid. It’s a conflict of interest. So essentially, we started looking at, you know, what is out there. And basically, that’s why we created what we created, because we looked at the DIY market, and all I saw was junk science, stuff that confirms the presence of mold, be tape lift, or swab. By the way, mold is ubiquitous in our environment. So confirming the presence of mold doesn’t do you much good. It’s mold, mold all over your skin, it’s all over you. It’s a take a deep breath right now. In a healthy home, you will breed in hundreds of species potentially. So that is normal. And I would argue healthy. And the opposite is also true. By the way, if you breathe in, and you only breathe in a small number of them, you’re probably in an unhealthy building with a low biodiversity. It’s very counterintuitive, right? So what we tried to do, first thing we had to do is get rid of a human. To make testing affordable, you got to get rid of the human. And then also to make testing valid, you have to have the best lab possible too. So we were fortunate enough to partner with EMLab P&K, number one lab in the country, which got acquired recently by Eurofins, which was arguably the number one environmental microbiology lab in the world. And so that was a very powerful partnership. And then to use professional devices, actually, to actually not reinvent the wheel, right? So to actually use what’s already the standard of care or the or, I should say, the go to sampling method, which is aerosol cassettes or spore traps, which is the most cost effective way to quickly take a look at what’s going on in your air. So if you want to have your house tested right now, and you were to hire a professional, they would come over with an air sampling pump, well, lots of other tools and equipment. But when they’re ready to take, take air samples and do the testing, they’ll typically bring out a tripod, and an air sampling pump, which is an expensive calibrated device 1000 bucks or so. And that will pull air through cassettes that are designed to capture the airborne particulate matter. And we focus on mold spores, but it captures pollen and household dust and, and various other airborne primarily bio aerosols. So in other words, biological particulate. So in order for us to be able to get that kind of test, we had to have a device that could actually mimic that professional pump. And so that’s one of the innovations that we brought to the table is we created one that’s battery operated pulls exactly the same flow rate as a professional pump, but it’s a fraction of the cost. And so when people buy our kit, they can then keep the pump after they’ve tested the first time, and then they can reuse it. And each time they they reuse it, the refills are $50 less per configuration. So it’s a, it’s a good value for them. So in essence, what we did was we took out inefficiencies, replace them the technology. And then the other piece of it is, in order to make the report not a bottleneck for us on the customer service side, we had to make it really easy to understand, we had to make a technical report really accessible to the consumer, and not give them so much information libraries have mold definitions, and all the stuff that you see with a lot of these reports. Nobody needs to know all the different Aspergillus and Penicillium types and what they do, they don’t need that. They can go on Google for that. If they want to know what’s in their air, we tell them, our report is a color coded interpreters are color coded interpretation, cover page, green, yellow, orange, or red, depending upon what we find, as well as the lab data, but it’s formatted the way I always wanted my lab reports to be formatted. You know, it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s easy on the eyes, it’s color coded. And it’s arranged so that you know, the different spores and types and whether they’re water damage indicators or not, and, and then the third page is the final page. And that includes next steps, resources, free resources, low cost resources, links to the trade associations, the trained qualified professionals, both on the inspection side and the remediation side. And what we have found is that out of out of the several 1000 kits that we’ve sold, we’ve had a grand total of two people that have called and said, can you explain my report, and it wasn’t that they were they needed help us, they just wanted to know, they want to talk to him about what to do next. So somehow or another, you know, we figured out how to do it and the results have been great. It’s really empowering. When you read the reviews, you know, when you when you see what people are the kind of relief that this provides people because they can get that testing done without having to get permission from their husband or wife, or from their boss or, and then they can keep the results to themselves. Or they can use it the leverage getting, you know, the landlord to do something. There’s real power in data. There’s real power, empowerment in giving people the tools and knowledge they need to make better decisions. And so from from that perspective, it’s been incredibly gratifying.

 

Caspar Szulc  11:02

Ya know, it sounds like an amazing journey to get this in the hands of more people, which is so, so necessary, and break down those barriers to entry for many of those. Now, you mentioned something there, they have to go back to because I believe this is probably part of the myths and I’d like you to exponge on what other myths there are. But mycotoxins are necessary and they’re not the only thing you should be caring about. Right. That’s kind of what you said. So go into that, because that’s gonna blow some people’s minds. What the hell are you talking about? It’s all about the mycotoxin. That’s all you test for. 

 

