Re-Release Jason Earle: A Mold Expert Shares The Vast Impact Mold Can Have On Your Health, and The Best Way to Detect and Remediate It

Have you ever considered the vast impacts of mold on our health and well-being? Join us as we venture deep into the world of mold with our guest, Jason Earl, a mold specialist and the CEO of 1-800-GOT-MOLD. After a personal battle with severe allergies and asthma traced back to his mold-ridden childhood home, Jason found his calling in the healthy home business.

 We explore various mold testing methods, their limitations, and the significance of understanding the age and dust levels of a house for accurate readings. In a surprising twist, we delve into Jason's journey from Wall Street to finding his real passion in helping people detect and remediate mold. We examine the spectrum of illnesses that can stem from mold exposure and stress the importance of reducing exposure and altering diets for healing.  Brace yourself for an eye-opening exploration of the often overlooked world of mold and its far-reaching effects on our health and life.

You can Find Jason Earle at:
*Website -  https://www.gotmold.com/openmindedhealing/
(to get your free ebook and coupon code for Mold Kit)
*Facebook - Facebook.com/gotmold
*Instagram - @GotMold

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Note: By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others, including but not limited to patients that you are treating. Consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Under no circumstances shall Marla Miller, Open-Minded Healing Podcast, any guests or contributors to the podcast, be responsible for damages arising from use of the podcast.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:35

Welcome everyone. Today, my guest is Jason Earl. Jason is a founder and CEO of the Mould Inspection Company called 1-800-GOT-MULD and the creator of the GOT-MULD test kit. The realization that his Mouldy childhood home was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma led him into the healthy home business in 2002, leaving behind a successful career on Wall Street. Over the last two decades, Jason has personally performed countless sick-building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way, helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind. Welcome, Jason.

Speaker 2: 1:17

Hi Marla, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Today we're going to really get into the topic of moles. I know a lot of people suffer the ramifications of mold in their homes. I want to get into a whole number of things like how people can figure out if they have mold in the first place, and then we'll get into all the chaos that can wreak on someone's health and then where you step in to help people. So let's start with your story. How did you even get into the mold business? It doesn't seem like something. You're little and you decide you want to be a fireman or a doctor or something like that. I haven't heard anyone say they want to be a mold expert, so I'm curious what drew you to this business?

Speaker 2: 2:05

It's a question that I get quite a bit, as you might imagine, because, as you pointed out, there's no academic track. I don't think it's something that people aspire to become expert in but, like most of the people that I know that are in this space doing good work, they come from a place of personal experience, and you see this with people who suffer from or overcome any sort of ill. You see this with people with addictions who then go to work in service of other people that are still sick and suffering. You see this with environmental illness like this. So I'm one of those. I got into this space, as you mentioned in your very generous introduction. I got into this space after already being a stockbroker for nine years and actually I was on a mission to figure out what I really wanted to do when I grew up.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Anyway, at the time I had become disheartened with my place in society. It was money for money and it didn't align with my higher self in any way. The people, the people who really benefited from my success, were the people who owned the stores where I shopped, and my mom raised me to be service oriented. She was a nurse and she worked her tail off, but she was very much the person who was there in a crisis and her goal was to improve the quality of other people's lives to her own detriment. Unfortunately, she was selfless to a fault. However, that aspect was really impressed upon me as a child, where I worked at the hospital as a volunteer, where she worked, and also stuff we did on the weekends for our church groups and things like that.

Speaker 2: 3:23

So, anyway, I was very disheartened by the emptiness of Wall Street and so I went backpacking right after September 11th, sold everything that I owned and put 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack, took a train from New York to LA but through Canada, and then flew to Hawaii. And while I was there, I was reading a lot of local newspapers and there were a lot of articles about a huge mold problem that had been discovered in the big hotel on Waikiki Beach, the Kalea Tower, and it had been shut down for a number of months at that point and they basically realized that they were going to have to gut the whole thing and it was like a $55 million mold problem on a $90 million new construction project. So it was really Wow.

Speaker 2: 4:01

The story that caught my attention, even though I was reading it from a business perspective. I was caught by one particular story of a gentleman who was in his 40s and he had developed adult onset asthma something I'd never even heard of before, as well as allergies and sensitivities to all these foods that he had normally consumed without any ill effect, and it was like a deja vu moment for me. I was suddenly reminded of my childhood issues and respiratory illness and all the concern and heartache that caused. So I called my father from a pay phone, which probably isn't there anymore, and said hey, do you think we had a mold problem at Old Trenton Road? And he just laughed at me. He goes Jason, we had mushrooms in the basement. Of course we had mold. Why, do you ask? And no matter how many times I tell the story, I can't help but recall the sort of just blasé way it was, as if of course basements have mold and that is the generational ignorance that was the pervasive sort of Feeling around just Pervasively around mold in general.

Speaker 2: 5:01

It's mold been here for millions of years. All that kind of stuff very dismissive. But for me, intuitively it felt like there's something really big here and I said do you think it had something to do with my illness as a kid? And he goes well? Couldn't it have helped? But keep in mind that they smoked in the car. I was severely asked that and they would smoke in the car with the windows closed and that's just the way it was in the 70s and 80s. That's just the way it was.

