Podcast Transcript
Welcome to Metabolic Matters Podcast, where we embark on conversations with thought leaders, disruptors, change agents, and passionate souls. Together, we’ll delve in to what truly matters to them. And you’ll learn how to metabolize this new found wisdom, so you can transform your own metabolic health.
Now, let’s meet today’s guest.
Well, hello, Jason. It is such an absolute joy to have you here. I was talking a little behind the scenes before we started, before you even joined into the room.
I was talking to Lynn, our behind the scenes person here. I’ve really only known you since October. I mean, I’ve known of you for a while, which is why most people who are listening might have heard of you as well.
I’m excited. If they haven’t, they’re going to just be blown away. But to get to know you and to be with you very briefly in an event that we were at together in October, and again, a short time later in a massive event in December, which you and I luckily got sat next to each other at a dinner one night.
I just felt like a kindred spirit in such a moment. And so it’s so beautiful to have connection and sort of mutual recognition sort of like this, so good to see you again, my friend type of vibe. It’s really lovely.
And so I was drawn to you more initially for just who you are as a person. And the conversations we’ve had since have blown my mind as to what you know and what you’re bringing to this planet. But I just want to start this conversation for a little transparency.
And I might have mentioned this before, but I think it’s important for our listeners to hear this. I honestly gave very little, very little attention to mold throughout my practice in the past. Just I thought living in the desert southwest, going to medical school in Arizona, living in Durango, Colorado, I was like, I don’t have to worry about this.
I live in the desert. There’s no mold. I was like, I mean, just me, like you’re laughing already.
It’s like, oh, you know what I mean. But that’s the place that I lived in until unfortunately, mold grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me awake to realize that these symptoms that I had that I had thought were my old autoimmune patterns, wreaking havoc or my cancer pattern in the past wreaking havoc, was to realize that in my detective work, mycotoxins and mold were driving this crazy train, and it humbled me to the core in my own. It brought me to my knees, my friend.
It was one of the most difficult, challenging health crises I’ve ever experienced, and that’s a lot coming from someone who nearly died multiple times from a cancer diagnosis. So humbling and I am incredibly grateful to have you here because I feel like I still don’t know anything about this and it’s just a joy to have someone who’s expert in the field here and that we get to do this together. We get to help bust other people’s ideas around this as well.
So Jason, welcome. Thank you for being here.
It’s so good to be here and all of those feelings are mutual. Kinder spirit indeed. I felt like you are by the way, and I think I can speak for anyone who I know who has been in your presence.
You’re the kind of person that if you’re within three feet of you, it feels like you’re giving them a hug. And so you’ve got a very, very special way about you. And so I was honored to meet you in the first place, but then to have Kismet bring us and sit us next to each other, it was beautiful.
And the conversation unfolded in a way that I, in retrospect, I’m not surprised, but it brought me to some fascinating places, it’s brought me to actually some other new awarenesses of my own, and I’ve learned quite a bit from you too. And so I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Well, honored. Thank you, my friend. So, how did you become the famed mold guy?
Guru of the mold, keeper of the mold, whisperer, mold whisperer, gotmold is your website, which I think is so freaking stellar that you created a little levity in bringing a very dense conversation to the masses. So tell us a little bit about your journey.
Well, people introduce me as a mold expert all the time. And one thing I can say is that I don’t think that I can really honestly call myself an expert because there’s so much to know, there’s so much to learn. I’m learning every day about this.
It’s an emerging field. I feel like the people who also call themselves and there are many people who call themselves experts oftentimes have their ideas made up around these things. And I have my own conclusions and we’ll share them today or I’ll share them today.
But it is something that is a constantly ever changing landscape and it’s fascinating. And I think maybe that’s what appeals to me about this is that I’m a lifelong learner. And so this is just the perfect place for me because this is a problem that will never be solved either, you know.
If you really think about it, this is a problem that will always be with us as long as we live in buildings and breathe air on planet Earth. And even in space, by the way, because mold grows really well on the International Space Station. So, I mean, it doesn’t matter as long as we’re inside of a habitat and there will be moisture problems.
And where there are moisture problems, there will be mold growth. And so it really is that fundamental. I mean, mold is as basic as gravity, as sunlight.
So I came to this from a very honest, you know, personal experience. You know, when I was four years old, I was falsely diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. And I had lost a lot of weight in a three-week period.
So my parents took me to Children’s Hospital where I got that diagnosis. And that was both shocking to them and also, in a way, not so surprising because it was in our family history. And so that was their worst nightmare coming true.
And so, fortunately, six weeks later, they got a second opinion. And actually, I had asthma compounded by pneumonia. And when they tested me for allergies, I was allergic to every single thing they tested me for.
So it was grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, even soybeans. And I was surrounded by fields of soybeans and of course, wearing cotton. I was itchy my whole childhood.
And when I was 12 years old, my folks split up, which was good for everyone involved, and moved out of that musty farmhouse, and all my symptoms went away. It was chalked up to spontaneous adolescent remission, which is, I guess, a fancy term for we have no idea what the hell happened.
Right, right. The levity of that, I mean, just letting that sit in the room for a moment of all of those conditions, how many parents do you think listening right now are looking at their own kid going, oh crap, could this actually just be mold? You just probably already have lit a fire under a few people to start to consider the environment in which they’re living and breathing in on a regular basis.
So wow, just from the get go.
Thank you. Yeah, and actually, that’s the thing about mold is that it masquerades around as all these other things, right? So it shows up or brings out latent symptom profiles that otherwise are maybe simmering onto the surface.
And so as much as mold is blamed as the source of disease, I think it’s the aggravator of much more. That’s at least what I’ve seen in my last 21 years or so.
And you started to start simply, like you make it sound like it really is so simple. And yet in all of my learnings and all my education seeking this information, Jason, it seems so complex. And yet you already broke it down to sort of just like air, light, water, you know, how do you command the movement of water in your living environment?
You know, like, how does it show up? Like, really break it down. You kind of gave us already this super simple funnel that we can go into to say, how does mold arrive, arise?
Mold at its root is just a moisture problem, that’s really all it is. So, but people always blank, they look at mold as the problem, mold is a symptom. Mold is a symptom.
So, when we do mold assessments, mold inspections, we’re not actually looking for mold, we’re looking for moisture problem. Now, mold can exist in buildings where there’s no active moisture problem. So, that might be a legacy issue.
And so, that’s a good reason to do testing anyway, especially when people are presenting with symptoms or where there are or where there are occupant complaints. But by and large, what we do is when we find mold, then we backtrack to find out where that moisture problem is, because that’s root cause. So, if you think about mold as root cause of illness, it’s actually moisture problems as root cause of illness.
Right? Wow. And then you go even further back.