Jason Earle  17:38

Yeah, I just gave a talk at the Biohacking Conference. Dave asked for his Biohacking Conference. The title of it was more than mycotoxins. And so you know, I unpack that for about an hour. So I’ll do a very short version of that. But when mold is growing, it produces three things. This is a hyper simplification, it produces a lot of things. But in essence, you’ve got spores, which are the reproductive seeds, and these are typically airborne people when they’re disturbed and they can cause upper respiratory irritation or allergic reactions, these kinds of things. They also happen to carry with them. The spores themselves some degree of mycotoxins if it’s a toxin producing mold. But spores by themselves are a natural, normal part of our environment, and you’re breathing in them in every day. And so this is the spores are not to be feared. In fact, by the way, fun fact, the Kingdom fungi produces 50 Mega tons of spores every year. 50 megatons, is equivalent to 500,000 Blue Whales. And that’s every year so mold, part of Kingdom fungi, is the largest producer of biological particulate on the planet. And so you’re not going to get away from it. 30% of the Earth’s biomass is fungi. And so we live on a fungal planet, make no mistake, we are the guests here, not the other way around. And mold and fungi are the reason that everything works, quite frankly. And so we need to embrace them, embrace these these critters instead of reject them. And then he said you got spores, you’ve got the the microbial gases, then the musty odor, but they call them what are known as microbial volatile organic compounds, MVOCs. For short, most people listening to the show probably familiar with VOCs. These are generally regarded as manmade chemicals. But formaldehyde is a common one, but the most popular one is alcohol. And many people like that for lots of different reasons. And so that’s a that’s a very popular voc. And it’s also a microbial voc because, in fact, alcohol is made through the fermentation of microbes. And then you’ve also got mycotoxins and mycotoxins are the poisons that fungi use to fight with each other, and other microbes. It is chemical warfare on a microscopic level, we get caught in the crosshairs. And because we are more genetically more closely related to fungi than we are bacteria, we end up but we’re kind of on the winning side of that for the most part. So anyway, so… and by the way, most common mycotoxins that most people are familiar with is penicillin. And so so there’s this is a semantic discussion in many ways, how do you define a chemical by its use. So if it’s a mycotoxin, it kills the things you don’t want. And if it’s an antibiotic it kills the things you do want, same chemical. So how you classify that is more more a matter of personal preference or they are the target that you’re looking for. So the bottom line is, what’s been happening with mycotoxins is that people focus on the mycotoxins, but most the evidence is very clear that most mycotoxin exposure does not come from air. And I can tell you how I know that, because when Alexander Fleming discovered mycotoxins, penicillin, when he discovered antibiotics, that is psyllium, the spore had landed. When he went out to lunch, he forgot to put the cover on the dish. He was cultivating streptococcus strep throat, right. So he had a bacterial culture. And he left and he was notoriously sloppy scientists. So he left without the cover, cover on top of the dish, he came back. And he saw that there was a colony in the middle of the dish that had a little clearer moat around it. And that clear moat was what he referred to as mold juice. That was his… is highly science… very technical, very technical, and he literally call that mold juice. And that mold juice was clearly keeping the bacteria at bay killing it, but also keeping it at bay. Now, there’s a misconception that if you’ve got mycotoxins in your house, and the dust in the corner of your, of your living room, that you’re now that it’s radioactive that it’s gonna get, it’s gonna get to you, but the stuff has to become airborne, and it doesn’t become airborne by its own because in fact, these mycotoxins are the ooze, they’re more like an oily substance. And so they tend to keep they do collect on the outside of dust and spores, which is to say the same thing. And it’s in some ways, because you know, that they all kind of hang out together. And if that becomes airborne, you can get about the amount of exposure that you would if it were on the outside of one of those cells, or one of those particulates, but they’re not flying around by themselves. And I can tell you how I know that’s true, because if you look at the dish that Alexander Fleming had, if they were flying around, the whole dish should be clear. Instead, they ooze out because mold cares about one thing competition on the surface it’s growing on. Mold doesn’t eat air, it eats the sheetrock or the paper on your sheet rock, it eats the dust that’s on the surface of whatever it’s going on. And so, it releases this very, the substance which stays on the surface to provide a competitive advantage. It is not designed to be airborne. This is a factual this is a grand misperception in the healthcare field, especially in the functional field, honestly, where if you’ve got mycotoxins or if you got mycotoxin genic species go forget about it, you know, leave with the shirts on your back. This is a dangerous philosophy, and it’s an inaccurate one. It’s scientifically invalid. But the thing that’s interesting is the actual the thing that’s probably the underlying cause of most mold related illness is the thing that is the most ubiquitous, see only mycotoxin genic species produce mycotoxins but and only they produce them intermittently. So they only produce them generally, when they’re threatened. Or when they’re having their threatened by competition, or threatened by drying out. So lot, lots of times they’ll produce them quickly when they’re, you know, when they’re starting to sort of like die off, you know, becoming dormant. So it’s not a reliable way. It’s kind of like the