Speaker 1: 5:26

So what were you dealing with when you were a child growing up? What were the illnesses At four?

Speaker 2: 5:31

around four years old, I suddenly lost 30% of my body weight in three weeks and was having difficulty breathing, and so they took me to the pediatrician who said you should take him to the hospital. And they brought me to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, which is very well known for respiratory illnesses, specifically asthma and cystic fibrosis. And so they presented family history and the sick little boy, and their first diagnosis was cystic fibrosis, which was devastating to both of my parents, but particularly my father, who'd lost four of his cousins before the age of 14 to CF. So here I was, their only child, and they're seeing him potentially along that path.

Speaker 2: 6:06

So six weeks later they had a second opinion, and that second opinion was that I didn't have cystic fibrosis evidence by me sitting here at 46 years old, but actually I had asthma compounded by pneumonia, which was my first big dose of antibiotics, which is another part of the health journey and they tested me for allergies and I was allergic to every single thing. They tested me for every single thing. So the short list is grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton. So my clothes, my sheets, soybeans we were surrounded by. I was raised on a small sort of hobby farm, not working farm, but basically they just took care of rescued animals, and so I was just summarized by all these things cornfields and soybean fields and dogs and cats, and you know you name it. So my childhood was itchy and wheezy.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine being allergic to that many things. I'm picturing we had a dog that had this allergy test done and our dog was allergic to a lot of things not as many as you're saying and itched constantly and her skin was so bad until they could properly address all of that. So, as a child, I can't even imagine the irritation at the least, but the anguish you would feel on a daily basis being allergic to everything around you.

Speaker 2: 7:22

Yeah, it wasn't fun, but you know it's fun. I have a very I don't know if this is a coping mechanism or if it's some sort of psychological blind spot but I have very few memories of pain or discomfort. I know I was in pain and I know I was uncomfortable, but I can't get there, I don't go there, I can't access that, which is, I think, a huge advantage. But you know, the knowledge and the memories of the facts surrounding that whole period of my life are indisputable. But I thankfully don't carry any sort of trauma from that, which a lot of people do and a lot of people who have mold related illness skipping way ahead, and we'll come back to this.

Speaker 2: 7:59

But you know, mold can make you sick in lots of different ways. Allergenic, clearly, is one pathway. Toxigenic there are toxins that are produced by molds that can send you for quite a trip down the immune system highway, but also inflammation. And then also there's a neurological component too, which some people refer to as psychosomatic, but it affects people psychiatrically and cognitively and affects brain function. There's lots of interesting research showing how these compounds affect people in very, very different ways, but the reality is a lot of it is actually sort of a neurological trauma. That's what you see a lot of people who just become viscerally, their body shuts down or they get the huge inflammatory responses just by being exposed to the musty odor or the tiniest bit of something. It's a disproportionate reaction that has been proven to be able to be reduced dramatically with certain methods that are completely oriented around the nervous system. Anyway, the point is that there's lots of different ways and I'm fortunate to have been able to, at 12 years old, moved out and all my symptoms went away, not immediately, but in fairly short order, and to this day, if you test me, I'm not allergic to anything that I was allergic to prior.

Speaker 2: 9:04

Now, that being said, when I have mold exposures of significance where I'm not taking proper precautions and things like that, I'll notice things that I'll get hives in certain areas and I'll start to notice that I'll have other dermal reactions, but for the most part it's all gone, and so I didn't think about that. I mean, when I was 12, my grandfather had grown out of his asthma and that's basically what they thought about me. Then my mom passed away suddenly by her own hand when I was 14 and then I got Lyme disease when I was 15 and I missed a lot of school and also had a huge amount of antibiotics at that point. And then I went to go work on Wall Street.

Speaker 2: 9:35

And the reason I bring this up is because a big part of the byproduct of all of this stuff was that I think a lot of my health issues had more to do with the treatments around some of these things rather than the actual exposure. So, like the antibiotics, for example, created all sorts of chemical sensitivities and gats, all sorts of dysbiosis so I ended up with a mold problem inside after I got rid of the mold problem outside, and that carried with me for a long time where if I ate a bagel, I would have an out of body experience. It was like I was fermenting so much that I would actually almost be drunk from simple carbohydrates. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 10:09

I should get my mind around that or to overcome all of that, but in any case, the way I got into the mold space was really because I put two and two together and I became fascinated not with mold per se in that moment when I was talking to my father on the phone, the light bulb really was. I became fascinated with how the buildings we live and work in impact our health.

Speaker 1: 10:27

Well, and also, how many people don't even correlate it with mold? They experience symptoms, but they just think it's life or aging or associated with different things, and they have no idea that it's actually the building that they're in.