What we really have to do is look at, and this is kind of one of my favorite parts of this conversation, is we have to look at our relationship with our buildings. So, you know, our buildings are a lot like bodies. You know, they’ve got a respiratory system, RHVAC, they’ve got, you know, the circulatory system is like the plumbing, and electrical systems like the nervous system, and so when buildings start to develop aches and pains, that shows up, usually the building starts to fail around how it sheds wind and water, and so water gets in, and next thing you know, I kind of think about that as like inflammation in the building.
The water gets in, and the initial mold growth is like inflammation. And if we leave that be, then it becomes chronic inflammation, which is where you get the really nasty molds and the really significant issues that lead to the toxigenic species. And so we all know that chronic inflammation is its own disease, which leads to a whole cascade of other potential issues.
And so when buildings get sick, we get sick. And then when buildings heal, it gives us the opportunity to heal. So you have to start there, really.
So this is sort of recognizing that we have a symbiotic relationship with our buildings. They’re really like an extension of our immune system. Like an exoskin or an exoskeleton.
And so if we can raise the awareness around that, then you recognize that maintenance of your building is a lot like taking care of yourself. Because it’s like the Matryoshka dolls, the Russian stacking dolls, right?
Oh my gosh. I mean, right now, all of my neurons are firing very rapidly at this moment here. And you are speaking so my language.
This is another reason and place where we connected is this concept of terrain inside and outside of us and how those interact. And the other piece that was near and dear is, you know, I was able to share with you a little bit about what we’re building, this hospital, you know, that we’re building on a farm, you know, in essence. But the design around this hospital is we wanted to create a living matrix design, this biophilic design that allowed a healing space to actually take what you just said and have an environment, a lived-in building environment actually be part of the healing process.
Yes.
And that interface, right? And so can you tell our listeners a little bit about what the heck we’re talking about when we talk about biophilic design? Because I know this is one of your passions.
Sure. Well, bio is life and philia is love, and so really we’re talking about bringing in the love of life into the buildings. And so the three enemies of a healthy building really are a moisture problem, which of course leads to mold growth, but also the proliferation of allergens and eventually decay, rot.
I mean, a moisture problem takes a building down, right? So a moisture problem can kill a building. And then there’s also chemicals, which is a major problem.
And so VOCs, we can get into that a little bit more later, because it’s hard to talk about mold and air quality without talking about VOCs and chemicals, because it’s like a diagram. And that’s where the overload really occurs in modern structures. I think they amplify each other greatly.
And of course, when we’re talking about cancer, to leave VOCs out of the conversation would be irresponsible.
Yeah, exactly.
Or just major omission. And then the third thing that I think is a huge issue is the hyper sanitization of our buildings, which is also caught to chemicals in a different way, where we have this idea that we need to kill everything in order for us to live. And the reality is only about 100 bacterial species actually are known to cause severe human illness, which is kind of wild when you think about the fact that people basically say bacteria is bad in general.
So, in other words, the idea here is to invite life into your building and have a robust, not just virgin green background, but actually to allow for a microbial diversity. And that is largely driven by having plants and soil and ventilation and air exchange with healthy outside air and all of these things, all done in such a way that the indoor environment reflects largely a healthy outdoor environment, right? So the idea that kind of strikes me as the word human actually comes from humus, which is soil.
Yes.
Right? And so we are so disconnected from that now. We put rubber on the bottom of our feet and we wash our vegetables.
We don’t have any dirt on your frist. You know, we’ve destroyed this idea, but what clean really means, people think clean means sterile now instead of free of dirt and debris. And so the idea of bringing nature back into our buildings so that we can then operate better within our space on a natural basis, you know, so we’re not stuck in these hermetically sealed chemical boxes that get moldy really quickly when they get wet.
And so and bringing in, listen, the reality is that we breathe oxygen and we separate ourselves from the very creation, the living elements that create that oxygen.
So we need to start really looking at how we have slowly separate ourselves from nature. I mean, over the course of the history of human species, we spent 99.9% of that time outside. Right.
And then 0.01% maybe. I mean, who knows whether it’s 0.01, 0.02, but an infinitesimally small fraction of that time we’ve spent indoors. And then look what’s happened in that time.
We’ve had skyrocketing rates of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, cancer, autism. And to say that that’s not related, I think, would be willful ignorance.
That’s huge. Well, and it’s interesting because there’s even study after study after study about just air quality itself as a known carcinogen. And that’s not even looking at, first of all, that study is looking at outside air.
So like industrial pollutants, wood, firewood, wood smoke from wildfires, those types of things. No one really questions those, right? They kind of go, yeah, it’s probably not good to be living near a paper factory, a paper mill or snorting all the smoke from the fires, disseminating our forests and whatnot.
We can kind of get our mind around that. But folks really are clueless about their indoor airspace. And so this is the place where, you know, you kind of alluded to, you can’t not talk about the interface between this, what do I want to say, this sort of fabricated living environment to, you know, how far away from nature it has become and the chemicals and the constituents that have made it so toxic and its interface with these water problems that lead to mold problems as the symptom.
And so I think that’s one element I want to unpack a little bit more. But there was just there was just so much about this. Like, I really love that you’re creating awareness around we are an extension of our environment and our next our environment is an extension of ourselves.
And so granted, most people on the planet may not have the financial resources and whatnot to do all the very high end expensive things. But there are some simple things you and I are going to talk about at the very end of this that is available for free for everybody that I know you’re going to bring weave into the conversation. So I want people to kind of be thinking it’s like we’re going to we’re talking problems right now, but we will get to some solutions.
But right now, this is about creating this curiosity and this awareness of maybe thinking about your living environment in a way you’ve never thought of it before. And specifically, so the other night on a call with my advocates, I was teaching about people asked a question about my discomfort of giving exogenous hormones. So talk about another truth bomb that really freaks people out.
But to me, the issue like like symptoms of hormonal deficiency are just out there symptoms, but they’re actually not really shining the light that we’re hormonal deficient. We’re circadian rhythm deficient. We’re not like matching our inside environment with our outside environment.
We’ve gotten so disconnected. And I was literally telling the story about sort of the little house on the prairie days when we walked an average of four hours a day. We literally chopped wood, carried water.
We spent the vast majority of our time outdoors. I never even thought about this piece that you just wove into the conversation about what were you exposed to when you walked through that threshold into that home that you just spent very, very little time in up until just recent times. So I am just really intrigued by this piece here because I think that we are all, myself included, hyper focused on the symptom versus the cause of that symptom.
And you are bringing us back to the awareness on such a profound way here. So anything else you would add to that piece before we dive into what are some of the biggest myths around mold? Because I think we have already hit a couple just out and running on this talk.