tiger versus the tail. The mycotoxins are like the tail, you know, you want to know the tiger, the tiger is dampness. Okay? That’s the enemy. Now what happens when mold grows, if the spore detects this, this combination lock, you know, the right temperature, the nutrition that it’s looking for the food source, the oxygen has to be present, because these are aerobic by the way, this is how you know they don’t grow in your gut. Most of these are highly aerobic, so they’re not anaerobic, they cannot colonize inside your gut 99% of these micros and so when that combination lock, you know that combination kicks in boom, that spore will then like a seed will be get will release a hyphae, which is a feeler and it will release enzymes, this brilliant little single celled organism will release enzymes based upon this catalogue of enzymes that it has, to eat exactly what it wants. And while it does that, it digests outside of the cell we digest inside produce gases, flatulence, and all that, which, by the way, are microbial gases, and they’re not human gases, those are microbial gas. Those are microbial VOCs. And they do it on the outside. And so what you have in the extracts the nutrition at once, and then it releases mold burps and that mold burp if you will, is the musty smell. And that musty smell is a potpourri of industrial solvents for lack of… I mean really, truly, if you look at them chemically, it’s benzene is commonly found coming off of actively growing mold. This is a group one carcinogen, right, alcohols, ketones, aldehydes. It’s a really truly I mean, if you the industrial solvents, and these become airborne and this is where you’ll see commonly with mold, with mold sufferers that they also tend to be chemically sensitive. Well, often times they’ll become chemically sensitive. Why? Well that’s why because the body picks up that chemical. It’s a predictive mechanism right? I smell that, bad news, shutdown, fight or flight, the whole inflammation cycle, that whole cascade kicks in, because of a smell they picked up at the grocery store. But it’s actually because of the chronic exposure to the musty smell in a building that they spent too much time in. And the evidence is pretty clear on this. And it’s emerging  rapid rather rapidly. But my friend Joan Bennett at Rutgers University, she’s doing fascinating work with fruit flies, because of her own awakening, having a building that she owned down in New Orleans that got flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and she’s a mycotoxin expert. She walked into the building with a respirator on and got very sick, and she realized the only thing that was making it through the respirator was the musty smell. So she came back to the lab and began testing fruit flies with the musty smell with one component of the musty smell. And she found that they stopped flying to the light, they flew down, they stopped producing dopamine, they have… they were special fruit flies, they fluoresce when they produce dopamine. So pretty cool where you can order online these days, they also began to stop reproducing. And then they also develop what she called Parkinsonian like symptoms, and then left on a the… her subsequent study showed that it causes mitochondrial damage, and locomotor dysfunction, this is just one component within the musty smell, and so the evidence is compounding. Brown University did a study in 2008, and concluded that there was a direct correlation between mold and dampness indoors and depression. And that’s why I brought up my mother’s early demise is because she was also an alcoholic but the question is what you know, what’s come first the chicken or the egg, you know, if you’re living if you’re depressed, and you’re living in a damp building, and then you’re more depressed, and you’re doing more to self medicate. And then you’re spending more time in the building, which is very common, anyone who’s listening to this, there’s some old software who’s in a moldy building, probably spending a lot of time on Facebook sitting in the middle of a thing that this making them sick, because they’re sick. So they’re staying where they are because they’re sick, and they’re getting sicker because they’re staying where they are, right. And so this is a negative cycle. It’s a vicious circle. And so the musty smell, is in fact, according to the emerging medical research, the first of all, all molds produce it. So when they’re growing so so you don’t have to find a toxigenic species in your house, it doesn’t matter if mold growing in your house is producing these gases. And if it’s producing these gases, and very tight structures that we currently live in, you’re breathing them. And by the way, I might remind everyone who’s here, he breathed 13 to 15 times a minute. And if you do the math on that 20,000 times a day. So look at every breath is a dose. Imagine taking 20,000 doses, even small doses of a toxic chemical, that can’t end well. Right. So this this whole thing about mycotoxins and even dust quite frankly, needs to be separated out. The main thing here is dampness in buildings is the enemy. The problem is not mold. The problem is dampness. Mold is a symptom. And actually, you could argue that mold signals, mold is actually telling you something’s wrong with a building, you can actually argue there’s a benevolence to it, because it releases the smell. If it really wanted to hurt you, it will do it silently. It would do it without any indication whatsoever. Instead, it tells you there’s a musty smell. Okay, there’s a moisture problem here. Now fix this. Now, if you don’t answer that the same way, if you don’t answer inflammation in your body, it becomes chronic inflammation, that’s its own disease. Same thing goes with the building, if you leave that by itself, it will continue to compound and ultimately becomes cancer in the building. And so this is the way I look at the building in the body is very, you know, there’s a metaphor here, there’s a symbiosis, if you will. So anyway, that mycotoxins this is a this is a major issue because it’s got most of the medical community completely blinded. 