Speaker 2: 10:41

Yes, I mean people establish a new baseline as they get older. They just chalk it up to being older or whatever, and you lower your standards, so to speak, because I think it's easier to deal with than taking ownership or taking action, because that could cost money, it could be shame or denial all around that stuff. Mold is very difficult like that. It's something that everybody knows you shouldn't have in your house. But if you start taking action on it, then you may have to take a lot more and maybe very costly. It could potentially like.

Speaker 2: 11:08

It brings some questions about hey, what have you been not taking care of? A lot of people get all twisted up emotionally and so they don't take action on it. And mold does one thing it grows, it gets worse, it doesn't get better, it never heals itself, it never goes away on its own. Even if you dry it out, you still have a mold problem. If you had one, you still have one. It needs to be removed, and so people who deny and who ignore this are actually making their problem much, much worse, and so it's one of those things that you cannot sweep this under the rug. It'll eat your rug.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Oh my gosh, that's a visual you can't put out of your head. So I know that certain people seem to have the ability to walk into a room and they know if there's mold because they are so sensitive to it, but I'm sure there are just as many people that walk into a room and they're oblivious to it. They have no idea. So do you know what makes that difference between those two people?

Speaker 2: 11:59

That's a really good question. No one's ever asked me that. There are a bunch of different facets to that in my experience. First of all, women tend to have a much better sense when it comes to these things and I found, by the way, we used to use mold sniffing dogs that was how we made our name through 1800, got Mold in the beginning and we used them for about 12 years. And we only use females because they have a better sense of smell. They actually truly do, and we find this to be true in humans too. You know, a mom can smell a dirty diaper across the room, dad's dumb.

Speaker 1: 12:31

So it's not just dads ignoring it.

Speaker 2: 12:35

I'm here to attest that men do not smell those things until they're up close and personal. It's just moms have that they can smell. I think it's an evolutionary advantage. I think it's what's kept our species alive to be able to smell food when it's foiling quickly and not have to think about it. It's a visceral thing. Also. Mold is the precursor, it's the beginning of decay and anything that's decaying around us is repulsive. Smell rotting food, smell feces, vomit anything that's in that process is a visceral repulsion. And so mold is just the beginning of that. And I think our nervous systems and our immune systems are tuned in that when that smell is around, to shut down because you don't want to breathe, that stuff Sinuses, close up respiratory airways, constrict with your feeling, with an asthmatic or someone who's right you got. All that stuff is designed to protect you, but we know the body can over protect and then cause all these unintended consequences. So I think first of all there's the female aspect, I think there's the evolutionary aspect and then I think also there is the hypervigilant immune system and nervous system that gets tuned up when this stuff happens and can pick up these odors, according to the research I've been reading, below the odor threshold, which is fascinating. So, in other words, they can pick it up before they can smell it. Even though the most likely pathway is the sense of smell, it's being picked up by the nervous system below the odor threshold, so before they can smell it. And that's fascinating stuff, right, and I think that that communication is a gift because I think it's really important.

Speaker 2: 14:12

When you have a mold problem in your house and that musty smell pops up, that is not a problem, that is the sign of a problem. It is a problem by itself, but that's mold sending you a message that there's an imbalance in your home and that you need to run towards and find the moisture problem, mix that moisture problem and then clean up the mold. The people that are sensing that and reacting adversely to it. Their body doesn't know that. That's a benevolent message from mold. That's an alarm in your house. Instead of an audible alarm, it's an olfactory alarm. That's the way I look at this stuff. It's not mold doing harm to you. You're misinterpreting the message.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Yeah, Does that make sense? That totally makes sense. And I was just thinking. I know of someone who I think may very well have a big mold issue in their home, who doesn't seem to have noticed it. And then I have someone who has mold issues but he's also had Lyme. I think his immune system is really, like you said, maybe kind of on high alert. So when your body is already out of balance and some things have already happened, say to your immune system, your body is extra protective. When he goes into a home and he's not smelling it, I think he just senses it, he knows that it's there. So that is kind of what you were talking about, I think right.

Speaker 2: 15:32

Yeah, it's subconscious but it's conscious. In other words, people feel like it's a sixth sense and it kind of is. There's a trigeminal nerve, there's a nerve that runs down your face and apparently that is super sensitive and picks up chemical threats and it's a straight line right into your nervous system and it's visceral. It's, like I said, a powerful thing that people can't explain. But my experience has been, when they say that they're right, going to an assessment I've had pregnant women on their hands and knees, sniffing, saying it's right here down, come here, get up, I believe you, I believe you. And then we bring the dogs in and dogs alert right in that spot and of course the whole place breaks out and laughter at that point because everyone thought she was crazy and she was dead right.

Speaker 2: 16:16

We see that a lot the thing about Lyme disease and the thing about a lot of these biotoxin-based illnesses. There's this detoxification pathway issue that a lot of people have and MTHFR mutation, which apparently 25% are. So the population suffers from where you have a hard time detoxifying from biotoxins and other toxins, and I find it fascinating and it's something that people, I think, just don't latch into because the language is very specific but people have to take a lot of antibiotics when they have Lyme disease, and people often forget that antibiotics are mycotoxins in most cases. In many cases, I mean that's where they were originally developed. Penicillin is a mycotoxin. We take pills dense pills dense with mycotoxins, and then we wonder why, after treatments, we might have sensitivities to mold right.