Yeah, so I think there are some really sort of amazing statistics and concepts for people to get their mind around when it comes to indoor air. One is, first of all, just the sheer amount that we breathe. We breathe 13 to 15 times a minute, which comes up to 20,000 times a day.
And that’s about 2,000 gallons, which is enough to fill a swimming pool. And if you do the math on this, and I’ve done it with my four-year-old son, it comes up to about 30 pounds of air. So now, if you drink eight glasses of water a day, you’re only drinking about four pounds of water.
And if you eat three full meals a day, which, you know, a lot of people with intermittent fasting are eating a lot of this and that, you may eat four pounds a day on the high end. And so you’re talking about your air is your single largest environmental exposure by a long shot, yet, of the four basic human needs, air, water, food, shelter. You know, we can live with that shelter for a long time.
We can live without food for three weeks or so. We can live with that water for a few days, but we can live with that air for a few minutes, and yet, air is often an afterthought. And so, we have this weird thing, humans, where we take for granted the things and people that are closest to us, right?
Until there’s a problem. And then suddenly, we have this, you know, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Well, when it’s your breath, boy, that’s a pretty critical issue.
And so, we don’t usually notice if air is a problem until it smells bad, tastes bad, or there’s not enough of it. And so, you don’t want to wait until that happens. And so, the problem with air is that you often can’t tell if it’s bad by taste or smell or, you know, what you basically end up doing is being a filter of this stuff.
And so, what’s fascinating also is that because we are living in these hermetically sealed boxes, and this is really, it’s like the proverbial book, Boiling Frog, you know, back in the old days, you talk about Little House Under Prairie, when the wind blew, the house whistled because there was no insulation in the walls and there was a lot of air exchange. And then we started, you know, closing things up. And then we started building with synthetic materials and drywall, which is like the ideal substrate for mold growth.
And so that was really after World War II to make faster, cheaper houses. And then after the fuel crisis in the 60s, we began really sealing things up. And then we also began introducing petroleum based product building materials.
And so, come on, you close it up and then put toxic materials in there. And so what we end up with is this idea that we’re re-breathing the same air 20,000 times a day. And so you don’t have to have a high pollutant load for that to become a real problem.
You have to look at air as either healthy or unhealthy. There’s no neutral. This is a really important idea.
There’s no neutral. So if air is not healthy, clean, fresh, also, with the exception of those who have a very severe compromised immune system, and of course that is many of your patients, all of your patients probably, you have to be aware of that microbiome. But the point is that you’re either breathing healthy, nutritious air that is detoxifying and that is energizing, or you’re breathing air that is potentially deleterious.
And there’s no in between. And then when you’re dealing with anywhere where there is outdoor air pollution, so any of the major cities or if you’re in proximity to a gas station or there happens to be a source nearby, if that infiltrates into the building, which it will, the moment you put an exhaust vent on, air blows out, air comes in. And so you are introducing outdoor air into your home, whether you know it or not.
And the stats on this are pretty fascinating too. In outdoor air pollution that infiltrates indoors because of the re-breathing, you can be exposed to outdoor air pollution indoors four times more than you would if you were outside. Get your mind around that.
Right?
Is it because it’s concentrating it at that point? And then, like, so it’s awesome.
Because, so you can have a small, a relatively low pollutant load in a building, but if you re-breathe it 20,000 times a day, think about that as 20,000 doses.
And you’re changing, it’s the chemical structure going through your own circulatory system. You’re actually turning it into other chemical compounds.
You’re metabolizing it, right? You don’t really breathe air so much as we consume it, right? You know, you have to look at this as we, this is our, if we were fish, this is our water.
And so we’re filtering this stuff out, and we are consuming it. And so the air awareness is the first step, right? Getting people to recognize that this is, it’s obviously vital, but it is the last frontier of environmental awareness.
People know you should eat healthy food and drink clean water, but air for some reason is just now getting its day in the sun, you know? Which is great, you know? It’s a good time to be in this space because people actually care about their air.
I think probably because of COVID, you know, the awareness around that, which is just, you know, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a mind stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions, and so I believe that we are actually, that’s a good thing because our society will never retrench from that. It only gets better from here.
So a little bit of hope on the horizon with conversations like this because now we might be, like you said, air awareness, getting the awareness, that’s how all these campaigns start, right? And then we start to look at assessing the situation like, okay, where there’s probably a problem, let’s look a little bit deeper. And then what are we going to do about it?
And so in that piece here, you and I talked last time about the concept of how you test for mold. It seems like one of the biggest mythologies that are out there in this arena is the, well, I’ll let you run with this because this is a tricky conversation. So when a person wakes up to this and has air awareness and knows that that could be compromising their health, their environment, their children’s health, whatever, like they go out there to be like, I’m going to test my environment.
I’m going to test my body. Tell us why that may not be as easy as it seems.
Yeah, I mean, to all the practitioners listening, buckle your seatbelt because…
I know, this is where when we talked, I was like, oh crap, here we go.
Yeah, it’s never very well received. And it’s also and only because there aren’t really very many alternatives to it, which is one of the big reasons this is a problem. So mycotoxin urine panels are very popular.
They’re like in vogue these days. And so everyone…
I use them all the time. And so you made me rethink that after our conversation.
I think they’re useful if you understand how to interpret the data, right? I think that’s the case with almost all tests. Understanding what tests are prone to false negatives and false positives.
Understanding what a false negative really is and what a false positive really is. And that’s another conversation that would be fascinating for us to unpack a little bit of that. But when it comes to the mycotoxin urine panels, when mold, first of all, there are roughly 100,000 species, about 100 are known to produce mycotoxins.
And so the idea that mycotoxins are the basis for all mold-related illness is to suggest that the other 99,900 don’t matter. That doesn’t seem logical on its face. You don’t have to be a mold specialist to realize that might not be a logical conclusion.
So bringing this back down to sixth-grade science class, when mold grows, it produces three things. Mold spores, which are the hardy reproductive capsules, seed-like capsules that go forth and multiply, carrying the genetic material. And so they can cause a lot of reactions.
They also can carry trace amounts of mycotoxins. And the mycotoxins are the second thing the molds produce. And they only produce them intermittently, even the mycotoxins producing molds, don’t produce them all the time.
They produce them when they’re threatened or when there are sort of environmental challenges. So like when they’re drying out, sometimes they’ll produce them to sort of protect their fiefdom. So that there’s no, you know, it’s all about competition, right?
These are just chemical weapons used at a microscopic level, and we get caught in the crosshairs.
And so they’re just trying for their own survival, really.
And they’re not trying to hurt us. Listen, mold is not the enemy here, people, you know, like that’s the most, that mold is actually just doing its thing. And without mold, we’d be in big trouble.
