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Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential, and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices, to personalized interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show.

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Welcome back to the show. I'm Natalie Denham, your host. Today's guest has a pretty unusual resume, former Wall Street success story turned mold detective. Jason Earl comes back to challenge some of the biggest assumptions in the mold world, including why one test is rarely enough and how fear can sometimes send people down an expensive rabbit hole.

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We also explore the fascinating idea that our homes function almost like a third skin and what happens when that protective layer becomes compromised. It is a really enlightening episode. I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. Now, if you're interested in the Got Mold Tests kits, all you have to do to get yours is visit www.gotmold.com forward slash shop and use code NAT10 for 10% off a mold testing kit for your home.

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Next up, we'll thank two of the sponsors that make this show possible. And then we're off. The term longevity is everywhere these days. And I do talk about it a lot. But here's something that we don't discuss nearly enough. Healthy aging isn't just about adding years to your life.

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So here's the thing about this episode. So many people think that if they just run the right mold test, they'll finally get the answers. And my guest today, my repeat guest today, thank you so much for being here, Jason Earl, says that's exactly where people go wrong and it's costing them thousands of dollars every year and years on their health. So Jason, thank you again for being here. This is going to be an amazing conversation. Thank you.

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It is always a pleasure to share time with you. So let's start with our talking about when your house stops being the sanctuary that maybe that it needs to be for us, right? I mean, safety is one of our most core needs for everything in our world.

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But, you know, in your personal life, and we're going to go back a little bit into Jason's origin story. We'll put links to earlier podcasts in the show notes. But just for those of you who are new to the podcast, I don't want to send you away. And I do want to get you oriented around Jason and where he's coming from. So, Jason, when you look back, what do you feel mold really took away from your childhood before you even had any language for what was happening to you?

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Well, you know, pre-language, so this happened, really this all kind of came to a head for me when I was about four, so, you know, early language. Early. And, you know, it's back, that's a time when feelings are bigger than words.

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Um, and so if I were to rewind and go back to the time when I knew I was having a hard time breathing, um, and I remember starting to notice that certain areas of the house were more troubling for me. Um, even though I wanted to be in the basement cause it was a workshop and we had a lot of stuff, you know, there's spaces down there for me to play and I can make a mess and not get in trouble. It always felt heavy.

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And I would get fatigued and I would remember it coming up, I'd be itchy, hives, things like that. And no one really thought much about it. It was just kind of like Jason was allergic. I was very, what they call atopic, and I was very sensitive to allergens. In fact, I was allergic to every single thing they tested me for. So what happened was just in short, I suddenly had a hard time breathing and I lost a lot of weight in a three week period. My parents took me to the pediatrician who said,

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yeah, no, this is probably something to take him to the children's hospital for, you know, cause they had a big asthma clinic there still do. And, um, they looked at me and said, well, based on family history, um,

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It looks like he may have CF, you know, he may have cystic fibrosis. I was having a really hard time breathing. And six weeks later, they got a second opinion. And by the way, they waited. They cried for six weeks, as I'm told, because my dad lost four of his cousins to CF before the age of 14. So this is like exactly what they were. Wow. So they were looking for it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I showed up. Right. Because they didn't really have proper diagnostics for these things.

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And so they just said, yeah, look, you know, this is like telltale stuff. And and because it showed up on the family history, they were like, well, this is probably what it is. And that turns out evidenced by the fact that I turned 50 today, by the way. So I did not have CF, do not have CF. That was a death sentence back then. And I certainly wouldn't be here talking about it today if that were true.

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But what I did have was asthma compounded by pneumonia, and I was allergic to every single thing. So I lived on inhalers and became sort of, you know, I was really more outdoors. Even though I was allergic to a lot of the outdoor allergens, I spent most of my time outdoors in the woods and in the fields. I grew up on a little non-working farm surrounded by all these fields and stuff.

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And so it was a little bit of a little boy's dream. But I but I do remember the the the the weight and the heaviness. And I also remember the lack of awareness around other things that were causing me problems like my parents smoked. So did my grandparents. Everyone smoked and they didn't think anything about driving the car with the windows closed and an asthmatic in the backseat. You know, like there was just no awareness back then.

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And, you know, I asked my dad a few years ago, what were you thinking? And his answer was, we weren't. Yeah. Yeah, that would be the exact answer, right? Who was thinking of these things? That's just what we did.

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We weren't. And so I asked him if we thought we had mushroom back in the day, you know, when the awareness came to me. So the arc is this, I at four years old, suddenly had this problem and I lived on inhalers till I was about 12. My folks split up and I moved out of that musty farmhouse and all my symptoms went away.

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And it was completely dismissed as adolescent remission, spontaneous adolescent remission, a fancy term for, we have no idea what the hell happened there. And, um, and so, uh, I didn't really, didn't think about it again. My grandfather grew up, his asthma. And then through a series of crazy circumstances, my mom died suddenly when I was almost 14, uh, to suicide, which is something we could unpack if you ever wanted to do that. Cause that's a really interesting comment. We've talked about that in previous episodes.

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We talked about it in the first – I think we did. I think you tie it back to that home. I think you tie it back to the severe health challenge that living in that moldy environment for so long presented and how it expressed differently in different people.

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And we now know that psychiatric afflictions have a strong inflammatory component. They find the same inflammatory markers in people with depression and anxiety that they do with people with mold-related illness. And so there's a lot of overlap here. And so you can't really pin the tail on a donkey completely, but you can certainly say it didn't help. And so I believe these things are all cumulative and compounding.

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And so anyway, long story short, I also got diagnosed with Lyme disease a year later. So I missed a ton of school. They forced me to drop out. I took full-time hours at the gas station. I met a guy there who rescued me as he recruited me to go work on Wall Street as a completely unqualified person. You're like a movie, man. That's that. What's his name? Who did a movie like that?

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Well, there's a few. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's a happiness. Yeah. Yeah. No. And it's it's that story, really. In fact, I'm connected with him on LinkedIn, that the actual gardener, I forget his first name.

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Um, what a, what a wonderful story, but it's very, very similar. And, uh, and I ended up, uh, unknowingly become the youngest licensed top worker in history. I have a Guinness world record right there for that. Um, totally accidental fairy tale kind of thing. Did that for nine years on my own firm for two years. Uh, dot com bubble burst. I decided I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. Uh, went, uh,

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backpacking around. I quit a month before September 11th, so I had to stay close by. Ended up in Hawaii, read a story about a local who worked in the Hilton Clea Tower, which is the big flagship property in Oahu. He had developed adult-onset asthma at 40 years old and all these allergies that he'd never had before. He blamed it on the mold in the building. I was like, wait, whoa, okay. I had that.

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I had my life in reverse here. Right. Um, by the way, I'm no longer allergic to anything. Right. I haven't had to use an inhaler since I moved out of that house. Like this is pretty definitive. And, uh, so I called my dad from a pay phone, uh, and asked him if we thought we had mold and he laughed at me and he goes, of course we had mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? We weren't even growing them. Unintentionally we were just propagating mushrooms. And, uh, and so, uh, I said, well, do you think that's what made me sick? And he's like, well, I couldn't help.

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And so that was a typical 70s parent response and he was right. And so, but in retrospect, I think it was the fulcrum. It was the lever and it was also, it turns out, the greatest gift I was ever given, or at least one of them is in the top three greatest gifts because I then became obsessed in that moment, standing in Hawaii, became obsessed with the idea that the buildings we live and work in can make you sick.

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And that in and of itself was a big idea 25 years ago. We had sick building syndromes, but it was so nonspecific. Here we have a very specific thing that's a biological organism that cohabitates with us on planet Earth. It's been here since before us, that will be here long after we're gone. That is found a way to live in our buildings and adversely affect us. And we did it. In other words, we created this environment. It wasn't like this 100 years ago. And I became obsessed with why.

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What is it about our buildings now that's different? What is it about the way we operate within our buildings that's different? So it's not just mold, right? This conversation mold is a gateway drug to much larger thinking, right? Like we have to start thinking about what is the purpose of a building, right? It's to shed wind and water and protect us from the elements. Also,

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to give us a safe place for our children to grow. And also it's really more and more, I think about it as an extension of your immune system, an exoskin or an exoskeleton. And it is so close to us, much like water is with fish, that we take it for granted. Air is our water, right? And the buildings are that next layer. You know, building biologists actually talk about the building as a third skin.

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I like that. Yeah. You know, we have our dermis and then we have clothing, which of course it has a huge impact. If you're wearing plastics and rubber, all that stuff, which many of us are, you know, that has an impact. And then of course, you know, the building itself is this one is the third skin that's hiding in plain sight. And when a building gets sick, which buildings do, they develop aches and pains. They, you know, buildings, think about a building as an organism, really, because it's an inanimate organism, but it is housing a microbiome, you know.

