Could your home be making you sick?

Podcast Transcript

Hey guys, I just want to welcome you. This is going to be the last episode for the next three weeks. I’m taking a little break to do a lot more publicity and a lot more recording.

 

I have several more episodes recorded already, but I’m going to be spending the next three weeks doing a lot more recording of both episodes as well as extras and working on publicity for this podcast, because I know we are not reaching nearly the audience that we should be getting. If you guys could help me out and continue to share this with your friends, with family, with any WhatsApp groups in America, in Israel, Facebook, whoever you think would be interested in bridging the gap between the best and the latest and greatest in health ideas and technologies, along with some Torah tying the two together. I know that we can be reaching a much broader audience than we are getting, though I’m thankful and grateful for those of you guys who continue to listen and to get in touch with me to give me weekly feedback as well.

 

I really, really, truly love it. This week’s episode with Jason from Got Mold was actually the first episode I recorded after October 7th. If I’m not mistaken, Jason and I spoke on October 10th.

 

And prior to the actual interview, I think that we spoke for at least 30 minutes about everything that was going on here. And I was just really impressed with Jason’s openness and willingness to listen and identify and even understand with what was going on. He’s just an incredible person.

 

And Jason, if you’re listening to this, I know you didn’t get your bomba yet, but God willing, if the war doesn’t expand to the North by the end of the month, I’m supposed to be coming to the States and you’re gonna be getting some gifts for me, for your little kids to try out and make sure that you keep them not allergic to peanuts. So you’ll be getting that. And I just wanna thank you so much for your time.

 

I think this is a really interesting episode. You guys will hear I had my own.

 

With Mold, you’ll hear that story as well. And I just think that this is a topic that’s not often spoke about enough and an issue that many, many people in Israel have, especially now during the rainy season. This week’s episode, I just want to thank Sonia Kogul.

 

This week’s episode is sponsored in memory of her father. His yore site is actually a little bit later on, but she wanted to sponsor an episode for me already. And I just wanna thank her.

 

And you guys will identify a little bit because Sonia is Edan Green’s mother. And you guys have heard Edan do the Torah extra on, gosh, I think it’s at least four of the episodes that we’ve had. She’s the youngest person I’ve had on, but one of the most powerful.

 

Her Torah is just incredibly inspiring, soulful. And I just love, love, love having her on every time she’s been on. So Sonia’s father’s name was Yona Wolf.

 

And his yore site is actually on Shushan Purim, but I wanna thank her for sponsoring this week’s episode. He was a Holocaust survivor. He was the only one of his family and he was a tough and proud Zionist.

 

He was a guy who I can identify with him because in terms of physical health and my PT background, he worked out every single day of his life. He went for a run every morning. He did a whole stretching and workout routine.

 

He was skiing the Rocky Mountains until he was 88 years old and he walked a mile at age 90. Sonia’s brother wrote a book about her father called Running Breathless, an untold true story of World War II and the Holocaust. And I’m happy to link that in the show notes as well, if anybody is interested in seeing that or purchasing that as well.

 

And I just wanna thank you, Sonia. And Sonia and I became friends when she first moved to Israel, which I’m gonna say was back in about 2020. And she’s just a wonderful person, so thank you so much.

 

So I want to again tell you guys that first of all, I’m thankful. I’ve had a few people who have offered to donate for soldiers. I’m starting to get more soldier patients who are coming back from the front.

 

And some of them just can’t afford private physical therapy. And as much as we like to think, the Army will take care of all of their needs. Those of you who are parents of soldiers know that with so much going on, the Army has a really hard time and they can’t always take care of everybody’s needs.

 

And you know, sometimes people need things that may be beyond the Army, beyond what the Army can actually give them. So if there’s anybody who’s interested in being paired with a soldier who’s going to be coming for treatment, please reach out to me and I’d like to help set that up. Thank you guys so much.

 

Thank you for listening. And enjoy this episode.

 

You’re listening to Holy Health, the podcast that brings you the latest in health ideas and technology across the spectrum of fields. Well, ultimately, our fate is up to God. How we get there is determined by us.

 

As it says in Kohelet, there is nothing new under the sun. We get that everything can be found in Torah. Our goal is to empower you with knowledge that may help you make better lifestyle choices.

 

This podcast has been brought to you by Musach Haguf Physical Therapy and Personal Training Studio. Our motto is fixing the past in order to build the future. You can find us on Instagram at Musach Haguf.

 

Hello everyone and welcome to Holy Health. My guest today is Jason Earle. Jason is a man on a mission and adoring father of two boys in diapers, incurable entrepreneur and indoor air quality crusader.

 

He’s founder and CEO of Got Mold and the creator of the Got Mold Test Kit. The realization that his moldy childhood home was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma led him into the healthy home business in 2002, leaving behind a successful career on Wall Street. Over the last two decades, Jason has personally performed countless sick building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way, helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind.