You know, there was a period where we didn’t have fungi and all the trees fell down and they didn’t rot. And that’s why we have oil and coal. And that was the Carboniferous period.
So fungi and mold are our friends, right, except for when they’re growing in our home. That’s the deal. So we got spores, which are, you know, which are abundant in every environment.
So don’t be afraid of spores. Kingdom fungi produces 50 megatons every year, which is the equivalent of 500,000 blue whales. It’s the most abundant particulate producer on the planet.
25 times as much tea as is drank every year by the entire planet is how much kingdom fungi produces in spores. So you’re not going to get away from those. The mycotoxins are a very small subset.
The mycotoxin producing molds are a very small subset of all micro fungi. And yet they are blamed for all mold related illness, which is a completely false narrative. And then the third thing that is completely ignored or overlooked when it comes to mold related illness is the musty smell.
The microbial gases. And you have to think about the idea that the musty smell is produced by all molds during active growth. So at the first phase of growth, which can occur in as little as 24 to 48 hours of a moisture problem, mold will begin to metabolize or eat, digest what it’s growing on.
And that can be something as simple as household dust or it can be the paper on your sheetrock or whatever is made of things that were one time living. Mold’s job is to turn dead things back into dirt. And so it will do that with anything in your house that is comprised of something that was at one time living.
And so as it’s metabolizing or eating this stuff, it’s digesting outside because it doesn’t have a stomach. And so it’s releasing enzymes and the gases that it produces, much like we produce gas. And by the way, those gases we produce are also microbial VOCs because we don’t really produce our own gases.
We’re kind of like ambulatory composters. You know what I mean?
We don’t really…
Yeah, exactly. So we are, and we are microbial, by the way, which is another tangent that we can go down. So what you have is this all molds producing the musty smell.
And the immune responses that are caused by the musty smell are not to be… It’s nothing to sneeze at, if you’ll pardon the expression.
So we all know VOCs, volatile organic compounds, are generally speaking man-made. However, there are microbial VOCs, and that’s what this is, MVOCs. So MVOCs are sort of a potpourri of industrial solvents.
So alcohols, ketones, aldehydes. There are other sort of telltale industrial solvents that are actually found from actively growing mold, like toluene and benzene has actually been found coming off of them. The biofuels are produced by microbial growth, and so we know that those are combustible, and you wouldn’t put those in your Cheerios.
So we don’t want to be breathing that stuff. Now, Dr. Joan Bennett at Rutgers University has done some really beautiful research around this stuff, and she actually had a mold exposure down in New Orleans in her house after Katrina came through, and she went in wearing a respirator to sort of recover some of her personal belongings and to document the damage, and being an ever curious fungal geneticist, mold researcher, she wanted to do some testing in her own house, and she had to leave several times because the musty smell was coming through the respirator, which was only there, you know, N95 only stops particles, it doesn’t stop gases. And so she became sick, and she was also at that point fascinated by the idea that she was getting sick by something, but she wasn’t being, she was getting sick from something that wasn’t spores or microtoxins that would be stopped by the filter.
So she went back to her lab and started researching the musty smell, and identified or isolated one compound which is which is common in most most musty environments, which is one octane, three all, it’s a mushroom alcohol. And she began doing some basic science experiments around with fruit flies and some some some some plants. And so she exposed the fruit flies and the plants to this to this component of the musty smell.
And the fruit flies stop producing dopamine. They start flying down and set it to the light. They stop reproducing.
They develop locomotor dysfunction, mitochondrial damage, and, of course, premature death. And so she once she actually is lobbying to have microbial VOCs instead of being sort of classified as a non micro toxin. She wants to call them follow toxins.
So essentially, she found out that they were neurotoxic. This is powerful stuff because what we have is a compound produced by almost all actively growing molds. I’m not saying one octan-3-L isn’t produced by all molds all the time, but it is a very common component of the musty smell.
And it is disregarded as a component in mold-related illness.
And yet, it is abundant and it is always airborne, too, because by nature, it’s a volatile compound. So our exposure is indisputable, whereas with spores and even the mycotoxins themselves, they don’t become airborne easily, contrary to popular opinion. And so this is a major issue that sort of shatters the idea that mycotoxins are the primary cause of mold-related illness.
So when these panels come in, sorry.
No, I’m just like, I’m like letting this soak in before you talk about the panels. I just want you to go through that list of symptoms that you rattled off about or the impact, like blocking dopamine, things like that. Can you just rattle that again?
Because I want this to land because it will probably make you look at yourself and the person sitting next to you listening, like, interesting. These are a lot of symptoms I’m carrying or somebody else’s.
Yeah, well, think about VOCs. You know, what’s the most common VOC out there? The most popular VOC is alcohol.
And how does that present usually? Well, it creates cognitive impairment and we do this electively, right? Well, other VOCs also cause cognitive impairment.
But we don’t connect the dots on these things. We just, this is one that this is fun one and this is the one that’s not so fun. So when you’re talking about the musty smell, these are VOCs and they impact us in many different ways.
The first, the most potent one, the thing that hits home for me is the fact that the fruit flies stop producing dopamine.
That’s huge, that’s the one. Whoa.
Yeah, we become depressed. And by the way, as a personal aside, you know, the musty house that I grew up in is the same home that my mother committed suicide in two years after the divorce. And of course, she was an alcoholic and these things are complex and no one can really separate what actually was the underlying cause.
I’m sure it was cumulative, but she was also an alcoholic, so who knows what she was self-medicating against. But I certainly, in retrospect, see that this couldn’t have helped. And also, by the way, Brown University did an interesting study in 2008 and found a strong correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression.
6,000 participants in the study, so not a small study. And so, you know, the idea that, again, that mycotoxins are causing all this illness, it literally ignores all of that data. And so they stop producing dopamine, they slide down and set it to the light, which means that they’ve lost their instinctive nature.
That’s a big deal.
This just also speaks volumes to our culture. I just think that’s so interesting. We’re locking ourselves up from the light.
We’re locking ourselves off from each other. We’re dopamine addicted by picking up our phones and eating our sugars and grabbing our drugs or dealing with our porn or shopping, consume, consume, consume. This is massive, Jason, what you’re speaking to here.
It’s massive. And so it is one of those places when someone’s like, I’ve done all the things in my health and something’s not getting, not improving. Like you have to be looking at this.
You’ve got to be looking at your air quality. You have to.
Yeah, it’s air food and attitude. But when we, you know, that’s, it’s, and you can’t do, you can’t leave one of them out because they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re required of each other.
And you’re going to be telling us soon how food is even linked to this maybe more so than we give it credit for as well, which I’m excited about because that’s another big truth bomb that’s I think overlooked in our, in our medical community.