 

Caspar Szulc  28:30

Yeah, it’s a real wild way to look at it that your home is the living organism or the organism, you could say, and the living organism within it is the symptom. So that if you have the mold that’s not it’s ringing the bell as to something else is the term problem to it, which when it shifts your whole perspective on mold problems, remediation of just going after mold does not work. Damp dust is really what you have to go after. So let’s now go into that case of, okay, let’s go with the one that you find mold. You get Got Mold? goes right on you. You have the smell there and everything. What is someone’s next step? Because as I know most remediation is about just cutting it out, spraying it with chemicals, airing it out for a little bit and leaving saying you remediated when, in truth, well, what was causing the damage?

 

Jason Earle  29:24

Exactly. So remediation, the root word is remedy. And so I love entomology, right? If you dig into words, they will they’re so self revealing. So to what is what do we need to remedy here? Well, we need to remedy the water problem. So remediation always begins with fixing the water, always. And if you don’t, then don’t bother, really, because 24 to 48 hours is how long you’ve got from the time something gets wet and it becomes moldy. So if you have a water damage event or a leak or any any sort of excess dampness, including high humidity 24 to 48 hours is the is the zone in which you need to take action according to the EPA. Yeah, the industry standard, which is the called the IICRC s520. IICRC is the organization, s520 is the document. They state that at 72 hours, something that’s gotten wet, excuse me, especially something that’s porcelain absorptive. So anything like carpet, carpet padding, sheet rock, of course, is the number one mold food, anything upholstered these things at 72 hours of dampness, not properly dried, need to be treated as if they’re moldy, whether they’re moldy or not visible, visibly moldy or not. So fixing the water problem is first, and then you have to set up environmental controls around so you asked me what what’s someone’s perception, find the water problem, and then determine from there because the water problem, see the mold will tell you how to find the water. This is the thing about mold is everyone thinks is the enemy. The mold gives you all the clues you need, it gives you the musty smell, which is the alarm bell. And then if you track that back, and you can find where the source of the moisture is and fix it. And there’s a whole trail because you got growth. And then you need to address that. Now if that’s beyond the scope of your experience and capabilities, that’s when you involve professional, right? So in other words, diagnosing the moisture problem. If that’s beyond your scope and experience, then you need to bring in a professional unfortunately, and that’s where it’s expensive. And that’s where it’s also difficult to find out let’s find somebody who’s qualified because the number one rule is no conflict of interest. Right? Number two rule is no ERMI, because that lends itself to conflict of interest, and also an endless rabbit hole of huge expenses. Anyone who’s pushing that, by the way, really pushing that had better have some really good justification, by the way I can share with you a link to an article we just wrote a book called The Truth About ERMI, which was a collaboration between some of the brightest science minds that I know and humbly us. And so I would love to share that with you so that you can share that with your with your audience. Because it’s a real problem, causes a lot of panic and fear that it really does people just it’s so much confusion, and so much heartache. So figuring out the where the water problem is, fixing that and then determining the extent of the mold. And then the remediation, the physical part of the remediation is removing the building materials that cannot be cleaned. And again, this is under special controls. So you’ll establish, you know, almost like E T, right, you’re going to tent off the the area the work area. So the dust you create in that work area stays in that work area, you’re going to isolate that HVAC and block your vents, you’re going to ventilate the space with a special what they call negative air pressure. So you’re going to blow air out of the window or out of any penetration you can to create a sort of a section within that workspace so that anything that you produce in the space and the space, and then you remove these building materials carpet, carpet padding, sheetrock installation, ceiling tiles, anything porous absorptive that was wet and stayed wet too long. And then there’s a microfiber cleaning. And that cleaning utilizes HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners and damp wipes. Now you’ll notice that I didn’t say anything about spraying, any amount fogging, anything about killing, because that is counter to actual remediation. In the standard, they specifically advocate against using chemicals unless there was concern about a bacterial issue. So in other words, if the source of water was sewage, or river water, or ocean water, which is loaded with nutrients, then you need to sanitize it. But they’re not saying to kill the mold. Because you don’t need to kill them all. Killing them all doesn’t actually help. Actually, what you’ve just done, if you come in and start spraying stuff, is you’ve added a chemical that you can’t get back out of the house where you can get the mold out, but you’ve added a chemical that you cannot remove. You’re also in many cases using that chemical in lieu of cleaning because contractors like to do less work and get paid more money. So they like chemicals, because that’s less work more money, and they’re leaving behind dead mold. Well, the purpose of mold remediation is to reduce the fungal load to an acceptable level, which means you have to clean out you have to remove it. Mold Remediation is about cleaning and removal, it’s not about killing. And also when you use chemicals to kill mold, as with bacteria, as you’re seeing in hospitals with resistant organisms like Mersa, and C diff and stuff like that. When you’re widespread killing stuff, what happens is you leave behind the really strong stuff. And this is called competitive release, where you kill off all the would be competitors that would normally keep that stuff in check in a bio diverse environment where you’ve got lots of different microbes competing for the resources that are there. Instead, you kill them all off and you leave the demo behind. And the really tough ones come out and eat the dead mold. That mold loves the mold. And so the really tough one comes out and eats the rest of the stuff. And by the way, if you’ve used bleach, it looks clean, but it’s not. And by the way, if you use bleach, it’s really funny. The bleach evaporates leaving behind what? Water, right? So bleach is primarily water, 97% water and so you get this hallucination that you’ve cleaned because it smells clean. And because it looks clean, but you’re actually leaving behind dead mold and water. You just added water to a water problem. And so all that stuff is very counterintuitive. And again, it runs right in the face of all the lifestyles and in the stuff that we’ve considered to be sort of fat, a bucket of bleach and some paint and you’re good to go. Not true. It’s difficult for the consumer because there’s not a lot they can do on their own unless the problem is very small. All which again goes back to acting quickly because it 24 to 48 hours, if something gets wet, you can rip it out yourself as long as there’s not a preexisting mold problem there. And you can dry it out. But it’s 72 hour and by the way, insurance will cover most water damage. Insurance, if you have a water damage issue, most insurance and even if you got a landlord that will be covered if you act quickly, that’s like free or cheap. At the 72 hour mark mold remediators have to come in, these guys come in with Moon suits, they’ve got different insurance, they’ve got different trucks, they’ve got different equipment, they’ve got different expenses, and your cost just went 10x. And by the way, insurance doesn’t cover it. That’s the big kicker. Right now it’s a cash peg. So you have three days of opportunity to take advantage of insurance, and a DIY solution. At the 72 hour mark, you are now in cash land. And you are now in professional land. And insurance companies will turn their back on you. And in fact, if you if you file a claim, they’ll drop you on renewal if you do it twice. So it’s a real problem. So this is my message, right? If you see it, if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something, and do it quickly, because you have two to three days maximum. 

 

Caspar Szulc  36:08

Now, the unfortunate part is I feel like most people don’t even realize the problem until it’s very downstream meaning it’s weeks, months, years, you know, and that becomes problematic because you don’t even know where the source is. So let’s say it’s not from a flood or anything, maybe leaky pipe somewhere, right, you have sheetrock that’s dampening. Molds there, then you start to get the scent, you may not even see where it is yet because the wetness is on the other side of the wall. And yet you still have that. So when you have something like that, what would be the advice there because of course in a flood, you know it you see the water, you know, the damage, you start to do dampening you could see even you know, on the little readouts where it’s damper in the sheetrock or here in there. But if you didn’t have that, if you got your test, and it came back positive, and you don’t even know where, you know, what, what do you advise there because some homes are very large, and can be just one little area that you’re just not able to see.

 