 

He’s been featured on Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover, oh, excuse me, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired and more. And now on the Holy Health Podcast, we are really, really lucky to have a man like Jason here with us today. So thank you so much, first of all.

 

Thank you, Dara, it’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Thanks a lot. So Mold, can you tell me a little bit about what Mold is?

 

Absolutely.

 

Who maybe never saw Mold before.

 

Sure, and we’ll listen. I mean, I think there’s so much confusion around this subject matter that whenever people want to talk to me about Mold, they go all the way out to how am I going to detox? And what kind of mold makes this mycotoxin?

 

And they’re way out on the tail of this thing. And I try to reel them back into the tiger, right? Which is the heart of it, which is that, and mold is a normal part of a healthy environment, just not when it’s growing in your house.

 

What is mold is a great place to start. Mold is essentially nature’s digestive organism. So mold is part of kingdom fungi, which includes macro fungi, what we know as mushrooms, as well as micro fungi, which are molds and yeasts.

 

And so the purpose of mold is to turn things that were at one time living, specifically plant matter back into dirt. So it’s doing its job if it’s doing that in your front yard, not so much if it’s doing that in your living room.

 

Okay, that was a good explanation. And I like things that are not way out on the fringe. We like to bring things together, dumb them down a little so that we can understand what we’re dealing with before we go off on tangents.

 

Yes, absolutely.

 

So let me ask you, right? So what about things like, if I see mold on my wall, we’re saying it’s not healthy, but what about things like blue cheese or even penicillin? Aren’t those made of mold?

 

Great question. So yes, mold is a Swiss army knife. It’s got so many different tools within its arsenal of resources.

 

So you look at these simple single celled organisms and it’s easy to look at them and think that they are as simple as they appear when they’re quite not. Molds have been used since the beginning of time to make things delicious, to make things nutritious and even to make things safe. So the original fermented beverages, beers and wines and things like that were actually necessary because drinking water was dangerous.

 

And so this was originally fermented with the first sort of domesticated microbes. So there was a very small amount of alcohol but just enough to kill the pathogens. And so, and then the ancients also used to harness the power of molds to make cheeses and soy sauce is a thousand up to eight, I think 800 BC was the first soy sauce which was made from a species of aspergillus which will also by the way grow on your drywall.

 

And so these organisms have a remarkable ability to sort of grow wherever the conditions are right. And it just so happens that mold really likes our conditions. I would argue that, or I assert that mold actually has evolved alongside of us.

 

And in fact is a very important part of our microbiome, which, so the microbial community on us, in us and around us. The problem with mold is when it grows in food that is uncontrolled. So like blue cheese is a specific culture.

 

There’s a penicillium species called Roqueforte, which makes Roquefort cheese. There’s also another one called Camembert cheese, which makes Camembert cheese. And what’s interesting about those two molds is that they will grow on drywall.

 

They also will grow in dairy products to make these beautiful cheeses, right? Without any ill effect to humans. Those same species growing on corn and then fed to cows will kill them because it produces very potent mycotoxins when it’s eating corn.

 

Mostly because there’s a lot of competition with other microbes there. So given the right conditions, it will produce these very potent toxins to be able to sort of plant its flag and eat what’s there. So the mold species is kind of irrelevant, even though everyone wants to talk about this mold or that mold.

 

What really matters is that mold is a normal part of a healthy environment. We just don’t want it growing in any significant amounts in our buildings. Why?

 

Well, so when mold grows, it produces three things, much more than three things. But for the purpose of this conversation, I’ll distill it down to spores, which are the hardy reproductive capsules, kind of like seeds that break free from the mold colonies and go forth and try to prosper. Those can be allergenic.

 

They can also carry trace amounts of mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are the poisons that molds produce in order to kill other molds or to inhibit growth of bacteria. The most famous one is actually penicillin.

 

Penicillin is in fact a mycotoxin. It is also an antibiotic, which is kind of a convention of modern science where we name things based upon our own human preferences. So if it kills something you don’t want to kill, like us or our friendly pets and things like that, that’s a mycotoxin.

 

That same chemical used to kill something you want to kill, like a bacterial infection, that’s an antibiotic. Same compound, different name depending upon the use. That’s human, that’s modern science, right?

 

And so when we’re talking about the things that molds produce, the spores, the mycotoxins, and then there’s also this thing called microbial volatile organic compounds. And so we all know that telltale musty scent when you walk into a building that’s been damp a little too long, that musty smell is comprised of a potpourri of compounds, VOCs, volatile organic compounds, that are essentially mold burps, okay? So they are digesting what they’re growing on and then releasing the digestive gases, just like when we digest, we produce gas, so do molds.

 

In fact, our gas, by the way, our digestive gases are also microbial VOCs, because we’re not really producing them. The microbes in our gut are. And so we’re producing VOCs, as well as the ones that are produced when mold is growing on your wallboard.