For sure. And that’s actually one of the things that they don’t want to talk about because it’s so hard to actually navigate. And so, you know, if you, if you’re told that, a lot of people just shut down.
So this is, you know, that’s why I said buckle your seat belts because there’s a lot, a lot of this stuff is, is, is, is a bitter pill to swallow. But it, but it’s necessary because this is where change begins, you know, conversations like this. And, and so, so, yeah, so, so by the way, we’ve, you know, the fruit flies fly down as they lose their instinctive nature.
Well, we’ve lost our instinctive nature to to a large degree. Right. And so, so they become this neurotoxicity, right.
She, she said she actually characterized it in her paper, by the way, which is called Silver Linings. It’s written in a memoir style. Anyone who’s interested, I can drop the, I can, we can drop the link.
It’s beautiful. Jones, she’s a very good friend of mine. And in fact, when she, when she, I met her because she, she read about me and my mold sniffing dog, Oreo, back in 2004, and she invited me up to her lab.
She called and she said, I read about you and your dog. I’d like to meet your dog. It’s okay if you come too.
I love her already just for that.
He’s fabulous. He’s a dear friend. And so, so she, you know, what she, what she has essentially highlighted here is that, that, oh, no, she, what she said was that there was a Parkinsonian like symptoms.
That’s how she described the fruit flies physiological response. And, and so, and they stopped reproducing too. So, you know, I’d like, like to not hallmark of depression.
And, you know, so the whole thing is really not surprising. And by the way, they stop reproducing. We all know that we’re having reproductive issues in our society, right?
A major problem. And we’re also set, we’re also becoming more and more siloed, social breakdown. So all of these things seem, you know, very sort of, you know, there seems like a lot of parallels.
And so it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating stuff. And it’s also completely preventable. That’s the thing, you know, mold related illness, most of it’s completely preventable because moisture problems can, if people realize how quickly mold grows, they’d act more quickly when they have a moisture problem.
And they, you know, this is this is when something gets wet and stays wet for more than a few days gets moldy. And so and the first thing that happens is the musty smell. And so you don’t have to wait a long time.
In fact, a long time is 48 hours with this stuff, you know. So so that’s that’s my these are my words of wisdom here is if you see something smell something or feel something, do something and do it quickly because you don’t have time to waste. And if you do it quickly, usually it’s free or cheap or insurance will pay for it.
And if you wait three days, insurance won’t pay for it. Now it’s a cash pay. And now you’re up, you know what creek without a paddle.
And so so so this is this is this is crucial stuff. And and it’s and it’s insidious, too, because our sense of smell tends to get numb pretty quickly. And so if you don’t leave the house, like most of us don’t anymore because we’re, you know, post-COVID working from home and you know, you can become numb to this.
And and and and then the very thing that’s causing you illness actually causes you to stay in the building that’s causing illness. You know what I mean?
Horrible.
And it’s a it’s a really negative cycle. And so we see this a lot on Facebook groups where these people are sort of crippled by their illness and they can’t leave the house or they don’t leave the house. But that’s the thing that’s making them sick.
And so so I encourage people to to to get their stuff clean and open the bloody windows, you know, get get some sunshine, get outside and walk. And, you know, it’s it’s amazing how these simple things can give you some perspective. And then you walk back in and you and and and tune back into your senses and go, wait, this doesn’t quite smell right.
You know, this doesn’t quite feel right. And by the way, the other smell is the new house smell. Watch out for that.
You know, the new house, new car smell. You know, that used to be something that was appealing to me until I until I got into this business. And now when I smell it, I smell autoimmune disease.
I smell cancer.
Exactly, because that’s all VOCs. That’s all the off gassing of those VOCs. And so now you eluded to earlier the interface between these micro VOCs and our living environment VOCs.
My understanding, and you explain this to me, and I’ve heard it elsewhere, they sort of compound each other or what’s the word I’m looking for? Like they make it worse. Yeah, no doubt.
So the body doesn’t know the difference between a microbial VOC and a man-made VOC. And what’s really common with this stuff is you get a big mold exposure and then you develop a chemical sensitivity. You see this all the time.
Or you see people that have a chemical sensitivity and they just can’t be around mold. Well, this also further supports this idea that the microbial VOCs are a major underlying causal factor, or at least an aggravator, in these illnesses. Because if these things are interplaying, where are they interplaying?
At what level? Well, the one commonality here is the VOC, right? And so it’s like a Venn diagram.
And the other thing that’s really fascinating, and then we can get into the panels and some of the false narratives around that, is how is it that people are actually getting sick from this stuff? And the research that I’m really digging into now that is most fascinating revolves around the cranial nerve, specifically the trigeminal nerve. In the face, you’ve got this three-pronged set of nerves that have the trigeminal nerve, with nerve endings in the eyes, jaw, and mouth.
It handles primarily heat, cold, and pain, but the nerve endings are also really sensitive to VOCs and to toxins, and specifically pungent VOCs that are actually irritants of the trigeminal nerve. And so if you are sensitized, and you can become sensitized very easily with this stuff, because we’re living in the same buildings, we’re never the same, 20,000 times a day, the same thing, we’re getting constantly exposed to this stuff. And it plays right alongside of the olfactory sense.
So the trigeminal nerve and the olfactory are sharing information, but the trigeminal nerve is able to detect these toxins below the odor threshold. So you don’t necessarily have to be able to smell it, but you got this spidey sense, and this is an evolutionary tool that can work against you, because once you become sensitized and these nerve endings become irritated, they will send a cascade of inflammatory signals down and they can trigger cytokine storms, which is also what’s underlying a lot of the Lyme-based inflammation and mold-related inflammation. So what looks like inflammation due to toxicity, it may very well simply be a sensory nerve irritation and an inflammatory response.
So when people talk about chronic inflammatory response syndrome, something that Dr. Richard Schumacher coined, they always look at, and when I say always, any conversation you have about this, people will talk about mycotoxins. But they don’t talk about VOCs and MVOCs. And this is the big missing link in my opinion, and it’s the trigeminal nerve interaction that triggers this response.
Everyone wants to go on a detox protocol, and they want to take a pill of potion powder or whatever to get rid of this. And the most important thing is to get the environment straight. And then oftentimes the thing that actually solves this is neural retraining and somatic work, the things that actually get your nervous system to the point where it’s not having that overactive sort of PTSD type of response.
Like a rewire the nerve, the neuronal behaviors at that point. Because you make it sound like, and this is what I’m really taking home here, is once this gets activated, it will so be easily activated no matter where you go. If you get out of your home, you go to a hotel, you go to a friend’s house, you go somewhere else, it’s just like you’re constantly in that place.
That’s right.
So that’s what you’re like. Once you clean up your own environment, you’ve got to clean up this environment and retrain those nerves to respond differently.