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we've got a microbiome in us, on us, and around us. And there's like Matryoshka dolls, right? These things stack up. And when there's a disruption in any of them, it will flow downward mostly. So when the building's microbiome gets disrupted, which of course is what moisture does, it flows down. You'll see people, by the way, that have fungal buildings tend to have more fungal problems in their body.

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on them and in them too, right? You see more athletes, but more science, more fungal sinusitis, more athletes, more yeasts and, and, you know, things like that. So there is a correlation. Microbes are sending signals that the musty smell and the mycotoxins, people talking about those poisons, they're actually little chemical signals that are communicating to the other microbes in us, on us and around us. And so, so, so if things are imbalanced, you're part of that, man, we are microbial.

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And so zooming out and recognizing how our relationship with buildings became a really big focus of mine, rather, for me for a very, very long time. Now 25 years, which is kind of hard. Half my life officially as of today.

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That's, yeah, yes. Well, yes. Happy birthday. Today is Jason's 50th birthday. That's so interesting as you're speaking in that, is it possible that it's our approach to, it's the way that we view our homes that's led us astray in the sense that we try to keep the outside out when we build homes, right?

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it leads us to the very problems that we're trying to escape because moisture is a reality. It's, you can't get away from it. Water is everywhere. We have bathrooms, we have laundry, we have all the different things in our home and the more impermeable that home is the more likely the, you know, the less amount of air exchange you allow, the more likely you are to end up in a situation where you've guess what? Yeah. You've locked everything out, but you've also locked everything in. Yeah.

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Totally. And this is a cumulative thing and it's a death by a thousand cuts and it's also layers and layers of accumulation. If you think about the way – there's so many fascinating metaphors that play all the way through here. But there's also parallels. So if you think about the way modern medicine is, when we have an affliction of some sort, we're told to add something.

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Right. A pill, a potion, a powder, a protocol, whatever it is. Right. And what we now know, if you've been in this space for a while or if you've had your own health issues, you find actually that the real healing comes not from addition of something, but usually the subtraction of something.

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Yeah. And maybe there'll be an addition, but there has to be a subtraction. Something brought this on. Like this is the thing, right? Some input is allowing for this. That's right. So there's a philosophy that I refer to as via negativa, which is improvement through subtraction. Okay. And so, or some people say addition through subtraction.

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You know, so I think which is more poetic, but probably not necessarily as accurate. So but so let's say let's say improvement through subtraction. So so we have this problem with buildings, too, where we you know, we used to build buildings that were built to last with stone, concrete, old growth, timber, brick, plaster. None of these materials support fungal growth easily. Yeah.

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They all get wet and dry out by their own volition, right? They are low by definition in chemicals. And so therefore don't off gas the noxious stuff into our buildings. Are they hard to heat and cool? For sure. But when water gets into the walls...

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it dries, right? And that's the old buildings. By the way, you live in Canada, I live in Minnesota, man. You know, I don't understand how people lived without insulation walls up like 100 years ago, it's like a new phenomenon, right? I can't get my mind around it still. And so when you start thinking about the difficulties, the creature comforts, and then what we did was we started adding insulation to the walls, well, that creates a moisture trap, we started saying, well, now the energy bills went through the roof during the 60s and 70s. And so man, we got to tighten this up for energy.

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Comfort, energy, comfort, energy, right? And then what the byproduct of that is, of course, and cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, which means that chemical, chemical, chemical, because if it's gonna dry fast, it's gonna cure fast, that means stuff has to evaporate from it, which means VOCs, right? VOCs, volatile organic compounds, come from building materials because that's how they make them fast. They evaporate out and they dry in your house, right? They are literally curing in your living space. If you smell that smell, that new house smell, that new car smell, same thing,

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Um, that is essentially the product still curing in your building. Okay. So, um, this is, this is not good stuff. So anyway, we've added, added, added, added, added. And then in the interest of energy and comfort, and then what we've caused is a health problem.

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And also what we've done is we've tightened up, as you said, this, this, think about our, our building, almost like a cell, a human cell, right? We know the cellular membrane has to be porous, right? We know that it has to communicate with its neighbors, right? We know that it has to be able to release toxins. It has to be able to allow nutrients in. It has to do all this stuff, right? And when we start closing this thing up really tightly, like our cell, well, if the cell closes up,

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Anybody who wants to go down a rabbit hole, look up cell danger response. This is a really popular subject right now, and it should be, which is where our cells suddenly close down because the mitochondria detect a threat. That threat can come in many forms. It's not just a toxin, any sort of perceived threat. And it says, I can't make energy right now. I got to batten down the hatches.

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I got to close things up. That's how that's the beginning of the end for many people. Right. You begin experiencing fatigue. And if that continues, you start talking about Zack Bush talks about that as the genesis of cancer. And so this is really a fundamental. By the way, this also plays down to our function. That also plays through as a metaphor for how we operate as communities with our neighbors as well. The moment we stop communicating,

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The moment we stop battening down the hatches and stop participating in community, it becomes cancer. Right. That's what Jack Bush said. Zach Bush says. And I'm 100 percent with him on that. Right. A hundred percent. So so so we have essentially said we know better.

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We're going to get this stuff out of here, all this nature stuff. We're going to put rubber on the bottom of our shoes. We're going to seal everything up. We're going to over sanitize. We're going to kill all the microbes because bacteria is a bad word. And then we see these huge, since the advent, 1947, right? End of World War II, all fast, cheap construction. And then we end up in the 70s with the 60s, 70s, the oil crisis, tightening things up, tracks directly with 100 new autoimmune diseases.

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Right. And we spend... Huge spikes in asthma and allergies, right? Yeah. Cancers. All that subtracts directly with the advent of fast, cheap housing.

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Yeah. I also think simultaneously we spend more and more, because you said something earlier about your childhood that you spent a lot of time outside, which probably to some degree probably helped and mitigated some of the damage that the house could do to you. At the same time, we are, we have been spending more and more and more time inside of these boxes, right? So you have all these things converging and creating a bigger problem. So yeah,

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I want to, you know, I want to move into something a little like, you know, when you walk into a home, what are the earliest clues to tell you that this is bigger than a little water spot on a wall or a ceiling or that it's just that there's a bigger issue at hand? What are the clues that you pick up on?

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Well, I think it's always a combination of things. I also, after having done this as long as I have, can't in good conscience talk about mold without talking about chemicals and VOCs because I see, first of all, they cross-sensitize. So people who experience big chemical exposures tend to be mold sensitive. People who have big mold exposures tend to be chemically sensitive because the chemical constituents of mold –

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that are bioactive and that actually are consistent amongst all kinds of mold problems is the musty odor, the chemicals that produce that. They're very easily airborne. They're gashed, gas phase. They disperse evenly through buildings. They also permeate walls, whereas the spores and the mycotoxins and things like that don't.

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which turns on its head this entire conversation, which we've talked about previously about mycotoxins, the operative mechanism, mycotoxin exposure being the operative mechanism of mold related illness. I say that quickly because I say it so many times. Mycotoxins are not the primary mechanism of mold related illness. So anyway, so this overlap, this gaseous overlap is a really big deal. So when I walk into a home,

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my nose is primary. Okay. Um, and, and, and my background before, you know, we, we didn't kind of get into after I pay phone, we, we kind of stopped there, but I pioneered these mold sniffing dogs. So scent is, you know, the nose nose. And so most people who live in a building can't smell it anymore until they go away for a little while, then they come back, but also they become familiar. You become a nerd to it. Um,

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And in many cases, actually, the musty smell can actually become sort of nostalgic, even like appealing grandma's basement, the vacation home we used to go to, right? There's a weird sort of positive Pavlovian association that some people actually develop with this. And I can relate to that because I actually really think back to my childhood fondly. It's much as my aunts and uncles try to tell me I had a lousy childhood. I look back quite fondly. So I have a weird sort of contradictory association to it as well, although I know better now consciously.

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And my immune system responds that way too. So anyway, I walk in and I, I spent a lot of time talking to people about their health. What brought me here? Why am I here today? Why are you spending several thousand dollars to have me come today? Right. And when you, when I get the symptom profiles and I got an odor,

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not specific or nonspecific, it's game on, right? Now we've got ourselves a disease incubator, you know? And that's what a building that's super tight that's got a moisture problem and or a chemical problem. And by the way, they all do unless they were specifically designed with the material specced out to not have that. So we are living in a epidemic, pervasive epidemic of disease

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Mold friendly homes that are slathered with toxic chemicals. To me, if you wanna talk about public health burden, if you wanna talk about reducing healthcare costs, this is number one, well over food, way over food. Well, the paradox is that those houses look good.