 

That’s interesting, what’s interesting about this is that the spores have long been vilified as a source of mold-related illness, and yes, they can in fact cause allergic reactions and immune responses in sensitive individuals. They can trigger inflammation in sensitive individuals, and in some cases can cause infections, especially with people with a compromised immune system. So you certainly want to have a grip on keeping spore counts to a normal level, but spores are also an important part of a normal healthy environment because our lungs learn about what’s normal in this world through this naked interface of breathing.

 

And so we need a certain amount of spores in our world. Otherwise what happens is we go out into the real world outside, I should say, when we go from indoors to outdoors, we can develop hypersensitivities or we can overreact or immune system can overreact. So some degree of mold spores is actually good.

 

It’s a hormetic stressor. The dose makes the poison a little bit, it’s actually good, a lot, it’s not so good. But when mold grows, you go into this imbalance where there’s a lot and that can trigger lots of different health responses. 

 

And everybody’s different, by the way. Everybody responds to mold differently. It’s a very personal kind of sensitivity.

 

The mycotoxins are very different. Most mycotoxin exposure is actually from food, from contaminated food. People think about mycotoxins being airborne.

 

They really aren’t because they’re sticky kind of oily substances and they tend to stick to the surfaces that they’re trying to protect. Mold’s trying to protect its surface where it eats. And so unless there’s a lot of disturbance and dust and spores have gone airborne, the mycotoxins tend to be on the surfaces.

 

Now, but in food, food is a major problem. Between 60 and 80 percent of imported grains in the United States are contaminated with mycotoxins. The numbers in Europe are about the same.

 

And so we have a very serious problem with our food supply as a world. Okay, globalization has given us many conveniences, but it’s also extended lead times, which allows for a lot of mold to grow in foods, which is cumulative because these mycotoxins actually build up in our body through something known as bioaccumulation. And so mold as a hazard needs to be looked at from two perspectives, indoor air quality and also what’s in your pantry.

 

And by the way, the biggest violator is actually restaurants. And also conventional meats and dairies, conventional meats and dairy because the animals are fed moldy grains often. They’re fed the non-human grade grains.

 

And then that stuff gets lodged in their fat cells. And just like mercury goes up the food chain with tuna, and then we end up at the top of that, same thing happens with conventional meats and dairy. So it’s very important to look at how clean you’re eating and how close to local you’re eating when you’re concerned about these kinds of things.

 

But when it comes to air quality, mycotoxins are less of a concern, much less of a concern than it is purported. Now, the third thing, which is the musty smell, this is fascinating because recent research has pointed to microbial, that musty smell as potentially the primary source of mold-related illness. It’s the first thing that happens when mold grows and all molds produce them, which explains why people get sick even in buildings where there aren’t the quote unquote toxic molds.

 

So that first bloom will produce that distinctive musty smell. And the symptoms commonly associated with that are headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and recent research, including through Brown University, they found a direct correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression. And subsequent studies with animals, including fruit flies, found that they stopped producing dopamine.

 

They essentially became depressed. They stopped reproducing. They start flying down and set it to the light.

 

They also develop Parkinsonian-like symptoms and neurological disorders and mitochondrial dysfunction. And so that’s just from inhaling one compound that’s found within the musty smell. So mold growth is really a chemical factory.

 

And so what we wanna do is once you identify that there’s any degree of mold growth going on, the most important thing to do is find the moisture source and stop it and fix that. And everything else begins and ends with moisture.

 

Okay, so first of all, I have so many things I wanna tell you, and I’m gonna break apart the food from the musty smell. So I told you, I had a good story about mold for you. So about six, eight weeks ago, I took my kids to Italy and we were renting an Airbnb there.

 

And it was very, it was sort of like an apartment complex, but every single apartment in there was sort of Airbnb. And I think it was owned by a company. So when they opened the door and we walked in, it was very like antiquey looking, all the furniture and everything, but it was very clean.

 

We walked in and the first thing my son said was, wow, this smells like Lake Placid. Lake Placid is where my grandmother went for 75 years. It was in the middle of the woods.

 

And I’m like, no, not to know, this smells like mold. But I didn’t say anything. The place looked clean.

 

I was like, okay, you know, whatever. We’re just here a few days. It won’t be so bad.

 

The bathroom was so horrible. Like you couldn’t even breathe when you were in the bathroom, but it still wasn’t occurring to me to complain, to say anything. The next morning we woke up.

 

My daughter-in-law had a horrible headache. My one daughter who 100% has the most sensitive gut she’s got. She’s my one kid with a little bit of anxiety and the most really sensitive of all the kids.

 

Sounded like she was coming down with the worst cold you’ve ever heard. She was all, whatever. And I realized that it was the mold.

 

And that’s when I knew I had to call you by the way. And I said to my son, I’m like, listen, it was our Sabbath, so we don’t drive, we don’t do things. But I said no to no, we have to go down there and we have to tell them, I’m sorry, they’re gonna have to give us some money back.

 

We have to leave Saturday night. We cannot stay here. So we went down, they came back up.

 

When they walked in, I mean, there was no denying it. You could smell it immediately. The bathroom was horrific.