Jason Earle  37:02

Yeah, and this is this is the hardest part about this, especially from the perspective of what we offer now as a DIY testing solution is that oftentimes, the next best step is to engage a professional in finding a qualified professional, by the way, and it’s a big expense is very difficult. We’re working on a on an exhaustive piece on how to select a qualified inspector. So we talked about the building as a body as a metaphor or building as an organism. Yeah, let me let me kick that around for a second, because I think you’ll appreciate this. So I look at the building as an ecoskin or an exoskeleton, okay, as an extension of your immune system. You know, we’re a lot like hermit crabs, we wouldn’t do too well, without our shell, you know. And there’s the four basic human needs air, water, food, shelter. Food, shelter, we can leave that for a while, but not too long, depending on the climate. And yet, you know, food what you need, we can’t go for much more than a few weeks, and then water a few days, and then air a few minutes. And yet we think about air last, which is amazing to me. It’s typical of humans that we’ve these fascinating cognitive blocks are kind of blind spots. So within this, this metaphor of the building as a body, I look at the system of systems that we have here that are says life sustaining, you know, buildings, got a respiratory system, and you could argue that the plumbing is circulatory and the electrical system is a nervous system. And then where’s the immune system, where the immune system, you can even argue that where the mitochondria within the building, you know, the where the energy, so we’re making sure everything works. And, you know, and that’s what’s ironic about that musty smell, doing mitochondrial damage, right, is that the musty smell causes, right, so it plays all the way through. And again, when a building develops aches and pains, the first thing usually manifests as a moisture problem and measure problems manifest versus a mold problem. And then the mold problem sends you a signal, which is the building’s form of pain, and then that pain molecule or molecules, and then whether you respond to that or not determines how much of a problem this pain becomes, this becomes its own disease. So when when you have a problem with a building that you know, you want to get some testing done, you could look at this as like a DIY test, you do some testing, if you had a problem, if you decided to do us one of these DIY tests for your own body. And let’s say it was cholesterol, you want to do cholesterol test. If you had high cholesterol ratings, you wouldn’t immediately scheduled heart surgery. You know, you wouldn’t say I gotta get a stent, you know, you wouldn’t immediately schedule an intervention, you would schedule an appointment with your doctor or with a specialist who would then say, let’s take a closer look. See what’s going on in your body. See if there’s some family history we need to be aware of see if there’s maybe some other variables maybe you just ate a cheeseburger and french fries and a milkshake before you came before you took that test maybe. So the same logic should be used with a DIY building test right? We test buildings and we test bodies. And and I look at the DIY tests a lot like that, that DIY cholesterol test is not truly actionable, no single test is actionable by itself, you need the actual context of what’s going on in the body or the building, in order for you to build the next step, right. And so you would go to a doctor, in other words, you’d hire a professional inspector, which is like a building doctor, you get a physical of the building, you know. And then that developed, the byproduct of that physical of the building is a scope of work, which is like a referral to a remediation contractor or referral to a surgeon, where it’s a team approach, you don’t skip over from a DIY cholesterol test to a stent, you know, you don’t skip over from a DIY test to remediation, because there are there are controls that are put in place. But if you follow that process well, and it’s not obligatory. So far, in a few states, there’s a couple states where there’s laws that state that you can’t have an inspector and remediator be the same guy. And they usually have to have an inspector, do an inspection and develop a scope of work. And that scope of work is, you know, the New York State is one of them. Texas is another they know, there’s a handful states that have regulations around this. And they’re poorly, they’re poorly executed, quite frankly, but they at least do keep us a Chinese wall between the inspectors and the remediators. So it is important to be able to find a qualified inspector in your area. Now, here’s the key, you need to have somebody who’s does this full time, this is all they do. They don’t do anything else. They’re not a home inspector, by the way, home inspectors are not qualified to do this. They need to be an environmental consultant with specialized experience in doing sick building diagnosis, they do not have remediation business on the side, nor does their brother or their cousin or their uncle. And if they do they disclose it to you. And there’s no financial relationships with them. And this is, at this point completely, you know, it’s something that they have to disclose voluntarily. It’s an honor system. And that’s very difficult, right. And then you want to make sure that they’re not also using tools like ERMI, which are slanted towards against the consumer, they’re slanted towards driving people towards us remediation costs. You also want to watch out for people that are that are charging huge sums for inspection, some people are getting away with six or 8000, I was calling the medical mold inspections, you also want to stay away from the guy who’s doing it for 250 bucks. You know, it’s kind of a common sense thing, you don’t want the highest and you don’t want the lowest. And you know, what’s really helpful is to find people that are working, that have a good number of references, consumers who really been helped, you know, people who have been through it, you want real life stories, you want to talk to these people. And by the way, I also advocate the use of mold sniffing dogs, I really do. They are so powerful if you can find an inspector in your area that is not conflicted, that has real experience in this I’m not talking about a guy just got dog yesterday, because they’re even more dangerous than a human by himself. But someone who’s got some experience in this and they’re hard to find, quite frankly, they are. But that’s the path that you need to go on. And that’s it’s unfortunate, there is no there is no silver bullet, there is no you know solution in a box, so to speak. It is Caveat emptor, or too large too great, you know?

 

Caspar Szulc  42:45

The whole thing is that we’re talking about health, we’re talking about, you know, the quality of life and everything. So you’re gonna want to go the extra mile on this, you’re not going to want to skimp out or just jump into a quick solution that doesn’t sound very well, you want to do your research, you want to feel good about it, just like I always say, when you choose a doctor go around, you’ll really understand what you’re going to ask them how they relate to you, and how you feel about it and see among a number of doctors, and don’t put clauses. The only thing but of course, keep that and arrange all these things. So it’s a big decision, as always, and it should be because again, it’s about your health, you know, I want to talk a little bit beyond mold, because you talked about indoor air quality, you’re an indoor air quality Crusader. I feel like we’re in this kind of spot, where we built our homes to be of terrible indoor air quality, meaning we’ve sealed them in, right, to make them very energy efficient, but that means nothing gets out. And then we put a bunch of just terrible ingredients, whether it’s even from scented candles Febreeze, our carpet is you know, fire retardants and VOCs. As you said before, they’re just it’s just basically we’re sitting in a, a chemical stew that’s in our air, and we’re breathing it. And then we don’t even open windows anymore, which I find strange, you know, I know new apartments that don’t even have a window that you can open to get fresh air. And they just say they they filter it. You know, with all of that said, what does one need to look out for number one, I would say part of that question, is there certain things that you don’t want to introduce into your environment, your home? And number two, how can we best filter those things that obviously we’re not going to get away from everything?