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You know what I mean? Like they're not the old decrepit house. It's the brand shiny spanking new home that, you know, in the brand new home, most likely it's the VOCs that are a bigger issue than mold. Unless God forbid there was some kind of water event during construction that somebody just slapped a bandaid on. But it's, it's really the, it's, it's the new homes. It's the, it's the homes that you don't suspect because, you know,

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Kind of like sheep and wolves clothing, not necessarily the old cabin in the woods that, to your point, is natural materials. It's breathing. It's not insulated. It's more able to adapt to the environment without harboring these organisms.

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Yeah, it's really it's it's crazy how we've done this thing where the irony is that most people say, well, I've got a new home. I probably don't have this problem. And actually, it's quite opposite. And also a lot of these new homes are being built in a way where they're they're using materials that are left out in the elements. If you drive past a lumber yard.

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ever. I've wondered about that. Yeah. No, I've wondered about that. Like if you're using lumber that's been rained on, is there, is there anything written in the manual of how you build a house that says, well, you got to make sure that wood has dried out before you seal it into the walls? Because if you don't, would you not end up with some kind of a moisture? Again, it's not that it's going to mold, but you've now got moisture that's going to mold.

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And you've got all this insulating material locking it in. Yeah. And you also, a lot of times, the wood come, they'll throw a tarp on it on site. And that gets really funky under the tarp, you know. And then they quickly put everything up. And, you know, they're under timeframes. They're always late, right? Every contractor is behind schedule. And so they get it up and they get a sunny day. And they're like, man, you got to close this up.

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you know, and they're supposed to use a moisture meter and probe, but you know what? These guys are going to probe where they get the lowest reading and they're, they're going to stay on. They got to stay on. It's not that big of a deal. It's going to be in the walls, but you know, once that, once that's propagated on the walls, then what happens is with mold, what's interesting is that it won't grow unless the condition, it won't begin to grow, you know, where the spore germinates, if you will, kind of like a seed and then begins to weave in the roots, what are called hyphae into the material and begins to digest, right? That,

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You have to have very specific circumstances for that to happen. The right temperature, the right moisture amount, the right nutrients, all this stuff is kind of like a combination lock. Suddenly, all those biological processes unfold. Whereas once it's growing already and you already have the colony in place and there's a mycelium beginning to form, it doesn't take liquid water. It just takes humidity.

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And so now you can have this stuff growing in your walls quite nicely on a low level. Lots of square footage of it.

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Just slowly, every time you turn on your dryer vent, your clothes dryer, you negatively pressurize your house slightly and things come in through the electrical outlets. So you end up with this very slow infiltration that happens every time you put on your kitchen exhaust. You use those events. I'm telling you, use the vents. But-

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In buildings where there's a problem in the walls because the building was built in the weather, as almost all houses that are not prefabricated are, you will see Pacific Northwest, you know, these places where there's a lot of rainy days, they have a lot of these problems.

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And then they're also, you know, also then again, slathering it, you know, putting in materials that have formaldehyde and all sorts of noxious chemicals. And so, you know, you just add it up and we don't stand a chance in this environment, you know. And so, you know, air purifiers are great. Ventilation is great. But the best thing you can do is stop is avoid having that stuff in your house in the first place. And oftentimes it's just too late. You know, these we have been sold a bill of goods in terms of the way our buildings are supposed to.

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Instead of focusing on the way they behave and how they support us, we focus on where it's located for the school district and stuff like that, which is great, what it looks like, and how much it's worth.

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Yeah. And the only number we usually know the numbers is the number that's on our door and what the thermostat is set to. Yeah. And that's – we've limited ourselves so much so that we don't really – we don't take the time to get to know, to have a relationship with this thing that literally its entire job is to protect us. And our job is to protect it.

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Because it's a mutual, it's a symbiotic relationship. It really is. You take care of the building, it takes care of you. If you don't, you will be harmed by that in time. And so that's my sort of call to arms is get to know your building. You know, like the Brits name their buildings. They name the houses and, you know, people name their boats. I suggest people consider it the same thing. Get personal with it. There's nothing more personal than your home.

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Well, so that's a beautiful segue to this next section, which is the dangerous seduction of the single answer. So one of your USPs, Jason Earl, is that no one test is actionable on its own. And you get a lot of heat for this because people are very attached to their tests. And people are very drawn to this promise that just one number, one species or one report is going to be the final answer. So...

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What does a truly intelligent mold assessment look like when you're refusing to oversimplify it? A lot like a physical in a doctor's office.

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Nice. Okay. Right. In fact, I really do think that the metaphor for the building as a body or as an organism allows for this to play through all the way, right? Buildings have a, you know, the bones are the studs and the fat is the insulation and the siding is like the dermis. In fact, if you look at a cross section, it looks a lot like skin, you know, you got the thin.

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the sheeting and the builder's paper and the siding. It looks a lot like dermis, right? And then, you know, you've got the HVAC system, lungs or respiratory system, and the nervous system is the electrical system and the plumbing is the circulatory. You know, you get all the way, right? I had no idea. We need to give you a name. Right. I mean, seriously, like, hey, we're, hey, I had no idea that you've got all these systems and they all operate perfectly. I mean, by definition, organism is a system of organs. Yes.

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Yeah. Right. And so and I would further define it as a system of life sustaining systems. And so so here we have a system of life sustaining systems that does not survive if you don't take care of it. That means to me it's alive. In fact, birthday buildings have a birthday birthday.

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And potentially a death day. And its longevity is largely driven by how well you care for it. We are living in a living building, right? This is a living entity, if you will. And so the way I like to look at it is the building starts to develop aches and pains. You know, water gets in. It manifests as a moisture problem. The moisture problem manifests as mold. You get a pain signal. That's the musty smell. It's a signal. It's a signal.

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it's telling you something's wrong. If you ignore a pain signal, it becomes chronic pain or chronic inflammation rather. Chronic inflammation is its own disease. Then you start talking about cancer in the building as a metaphor, right? And you start looking at this, the whole metaphor plays all the way through. So now you got a problem. You wanna hire someone to check this out. Well, you can do a DIY, you know, we sell an at home kit, right? But if you wanna do a DIY, you're never gonna get like a lipid panel. You're concerned about your cardiovascular health. You get into lipid panel, you're not diagnosing your heart disease from that.

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You're certainly not going to schedule an appointment with your cardiologist to have a stent put in because you've got high cholesterol or something like that. The first thing you can do is you're going to go to the doctor and the doctor is going to say,

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Let's talk about your history. Let's talk about your symptoms. Let's talk about your lifestyle. Let's talk about what other tests you've done. Let's talk about your other medical records, right? This is the way a proper mold inspection is done or a proper environmental assessment is done. Let's talk about the building history, leaks, floods, water damage, odors. Does anyone else who visits you ever complain? That's a great question, right? Because not a lot of people get numb to it. And then, so then I'll have them give me a tour of their home.

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And show me the areas that you're concerned about inside. We've been outside and then we go inside. And so this is a physical. This is like a physical, but for your home. We're going to look at every part of the building. And then at the end of that physical, we're going to say, you know, based upon your history, your complaints.

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treatments you've already gone through, the concerns that I've found, let's do these tests. Notice the testing comes after the inspection. It is not the inspection. It does not replace it. You would never walk into a doctor's office and they go, all right, cat scan, blood test, you know, we're going to run you through all these tests. And then, by the way, what's wrong?

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Well, I mean, I think in the conventional system, one of the big criticisms is that, right? That there's not enough time spent really talking to the person or really exploring the whole ecosystem, whether it's a human or a home.

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And too much time focusing on one thing, which leads to the next question, which is, why do you believe that ERMI can create either false confidence or false panic? Because that's where a lot of people run. They just run to the ERMI test. So where do you see it? Either lulling people into a false sense of security or sending them down a panic-ridden path where they're going to get...

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You know, poorer, a lot more poor, a lot more poorer and a lot and no healthier and more confused. You know, like I think of all the things that people really want when it comes to mold testing inspections. I think about this a lot. You know, like what do people really want? They want two things. They want clarity. Number one.

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Clarity. What is it? What's going on? Do I have a problem? Do I need to take action? What action is necessary? Is this causing the harm in my family? Is this, you know, I don't clarity. I just want clarity. And then ultimately they want peace. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But the clarity is the step is the first part. Ernie gives a, and all the tests that are sold by the recommending professional.

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whether it be the Petri dishes. Yeah, which I'd love you to talk about as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same. So these are tests. If you want to call them tests, I would call them science fair experiments. This proves that spores are ubiquitous. The Petri dishes in particular are always positive. And if they're not, you may actually have the opposite problem. You may actually have an environment that's too sanitized. There are two kinds of building problems. One that has too many microbes

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too much growth, you got a moisture problem, you got a fungal ecology disruption, right, caused by a moisture problem. It could be active, it could be dormant, it could be visible, it could be non-visible, but that's one side of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is where a lot of people run to, which is I'm going to make my house completely mold-free, no bacteria, nothing, right, no microbes, I'm going to HEPA vacuum obsessively, I'm going to fog

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I'm going to use essential oils because I think that's going to do something. It doesn't, by the way. I'm going to use, I'm going to, I'm going to sanitize everything. I'm going to spray, I'm going to use bleach. I'm going to everything. Those homes actually have much higher cases of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disease. We've talked about this quite a bit.