 

And you could look out on the porch and there was an awning and you could see black mold on the awning itself. So they actually changed us to a different apartment, which didn’t smell at all. And by the next day, the headache was gone.

 

My daughter’s cold symptoms were gone. And everything was back to normal. But that to me was my first real association and really reminded me, because I had heard your podcast not so long before that like, how powerful is this?

 

So that was my-

 

Yes, it’s incredible. And what you highlighted there, which is fascinating. I’m so glad to hear that you took immediate action because my observation over the last 21 years doing thousands of these investigations and overseeing all the remediations and seeing how people get better is that in essence, acute exposure, short-term exposures tend to create short-term symptoms.

 

Long-term exposure tends to lead to long-term or chronic symptoms. So what happens is, and this is why I always say that most mold problems are preventable or at least the consequences of them are preventable. If people would listen to the signals, if they’ll listen to the signals that the building is giving them or that the mold is giving them.

 

I would even argue, a lot of people vilify mold. Mold is just doing its thing, right? Mold has nothing against you.

 

And believe me, if mold wanted to kill you, you’d be dead because it’s got better weapons in you. It’s smarter. It’s got a lot of time on its hands.

 

So it is absolutely, it is just doing its thing and it wants you to get out of the way. I even sometimes think that mold makes it really uncomfortable in buildings so you get out so we can eat the rest of it. So it’s just kind of like, get out of here.

 

We’ll make this uncomfortable enough. We’ll make a lot of noise, like a bad neighbor, just so you can move out and then I’ll buy the house. And so that’s, I think, what mold’s motive is.

 

But it’ll send you a signal the moment that it starts to grow to let you know there’s an imbalance in the building. And that’s what this comes down to. There’s an imbalance in moisture.

 

We have four basic human needs. Air, water, food, shelter. And all of that stuff, it requires a certain degree of balance.

 

Air quality is really a byproduct of maintaining a low chemical load and keeping things clean and dry. The moment things go slightly off balance, next thing you know, you’ll start to see mold growth as well as dust mites and other allergens will start to proliferate. Then you’ll start to end up with a very high allergen load in the home.

 

But the fact that you were able to listen to the signal and then take action on it, gave you the ability to literally recover faster. The longer people are in it, the longer it takes to get out of it. I’ve seen way too many people who their long-term exposure actually changes them.

 

It shifts them into a hypersensitivity mode, almost like a fight-or-flight type of, there’s almost a permanent state of anxiety. Also, they tend to come away with chemical sensitivities, specifically fragrances. Sometimes they can’t even go into a dry cleaner or a grocery store afterwards.

 

That’s really hard to reel back in. It pushes a button inside people that really, if they’re already prone to fear and anxiety, it can really up-level that. The most important thing you can do, if you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something.

 

That’s why I say this so many times a day, but if you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something, I’m so glad you did.

 

Thank you. I have another question about, for about seven years, my parents were in a brand new building. You know how it is when you can move into a brand new building.

 

The first year, there’s leaks here, there’s leaks there. Right, like people have to fix things because you never know until people move in, until you get through that first winter, like you never know how things are gonna play out. So for about seven years, my parents had every single winter when it would rain really hard in Israel, they would have a leak of water that would go across the ceiling.

 

And even then, because I always knew, you hear about black mold and things, and you never smelled anything. But I always remember thinking, look, how do we know there’s no mold? Like, yeah, it’s great that they come and they paint.

 

How do we know there’s no mold in the ceiling? Now I want to add the, not disclaimer, but I do want to add on to this, that then when winter is over, we have about seven months where it is so dry here that everything completely dries out. So would that also factor into this situation?

 

Yes and no. So, and it also depends on the building material. So the answer to that is it depends.

 

And so that’s always, and that’s the answer to most mold questions. It depends, because mold is like a combination lock. You have to have all the right conditions and then this biological process unfolds that is completely driven by moisture.

 

So yes, it will stop it, but it doesn’t get rid of it. It never goes away. So it will become dormant and in that dormancy, you will have, if you don’t have direct exposure to the surface that it’s growing on, you will unlikely have any exposure that would lead to symptoms.

 

Mold growth itself, the actual biological process of mold eating and then burping, if you will, for lack of a better term, it is then producing all these compounds. It’s making some poisons, if it’s one of the toxigenic species and the conditions are right and there’s competition. In other words, the molds that make the toxins only make them intermittently and then even those only make them if the conditions are right.

 

So the told toxic mold conversation is kind of a farce because the reality is that all mold is toxic when it’s growing or all mold produces toxins when it’s growing, not necessarily mycotoxins, but they’re all producing toxins, especially neurotoxins. So when it dries out, it’s not gonna be emanating those gases anymore and it’s not gonna be producing mycotoxins. They will still, if they produce them, it will still be in the colony.

 

It’ll still be on the substrate, but it will not be producing anymore. And so the reality is, and I used to hesitate to tell people this, but dormant mold growth in a wall is not gonna make you sick. But the problem is it will begin to grow and metabolize again in the presence of high humidity once it’s grown as opposed to the presence of moisture.