Speaker 1: 17:05

Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 17:05

Now which came first, the chicken and the egg? I don't know, but you start looking at this thing, you wonder are the antibiotics, which are sometimes absolutely life-saving, causing additional sensitivities or amplifying sensitivities? Because these are powerful compounds, they're designed to be used microscopically, microscopically. These are one mold trying to kill the other mold. It's chemical warfare on a microscopic level. We take that, tune it up and make factories where you produce tons of mycotoxins, put them in pills and then hand them to people Not hand them to people, funnel them into their mouth. I mean, it's just incredible. So I just think that the overlap. There's lots of reasons why, and there are some that are a little more obvious but not as easy to see.

Speaker 1: 17:48

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it makes sense. So I guess the first thing you talked about using a dog to sniff out the mold, so you've changed that technique right? Do you still bring along a dog with you?

Speaker 2: 18:01

Not more, mostly because 1-800 got mold. We still do inspections but we're really focused on the test kit business primarily Just do the ability for us to scale up and have a greater impact and build more community around that and serve the underserved because of the price point. Our mold dogs were the heartbeat of the company for a long time and I'm still a huge endorser of mold dogs. Anytime you've got a question about hidden mold issue, go look for a mold dog. Go look for a mold dog in your area.

Speaker 1: 18:31

Where do you find a mold dog? That's interesting.

Speaker 2: 18:34

Google mold dog in your area, your zip code. There are not a lot of them, unfortunately, but you can also call the Florida Canine Academy. I think it's mold-dogcom, and that's Bill Whitstein who's the sort of dog trainer extraordinaire who trained my dog and many others. But he trains dogs for everything. I mean bombs, drugs, missing people, endangered species of snakes, you name it. I mean he can train a dog to find anything but mold's easy because it's a static thing that's producing a chemical potpourri and it's not moving like bombs or drugs in a car. So it molds an easy target and the dogs are incredibly effective. In fact, I will argue that I learned more from the mold dogs than they learned from me for sure. I learned more about how buildings leak, where the defects occur, because you see patterns. If you do thousands and thousands of these, eventually you figure it out, and certainly the perspective that I got from our four-legged mold detectives was incredibly insightful. So there are two kinds of mold problems. There's the kind that's sequestered in a wall that spores can't come through and the musceotr can come through, and then there's mold growth that's on surfaces inside of a living space where those spores can become airborne. Those are two very different kinds of mold problems. Right, because the one will have high spore counts or presumably there will be symptoms of it in the air quality.

Speaker 2: 19:49

In terms of spore counts, our test kit measures that, the stuff that's in the wall where spores can't get through.

Speaker 2: 19:55

That's trickier and that really takes the skilled technician, qualified inspector, ideally mold dog, or you can test for that using a test made by a company called Home Air Check and that's looking for the mold and VOCs made by mold. So if you use our test kit, actually the Gotmold Test Kit, with that test kit from Home Air Check, you end up with a more holistic view of what's going on in the air, because you're looking for the gases and the particles and, to hyper-simplify, air, you're basically dealing with gases and particles. And so when it comes to air pollution, we're testing for mold-related particles with a Gotmold Test Kit and we're testing for mold-related VOCs and even man-made VOCs with the Home Air Check Test Kit, and then you have a more whole view on things, because you can tend to find false negatives with one or the other, but when you have both, if you have a negative, very likely, but that you don't have a serious problem- Okay, well, that's good to know about the two different kinds and how to address both of those with different test kits.

Speaker 1: 20:55

So when I wasn't sure if I had molded my home some years ago, I was still to get the ARME kit, the E-R-M-I. So that was where you took a cloth and you took samples from three different places in the home and then mailed it in and got your results back. How does that compare to either of those two tests you just mentioned?

Speaker 2: 21:17

ARME stands for Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. It's actually technically not a test, even though it's sold as a test. It's actually an index. It's a way of interpreting data from a panel of molds that were identified during an EPA experiment or an EPA research project. So Steve Vesper with the EPA was trying to figure out based upon a they were looking to see if they could identify whether their house was moldy or not using this tool called PCR. Everyone knows what PCR is now because it's the most common form of testing for COVID, where you can find very small amounts of organisms in a larger sample and then you can amplify it, and so PCR has become big headline news. But back then it was a new technology and the EPA was embracing it on a research basis and they found one particular area. They looked at 20 homes, took the molds that were in the moldy homes and then they looked at the houses that weren't deemed to be moldy and looked at the molds that they found in there and they came up with a panel. It was a very limited study 20 houses, okay, 20. And then they made an index off of that and that's 20 houses in one geographic area, so it's even more. I mean it's just like so tiny. But this Ermey is 36 molds I think, 26 for indicators and 10 are common background.