And it really is sort of the same way that you handle PTSD, which is where you look at the thing that caused the trauma and you realize, okay, this is not going to kill me. I can look at it again. You know, small exposures even to the idea of it.
Because a lot of people really, they become afraid of mold, afraid of this, afraid of that. And I’ve never seen anybody get better when they’re afraid. And the only way to reel this back in is to get to the point where you realize, hey, listen, mold is a normal part of every healthy environment.
To be afraid of mold is to be afraid of gravity or sunlight is a part of nature. It’s not practical. It doesn’t have any, there’s no equity there, right?
And it sensitized to the point where, yes, it doesn’t know the difference between the man-made stuff and the biological stuff. And so, you know, you’re going to go into the hardware store and you’re going to have a problem. You’re going to go into the dry cleaner or the nail salon or wherever.
The hotels forget it because they have mold and chemicals, right? So this is the research coming out around the trigeminal nerve. And it’s the interface, no pun intended.
It’s in our face. It is literally, it is an evolutionary advantage that turns inside out on us, so to speak. And then you have to reel it back in again.
And so, you know, there’s great stuff. There’s DNRS, Primal Trust, Dr. Kat King is doing fabulous work. And so, you know, this is the kind of stuff that I think has the potential to, once you’ve gotten your air and food together, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, then attitude, right?
And when I say attitude, it’s not like you just wake up one day and, oh, we’re just going to have affirmations. No, this is work.
You’re not going to Polly on over it, yeah.
No, no, no. It’s not like you have to, like, and there’s no mold, there’s no mold. No, this is the real deal.
You have, this is going to take work in there, but there are tools and resources out there. Wow.
And I just want to highlight something you said in this because it’s so critical. Can you repeat what you said about fear, please?
Well, first of all, you’ll never get better until you believe you can, first of all. And also, I’ve never seen anybody get better that’s afraid of mold or afraid. And I think that’s just it.
It’s like, I just wanted the word afraid because that’s what I see in my world, that fear in the cancer space is very, very prolific. Oh, yeah. And it is nearly impossible.
Actually, I would say it is impossible to bring corrective, optimal healing into an environment that’s revving from a fear space. And so you could be throwing the best of whatever treatment, you could be changing up the environment outside of you, inside of you. You could be doing all the things, but if you are coming from a place of fear, whatever therapies you bring on board will not do anything.
And so I just thought that was so powerful that you brought this in because this goes beyond the mold conversation. This goes into every conversation. And you’re speaking down to its spidey senses and its neurological wiring and its belief system wiring that perpetuates a condition.
And until you rewire that and you get out of your own way, you’ll unfortunately be meeting more and more of the same things you’re trying to resist and trying to resist out of a fear place. So, wow, Jason, that was massive.
No doubt about it. No, I mean, listen, to disregard the emotional component of illness is, again, it’s a willful ignorance because you know it, by the way, intuitively. We all know it, right?
We all, this is the turmoil. And it’s hard to turn that around sometimes, but this is not something that you need to do alone also. This is a well-traveled path.
And so, you know, the idea, like most things, you can’t do it alone, you shouldn’t do it alone. And the resources are, you know, like I said, DNRS is great, but the work that Cat King at Primal Trust is doing has taken it up a few notches. And so I’d highly recommend anyone who’s concerned about this, who wants to get their nervous system back into tune and start thinking more about, you know, getting into more of a state of love and acceptance instead of fear and disrhythm.
This is, again, we’re talking about, really, we’re talking about our relationship with nature when we’re talking about mold. And we’re talking about our buildings have disconnected us from nature. And so all of this stuff comes back down to like really basic ideas that are sort of clouded by, you know, our busyness and clouded by all this other stuff.
But yeah, so it’s all very complex, but at the end of the day, these are very simple concepts. And again, the good news is, and there’s a lot of good news around this, is that 20 years ago, when I first started doing this, mold, you know , people dismissed it. I think people were like, what are you doing?
What kind of industry? Mold?
I was right there with them.
And now everyone understands that this stuff is bad, or at least everyone understands that this stuff can cause you illness. I shouldn’t say it’s even bad because it is not bad.
It is not out to get us.
It’s not out to get us. Mold is not trying to kill you. In fact, I would even assert that the musty smell that comes from initial, the initial water damage is actually a pain.
Like I said, it’s inflammation in the building. It’s like a pain signal. It’s actually potentially the building sending you a signal or the mold sending you a signal saying, hey, there’s an imbalance here.
Yeah, tension here right now. If it really wanted to kill you, mold’s got a lot of intelligence and it’s been around for a long time. It’s got a lot more time and resources on its hands.
It’s got better chemicals and weapons too. If it really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already, I assure you. So it’s actually signaling to you when you get that musty smell that there’s something wrong.
If you don’t listen to it, it’s like ignoring pain in your body. It will eventually manifest as something more significant. So listen to the signals that your body gives you.
Listen to the signals that your building gives you.
So beautiful. And where do we begin in testing for this that’s not BS testing? Because that’s what I’m concerned about.
It’s like, how do we start to explore this? And maybe one of the conversations you and I had last time was like, maybe we should put less attention on testing versus attention on healing the environment or preventing it from the get go.
Yes. So testing is complex. A lot of people recommend ERME, which is a dust test.
It’s actually not even a test. It’s a research tool developed by an EPA staffer that looks for 36 moles, 36 species out of 100,000 species. And so it’s extremely narrow and it’s also prone, wildly prone to false positives.
So it scares the crap out of people. And often leads to a cascade of expensive inspections and unnecessary investigative demolition and stuff like that. Because of the fact that people want a silver bullet with testing, they want one test, right?
Imagine if there was one test for the body that tells you if you’ve got, you know, it’s just not realistic, right? If you want to test for cancer, how many tests are there for cancer? I mean, you have imaging, you got blood, you’ve got physical, you’ve got, you know, there’s so many different ways.
And if you just do blood, you’re going to miss a lot of cancers. If you just do imaging, you’re going to miss a lot. If you just do physical, you’re going to miss a lot.
The building is no different. You need to look at this in a multifaceted approach. So even if you do testing on your own, you still need to look for evidence of moisture.
You still need to use your nose. You still need to think about the building history. Have you had leaks, floods, water damage?
You still need to think about symptom profiles. Is it getting better when you leave the building? All of these things are essentially the same as, you know, just like if you’re dealing with a workup for a physical, for your own body, right?
You’re doing a physical or a workup for the building. And so we developed a mold test that uses spore traps, and so it looks for airborne mold spores. It’s one tool in the arsenal of other tools, right?