There’s a big difference, right? So liquid water on the surface, like a little bit of condensation is what causes most mold growth. But so just a high humidity in a room where there’s no condensation just will not generally cause it.

 

But once mold grows, then all it takes is that little bit of ambient humidity. And then it sort of wakes up and goes, what are we gonna eat today? So it’s very important that when you look at this, not to think that it will go away on its own and that it’s not an issue because leaks don’t fix themselves.

 

The building doesn’t have an immune system. Actually, that’s not true. You’re the immune system.

 

So if you didn’t fix it, it isn’t gonna get fixed, right? And so I don’t want people to rest on their laurels thinking, well, it just happened that one time. Leaks aren’t one time usually.

 

Usually there’s something going on unless it’s like a toilet that overflowed or something like that. But if it’s something that’s caused by an external building envelope issue, in other words, a leak from a roof, any sort of external moisture movement of groundwater, those kinds of things, the best thing for you to do is take action on it right away. And then the second best thing to do is to take action on it as quickly as you can to stop the moisture problem immediately.

 

Actually, the first thing you should do is stop the moisture problem and fix it immediately. And if you can’t, wait until the moisture problem dries out and then assess the size of the damage and then have it professionally removed.

 

Okay, because where we do get mold in most of many of the houses in Israel, is like we said, and it only rains in the winter and it rains and it’s cold. But then obviously inside the house is warm. So we actually tend to get it.

 

I don’t know if you can see kind of the metal door over there, but we actually get mold on like the metal window frames. And I would have thought almost like what’s mold eating on metal, right? And it doesn’t smell though.

 

So if you don’t smell it, is it as dangerous or?

 

Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. So the truth is that if you don’t smell it, you’re probably not being exposed to a lot of the compounds that are attributed to mold related illness. The musty smell is a big deal.

 

The reason that you’re not getting that is because it’s just not eating enough. It’s like having a couple of nibbles of popcorn, right? It’s like waiting for the main event.

 

What is growing on is the dust that has accumulated on those surfaces. You won’t see it because it’s very small. Dust is beautiful for mold because it’s pretty digested, it’s tiny little bit, very absorbent.

 

It will pick up ambient humidity and it’s generally comprised of things that are nutrient rich. This is why I always say.

 

That the healthy home mantra is clean and dry. When I say clean, I don’t mean sterile. This is very important.

 

Clean means free of dirt and debris. If I can reorder one thing in our global society is to redefine the word clean. It does not mean spray with bleach, it does not mean sanitize it, it does not mean viral eradication.

 

We’re talking about removing dirt and debris, dust. If you do that, guess what happens? Mold doesn’t have a lot to grow on.

 

If you do get these spikes in humidity, which you will because you have seasonal imbalances and you’ve got moisture that grows. See, what you’re talking about is something called thermal bridging. The cold from outside makes the window metal cold comes through, and so it bridges the temperature from outside to the inside.

 

When doing so, it then makes a very, very cold surface. If you took an infrared camera and you could see the window, you’d see that the window is very cold around the perimeter, and the wall next to it is room temperature probably. The ambient humidity from showering, cooking, cleaning, breathing, all that stuff, you’ll get condensation forming on that.

 

But if that surface is clean, free of dust, and you could just do that with wiping down, HEPA filtered air cleaners are very helpful to reduce the dust that accumulates on surfaces like that. You know, people want to clean less, get yourself a HEPA filtered air cleaner, you will clean less. And you will benefit in many, many other ways as well.

 

But because you’re not smelling it, it’s probably not eating too much because there’s not much there to eat.

 

That actually makes a lot of sense. And even the whole dust factor being on like the windowsills, because we have so much building that goes on in these areas, there’s always dust. Like you can clean it in the morning and there’s dust there by the afternoon.

 

So it actually, that makes total and complete sense. Really does.

 

And you also, I would encourage people to get HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners too. And by the way, there’s a distinction here. You want to look for units that have another distinction, which is true HEPA.

 

And it makes you wonder what the other HEPA is. But true HEPA basically means that there’s a gasket on both sides of that filter. So the air has to go through the filter.

 

Otherwise, HEPA just means that there’s a HEPA filter in it. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the air goes through and there’s something called bypass air, which of course is not filtered. And so it defeats the purpose of even having a really high efficiency filter.

 

So you want to look for true HEPA air cleaners, true HEPA vacuum cleaners, and that will help you a lot. But I will also say this, and this is very important. I encourage people to use lots of filters, not zappers, not ozone generators, not ionizers, not this kind of stuff.

 

I mean, these kinds of things have a place, but not for general everyday use. HEPA filtered air cleaners, especially with carbon in them, because that will take the VOC and the smell out. It will take out man-made VOCs.

 

Carbon will take out man-made VOCs as well as microbial VOCs, and the HEPA filter will take out particles. So the perfect air filter actually has both. You want to run those 365 days a year, change them religiously, but at the same time, while you’re removing all of these microbes from the air, as I said in the beginning of the conversation, microbes are very important for us.