Speaker 2: 22:33

Anyway, the bottom line is that you're supposed to initially have vacuumed up dust in your carpet in your bedroom and your living room. That's called a compound sample, which has problems because you then don't know where the problem was. Big part of doing testing is to try to figure out where the problem is. And when you compound them and you combine them, you lose that very important aspect of investigative testing. So first of all it used to be a vacuum and you'd put tape on a fixed area and you vacuum that area. And then it's changed to swifters now and you get lower and lower quality. But people love the PCR thing, doctors love the PCR thing. It seems like good science, shiny, shiny, shiny science. But it's what we call junk science because it's good science being used inappropriately.

Speaker 2: 23:13

And then you get this single numerical value. So it looks for these molds. By the way, if you hit one colony of stachybotrys, it will tell you that your house is uninhabitable. The numbers just go almost always false, always false. Positives too, because it doesn't take anything into consideration about the age or the light or the way the house is used. If it's an old house, it's gonna have a lot of settled dust with a lot of mold spores. If it's a new house, it's gonna have less settled dust with less spores. There's nothing in their algorithm to normalize that against the reality of that. An older house is gonna have more fungal spores in its dust, right. So this has been a problem for a long time because people love to use this and you get this one numerical value which Dr Schumacher the former Dr Schumacher used to use as a way to say that the house was livable or not livable.

Speaker 2: 23:57

But there is no test. I'm here to tell you as the creator of a test kit there is no one test that tells you if your house is safe or not or what to do next. All these tests are designed to give you enough visibility to take the next step. It's not a replacement for a professional test Can't be, because the professional will tell you how to take that information and put it to use.

Speaker 2: 24:18

This idea that there's a binary you know there's a good, bad or safe, not safe from a test is a false narrative and dangerous too, and it's such that the EPA has actually posted on their website, google, epa, mold and ERME, and you'll see that they tell people to use it. They developed it, they own the patent, they get paid or they did up until recently, because the patents since expired. But the point is is that the EPA, who developed it, says don't use it for building diagnostics, and people keep using it Anyway. So it's a really good question, because people use it a lot and it's wildly flawed. It's prone to false positives and it gives people the wrong idea that there is a test by itself that could be actionable, and no such thing exists, not yet at least.

Speaker 1: 25:01

Well, I'm glad you clarified all of that. My test did come back very positive high amounts of mold and so I had a mold company come out that did the air I can't remember the name of that kind of test and they said we don't see any evidence of a problem here.

Speaker 2: 25:17

So then I dropped it after that we use aerosol cassettes, which is probably what he was saying. They use these round cassettes in the house when they were testing. These are the spore traps that we use with the gommel test kit. So it's the most common professional mold testing methodology and, like I was saying the thing about a mold inspection or a building inspection, it's a lot like a physical when you go to the doctor.

Speaker 2: 25:38

If you go to the doctor and say I'm not feeling well, test me. First, we need to know a little bit about what's going on. What are your symptoms? Yeah, how long you've been feeling this way? Is there any time that you notice your symptoms changed? This is what a mold inspection should entail asking these questions, because you need to have more knowledge than just this binary thing have it or not? Have it sick? Not sick, because what's gonna happen is the doctor's gonna get this information from you about your history and your current situation and he's gonna then, or she's gonna then, tell you what kind of test you should take, because there is no test for health, right, just like there's no test for safe yeah, all right. So if you're, if it can't do a test for health for your body, what these people think the bit of something is complicated, as a building is gonna have a simple test for safe. It's not realistic. So what?

Speaker 2: 26:23

you have to do is you have to look at all the layers, almost like the peel, like like an onion, right? Our job as a professional on the consulting side is to peel the layers of the onion away. Or Another way to think about it is layering on data, because a negative doesn't negate the presence or the possibility of its presence. When it comes to assessments, you're only looking for positives, but you have to be careful with the positives because they sometimes can be false too. So you have to be looking at things and be willing to discard the useless data and then be able to evaluate and have the Experience and the training to figure out what makes sense, and that's why there is no test kit that replaces a professional. However, there are ways for you to get closer to the point where you'd have the confidence to know that you're on the right track and hiring a professional is a good decision.

Speaker 2: 27:08

And that's where the test kits can be useful, because the main thing is you don't ever jump from a test result right to remediation. That would be like jumping from a pregnancy test kit saying positive directly to like scheduling your labor Scheduling, you know, with the hospital. Right, that's surgery. You know, remediation is like surgery You've got to go through the process, which is do yourself test kits. If you're gonna go that route, ideally find a qualified independent inspector in your area and then have that person guide you through the process of remediation, if in fact it's necessary. But if you have anybody recommending Irmi, run.

Speaker 1: 27:44

Alright, so the first step would be getting your kit, say, 1-800 got mold plus the other one you identified.

Speaker 2: 27:53

So 1-800 got molded as our mold inspection business. We don't want to send people there. I mean, granted, if you feel like you need a professional inspection, we're more than glad to help you, even to help find a qualified professional in your area. But the got mold test kit which is at got mold calm and in fact, for your listeners, we created a special welcome page where they can go to got mold calm, slash, open minded healing and they can take a look there. We also have an e-book.