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And so these are two opposite ends of the spectrum. And as with most things, there's a middle way, right? I mean, this is like ancient philosophy, the middle way, right? So the middle way is we want lots of microbes in our house, just none growing. So that means no moisture problems, right? And so when you have a test like a Petri dish, there's no reference to...

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And same thing with Ermey, there's no outdoor reference. What we want our indoor environment to look like on a microbial level is very similar to outside.

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So think about this. Molds are doing their job if they're taking leaves and twigs and stuff and turning them back into dirt. Not so much if it's doing that in your living room, right? Right. The microbes that are doing their work out there are what we're used to. We walk outside. You take a walk in the woods. You're getting all these little chemical signals or these little biological signals from the spores and all this stuff that's coming in. And you're getting all these little messages. And your immune system is being told to you this is what's normal. Right.

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As soon as you get into an environment where, and by the way, it's constantly changing, it's, it's, it's shifting all over the place. When you're, when you, when you look at the indoor environment, it should look a lot like the outdoor environment in terms of the types of molds and the kinds of concentrations, the diversity. When we look for molds indoors, what we're looking for is it, is it Delta between those two? We're looking for a higher concentration of specific organisms, not specific types. I don't really care so much about which ones, but if I see a concentration of,

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that means that there's something growing, likely growing in the sources in the call is coming from inside the house. You know, it's like dial in for murder. Right. So, so it's, it's the same kind of thing. So the Petri dishes do not calibrate it for that. So there's no outdoor. And plus they always grow really, they, they grow the fast growing molds only.

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So they're kind of like they're the weeds. So the really slow growing molds are the ones that most people worry about, stachybotrys and ketomium and all that kind of stuff. Those will not grow in those petri dishes. They don't they don't eat malt extract. That's too sweet. They'll eat cellulose. So in the lab, they only grow those on a different kind of agar. Those tests are completely junk science. I mean, completely 110 percent. There's no value. And in fact, anybody who wants to disprove this, go look up how many species are found

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in a Petri dish versus next generation sequencing, which is genetic sequencing. We lose 80% of the species in a dish. Wow, wow. 80%. So if you think you're going to get anything out of that, what I'm telling you is that you're growing weeds, the weeds of mold, and they'll grow anywhere. You can put a piece of white bread, wet white bread on your counter in a plastic bag for three days and you'll get the same result. It tells you nothing.

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That's petri dish. Don't just don't bother. Okay. They don't even use them in the lab anymore because DNA sequencing has proven that they are completely worthless. Wow. And what about Erme? So Erme is developed 20, it was 24 years ago, roughly by a couple of EPA staffers. And it was based on, it was designed to test or to, to study the relationship between moldiness in homes and asthma.

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And so they initially did this study in Ohio with 17 homes. It's been talked, there's a lot of confusion around this. There were 17 homes in Ohio where they collected samples and they ran them through sequencing. And they identified that there were about 80 something moles that they thought were relevant. And they paired it down to 36.

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for reasons that are still unclear to most people in this space. And so probably because of cost, because PCR was expensive back then. So they came up with this little panel, 26 for indoor molds and 10 for outdoor backgrounds. And so they created this interesting test. And then they ran it from the 17 homes. They then took it out and they did it in 1096 homes. And this is where most people think about Hermia is a thousand homes.

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with the 17 mold with the, from, from the data from 17 homes in, in Ohio. So not exactly a geographically diverse data set. So you're talking about the normal fungal ecology of the country based upon 17 homes in Ohio. That's insane. Okay. Like how does that can relate to Portland or like a, a damp place or somebody by the beach or someone in the desert? Like it's a completely, you have all these different ecosystems.

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Or Manhattan Skyrise. Or that. And that. Or Highrise, rather. You know, you're not going to get the same flora. You're not going to get the same diversity. You're not going to get any of that stuff. And so it got hijacked, really, by Richie Schumacher.

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Um, who, you know, uh, was doing some interesting DNA work. He's a, you know, prominent early researcher, very troubled. Um, not, I, I, he's done some good work, but you know, baby, you know, like there's a lot, you have to pick and choose with Richie's work, honestly. But what he did was he, he then took Ernie and said, you know, Hey, listen, let's see if we can find a way to correlate these things. And then they changed it to hurts me too. So 36 species wasn't good enough. So he made it five. Yeah.

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You know, like you got more narrow instead of broader. And what we know now is my first test I ever created was an ERMI-based test. And I ended up with a lot of data. And I saw quickly that they're all high. And I always had that notion because when I was still going into the field, I did thousands of inspections with Oreo. And we got calls constantly.

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constantly about Ermey. We had a high Ermey score, but we can't find the mold. We would go in with mold-suffling dogs and thermal imaging cameras and a lot of experience and time we charged enough to take time. Most inspections took a day.

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Yeah. And I was able to correlate the ERMI scores with less than 10% of actual conditions. So what that means is people were freaking out, selling their houses, moving out, doing detoxes, throwing all their stuff out, getting their houses torn apart, looking for the source. And we went in oftentimes and said,

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you may have health issues and you may be sensitive to mold, but you don't have a mold problem that, that is a 30 on an ERMI score, which is like move out, you know? Yeah. And it was all based on, you know, Hey, old house windows are open. We don't use air conditioning much spores flow in and they settle out. That's called gravity. It's really reliable. Yeah. So, so we, we found that it was extremely problematic such that I became very outspoken against ERMI, even though I made a lot of money selling ERMI.

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And I no longer sell it. And so I went on a mission to and I also talked to all the labs, by the way, I wrote an article about this, which I which we should include in the show notes. And and I and I wrote an article with in collaboration with two prominent scientists who work at two prominent labs who sell a lot of armies and didn't want their name on it.

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Um, but I published the article. Um, and the reason that they didn't want their name on it is because they derive a huge amount of revenue from it and there's no reliable replacement. This is what I heard. And I was like, holy crap, this needs to be fixed. Um, and I might be, you know, qualified to do this. So, um, so I, I basically, uh, worked with, uh,

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the top two researchers in the, in the country, Dr. Richard Shaughnessy and Dr. Jordan Pescia, um, Pescia at Yale, uh, and, and Shaughnessy is at the University of Tulsa. They, they had a HUD grant that they, they, uh, um, that they were, uh, given specifically because of the problems with Ermey, believe it or not. Um,

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to deal with this. And they, over the last 10 years, collected samples from hundreds of homes throughout the country, had them all sequenced using next generation sequencing, which is the same stuff used for poop tests, right? Not PCR, which is 25 year old genomics, which is ancient, which is like stone age in genomics. Now it really is. I mean, it's crazy. If you look at the chart, I was thinking about this in the shower today. If you look at the chart of what it cost to sequence 25 years ago to where it is now,

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I mean, it's like, right, it's a cliff. And the awareness around mold has done the exact opposite. And that's the nexus of these two. The cost of sequencing and the awareness about it is right where we are. And so it's a super exciting time because now we can, for the same price as a PCR for 36 species, we can look at the entire fungal ecosystem.

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400,000 taxa, okay? That's not quite species, but it's 400,000 types. Yeah. The same price. And then it's run through, we take the genetic data from the dust samples, we collect them from above the doors.

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And the way it worked with the research is they took these homes. They knew 50 of them were really moldy and they knew 50 were not. And they told the AI, these are moldy and these are not. And then they afterwards started feeding in samples that they knew were moldy or not, but they didn't tell the AI. And the AI was 100% right on the non-moldy houses in the first go-round. And it was 90% accurate on the moldy houses on the first go-round. The database is now 700 plus homes. We also just got a big data set coming in from Australia. I was down there for six months last year.

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So, uh, so we partnered with the number one guy down there. He's got the amazing inspection company. So we're now, we're now defining the normal fungal ecology, uh, globally, um, which is really wild. And so we're, we're able to, um, with the same for, for, you know, grab a few samples from above these doors and we can tell you whether you have a normal fungal ecology or whether it's disrupted and to what degree it's disrupted. Um, and so, yeah, this is what the gut mold test. Sorry. Sorry.

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No, so the Gottmold test, we have, so by the way, let me back up. You talk about one test being the most, the, the, the, not, not one test, not being actionable. I always say there's no silver bullet. Our Gottmold test, the one that we have out right now is an air test that uses spore traps. This is often misunderstood. There are two things that are misunderstood. Number one is that because we sell a test, we sell one test, that we sell the test.

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There is no the test. Testing is multifactorial. Just like I didn't even say the first thing I do when I walk into a house is figure out where I'm going to test. I figure out if we need to test. And then I figure out where to test based upon symptoms, observations, odors, complaints, things like that.