 

There’s an inverse relationship with microbial diversity and health. So in other words, the data on this is very strong. Houses that have a high microbial diversity, which means lots of different kinds of microbes, but none growing in the house.

 

ots of different microbes actually have a much, much lower case of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease. They’re even saying now autism and other very common problems these days, scary common problems these days. The adverse is true too.

 

Homes that have a very low microbial diversity, which is primarily from over sanitizing. COVID did a number on us with this stuff, as well as the overuse of HEPA filters and HEPA filter vacuum cleaners. Too clean will actually make your body more sensitive to these things.

 

You see huge numbers. The divergence is massive. Huge spikes in asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease.

 

It’s actually so significant that follow-up studies have actually looked at things like dishwashing. Homes that hand wash dishes have much lower cases of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease. Us too, for this one.

 

My son is very allergic because he was born without a microbiome. Sarah had antibiotics when she was pregnant with him and then he was born C-section, so he had no chance. We’ve had to really implement a lot of the things that I’ve been talking about for a long time with my son, which has been a privilege, but also it’s daunting to me to think about how many people had that problem and don’t have the resources or insights that I have to be able to help their kids bounce back.

 

Which is part of the reason why I like to do these talks. But the dishwasher sanitizes. And so you don’t get those little bits of food that might be in that those little microdoses that the kids actually need of the things that are irritating them, right?

 

The hormetic stressor, that thing that teaches your body what’s normal in the environment to keep you from having an anaphylactic reaction to something that’s a common thing, eggs, peanuts, whatever. But also when it comes to the microbes. And so it’s very important that we don’t live in a bubble.

 

We are, and then I’ll get off my soapbox in a minute, but humans are, you know, we are earthlings, earthlings, and the word human is actually the root, the Latin root of is humus, which is soil, right? It’s a human soil. And in fact, we began the conversation talking about digestion a little bit.

 

Most of our gut microbes are soil microbes. We are really not digesting. We’re really an ambulatory composter.

 

You know, like we’re not really digesting. The microbes are, and we’re getting the benefits from this ancient evolutionary partnership. And so, and we’re mostly microbe, I shouldn’t say mostly, we’re 30, I think 39 trillion human cells and something like 36 trillion microbial cells in us, on us and around us.

 

And so this idea about killing microbes is kind of hilarious because we are microbial, right? And so embrace the bugs because most of them are actually friendly or neutral. And by the way, only about a hundred of all the known bacteria cause major human disease.

 

Isn’t that crazy? But we’ll kill them all, kill them all. But only about a hundred are known to cause really common, really significant human disease.

 

And fungi, similarly, you may be a hundred or so produce the toxins and only a handful are pathogenic. And so there’s a reason that they’re here and we do need them. So I encourage people to focus on the thing that they can control, which is to control moisture and to keep their place clean.

 

But then also, as I was saying, they began the whole thing, use your HEPA filters, use your HEPA vacuums, clean your house and open your windows.

 

Okay, so I have a lot of good things. First of all, I just want to let you know that you know that Adam was the first man. Adam, the Hebrew word for Adam is Adam.

 

And the word Adam comes from Adama, which means the ground. So everything you’re saying tracks 100% with the Bible. And I’m sure I just ruined a piece for someone who would have loved to say something like that.

 

And maybe they still will anyways. So that’s number one. Number two, I was always the type of mother who was like, oh, let them have their pacifier off the floor.

 

I would let my kids crawl around on the floor. I’d let them play with dirt. I was like, it’s good for their immune system.

 

It helps you build immunity. I never sterilized my kids’ bottles. I never sterilized their pacifiers.

 

I was probably also too lazy to never wanted to invest in a sterilizer anyways, but I’m happy I did. And when we moved, I moved for about eight years from Israel back to the United States. My youngest daughter, my youngest, my first daughter was four weeks old.

 

And I remember taking her to the pediatrician in America. And the doctor said there now, as I was leaving now, remember, you’re nursing, so don’t have any peanuts and make sure you don’t have this and don’t take her out to places. And I was like, what are you talking about?

 

I’m like, peanuts are like bomba. That’s baby’s first food. I’m like, someday you guys are gonna see that the fact that we don’t give kids peanuts is causing peanut allergies.

 

And lo and behold, there’s been research showing that Israelis have a lot less peanut allergies because we give our kids bomba very early on.

 

That’s right. In fact, I tried to get some of those for my son. Absolutely.

 

I’ll send you some. Give me your address.

 

I absolutely will. And I say this all the time. And a lot of this also has to do, there’s also an emotional component to this.

 

Not to say that babies that are sensitive have an emotional component to their sensitivities, but fear perpetuates a lot of this too.

 

And it keeps the immune system and our whole presence on high alert. And the adrenal system is just all to trigger happy and would love to shut things down and to freak out. That’s what it does best.