Speaker 2: 28:16

The first step would really be that's knowledge. Okay, the first step is really to do your own inspection, and so we created an e-book called how to find mold in your home, and it is something we get a lot of positive feedback on. It's about 45 pages of inspection checklists and things to look out for, as well as FAQs on what is and what isn't, older mediation, etc. There are also some additional resources in the back for how to find inspectors and remediators and things like that. So that's actually the first step is to get a little bit of education at got mold calm, slash, open minded healing.

Speaker 2: 28:48

Okay, great and also there you'll see that there's a link to the test kit website and there's a coupon code there for anybody who wants to purchase one. They can get 10% off with healing 10.

Speaker 2: 29:00

Fancy healing number one zero mold is something that's never gonna go away. It was here before we were here and it's gonna be here after we're gone. It's one of those things that you should get accustomed to and learn how to navigate. I think it's a basic life skill. Unfortunately, a generational ignorance has gotten us to the point where we misunderstand how it works, and so that book will help set that straight. And if you feel that you need to take the next step, because you either see something, smell something or feel something, that's what we always say if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something. That's when you might want to grab a test kit and Collect some samples, invest a couple hundred bucks and see if your gut feeling is right. I always say trust your intuition, but get the data test, don't guess.

Speaker 1: 29:42

Perfect. Well, and I did use one of your test kits and it was super easy to use. You just put the little cassette and turn it on, like in maybe three spaces in the house, and then the results came back very easy to read Is so it's definitely a great place to start after the education.

Speaker 2: 29:59

Yeah, after the education, I encourage people to consider the fact that your building is an extension of your immune system. Buildings that you live and work in Are extensions of your immune system. There are exoskins and exoskeletons and it's a one of the four basic human needs. Right, you know, you got air, water, food and shelter. And shelter and air are kind of two sides of the same coin, but we disproportionally we focus so much on food, which is a big deal, and it can be the source of illness or the source of health, but you only do that a few times a day and you can live without food for a very long time.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Water we're all more aware with every passing day that the quality of the water you drink is super important. But you can get away without drinking water for a while, but we're all everyone who's curious about health is a well aware that the water quality is important. Air is the thing that we do the most and, like most things that we're exposed to all the time, we take it for granted, right, and it's not the law familiarity, whatever, you get a long enough you take for granted. So can you think of anything that you're exposed to more than air?

Speaker 2: 30:56

No oh, that you take for granted. You know, if you do the math, between 13 and 15 breaths a minute comes out to 1,000 times a day. You breathe 20,000 times a day. The only thing you do more than that probably is your heart beats. But the the reality is is that in that 20,000 breaths You're often re breathing the same stuff over and over and over again. That's the danger of indoor air quality is that a small problem in your house is actually amplified by 20,000 exposures every day, and so that amounts to a huge exposure over time. And so that's the real issue when it comes to indoor quality.

Speaker 2: 31:29

But my philosophy around this is that the mold is not doing anything to harm us. It's just doing what it's supposed to do, which is bring stuff, turn it back into dirt. Right to take dead things and turn it back Into dirt. Yeah, it's doing that. It well if it's doing in your yard, but not if it's doing in your living room or your basement, and so establishing a relationship with your building where you realize the building is here to protect you. It actually has a birthday and a death, that you could look at it as an organism, as a birthday and a death day and the Longevity of the building is determined by how well you care for it. At the moment, where born were dying, same thing with the building, and I often think that the building doesn't have an immune system, but then it does. Actually, you are the building's immune system. In fact, in many ways we're like the mitochondria, we're the foreign DNA inside this building that's actually keeping stuff moving. But the building needs you as much as you need it, and there's a mutualism or a symbiosis, if you're willing to play with that idea. There's a relationship there that I encourage people to become more conscious of, because when the building develops aches and pains, you want to be the solution and you want to get to it quickly.

Speaker 2: 32:29

You got 24 to 48 hours after something gets wet before it becomes a mold risk, according to the EPA and according to the industry standard.

Speaker 2: 32:35

You've got 72 hours before something porous, absorptive that gets wet, gets moldy or should be treated as such, even if it's not visibly moldy. So the guidance on this stuff is hours and days. Meanwhile, people treat these moisture problems in their houses if it's no big deal and it's very expensive to do that. Water damage is cheap, to fix mold is very expensive, and so you know, when you get that message that musty smell Listen and recognize that the building is sending you a message, the same way your body does when it has pain, like inflammation. It's inflammation for the building and you're getting that message and then, if you don't deal with it, you end up with chronic inflammation in which we all know it's the zone disease. I could go on and on about just becoming more aware of what's going on in the building, because by doing that, when the building heals, so do the people inside the building. When the building is sick, so are the people.

Speaker 1: 33:23

So what are some of the conditions you've seen the mold effect when it comes to someone's health, and even talk about the different neurological Symptoms or diseases. Whatever you have seen, I mean it.