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Spore traps are really useful, but they don't find mold in walls and they don't tell you much about the building history. Right. They don't tell you much about whether there's a fungal load in the building. They tell you what's in the air at the time that you're that you're there. Most accessible. It was the it was the it was the biggest problem that we could solve.

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But it wasn't solving all the problems. And so the only way for us to really solve the problem is to create a multifactorial approach that's accessible to the consumer. And so, yeah, we're a little company. So we build things as we can and as the technologies become available. But now this will eliminate that one misunderstanding or this implied problem.

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uh, brand representation, which is that we make the test. No, we make a test. We make a better test, uh, for air sampling because it's accessible and you don't have to spend a thousand bucks or 2000 bucks to have somebody come over, but it doesn't tell you all the things you need to know. Whereas the new test I'm talking about is, is the ERMI killer and it's a dust test. So we collect little dust samples from low specific locations in the home, submit them to

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the genetics lab. And then, and then it runs through this AI machine learning algorithm that Yale developed. We have a global exclusive on this and we're launching it in July. In fact, we'll put a link in the show notes for this. This is, this is all the labs, all the big labs want this now to get rid of Ermey. So this potentially could make Ermey go away and it should because it's the same price. Yeah. And it's 400,000 taxes versus 36. Yeah.

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And so the dust test is not, it's test, it's looking at, I guess it's going on the premise that your dust carries all these different organisms. And so that's why you're testing the dust. You're not saying you have a dusty house, pull out the feather duster. What you're saying is bring me your dust and let me see what you're dealing with.

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Your dust is a forensic accumulation of your building history. That's so cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really interesting. It's fascinating and it's really effective. And it's not a perfect, there's no silver bullet, right? I mean, so like, for example, if you remediate the house and you clean it,

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remove all that dust well then you know doing another dust sample in a month isn't going to be very useful so we're talking about you know maybe in three months or six months you could potentially go back and sample again and you can start getting some meaningful data out of that it's not something you do on a regular basis whereas you could cause sport traps all day long and kind of see hey what's what's happening here outdoor versus indoor you can see where the outdoor infiltrates indoors or you can you know they're that's a constant that's like weather sport traps measure air like weather

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Right. Whereas, whereas this measures things more on a forensic historical, the dust is more of a forensic historical. Here's one of those inconvenient facts. It doesn't matter if you're consuming 50 grams of protein or 500 grams of protein. If your protein digestion is incomplete, your muscles will be starving for those building blocks and they are vital. This is why it's crucial that you take a high quality digestive enzyme.

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Use the link, use the code. That's it. So if you were already thinking about trying it out, this is your sign. Go over to bioptimizers.com forward slash Bionat and use code Bionat and grab it before it's gone. So let me ask you this. When someone has symptoms...

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the house is a bit sus. We have suspicions, but the test results come back mixed. Like, how do you think through that without collapsing into some kind of throwing darts at the wall? Like, I mean, do you think, do you think the dust test starts to shed light there and in maybe the combination of mold and dust testing? Like, like, you know, I guess, you know, a lot of these symptoms are insidious. They could be so many different things. And they often are, right? Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. It's never really one thing. How do you decide it's the building? Because to me, to believe that your home is making you sick because your home is sick based on our conversation.

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That is, that's a nervous system. That's a hit to your nervous system, man. Like this is telling you that you are not safe in the one place in the world where you're supposed to be safe. Like, what are you supposed to do? Move into your car? Like that's stressful, right? And I'm not one who's willing to run out of my house into another home, like even an Airbnb, because God only knows, like you could become pretty freaking dysfunctional about stuff like this. Like how do you...

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Huh? I'm sure it does. And I've seen it. I've seen people in the biohacking and functional medicine space, like tear their houses apart or run away to another place. And then they land there and then, oh my God, no, this one's moldy too. And then they're running somewhere else. And it's, this is, this can be so insanely disruptive to your life. Like, how do we help people?

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gain some balance here? Because, you know, like what we've been talking about, we could create a lot of distress in the world. So how do we help people to kind of...

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be calm about this. And how do we know when it is our home? And, and I mean, there's the obvious stuff, right? There's the window air conditioning unit. That's disgusting. It's been there for 50 years and it's kind of black and gross. We've all walked into hotel rooms like that. Fortunately, fewer of them now than before, but still like, how do we help people get some balance here?

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There's a few things. I think people, first of all, and it is very much a nervous system issue.

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This has become more and more front and center in the discussions that I have about this, because there's a misunderstanding about the fact that there's four, they've commonly discussed four pathways for mold exposure or mold-related illness. It's allergic, inflammatory, toxicity, and then infection, right? And so infection is kind of rare, and people misunderstand it. That's insane, yeah.

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Yeah, I think people think it's happening in their gut. You're not colonizing in your gut. I hate to tell you, if you think your gut mold is growing in your gut, you need a new practitioner because environmental molds are obligate aerobics. Let me be very clear. That means that they require oxygen. You do not have enough oxygen in your gut for environmental molds to grow. If you see aspergillus and stuff like that in your oats panels and all that stuff, that's carryover effect from food. So just that's.

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That's food. Okay. That's food. And you may have some, you could potentially have some, some, some by-product from inhalation, believe it or not. I mean, if you're, but, but it's unlike you're not, you're not colonizing in your gut. And if you do have Aspergillus infections in your, in your body, it seemed to be in the respiratory tract because again, they're obligate aerobes. And if you have a really seriously compromised immune system, you can have a disseminating fungal infection, which will go into deep, deep into tissues, but it's still getting oxygen from the respiratory tract. So you're not, this is not happening the way people envision.

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So, but there's another pathway, right? By the way, the allergic inflammatory and toxicity pathways, everyone is allergic. Everyone's pretty obvious that inflammation happens amongst those three, but the toxicity pathway is what everyone talks about because mold toxicity, mold toxicity, mold toxicity, mycotoxins, mycotoxins, mycotoxins. And then I got the mycotoxin urine panels. And then I got the mycotoxin blood thing from Campbell and all these, right? Mycotoxin, mycotoxin, mycotoxin.

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But the science doesn't this does not the toxicity model does not explain the rapid onset of symptoms when you walk into a building that has an issue and then the rapid offset that happens when you're in the building. That is not toxicity by definition.

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So all the practitioners who are treating mold-related illness, I want you to listen very clearly to this. Mold toxicity does not come on abruptly and then leave. The symptoms don't subside as quickly as you leave the building. And this is very common where people will have an immediate reaction and then they leave in a day or two or even fat, maybe sometimes hours later, they're better. That's not toxicity. Yeah.

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So what is it? Well, so if you if you go into old literature, believe it or not, it's about 40 years. There was discussion around the neurosensory model. We talked about this in previous shows, too. But the trigeminal nerve, which is in the eyes, mouth and jaw, is where tissue meets air. And it's a it's a primal sense. It's it senses heat, pain and cold, but also chemicals.

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And they're specifically sensitive, the trigeminal nerve, once it gets activated and it gets activated in a variety of ways. But once it gets activated, it becomes very sensitive to chemicals, also light EMF, potentially very ultra fine particles. Lots of stuff, which you, by the way, lots of people that are sensitive to these things get sensitive to all that stuff. Right.

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And so what's fascinating is that it's occurs below the odor threshold. So this is what happens when you walk into a room and they can't smell it, but they can feel it and they know it and they have this physiological reaction. And they used to say, man, that person's psychosomatic. That's not psychosomatic, that's physiological, but it's a neurosensory connection that also triggers all of the inflammatory allergic responses and looks like toxicity.

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And, and, but you can find the toxicity. If you do a mycotoxin urine panel, you can find the mycotoxins. And if you do the, you can find these things. And now we end up getting into the conversation around confirmation bias, which is where if I have a data point that I believe in and I get enough of those, I can paint a picture that looks like what I think it should look like.

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And, you know, we used to do this for thousands of years with stars, constellations. Oh, that's the belt of Orion. Oh, that's Big Dipper. We built stories around this. I mean, this is like literally people still base their decisions in life around astrological charts from constellations that were built out of stories that have no basis whatsoever in reality. Now, sorry if anyone's astrologically inclined, but if you just look at it, we're talking about dots of light in the sky that we turn into stories and then build our life around.

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People are doing the same thing with with with mycotoxin urine panels and ERMIs and symptoms. And the doctors or providers who are giving them guidance on this are just as just as blinded by confirmation bias as they are by the incentives around revenue.

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because this drives, this daisy chain of misinformation drives inspection, very expensive detoxes that are based on mycotoxins that are primarily food-based, by the way. You're not inhaling mycotoxins in indoor environments in 99% of cases in indoor environments, in residential environments.