There are also, and so we’ll drop a link at the end to our website about that, and we can talk more about that later. But there’s also tests for the VOCs and for the musty smell. Another test that will show another facet of the indoor air.
And so when you start layering these things on, then you start to get a picture. But there’s no single data point, whether it be an ERME test, a spore trap, a VOC test, or even the musty. None of those things are actionable on their own.
They need to have the context of what’s going on in the environment. So that’s one of the reasons why we created an e-book, The How to Find Mold. And so this walks you through your home with inspection checklists and FAQs and gives you sort of the, it slows you down a little bit so that you will take a walk through your own home, the same way if you were to give yourself a little mole exam, you know, like you look around, you want to take the time to do that sometimes, right?
And so the same thing with your building. And then when you find areas of concern where there’s, you know, a musty smell, there’s some evidence of moisture, you might find water bugs, that’s a big red flag, you know, these kinds of things. Then you might consider using a test like ours, the Gotmold Test Kit.
And then you’ll start to be able to collect air samples and determine whether or not there are abnormal spore counts, which could be reflective of a mold problem, or any one of the other resources that we talk and promote. In the e-book, by the way. I love this.
Such an amazing resource, Jason. I’m so grateful to have a place to send people to say, where do I begin? How do I start to look at this?
And I love that you’re putting it back into their control, into their responsibility and their autonomy to take measures in their own hands and not spend a fortune bringing in an inspector. They can start the inspecting process themselves. Yes, we want to empower people.
Yeah, we’re here to empower people with the tools and knowledge they need to make better decisions about the air they breathe. But it is a one step at a time process. Like I said, there’s no silver bullets.
And also, I should mention this, and this is a really important point, and if we have time, I would love to chat more about the mold and the food. But when it comes to tests, it’s really important to realize that there’s petri dishes that are very popular too. They’re always positive, always positive, because mold spores are abundant and they always grow on petri dishes.
So if you have a test that’s prone to false positive, that’s a very dangerous data point, because false positives will send you down rabbit holes. They will lead to you maybe hiring inspectors that will also leverage that data and remediators who will leverage that data into procedures that may or may not be necessary. When it comes to tests that show not detected, for example, spore traps like ours, nothing may be detected.
When you may actually have a musty smell, you may have water damage, that’s not a false negative, even though what it actually is, it shows you the nature of the mold problem. You might have mold growing in the wall, spores aren’t coming through, but the musty smell is. We already know the musty smell can make you sick.
That’s not a false negative, that’s actually helping you characterize the nature of the mold problem. In those cases, you’re going to want to bring in a professional to do the investigative work to find out where that source of moisture is. Understanding how to interpret data is one of the trickiest parts of this, but it’s important to realize that there’s a lot of confirmation bias when it comes to testing.
People get the Petri dishes. POSIS-C, I told you, right? The ERMI test, I told you.
This also rolls up to practitioners who are in the business of making money too, of course. In some cases, this perpetuates the next visit, right? When I have a high reading and then you have a mycotoxin panel and that’s a high reading.
Well, gosh, if you got a high ERMI and a high mycotoxin panel, you got a problem. Well, I’m here to tell you that everybody will have a high mycotoxin panel. Well, not everybody, but almost everybody will have, unless you’re not excreting well.
If you eat at restaurants and you’re in modern America, you probably are eating mycotoxin contaminated food to some degree, and so therefore you will be excreting them and they will show up in your panel. And almost every single ERMI test is high. And if you misinterpret that data and then daisy chain them together, garbage in, garbage out, confirmation bias, well, that makes you know you’re in a funnel of remediators and inspectors and you may or may not have a problem.
But then you go back and you’re not getting better. Because the reality is that the mycotoxin panel is actually reflecting your food. I mean, 99% of that, I think, is food related.
And the ERMI, you’re almost never going to get a clean ERMI. And so then that’s just like there’s a cascade of disappointment and additional unnecessary work around that. It’s very complex stuff.
So for those false positives from the panels, and by the way, it’s not really a false positive. It’s telling you that you’re eating badly.
Right. Right. Exactly.
Because they do. When you look at the, as a clinician, you look at the result, like the interpretation section, and it’ll say, yes, you can get this from water damaged buildings. But here’s also where it’s found.
Agriculture, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, coffee, wine. Suddenly you realize this is the massive food systems of our developed nations. I mean, it hits you really quickly that that list is extensive and it’s not solely coming from your home.
And I think that’s a piece that is huge for you to bring to light.
Yeah, no, and it’s also conventional meats and dairy. So check this out. What are they feeding cows if they’re not grass-fed?
What do they feed? They’re feeding them moldy grains.
Moldy grains, exactly. So not only are we also getting the glyphosate and the hormones and the antibiotics and the… You’re getting the moldy grain piece, which means mycotoxins on mycotoxins on mycotoxins or BOC is the whole thing.
Yeah, you’re getting the whole thing. And it’s just like mercury rolls up the food chain, right? Mycotoxins do too.
They’re lipophilic and so they stick in fats. And of course, dairy is a lot of fat. And so it goes right on through.
And they’re also heat-resistant, so you can’t cook them out. And they’re also hydrophobic, which means that they don’t excrete well. So they get lodged in your fat cells.
They don’t cook out. You know, this stuff is… It’s durable stuff.
I mean… And so, yeah, and it’s imported grains, nuts, seeds, coffee, tea, spices. You know, the list is long.
But, like, anytime you go to a restaurant, if it does not say organic, local, seasonal, grass-fed pasture, you know what it is, and it’s filled with the long list of other pollutants, and then you can also add mycotoxins in there. We get people calling us all the time with high-mycotoxin panels, and they want us to find the mold that’s producing that mycotoxin in their building, and I’m like, well, it’s not in your building. If it’s in your building, it’s in your pantry.
You know?
That’s huge. So we need to start with the pantry. If you’re doing human testing and finding high levels, especially things like okra toxin is a really good example of one that seems to show up pretty common in our patient profiles, you need to start more with the pantry than the building.
And vomitoxin, D-O-N, you know, that’s also… I mean, that’s commonly found coming from fusarium. And I’ve been doing this 21 years.
I’ve done thousands and thousands of assessments. And I’ve never once seen a fusarium infestation in a home. But it loves corn.
Loves corn. And by the way, corn isn’t not food anyway, in my opinion.
And I live down here in Mexico, where like, corn is king, right? But it is such, it’s such, it carries so much. This little pork corn, it’s not the corn of our ancestors today.
You know, I’m sure those little tiny purple, you know, little tiny red corn on the cobs from, you know, millennia ago were great. But today, unfortunately, they’re giant bombs of poison. Glyphosate, there is actually, people don’t realize this, but gluten or corn actually contains gluten.