Speaker 2: 33:35

I can't think of anything that it hasn't. What one of the things that I think mold does is? It brings out latent issues that you already have. For example, for me, I'm sure if I were back in a moldy environment I would be allergic to many of those things again. So you know the typical upper respiratory. You know sinusitis Chronic sinusitis is actually the most prevalent long-term respiratory illness in America and affects 37 million Americans and according to the Mayo Clinic, it's mostly mold related. Most people who have sinusitis don't know that, but they should. Asthma is 24.6 million Americans, of which 4.6 million are mold and dampness related, according to EPA and Berkeley labs.

Speaker 2: 34:10

These are big numbers, you know. Those are the obvious ones. Then you get into the less obvious ones. We have multiple chemical sensitivities, or something that's now called tilt, where people become sensitive to fragrances and things like that. That's a common mold exposure issue. That's a byproduct of really chronic exposure. You also have all of the live disease. It's a great mimicker. A lot of people end up with Other diagnoses and you see people with really interesting Symptom profiles that once their environment gets straightened out, suddenly their symptoms go away. So the the entire gamut. There's a psychiatric facility that has about 500 new patients a month and they're considering prescribing our test kit to all of their new patients because they're finding inflammation in all of the cases of people who are coming in for non-relationship matters, and they are looking at the environment as a primary source of that information. So if you can imagine how many different illnesses are showing up at a psychiatric intake, you can look at mold as as a potential root cause or at least an aggravating component of what would be an example of that?

Speaker 2: 35:12

Mold rage is actually a thing. The emotional dysregulation is really common Cognitive impairment, brain fog, headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, the depression. My mom committed suicide and she was also an alcoholic, but she lived in a very moldy house, the house I moved out of. She stayed, and Over the years medical research has honed in on some interesting stuff. The dr Joan Bennett with Rutgers had her own house got flooded during her kink Katrina. She went down to investigate it. She wore an N95 respirator, which should have protected her from the mold spores and did, but she got sick anyway because she got exposed to the musty odor and she was so interested in that fact that she got sick, even though she was Weigh a respirator, that she began studying this and started testing fruit flies. They're genetically engineered to glow when they produce dopamine and she tested these chemicals on Food flies and they stopped producing dopamine, they stopped reproducing, they began flying downwards instead of the light and they also developed what she called Parkinsonian like symptoms. Those results have since been replicated by other researchers.

Speaker 1: 36:15

Just incredible.

Speaker 2: 36:16

Yeah, really incredible. And there were some stuff at Brown University too, where they looked at 6,000 homes a really significant study. They found a direct correlation between mold and dampness indoors and depression. And these compounds can do some real harm. And at the very least, what they do is, if it's not specific, they make you weak and it interrupts other normal processes. This is fun.

Speaker 2: 36:36

I does this on a benevolent basis in the forest, under the floor. It's just not supposed to do that to your house, in your system, and so it interrupts all these natural processes and again it makes you weak. And when you're weak, then Opportunistic and latent issues have a chance to surface, and that's what I consistently see. So it's the entire gamut of symptoms that you can possibly imagine. If you have five people in a moldy house, they often have five different symptom profiles. One of them has the most symptom, but oftentimes there are people saying they feel fine and then the mold gets corrected and suddenly the humble ones will say you know what? Now I'm actually sleeping through the night, now I'm not feeling so anxious, now I'm not blowing my nose four times a day, now I'm digesting properly. I had no idea that it was the mold. It's that diverse it really. I wish I could give you just a list, but it's the grand list of all symptoms. Really, it just depends on who you are and what kind of baggage you bring.

Speaker 1: 37:30

Well, maybe we can end on a positive note. Have you seen people heal once they discover they have mold and they address it? Have you seen any success stories?

Speaker 2: 37:41

tons and tons and tons, and so every single person has a different path. But what I can tell you is that in my own experience, my path was, first of all, eliminate exposure Right. So if you've got a mold problem, the best thing you can do is remediate it. Obviously, if you can't do that, then you should really get yourself some good air purifiers. If you need to buy time. I happen to be a big fan of metify air filters. They're the most affordable, high-quality filter that I've been able to find in recent years, and I don't get paid by them for that endorsement, but I'll be glad to. I really do.

Speaker 2: 38:12

I really do think that their stuff is great I've got one right here next to my desk but you need to first eliminate exposure or reduce exposure as much as you possibly can and take whatever actions you need to in order to do so. And then you also have to look at your diet. In most cases and a lot of people don't recognize that most mycotoxins are actually coming from food. So sugar and grains, anything processed. If you eliminate that stuff from your diet first of all, it will make you healthier anyway, but it also is where you're getting a lot of mycotoxins. We actually import food with the highest mycotoxin levels, more so than most other developed countries. We will accept sick food at our ports, whereas the EU won't. We really have a strange relationship with food here in America.

Speaker 2: 38:52

But the bottom line is is that oftentimes, to truly heal, you have to remove all of those exposures and you have to get to a diet where you're doing things that are less taxing overall on your immune system and then doing things to accelerate the detoxification. People talk about infrared sauna, any kind of sauna exercise. Obviously mindfulness is super powerful because a lot of this can be neurological I mean your nervous system, hyper vigilant. And then I've also seen a lot of people have a lot of success with DNRS, which is a dynamic neuro retraining system. Basically it's controlled exposures to things that set you off, and then you observe your responses to controlled adversity, if you will, and then you start to be able to respond instead of react. It's a less visceral thing, it's hard work, but I've seen tremendous healing from that.