 

Jason Earle  44:27

Yeah, so you hit on a very important point. So mold is only one piece of the whole thing, right? If you were to look at air, it looks a lot like weather, right? You got plumes of chemicals and particles and they are you know, if you could see microscopically, you’d be amazed that we’re in like a more like more like a stew than we are in like this clear liquid that’s, you know, this clear fluid I should say, you know. In fact there’s the statistics around this are fascinating and I’ll get into the filtration in a minute, but you know the, from 1965 until 2014 respiratory illness is up 165% in the United States, and also during that same period, roughly the same period, deaths related to respiratory illness is up 30%. Now this is during a time when smoking has gone down precipitously, by some measures about 80%. And so you think, well, geez, if we got rid of smoking, which is the big cause of lung cancer and respiratory illness, then why are the numbers going up so high. And you can quickly point, if you just do a little bit of a rewind, you’ll see that we closed up our buildings really tight for energy efficiency in the 70s. Right during the fuel crisis, we also started building out of essentially petrochemicals and very cheap, quick building materials in order to meet the demands of the baby boomers. And then, you know, the buildings now when they get wet, the water gets into the walls, it used to be we built out of stone, plaster, old growth timber, things like that concrete. And when water got in the walls, it went away. So it would dry out, the wind would blow on it. Wood would dry out, now stuff gets in and stays in, we build up, we build paper mache, and plastic bags, you know, it’s really crazy. And the materials are, you know, doing a lot of imports from obviously, from overseas. And so in order to make those things quick, quickly and cheaply, they they’re made with solvents, and adhesives and things that have to dry quickly. Which means if they dry, those chemicals are becoming airborne, you know that things don’t dry and then go nowhere that comes out and goes into the air. And so but we lock ourselves in these boxes, and the new house smell is one of those funny things a new car smell is very alluring. It’s a it’s again, a very counterintuitive thing. People think of this as like a badge, like they won, they’ve arrived. And when I walk into a house like that I smell cancer, you know, and that’s the reality of it. And I used to be lured by that I remember moving into my first apartment, it was freshly painted, I thought, oh my god, this is great. It’s fresh, it’s new, it’s clean. And I look back at that now. And I’m like, I wouldn’t let my kids spend 10 minutes in there, right? And I was like, cool, let’s move in. So the first step to detoxing and again, buildings and bodies detox the body detox, the building. First step, the detoxing, stop toxic. So stop bringing that stuff in the building. That means if you’re going to paint use no VOC paints, if you’re going to get carpet or any installations at all, go to greenguard.org. It’s a resource where we’re builders can find low emission materials, low and no emission materials. And before you buy even so much as a tube of chaulk, you can go there and verify that what you’re getting actually is low or no emissions very important. Also no chemicals that you don’t need to kill anything, you don’t need to use any antimicrobials by the way, even with COVID, that the study that they did on COVID, where they use a surrogate virus, and they spread it out on on hard surfaces. And they use an anti wide spectrum antimicrobial, and also hot water and the same exact cleaning mechanism on both sides. And they couldn’t tell the difference between the outcomes, there is no difference. So you don’t need to kill, stop the killing. So that’s number two. And if you stop the killing, and recognize that we need to cooperate with our environment, and that there’s a direct correlation between a high biodiversity, lots of microbes in your building, okay, and this great book called Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn, anyone who’s interested in this should read Rob Dunn’s fascinating and hilarious and eye opening book, he’s a riot. And you’ll be shocked and surprised by what’s in your house. But also, you’ll stop wanting to kill stuff. So there’s a direct correlation between the high biodiversity and low incidence of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease, the data is very strong, and also a very low biodiversity very high degree of high incidence of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disease. So we need these microbes, right. And so what we don’t need as all these chemicals, so So the first thing you wanna do is stop getting stopped getting these chemicals in the house, and stop, stop trying to kill everything. And don’t use air fresheners. These are bad news. Don’t use essential oils except for very occasionally as a way to it because by the way, those are VOCs too. And oftentimes they can cause problems and people that are sensitive and they don’t even know it. A lot of people rely on those the airing airing, they think that they’re gonna do something for mold, and they don’t, this is a lifestyle. There are applications for that they’re outside of my area of expertise. But as a general rule, you know, using anything too fresh and air actually is not freshening the air, if you want to fresh in air, open your windows. Okay, that’s fresh air presuming that your outside areas is acceptable. And that’s the other thing is we don’t open our windows enough you know, the word human comes from humus, which means earth soil. In fact, most of the microbes that are very friendly, that are in our gut are from soil, right. And so we are from soil and theoretically we go back to the soil. But we’ve disconnected ourselves such that we even bare shelves and boxes the soil can’t get in. Right. So we are so disconnected from the earth, that we are now wondering why the earth is now a threat to us mold. The most ubiquitous biological particulates in the world are now a threat to us because we’ve been so distanced from them. So I always say use a lot of HEPA filters. Use HEPA vacuums, but not to remove the particles that are produced by biological materials. You want to use those to remove the man made stuff you’re building is shedding paint particles and the polyurethane flooring that you’re walking across. Why do you have to refinish your floor? Because those particles are coming off, they’re going into the dust, you want to worry about your dust, we’re worried about that stuff. That’s a concentrated amount of chemicals that your babies and your puppies and your kittens are licking. It’s called incidental ingestion. And by some measures, we take in about 100 milligrams a day of these kinds of chemicals, via dust, especially like I said, babies and puppies and kittens and the people who we really care and love for the most. So we want to clean that stuff up, but not to get rid of all the particles not to sterilize the air, we want to get rid of that stuff because of the chemicals, more so than anything else. And also the if you want to filter out VOCs, you have to use filters to have a lot of carbon in them. And most of the filters are not HEPA filters are for particles only. So you need activated carbon. And most filters, even with activated carbon have very little they have a thin layer of it. There are a few units out there, the IQ air makes a probably the best voc filters out there, the healthpro plus. And then in some cases where you have a voc problem in the house, you sometimes need to install diluted mechanisms. So in other words, where you’d actually have like an energy recovery ventilator or heat recovery ventilator, which actually brings fresh air from outside and then expel stale air and transfers the heat. So using a heat exchanger, those are very effective in buildings where there’s a lot of VOCs. But the bottom line is that that we are now facing I would argue a real threat with our health. Mold is always what people call us about, but I actually really do think that the, the predominant cause of most chronic illness is poor air quality. And food follows a very close second, and VOCs are the primary violator. And this is what the data is showing, especially as we spend more time indoors, especially as we stay in one building, particularly 20,000 doses of just one buildings poison, just multiple buildings, right?