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Commercial environments like farming, grain silos, there are certain occupational exposures that are very real and mycotoxins are well established to be airborne and yield in urine panels and things like that. Modern indoor environments do not have that problem. We have much, it's more gas phase. So when you start looking at the confirmation bias and you start to look at how that all happens, the thing that ultimately is missing from most of the conversation, although many doctors are starting to recognize the nervous system,

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as at the neurosensory component to it in the sense of neural retraining, limbic system, retraining somatic work, essentially finding that the people who really do all the things, right. I always talk about air food and attitude, right, which is mold and VOCs. Right. And then food is get the, get that mycotoxin stuff out of your diet and no sugar, no grains good for you anyway. Right. So just, you know, you want to,

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No conventional meat and dairy. There's a lot of carryover effect from these animals eating moldy grains. And so, you know, that comes through, especially in dairy. And so get your air and food straight. But then a lot of people do all that stuff right, and then they don't get better. They're still not better. They're still super tuned up. They're super reactive. Those people do really well if they are able to find peace in their life.

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in reality. And this is a very difficult thing to do. So they have to learn how to consciously self regulate. This is heart math. This is breathing exercises in the beginning. This is meditation for people who have a hard time getting to meditation. There's there's baby steps like heart math. And so you start getting into this thing where you can start to say, wait, if I take five minutes here, and I breathe for four, four, four, four,

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I get into coherence. I've got this, all this stuff, all my calm down. And if I can do that consciously on a regular basis, I can reorder myself. Right now I'm a victim to the whims of the environment. It doesn't have to be that way. And so there's a worldview that often has to change here. Unfortunately, the worldview often gets people here. So the people that tend to be very reactive to these things often come with anxiety.

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They were born this way or they got trauma from childhood or whatever the case may be. Oftentimes they're already already inclined towards anxiety. The trigeminal nerve. There's really interesting research that shows that the anxiety exacerbates the trigeminal nerve sensitivity. What a crazy, brutal trick this is where the anxiety causes sensitivity and the sensitivity causes anxiety.

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It's a brew. It's kind of like the alcoholic who drinks to get rid of the anxiety, but then the alcohol withdrawal causes the anxiety. So they drink more for that. It's a same loop. And this is what we're dealing with. So this is a nervous system dysregulation that's caused by and it goes back down to the beginning with cell danger response. The mitochondria sense that there's a threat. It closes things down. You stop producing energy. You become tired, fatigued, right? MECF, right?

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This is very common with early stage environmental exposures where suddenly people become tired, also anxious and depressed and the whole thing. And then you get stuck in the same in the building that's causing the problem. How's that? Right. You don't leave the house, you know. Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you for a second. So are you saying that I got a little lost in that in that?

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Are you describing now a situation where the building is not the problem, but it's the belief and the nervous system dysregulation? Or are you talking about the amplification of an issue that may or may not be that bad by nervous system dysregulation? Yeah.

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Or both. Really good question. Thank you for pausing there, interrupting me and unpacking that because it's really important. Sorry. Yeah, because I mean, you're a great storyteller. I could listen to your stories all day, but I myself started to get lost. No, no, that's great. No, it's great because I think sometimes I'm so used to talking about this stuff. Sometimes I'll cruise over an important piece. And so no one's going to live in a perfect building.

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Okay. Right? Okay. And we're going to move through the world into environments that are less than ideal, right? I mean, if you ever want to go on vacation ever again, you're going to have to get straight with that, right? I mean, that's just the reality. If you want sunshine, you're going to deal with a must-eat hotel here. Yeah. Right? And so I'll tell you a quick story so that you can appreciate this. So I went down to...

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hack your health two years ago, rented, I got the carpenter hotel because it specifically had terracotta walls, no carpet. I was like, this is my place. There's no sheet rock. There's no wall to wall. I was like, this is awesome. I go set my booth up, have a party to go to, of course, show up at the hotel, grab my bags from the front, go upstairs, 1130 at night, open up the door, musty, musty, musty. And I'm like, okay, call downstairs. And I go, hey, listen,

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this room has a mold problem. Do you have a place you can put me? And they go, how do you know? And I said, look at my reservation and my email address. Did you not pay attention? So I know. I'm pretty sure I know. And so she said, well, I'm so sorry, but we're full and we can't move you. So I was like,

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Oh, boy. Now, last time this happened, I had the worst night terrors. I woke up exhausted, big bags under my eyes. I couldn't sleep. But I have since done neural retraining work and I've since learned the tricks of somatic work and also the power of simply stating, affirming that it's OK.

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You know, like you're okay, you're strong. Just very simple idea. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna go out and I sat on the porch. There was like a little balcony and I meditated.

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And I affirm that I worked through some of these things that I learned through Primal Trust. Honestly, primaltrust.org. I love Kat King. She's doing amazing work. Very accessible neural retraining. It's $99 a month. I have no financial interest in it whatsoever. But this is the missing link for most people is understanding how your nervous system reacts to this and what you can do consciously. So I sat out, did all that, came back in.

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Brush my teeth, taped my mouth, went to sleep and said, you got this, kid. You got this. Yeah. So what you're saying or what I'm hearing, I think, is that.

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With that, there are certainly people that have bigger issues with this, that will get sick, that may have other underlying conditions. But in an instance like this, you're essentially trusting your body's systems that you have detoxification pathways in place for a reason. And what you're saying, and I think this is so important for people to hear, right, that

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You're, you know, one or two or maybe three nights if it, if it happens. Now you may not want your home to be like this because that would be chronic disease.

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assault on your system, right? So a chronic impact, let's not even call it assault. No, it's an assault. No, it's an assault, it's a repetitive stress. Yeah, but in a hotel room, you will live to fight another day if you've built that resilience into your system and you trust that your body can manage the damage. And it is trust. And what you said there was the key, this is a worldview issue. And I say that at the risk of scaring people because they go, I'm gonna change my worldview.

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The idea is that if you think that the world is a dangerous place and that your building is a dangerous place and that nature is out to harm you, there's no way you'll get better. I'm sorry. It is not physically possible. You cannot get better in fear. So the best detox is a fear detox.

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Like reframing this so that you realize fungi, by the way, if you look at it, it is actually responsible for our survival. Without fungi, we'd be in big trouble. Like as far as I'm kids from fungi are the most fascinating, the most fascinating kingdom within this beautiful planet because it is the source of medicines and foods and things.

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Our immune system is largely driven by the relationship between fungi and bacteria. The beauty of things like lichen, which is a combination of fungi and bacteria that work together to turn rock into dirt. We wouldn't have dirt if it weren't for that, right? I mean, we literally would not have dirt. So, like, you have to look at fungi as a fundamentally important part of our world. And by the way, like I said, if mold wanted to kill you, you'd be dead already. Those signals that we get from the building are benevolent in my estimation.

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They're actually telling you there's a problem. If it wanted to kill you, we'd do it silently. Instead, it's actually letting you know there's something wrong and it's giving you that pain signal, right? So there's an opportunity to reframe this into a partnership as a relate, not a enemy, not as a victim. And the people that can get out of victimhood and start to say, you know what?

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We've been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years as humans, and we've cohabitated. Our recent decision to create buildings that support fungal growth is, you know, it's a mistake, but we can navigate this. We're adaptive. We're humans. And we also have the ability to change our perspective. We can change our mind. And when we change our mind, we change our body. We change our physiology. This has been proven over and over and over again in many, many, many ways. And so the worldview here is that I have to learn to trust humans.

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that this is not a dangerous place. I have to learn to trust that this opportunity is a way for me to actually learn more and to be useful to the world and also to take control of this one environment that I can control. I can't control the outdoor environment. Russia and China and all these guys are going to pollute whatever they're going to. And now with Trump doing his stuff and taking all the environmental controls, we have even less control over the outdoor environment. But the indoor environment, in great contrast, in direct...

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In exactly the opposite way, we have this enormous potential for control if we choose to accept it. And so what do people have to do to really quickly wrap this up? They have to, first of all, start to trust their senses.

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And if you notice something is wrong with a building, take time to leave the building. Find a safe place that has a low chemical load and doesn't have a mold problem for a day or two if you can. If you feel better, that's your signal. That's a better test than any mold test, I hate to tell you.

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The testing that you do after that helps you identify the sources, the extent of it. And that's why a professional is often really useful. Our tests are really good for people that are trying that are early in that process. And they're trying to get their mind around these things where they've recently had an event, a flood or water damage or whatever it is.

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The other thing that I really encourage people to do is stop bringing bad stuff in your house. Be aware of those things, chemicals and fragrances and those things, because they will make it worse. Covering up odors with odors doesn't work. And then the last thing is for people, this is all very basic stuff, is getting really good air purifiers that have a lot of carbon in them because they'll reduce your VOC and mold exposures. And that's something that every home should do anyway. You reduce exposure, reduce exposure, but then also...