Speaker 1: 39:39

Is that something they do themselves at home or in a doctor's office?

Speaker 2: 39:42

There's a course you can take and they are doing them in person. I believe now again, and my understanding is, that you can do them online. Most people don't do well if they do them online, because there's a tremendous amount of accountability that you get from being in a group, because you have to do the work, you have to take it. It's a couple hours a day if you do it right. And it's hard. It's hard doing that by yourself. So it's hard, especially if you're dealing with mold related illness, where you're just tired and you're not thinking right and you just want to turn on the freaking TV. That's what you're dealing with with mold sickness and, by the way, watching that TV in the same room, that's got a mold problem, probably right, and it's hard to get up and do these things when you're in that state. So going away and building a tribe of people who are on that path with you, who you can lean on and who can lean on you, seems to be a very important factor.

Speaker 1: 40:28

Well, I'm so glad there's help for people, that if they do find they have a mold issue they can turn to the things you mentioned and start to heal, and that there is hope for a healthy future.

Speaker 2: 40:40

There is, and let me leave you with this. The thing about indoor equality is that it's a relatively small investment to get it good, to get it right, and the dividends that get paid from that are huge and they're life giving. Truly, you could extend your life by taking care of the thing that you do 20,000 times a day. It's a common sense when you put it that way, right. But the penalties associated with not making that investment are just as plentiful, and so it's a true double-edged sword. I mean, it's one of those things where the investment has huge payoff and the lack of it has huge penalties. That's the thing to consider when you're looking at your budget, saying should I buy air filters or should we go on vacation? Everyone knows what I'm thinking. Right, invest in your air. It will invest in you. Healthy air is a nutrient, unhealthy air is a toxin. It's that binary. It really truly is.

Speaker 1: 41:31

That's a very good point to put your money to the area that's going to bring you the most healing, the better life, the greater happiness. It's tough in the short term when you're trying to scrounge up money maybe, like you said, burn air filters, something like that but in the long term it'll get you building momentum toward the best life that you can have.

Speaker 2: 41:51

That's right. It's a virtuous circle, and the more you do that, the more you'll get the energy and the more energy you have. The whole thing is it's a long-term gratification, but I assure you that it's worth it. We don't have a lot of control over many things in our life. We really don't. We want to, we wish we did, but we are frustrated by that. And this is an area where you have so much control and I feel like if you don't take advantage of that right, then you're squandering an opportunity.

Speaker 1: 42:18

Yeah, perfectly said. So I want people to know where they can find you. Maybe can restate your website or any resources that you want to put out there, and I'll also put them in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 42:29

Absolutely. Just to reiterate gotmoldcom slash open-minded healing is where you'll find the ebook and coupon code for the test kits. You can also just go to the homepage there at gotmoldcom and scroll to the bottom. If you've got questions that you'd like to direct towards me, I see all of them and so there's a little contact form there at the bottom. You can also, if you want we're just starting this or you can post questions to Facebook on our Facebook page, facebookcom slash gotmold, and we're also just getting started on Instagram, also at gotmold. Those are the best ways to get in touch and, of course, you can always just do the simple thing, which is send an email to questions At gotmoldcom, and I do see all of those.

Speaker 1: 43:09

Perfect. So I do want to say I'm very glad that you were someone at a young age that really tuned into your purpose and made a huge decision to leave a lucrative job on Wall Street and maybe tell people real quick you were how old when you started working at Wall Street.

Speaker 2: 43:28

It's a very interesting fact 16. I got my serious 7 when I was 17.

Speaker 1: 43:34

That's astounding. And also you were in the Guinness Book of World. Records.

Speaker 2: 43:40

Yeah, I didn't know it at the time, but that did make me the youngest licensed opera in history and there's a Guinness World Record on my wall here. Yeah, totally accidental, I was the least likely kid in my graduating class to end up on Wall Street, probably. I mean I failed Algebra I. It was just one of those fortuitous things. I got recruited out of the gas station after I dropped out of high school and it was a fairytale.

Speaker 1: 43:59

That's amazing. So you made a particular connection that led you in the direction of Wall Street and then actually made yourself successful there.

Speaker 2: 44:08

Yeah, I got recruited literally out of the gas station and he took me under his wing. Turns out he was managing director of a notorious firm. I got the door open and I took to it. Well, and then I did that for nine years. The last two years I owned my own firm. So it was a good path for me, but it was a very fixed period of time. It served its purpose.

Speaker 1: 44:26

And it's a testament to how much you truly want to help people that you would give up that career and throw yourself wholeheartedly into this career, Helping people realize if they have mold or not. But also you want them to live a healthy life as well.

Speaker 2: 44:40

I do. You know, when one person heals, the whole world heals.

Speaker 1: 44:43

And that is a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for being here, Jason.

Speaker 2: 44:49

Thank you for having me.