 

Caspar Szulc  51:56

That was the wild part of the pandemic where lockdowns were suddenly you were stuck inside your house for much longer than you’ve ever been. You weren’t outside at all, you were stuck in a house most likely that wasn’t doing you any favors because of what’s going on the air. And people don’t know this. And like you said, it’s air quality. It’s food people like to you know, just stick on food all the time. What are you eating? How are you eating? How clean is it, this that everything. But don’t ever discuss air quality, the thing you breathe, like you said 20,000 times every single day over and over. And that’s where you know, the discussion needs to go to and I’m really having happy we’re having this discussion. Now. There is something I gotta ask you, because a lot of our patients are and people that listen to this are dealing with chronic diseases. And something that you’ve dealt with that a large portion of our population deals with is Lyme disease. And somehow Lyme and mold go hand in hand. You see it over and over. Patients sometimes get mold diagnosis, get Lyme diagnosis, get, you know, it’s a back and forth and you’re treating one or the other Schumaker protocol, and then you’re going on high doses of antibiotics, and you just go in circles and get worse, oftentimes, what is it about that connection, that you find that you actually do have mold patients, lyme patients, lyme patients, mold patients.

 

Jason Earle  53:12

It is, to some degree a mystery. It’s clear that biotoxins are the issue and the inability for the body to naturally process them and detoxify naturally. And that seems to be the Venn diagram. That’s largely work. So you know, Schumacher, I’ve got a lot of issues, the Schumacher, and he and I’ve had many public debates about a lot of things. But well, he did act, what he did do well was that was he honed in on that was that it’s biotoxin related, what he did not do well was say there’s a one size fits all approach, because that’s not true. There’s never been true medicine. It’s not true, and almost anything. And so he’s got a very didactic approach with that kind of stuff. So that’s where, you know, the beginning and the end. And I think he’s actually, by the way, also said recently, which I really agree with, is actinomycetes, which are kind of bacteria, rod shaped bacteria that grows alongside of mold and water damaged buildings, but isn’t often tested for and also is a pretty sort of major, major chemical producer. In fact, two thirds of the antibiotics that we produced in our in the world are produced from actinomycetes, not from mold. So this is this is a blind spot, also in the testing protocols that are that are commonplace. And so we’re actually working on a DNA based test to knock ERMI out of the box. It looks at all known microbes, including actinomycetes, for the same causes and army which looks for 36. So orders of magnitude and not even It’s logarithmic. It’s just way so the Lyme thing and the mold thing tends to be I think, the biotoxin overlap. What’s also fascinating is that, you know, you end up with chronic fatigue, that fibromyalgia, all these other sort of nebulous illnesses that fall when I see in Lyme is is different because Lyme is clearly an infection. These other diseases, what I see the mold does or even poor indoor air quality does is it brings out the latent symptoms that are already there. In other words, the latent diseases that you may already have on the on the surface happened to me, right? So all that stuff came up. And then as soon as I got the environment under control and I went on a no sugar, no grains diet, by the way, because a lot of most mycotoxin exposures food food base, and so people don’t want to hear about that you talk about don’t talk about religion, politics or my food, right? Like those… It’s don’t tell me I gotta change my diet, because… 

 

Caspar Szulc  55:20

Especially when it’s a coffee, right that that is like, totally. Don’t ever tell me not to drink my coffee.

 

Jason Earle  55:26

Or my carbs don’t get, don’t tell me I got to drop my carbs. Because what am I going to do? It’s the only thing I’ve got in this world. Is I got my, well, my booze, my coffee and my carbs. That’s it right? Don’t tell me I can’t have my wine, you know. And so you what I what I see happen consistently is that this is the problem that most people face. And I also think that a lot of times with Lyme, what happens is, Lyme people end up spending a lot of time indoors, if they’ve got some white mold or moisture problem, they’re hyper exposed. And so you know, this comes down to get out of the house. This comes down to 20,000 doses a day. What are you dosing? Are you dosing 20,000 20,000 sips of outdoor highly bio diverse air with, you know, lots and lots of exposure to a wide variety of microbes, where you’re getting maybe a little bit of musty smell here, these micro microbial gases here and there, because that’s the way a forest smells, but you’re not literally inhaling it constantly as if you’re living over a compost heap, right? This is the difference, right? I mean, think about mold growth as compost, you are living in a compost bin, if you just continue to let it go. And you’re inhaling that, how is that going to? How’s that going to end? Well, right, your immune system is going to say, Hey, man, I’m gonna shut down for a little while here, my sinuses are gonna close, right sinusitis. My lungs are gonna cause an asthma, right? Everything goes, this is the body protecting itself. So I think that a lot of what we see when it comes to the exacerbation of illnesses is that mold tends to make people fatigued, and they tend to not leave the house. And then that just amplifies everything. And Lyme is no exception, people are bedridden, and if they don’t have their air quality straight in their home. And by the way, a lot of times these people are also met, they’ve lost their cocktail, a lot of their decision making, they’re not maintaining the building well, right? There’s a socio economic component to this, there’s a psychiatric component to this. In fact, I’m working with a psychiatric clinic that has like 400 new patients a month, and they’re finding inflammation in every single intake. And so they believe that mold or air quality is an underlying cause, in many of the psychiatric cases, such that some of these doctors I’m talking to, in that world are now referring to depression as a as an inflammatory disease. 