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Consider, you know, if you don't have a meditation practice, if you don't have a way to self-regulate. By the way, I woke up that day after taping my mouth, brushing my teeth, taping my mouth. I woke up and I had eight hours of sleep. And I went in there and I pulled the tape off and I looked, I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna have these

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nothing. I didn't have a single nightmare. I didn't have a single sleep disturbance. They did move me to another room. It was still moldy. And I was there for two more days. And I did the same thing that it's next night. And I never had a single reaction the entire time. And it was a surprise to me as well. But this story is one I think that I could share because it offers hope to people who also have had these disproportionate responses that are outside of their ability to understand and that their doctors can't explain either. And what I'm telling you is that this is not a toxicity problem.

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This is a neurosensory issue and it is your nervous system. And you can actually become resilient even in the face of exposure. Yeah. But that's big, right? That's huge because –

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As you say, sometimes it's inevitable and we have to be able to survive this. Like it's, you know, I myself have asked to change rooms. And the problem is if a hotel has a moldy room, probably the hotel is moldy. Like it's...

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It's most likely it's systemic. It's not, it's not a one, one shot deal. And so, you know, you could change hotels for sure. But if, if it's not that bad and you don't have a health condition that makes you so, you know, like there are people who have impaired detoxification pathways or they have other health issues, this will, this could trigger a

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a greater reaction in them, so be it. But for the rest of us, we may just be able to calm our nervous systems enough to be able to live to fight another day without too much effect. But I will say this, and this is really important, is that people coming out of a moldy environment that haven't done none of that work,

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and that have had no break in exposure. I have break in my exposure. My house is filled. I mean, you can imagine what my house is like, right? I've got air purifiers all over, you know, like, and I also open the windows whenever possible to bring the floor back in. And so we're constantly refreshing my outdoor environment, my indoor environment, or there's a very, there's a fluid relationship between my indoor and outdoor environments, because that's really the way I believe a healthy building really behaves.

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and the humans within it behave. And so that being said, I think a lot of people are coming out of moldy or compromised environments where there's a lot of high chemical load or high mold load or both, and then they wanna do this trick, this affirmation or whatever kind of woo-woo thing that I described. And first of all, it's not, it's neuro-linguistic programming really is what it is. But more importantly, it is the by-product. I've also been out of that exposure for a long time.

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And so as a result, I, my body has adapted, it has, it has, it has calibrated, has found equilibrium. You have to find some sense of equilibrium so that you can develop cellular trust because what's happening here on the other side is cellular fear.

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Yeah. No, that's such a powerful. And as you go continue on that concept, I'd love you to talk about when two people are living in a house and one person is getting crushed and the other one isn't. So keep going on the cellular fear because we've heard these stories, right? So then the sick person gets called crazy, but they're sick. Like they're feeling awful.

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Yeah, well, there's a couple of things that happen there. There's opportunities within that, which is really fun. I mean, I can't tell you how many homes I've been in where that was the case and it's usually the mom or whoever spends the most time in the house, right? Because of course they're getting chronically exposed. Babies, kids, pets are often the canaries because they're low to the ground. Their respiration rate's about five times higher than humans. And so as a result, they get five times the exposure to indoor air pollutants than two-leggers. By the way, babies also breathe five times.

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100,000 beats per minute. Crazy, right? How many? A baby can have five times the heart rate. Five times the heart rate of adults. Wow. Five times, right? And so you start getting into – I'm having a senior moment, but it's five times. So you end up with – So you're looking at –

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Three to 400 beats a minute, maybe. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So you end up with this really high, 100,000 more time. You end up with this really, really outrageous disproportionate exposure based per pound of body weight. So now you've got these people that are essentially disproportionately having this disproportionate effect. The person who's transient comes in and out, not really having the problem.

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when, when the, when the house gets fixed, if it's fixed correctly. Uh, and by the way, if you're, if you're doing a proper assessment, you're asking everyone's health profile. It's not just the person who's complaining. For sure. Yeah. Um, and, and you'll see things, you know, you'll see him blowing his nose or, you know, you know, these little things, the guy who's not complaining. Right. Um, and then you come back after afterwards or follow up on a, on a call and ask how everyone's doing. Um,

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And sure enough, the person that's got the complaints is doing way better, right? But if there's honesty in the home, and this happened many times,

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The husband would say, you know, I have to be honest with you. I haven't slept this kind of long time, you know. Or the kids are like, well, you know, I mean, I just, you know, I was able to like really, you know, I was at gym class and I just I was able to actually run the run the run the track, you know. Or, you know, you hear that the dog's no longer coughing and sneezing and, you know, whatever. There's all these little validations that what happened was everyone was experiencing illness. But they've lowered their expectation, their baseline expectation on what health is.

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And then suddenly now, absent that chronic exposure, suddenly everybody's doing better. And it helps. And it also heals the – it validates the person that was sick.

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And it doesn't just validate the person. It validates the perspective that the other person had. It validates them. And then the person who was judging them suddenly goes, shit, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Right. This is real. And I will tell you this. Sarah, my better half, better three quarters sometimes. When we were in Australia, we moved into a moldy house. It was sight unseen. We had no idea. We were renting this thing from, you know, however many thousands of miles away.

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And we walked in with our bags and boom, I smelled that smell. And I was like, oh my God, I cannot believe this.

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And so I called our friends at Austin Air and they sent us down some air purifiers. They actually changed the outlet, the plugs on them for Australia. And they were so, so sweet. And I had to go to China really quickly to fix some stuff that was going on with our pumps. And so what I did was I set up the air purifiers for a couple of days. Well, let me back up. We first moved in, first couple of days, Sarah, who's never been sick. I mean, I've known her for now. We're celebrating our 13th year together in June and she's been sick four times.

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since I've known her four times and, uh, Ironman triathlete, you know, she's like a beast. So she, she was down and out, man. She, and she was even more angry with me than normal. And so it was just this, it was, it was, she was very debilitated by this. And, uh, everyone in the house was, my kids had these pure, this green purulent ooze coming out.

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And so we got these air purifiers going within 24 hours. Everyone was feeling better within 48 hours. Everyone was back to a hundred percent and you could still smell it a little bit, right? Because it was pervasive. It was actually in the crawl space underneath, but you couldn't see anything in the building, but it was underneath, underneath the building. And we ran all, all the tests and we reduced it by about 90%, but that 90% was enough to have an incomplete abatement of symptoms within our entire family. And what was exciting about it was that Sarah actually confessed to me. She goes, I always thought your clients might be a little crazy.

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And I said, well, it's true, but this makes them crazy, you know, and this will unseat you. It will make you not trust your home and not trust nature. I mean, come on. That's a big deal. You know, like that's crazy. Make that's crazy making stuff. And she said, I get it now.

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And I finally get what you do. And it was like this huge validation for me. But I experienced what many of my clients had experienced over the years, which was where there's suddenly a shift in perspective. And, you know, that's a miracle in and of itself is when someone who you who's bumping up against what you're experiencing and not believing that it's real suddenly step into your reality with you.

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And what that did for our relationship was profound. And so what I'm suggesting is that the healing of a home

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is beyond physical, right? When a home heals, it allows for so many things to reorder and to reset and for peace to be found in the family. But you have to take the step towards that. You have to start believing it can be better, not just hoping, not just throwing money at it, not just relinquishing it. Like we talked earlier before we pressed record, we outsource everything, our nutrition and everything else. We outsource all that stuff.

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This is your place to take control and for you to get invested in this. And, and, and that believing that it's possible is the first step. Beautiful. So let's give people a bit of a roadmap here. If they suspect that there's an issue in their home, because we've talked about a lot of different things, obviously working on nervous system regulation right out of the gate is going to help the journey.

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it's not going to fix everything. So what are the steps? What are the first low cost observations or measurements that really matter? And I know we're going to say, you know, how does it smell? Right. Like step away, come back in. But what are the basic, what are the steps that people need to take to get to the point where the next question will be, how do we decide when we stay to fix and how do we decide when we just need to go? So let's start with,

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How do we begin this? What's our roadmap? It begins with suspicion, right? Hey, something's going on here, usually driven by a symptom or observation or a complaint, sometimes from someone who doesn't live there. Okay. So now we want to, A, identify if there is any

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conditions that are conducive or that support this, this suspicion. So if you see something, smell something or feel something, these are your three primary tests before you deal with lab tests. Yeah. Seeing you're looking for moisture issues. And by the way, we have an ebook. I please include this in the notes. It's a 46 pages of checklists and, and, and inspection guides. It's really useful. We, we, we give it away, uh,

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for free because if you just followed this, man, you know, most people wouldn't even have to hire a pro until they actually identify a problem that needs to be remediated, right?

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So you're looking for any signs of moisture indoors, defects that could lead to intrusion. And then odors, of course, if you if you smell anything damp, musty and also new home, new home smell, that chemical smell, as alluring as it is, is in fact a is a problem in and of itself and will trigger a nervous system.