 

And so I often say when people ask me how to detox, I say, well, first start with the fear detox, right? Because you can’t be afraid of mold any more so than you should be afraid of gravity. It is literally a fact of life.

 

So don’t be afraid of mold. Learn how to be discerning. There’s a big difference between being fearful and being discerning.

 

Knowing when you get to a fork in the road, don’t be afraid of the fork in the road. Learn how to make a wise and informed decision about which direction you’re going to go. And I think that that’s a big part of this.

 

Because there’s so much confusion around the subject matter. And I think that lends itself to fear. And so that’s, again, one of the reasons why I love these conversations is because it’s not nearly as complex as people think.

 

Yes, it is. I mean, the more you dig into it, but that’s with everything. The more you look at anything, the more you’ll see complexities and beauty everywhere you go, including with mold.

 

But at a top level, the misunderstandings are mostly driven by wives’ tales and by people who have a vested interest in having fear be the driving force of commerce.

 

Well, I fully agree with you on that whole fear piece. And it’s interesting because when people are fearful, they tend to do or they tend to not do my favorite thing, which is they tend not to breathe well. I’m a big believer in breathing.

 

I teach breathing. And if you’re in a room that smells musty and moldy, one of the things you can’t do is you can’t breathe deeply because you actually smell it. And the smell is so terrible that it then doesn’t allow you to breathe.

 

So then you’re not breathing as well. You’re not breathing diaphragmatically. And breathing diaphragmatically pushes the lymph system as well because 70, 75% of the lymph is in the gut as well.

 

So if you’re not breathing well, you’re not pumping that lymph. And it just goes hands in hand with everything you’re saying about the fear. And then you end up in this more anxiety driven space.

 

And then the mold is acting on you and creating more issues and creating more issues in your gut and gut brain connection. Everything you’re saying, everything goes hand in hand and it just all makes so much sense.

 

Yes, well, it’s been with us for a long time. And like I said, I think we’ve been partners with these guys for a long time. And the fact that we now build buildings out of basically mold food, and then we tighten them up really tight.

 

And then we also have lower quality construction. So that when buildings fail more often, listen, buildings fail primarily in two ways. They fail to shed wind and water, and usually both at the same time.

 

And when that happens, water gets in the walls, and modern construction is paper mache. It’s even the dumbest of the three little pigs didn’t build this house out of paper, but we do. And once water gets in the walls, it grows like wildfire, because we now have fluffy insulation in the walls.

 

Back when I was a kid, some houses had insulation, and some didn’t, even in really cold climates. But now they all do. And so the very tight homes, chemically laden homes, by the way, that are made of mold food.

 

And so we have brought this partnership to sort of a crescendo, because now what we’re saying is move in and proliferate. It used to be that we could cohabitate pretty well, and we had enough dilution, because our buildings used to breathe. Our buildings don’t breathe anymore.

 

And guess what? So can’t we, right? So, you know, and I would also introduce this idea.

 

You know, I look more and more at buildings as an extension of our immune system. I look at buildings as an exoskin or an exoskeleton. You know, we’re a lot like hermit crabs in the sense that we wouldn’t do too well without our shell, you know?

 

And so you can even look at the building as an organism, you know, like a system of life-sustaining systems. You know, you’ve got the circulatory system and the plumbing and the nervous system is the electrical system. If you want it to personify and anthropomorphize the way people do with cars and boats, it’s pretty easy to do.

 

People don’t do it. But what we have is this blind spot with our buildings and we think that they’re these static things that just we live and work in and store our stuff in. And really what we have to recognize is this is symbiosis and that the building needs us and we need it.

 

And if we don’t take care of it, it gets sick. And when the building gets sick, so do we. And when the building heals, so do we.

 

And so there’s a real relationship here that’s hiding in plain sight. And so you can’t, just like you can’t expect your relationship, your personal human relationships to thrive if you don’t give them attention, your building relationship will not thrive unless it’s given adequate attention. And so you have to listen to the signals.

 

You have to engage your senses. Again, if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something. And it all comes down to really awareness.

 

This whole subject is about awareness. And that’s why I say that most mold problems are preventable because if people would listen to the signals, they would get to it quickly enough that it wouldn’t be a capital P problem. It would be more like a lower case P problem, something that could be dealt with in a bite size fashion on your timeframe, on a budget that’s reasonable.

 

But if you deny it, you can deny reality, but you cannot deny the consequences of denying reality. And so that will come to roost. And mold is one thing that it does one thing better than anything else, it grows.

 

And the more it grows, the more expensive it becomes and the more the exposure roasted. So ignoring it is not a strategy.

 

So what about mold in like your air conditioning system and your air conditioning filters and things like that?

 

It’s a major problem and it’s a common problem. And it’s mostly, again, comes down to the lack of maintenance. If you swap your filters out on a regular basis, the HVAC filters, I’m not talking about standalone air filters, you need to change those too.

 

But the HVAC filters, they are not for your air quality. They are to keep your equipment clean. Goes back to the window cell conversation.