You know, it’s quote unquote safe levels of it, unless you’re somebody like me who’s a canary in the coal mine, then it backfires there too. It is such the carrier of these mold, you know, spores, VOCs, mycotoxins, it likes them all. It seems to just sponge it all up there.
And then it’s in everything, in everything from body care products to fillers and medications to, you know, non-caking items. You know, when you see things that say dextrin or maltodextrin, it’s always corn unless otherwise specified. And so, yeah, Jason, you’re like, a lot of people are probably sitting here right now, like I’m ready to jump off a building, at least it’s a moldy building.
So hopefully they buckled their seat belts and they won’t be able to jump off without. Yeah.
So where you’ve given us resources around what’s on your website of this little like walk through our house guide and where to start with this, what simple places do you advise people to start on this journey? Because you’ve just blown, I mean we’ve gone through so many rabbit holes today around biophilic design, to proper testing, to misinformation, to fear and its impact on all of this. We have already alluded to a little bit of the impact on our health of these types of toxins in our environment.
I mean, I can tell you as a clinician, they definitely sit on your immune system and prevent it from doing its job. They definitely impact mitochondrial function. They definitely impact, as he mentioned, the dopamine, which is going to impact all of your hormone relationships, like all of your hormonal orchestra.
Definitely going to impact your neurochemistry. Definitely going to impact the way you even absorb certain nutrients. And so leading to further malabsorption.
It’s just massive of the reach it has into our health. And so what are some tangible first steps? Let’s take this from the, oh my god, this is too much, this is overwhelming, to what are the tangible next steps to take that bring us back into the light of hope?
Well, the first thing is you need to focus on moisture. And so really you need to make sure you maintain your building. And so if you are renting, of course, that’s a challenge.
But if you own your home, make sure that you maintain the outside of the building so the water doesn’t get in the first place. And then on the inside, you want to manage your humidity and keep it in the sort of Goldilocks zone, which is between 40 and 60 percent, and with a target of 45 percent. So that means you’re going to want to get humidity gauges and watch them closely.
This is incredibly important. So you want to want air conditioning when necessary or run a dehumidifier as necessary. Use your exhaust vents in your kitchen and your bathroom.
And so, you know, prevention is key on all this stuff. And you’re going to want to also, you know, if you do have a problem, there’s only three things you can really do with a mold problem. You can either you can do source control, which is remediate it.
And that’s a whole different conversation. We do address that in the ebook and talk about some things, some sort of dos and don’ts and what to avoid. But source control is not always possible or practical.
So oftentimes, the second thing you can do, which is useful to a lot of people, is getting really good air purifiers. And so that’s extremely helpful to reduce exposure. It doesn’t solve a mold problem.
It’s not a substitute for remediation, but it’s certainly helpful. And so you’re going to want to get an air purifier that has a lot of carbon in it because that takes out the VOCs. Just plain heavy filters only take out particles.
And so you’re going to want to have an air purifier like Austin Air or IQ Air are two really good units that have a lot of carbon. But there are other filters out there that have a decent amount of air doctor, Medify, Jasper even. And then the third thing you can do if you’ve got a known issue is, and this is whether it be VOCs or mold, is ventilation.
And so that means you can open the windows when the weather is nice, when it’s not too hot, too cold or too humid. But also there are mechanical ventilation systems or air exchange systems called ERVs or HRVs. And these are extremely effective for diluting poor indoor air, right?
We live in these hermetically sealed boxes, and building code doesn’t require us to have air exchange. So these kinds of things can be really, really useful for people who have the ability to make those kinds of mechanical interventions. But like I said before, you can use your HEPA filters and you can use your HEPA vacuums and you can monitor the moisture and you should do all those things.
Don’t stop producing, stop bringing chemicals into your home. Get rid of the ones that you do have. If you’re going to renovate, make sure that you look at resources like greenguard.org to reduce chemical loads because those products that you bring in are going to off gas over the course of years.
So there’s lots of things when it comes to renovations and new construction that you’re going to want to keep that stuff out. The choices are abundant and available these days. You do not have to buy toxic chemicals and building materials.
But at the same time, the most important thing is that whenever possible, open your windows. I mean, it sounds like such a simple thing, but it is so critical. And so other than that, the most important thing you can do is try to accept the fact that the mold is a function of nature and to embrace the fact that it is not the enemy, that fear is the enemy when it comes to this stuff and that when it comes down to what to do about it, it really is about speed.
So if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something.
I love that. I love that. Such a powerful mantra.
Jason, where can people find you?
Yes.
You talk about the amazing booklet that you give, but you do so much and share so much with the world.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much. And the best place for people to go initially is to gotmold.com/metabolicmatters.
And so that’s all one word, metabolic matters, gotmold.com/metabolicmatters. And there you’ll find a link to the e-book that I mentioned. You’ll also find a discount code, which is MMP10, which will give your listeners a 10% discount off of our test kits.
Our gotmold test kit allows you to test one, two, or three rooms with the same device as the professionals use, but without the cost or hassle associated with trying to find a higher one. And then once you have one of our kits, you get to keep the air sampling pump, our cute little people call it the egg. And so you get to keep this, and then you can buy refills, and you can retest for $50 less.
So kits start at $199, they go up to $299 for a three room kit, and then refills start at $149 and go to $249. So people often share them with friends as well, so that they can also enjoy the savings. And so this is a nice little utility for people.
And then also if people want to get in touch and they want to ask questions, one way is to go to our website, the bottom of the homepage. There’s a little contact field. I see every single one of the questions that comes through there.
And then you can also post questions on Instagram. I have an Ask Me Anything pinned at the top. So I love to be able to interact with people there.
And so yeah, so we often think, we often say that we’re more of an education company that happens to sell a test kit than a test kit company that uses content marketing. So if you have any questions, let us know. We’re here to help.
My gosh, this has been mind blowing. And I’ve even heard a few of these things before, but the levity of it, it’s just like you hear it, you’ll need to hear this again and again for it to sit in. And wow, we’re going to have to have you back because there’s so many other things that I would love to cover with you again.
But Jason, what a gift you are to the world. Thank you for your four year old self who had this experience that brought you to where you are today. Thank you for the many people including your mother that is no longer with us who reflects back maybe some other vulnerabilities in our environment that can lead to, you know, to all kinds of health conditions from mental to cancerous and everything in between.
Thank you so much for being on this passion and purpose and articulating it so beautifully of what you do. You really have a gift of the gab and it’s just an absolute honor and joy to have you, Jason, and thank you for all of your amazing resources for our community.
Well, thank you. It has all been a blessing and it is a blessing to be here with you. Thank you, Nasha.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Metabolic Matters. We hope you found today’s conversation insightful and empowering. As we wrap up today’s episode, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible team and supporters who make this podcast possible.
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