 

Caspar Szulc  57:41

Right. 

 

Jason Earle  57:43

Fascinating stuff. And it’s and what’s what’s gratifying is that it’s emerged, the conversations we’re having here today, are conversations that need to be had at scale. Right? It should be out there, this is the one thing you know that all people do, right? We all breathe air. We all live in buildings, you know. And so like, this is like the basics. This is foundational, this is table stakes, you’re born into this planet, you should, you should be able to understand how to navigate living in buildings, and breathing air. Yeah, and what it takes to optimize that. And so that’s the mission that we’re on.

 

Caspar Szulc  58:18

Yeah. I know, this conversation and I hope it’s it’s doing for others really change your perspective. You know, your home is an extension of you in some ways, as the home so the body as above, so below sort of thing goes goes hand in hand here. And we seem to hyper focus singularly on the body, you know, as if it doesn’t take things in and give things off itself, just as the house will give them a voc this and that. And then at the end of the day, also, you make this great case for, you know, you’re going to take these 20,000 or so breaths, why not take some in the greatest type of environment which is outdoors, reconnect with nature, yes, optimize your home, no doubt about it, but still know that nature is the ultimate healer in all of this and nature is mycotoxins, mold all of it. So let’s not just demonize that and say that’s your problem. So it really does shift the perspective on everything. And I think this has been a really, really enlightening one. As far as just understanding that you do have power to do things about things. You just got to do them, right. Whether it’s the testing, whether it’s how you address it the dampness versus the mold, you know, kind of which one and address all these things. Is there anything you could leave us with, as far as you know, people who are concerned about mold, you know, any tips or advice that you could leave with people so that we feel a little bit more confident dressing what is bound to be a growing issue?

 

Jason Earle  59:44

Well, I think the first thing that I like to encourage people to do is trusting your intuition. So use your senses. You’re the best metal detector there is. You know, people tend to say that they may not see it. They can often smell it, but more often than not, if they’re willing to trust themselves, they can feel, you know, you walk into a building and it’s not right, whether it be a hotel that you’re staying because everyone’s had thinks most people had the experience of walking into a vacation home or hotel and going, you know, you know, those are often be restless nights difficult to sleep, because you’ll cause sleep disturbances and but more than that, right, you’re just getting 20,000 doses, again of chemical popery. So you need to trust your intuition. But in addition to that, get the facts, right. So in other words, trust your intuition, and then use data to support the next steps. That’s why we encourage people to test don’t guess, right? So whether it be the air or their body, don’t just assume that, in fact, assume nothing. Greet this with humility and an open mind and get the facts and then be judicious this treat mold inspectors the same way you treat finding a mold professional the same way you treat finding a physician. In fact, in many cases, though, your mold inspector will have a greater impact on your health than the physician that you’re, then you’re working with. So take the time to interview and really follow again, your intuition on that stuff, because your gut is going to tell you a lot more than you think. And then, you know, be patient and recognize that this is a long road. In some cases, you know, properly done or mold remediation project will take a month or three in the selection of the inspector and the testing in the scope of work development and the finding the contractors and then doing the project and getting the testing done. It’s a long process. And then lastly, be vigilant in your prevention, spend the money and the time to maintain the building from the outside and so that moisture does not become a problem again, and make that investment not just in your building, but in your health. I look at the house and the been the the microbiomes that we in the building in the US. These are what what some people call nesting ecologies, right like a matryoshka doll, as above, so below. And so so we are all part of the unified whole, you know, that’s the reality, you can’t separate this out. And we are part of nature, whether you like it or not. So I say embrace it. And at the end of the day, you know, the quality of the air you breathe is the quality of your life. And it’s a very low investment relative to food and all these other things that you that the costs associated with improving your air quality, it pays dividends, huge difference, huge ROI. And it can improve the quality of your life and the longevity of you and your family. And your failure to do that can cause real disease and early demise. It’s it and by the way, there’s no there’s only healthier and unhealthy air. There’s no neutral. It’s either life giving or disease causing. That’s how binary it is there is no neutral. So strive to make your air quality’s good as you can, because as clean as you can, and then get outside.

 

Caspar Szulc  1:02:49

Amazing stuff. Thank you so much, Jason, really appreciate this conversation. I know it’s probably open some eyes here. Where can people learn more about you and the company?

 

Jason Earle  1:02:58

Sure. So we created a welcome page for your listeners, specifically at gotmold.com/innomed. That’s i n n o m e d. On that page, we have a couple of things there. One of them is an ebook that we produced. There’s about 46 page, pages of FAQs, and you know, common myths and misconceptions. Some of the stuff we addressed here today, as well as checklists. Basically, it’s a way for you to do an inspection of your own home. And so people give us a lot of great feedback about that. There’s also a link to the website, to the test kits, where there’s a 10% discount offer also for your audience. And just quickly, verbally, it’s innomed10, in case anyone’s interested, i n n o m e d 10, which is a 10% discount. I am, you know, for better or for worse, I see every message that comes in from the website. So if anybody has any questions about this about mold and air quality, best thing to do is just go to the homepage and drop a inquiry there in the Contact Us section. And if you address it to me, there’s a few Jason’s here actually believe it or not, but I see them all. So I’m more than willing to answer any questions anybody has there too.

 

Caspar Szulc  1:04:11

Awesome, amazing stuff. Thank you so much, Jason, really appreciate it.

 

Jason Earle  1:04:14

Thank you for having me. 

 

Caspar Szulc  1:04:15

As you’ve heard today, it’s always inspiring to see people like Jason who have turned a health setback into a successful business that’s now paying it forward and helping others so check out got mold.com/innomed And until next time, continue writing your own healing story.