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dysregulation, insensitized individuals. Then of course, if you feel something, and I think that that's oftentimes the most important thing. Of course, if there's a building history, if the building has a history of water damage, leaks, floods, dampness, if you've got chronic high humidity, by the way, get yourself a humidity gauge, this is a really fundamental thing.

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If your humidity is above 60% for any length of time, you're in a high risk zone. If it's below 40%, you're likely going to end up with other sorts of dryness that causes you to get, be susceptible during the winter to bugs and stuff like that. So 40 to 60%. So if you see something, smell something, feel something. So you tune into your senses and learn to trust that. And again, trust is the problem here, right? We've outsourced trust. We need to recapture trust and become the source of this internal locus of feedback, if you will.

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So, and then once you've identified that there's an issue, now, if you see something, smell something, or feel something, then I always encourage people to grab some samples, you know, whether it be air samples or dust samples or both. Not Ernie because it's always high. Not Petri dishes because they're always high. You want something that actually gives, that has negatives sometimes. Negatives, by the way, don't disprove a mold problem. It just helps you understand the problem. It tells you if it's airborne and things like that. So, anyway, identify whether there's a risk.

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There's a suspicion and then there's a risk. And then if the risk of a problem is high because you see something, smell something, feel something or have data that supports that, then you have to relocate or remediate. Okay.

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And relocating is tough because you could often jump out of the frying pan into the fire. Oftentimes people move into a building that's – especially rentals. They're not well-maintained. They oftentimes have fragrances. They oftentimes are cheap, so they're building with cheap building materials and stuff like that. So it's really hard. I'm not saying this is easy. But if you can identify a place that actually has a low chemical load, does have a mold problem, must you smell, getting a couple of –

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a little bit of a break from that will tell you almost everything you need to know. Now everyone feels better on vacation. I'm not saying that you need to go to take a vacation for that, but I'm saying literally a couple of days is usually what you need to know. Then remediating is removing all the moisture problems, fixing all the moisture problems, and then reducing the chemical load. That oftentimes can be done if you can't afford to do the full thing. Getting really good air purifiers really does reduce exposure.

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Opening the windows when there is, you can only do three things with a, with a, with an air quality problem. You can either remediate, which is source control. That's ideal, but not always possible or practical. Uh, you can filter the air, which of course you have the special filters that have a lot of carbon. That's why I love Austin, you know? Um.

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and, and they've got, you know, instead of ounces, I love Mike Jasper. He's one of my very dear friends, but he's got very little carbon in the Jasper. It's not really great for a VOC problem, right? It's really great in your kitchen for, for, for, you know, it's really good as a maintenance thing. It's really good to keep your building healthy if it's already pretty good. But if you've got, and you're cooking and stuff, you know, that, that, that had one in my kitchen and it picks up my, it's across the way. As soon as I, as soon as I'm cooking anything that's got any sort of

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You know, that my exhaust fan isn't taken care of. It does. It takes care of it for me. But for when someone's experiencing acute symptoms and they're dysregulated, Austin Air, IQ Air, HealthPro Plus, these are the real beasts that can take out the chemicals. And so you got –

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You've got the three things, which is you can source control, remediate, you can filter, or you can dilute, meaning bringing fresh air from outside. Bringing fresh air from outside is tricky because if it's too hot, too cold, or too humid, you're going to create more problems inside, right?

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So there's a mechanical function that you can install in a lot of homes, especially in our climate. They use these things called energy recovery ventilators or heat recovery ventilators, where it exhausts air out that's stale and brings air in that's fresh and transfers the heat energy to the air that's coming in. So they're not just putting energy out the window. And so in cooling climates, they're called energy recovery and heating climates are called heat recovery ventilators.

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Those are really effective at exchanging air so that you don't have that chronic 20,000 breaths a day of the same exact chemical and fungal profile. That is the repetitive stress. When you're in the woods and you're exposed to mold, it's different. Every breath is different, right? When you're moving through the world, normally we used to leave our buildings and go to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we have the same. And now we just live in the house. Yeah. And it's like if you just do this to your skin, eventually you're going to end up with a blister. You keep doing that, you're going to end up with a wound.

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And so we need that diversity of exposures also. And that's why opening the windows and all that stuff is really important, but you got to do it judiciously. So remediating or relocating is really important. But again, in Australia, I couldn't do that. So instead we filtered the air and we opened up the windows whenever we left the house, whenever the weather was nice. But before we went to bed,

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or before we left the house for any length of time, actually, if the weather wasn't great, we would turn the air purifier on full blast, put on the ceiling fans, run that thing with the windows and doors closed, and come home, slip right into bed. Now you got a sanctuary in a room. If you can't make your home a sanctuary, make a room a sanctuary, right? And get rid of all the fragrances and get rid of all the... I'm talking about the...

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Laundry detergent. I'm talking about your hand sanitizer, all that stuff. Get rid of all that shit. It is not serving you. And create a sanctuary, ideally in your bedroom, because that's where you will rest and recover and heal. And that's where you can meditate and find that source of peace. If you find peace,

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in the chaos of what's going on in your environment, you will be able to do that again on a repetitive basis. You know, this is, you need to create training wheels sometimes for yourself before you start to learn how to go on your own because we're not taught these things. In fact, you know, we have been, we were literally not equipped for this.

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Yeah. And so but this is how we adapt. Right. You adapt a little bit of technology. And then, of course, going back to via negativa, what do we have to remove from our environment to to to optimize this? So what chemicals can we remove? What fragrances, personal care products, cleaning products, all that stuff? All those things add up and make your mold sensitivity worse. Yeah. So so it's a collective holistic thing. You know, there's no silver bullet for testing.

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There's no silver bullet for any of this stuff. It's a multifactorial thing. And every single thing you do counts either for you

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or against you. There's no neutral. I'm not for you. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But the good news is it is a well-traveled path. The problem is, is that everyone's trying to sell you shit along the way. And most of the stuff that you need to do isn't really that expensive. You know, most of it has to do with tuning into yourself, being willing to take some action, doing some experiments, getting some really good air purifiers, not bringing bad shit into your house. And, and, and ultimately realizing that most of what's going on here is fear-based and,

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The treatments are fear-based. The discussion around mold is fear-based, but no one gets better in fear. So you have to be willing to reframe this and get out of fear. If you get out of fear, you've got a fabulous chance of getting better. If you are still in fear, your chances are very low. And so more than mold, I would say, believe it or not, it's how you perceive mold that matters. Yeah.

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Beautiful. I love that. I think that's a good place to get to our unwind. I love that. Thank you, Jason. We're going to finish with four rapid fire questions. So short, snappy answers. What is the single most harmful belief people hold about mold today? That you need to kill it. Perfect. What is one belief you wish functional medicine practitioners would retire? Ermey.

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What is one belief you wish the building industry would retire? Sheetrock. Thank you. If this audience remembers only one line from today, what should it be? Via negativa. Beautiful. Improvement through subtraction. Things that you're adding in that are causing problems. It's time to start looking at what you need to remove.

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Beautiful. Jason, as always, an enlightening and spectacular conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Let's point people to your website and where they can get their hands on the Got Mold, the ebook, which we will also put in the show notes, of course. And by the time this episode is released, if not right away, they'll be able to get their hands on the dust test as well pretty soon.

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Yes. So so we have a welcome page for your listeners. You go to gotmull.com slash Nat. And there you can find a discount code for our test kits, as well as a copy of our ebook that I mentioned before. Yeah. So that's that's that's there for anyone and everyone.

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And then we also have a little landing page for people that are interested in learning more about the dust test, especially practitioners who might want to start using this in their practice because this is going to be when this will eclipse Ermey wholesale. And that's dusttest.com.

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gotmold.com. There's a lot of dots and gots in there, but dusttest.gotmold.com. And there you can sign up for early release beta testing opportunities, you know, general updates and stuff like that. And we're hoping if all goes well, and right now we're actually ahead of schedule. So I shouldn't have said that out loud.

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We're ahead of schedule for a July 1st launch. So we're very excited about that. That's, again, in partnership with that. That's a Yale patent that we're doing through University of Minnesota Genetics Center. So it's a really top shelf offering. We're super excited about that. And then our e-book will also give you a – oh, the e-book is actually in that gotmold.com. So pretty much everything is there.

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Beautiful. And it's free. So thank you, Jason. Thank you so much. I feel for a while there, I was feeling sad and now I'm feeling much more optimistic and hopeful. So thank you so much. I love that. Most people don't feel optimistic after a conversation about mold, but I really do believe that there's a silver lining to this and no adversity should be wasted. If you're

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as, you know, my heart goes out to you, but this is an opportunity. And in retrospect, you'll look back at this and I hope be grateful. You know, I know I am. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nat. Hey folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast

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is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.