 

The dust in your HVAC system is where the mold grows. Mold doesn’t grow on metal, but it grows on dust on metal. I’ve actually seen mold growth in the form of a hand print, the shape of a hand print.

 

I mean, exactly moldy hand print on a glass, sliding glass door. I took a picture. I don’t have the picture here.

 

I can’t find it for the life of me. But I was so transfixed by this because I couldn’t figure out what it was. What I realized is that it was growing on the oils from the hand print.

 

That’s how fine and minute it’s able to identify these tiny little bit of nutrient. The spores just happened to land there, and then it started to colonize, and it colonized in the shape of an exact hand print on glass. I always say mold can’t grow on glass unless there’s something else on it.

 

That’s the same thing with the HVAC system. You need to have a filter in place to keep the dust from getting in there so that the mold doesn’t have anything to go out because air conditioners produce moisture. That’s what they do.

 

They’re dehumidifiers, really. They’re pulling moisture by creating condensation. Well, if that condensation is not being routed out correctly, so in other words, it’s not draining expeditiously, then that can cause problems.

 

A lot of air conditioner related mold problems actually are caused by the condensate pump will break or a line will come loose and the thing will just run out. But oftentimes, you also see that the coils have gotten dusty because there’s no filter, which is more common than you might think, or the filter has not gotten changed and so all the air is bypassing it, as I mentioned before, because there’s no gasket on these things. You just slide them in, they’re really loosey goosey.

 

So air will bypass them because there’s been so much resistance created by the dust that’s overloaded in the current filter. This comes down to that loving relationship. Your respiratory system, your house’s respiratory system is the HVAC.

 

If you saw your kid running around and he had big plugs of sticks and twigs in his nose, you’d say, what are you doing? You’d pick on, this is crazy. That’s the equivalent of allowing the filter in your HVAC system to get clogged up.

 

Wow. How often should it be changed or is it depending on where you live? It’s really dusty here like I told you.

 

Yeah, it depends, kind of an answer. The general rule of thumb is seasonally or quarterly. I set my alarm in my phone.

 

I set an alert to remind me of this stuff because as an indoor air quality expert, even I, the cobbler son has no shoes. I still have to remind myself of the very things. I teach what I need to learn most really.

 

So I set these alarms for, and then I’ll go and I’ll check them out. Sometimes I’ll open like my one downstairs, I pull it up. There’s never any dust on this thing.

 

It’s incredible. The one upstairs gets it all. So I’m swapping that thing out sometimes every two months, and I might not swap out the one downstairs every six months.

 

So you have to look at these things and use a little bit of judgment.

 

Okay. So I understand you have a kit that people can use to be able to tell what is it. I’d love to hear about it.

 

This is me asking you, this isn’t me even trying to sell your product. I’m interested in hearing because I think it might be good to understand if we have mold in our houses that have not.

 

For sure. For sure. Right now it’s only available in the US market, but we’ll be expanding into other markets in the next year and a half or so.

 

But the mold test kit that we created was designed to answer a major concern that came up while I was running my mold inspection business, 1-800-GOT-MOLD. I created that company because of the awareness that my childhood home had made me sick. I was falsely diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when I was four.

 

It was a whole big drama. But all my symptoms when I went, I was 12 because I moved out of the house, my folks got divorced. I never thought about it again until after Wall Street.

 

Then I read a story about a guy who’d gotten sick from the hotel where he was an employee and I was like, boom, wow. He had developed adult onset asthma and all these allergies that he never had before. I had the opposite where mine went away when I left the building, so I connected the dots and that’s what got me into the space.

 

So I created this really effective mold inspection company that was also expensive by most standards and cost prohibitive for most people. Average inspection $1,500 or so, $2,000, so that’s a mortgage payment for a lot of families. And so my own parents could not have afforded to hire the company that I created to help families navigate around the situation that my family did.

 

So that didn’t sit well with me. So what I decided to do was find a way to, and I looked at all the kids on the market and they’re all junk. And so I decided to create one that my parents could afford and that I would recommend.

 

And so if you want to have your house tested for mold right now, sort of the state of theart, which is by the way, it’s a time test. This has been the same method has been used for a long time. They’re known as spore traps.

 

Spore traps are these precision cassettes that air is pulled through them using a vacuum pump, a calibrated scientific instrument that pulls exactly the same amount of air through each cassette. So you compare cassette to cassette to cassette, because with an outside air sample, and then you sample in the rooms of concern, it picks up all airborne particulate within a certain size range that includes mold spores, pollen, background dust, even combustion particles from things like candles or badly vented combustion appliances, things like that. They will show up in here.

 

Then they’re analyzed and then compared to each other. What we want to see is the outside air. We want to see the indoor air about the same as the outside air.

 

That’s considered a healthy background. As I mentioned before, we want these microbes. We want them in our building, in our life.

 

We just don’t want them growing in our house. When we see higher amounts in different kinds, so a different kind of biodiversity, concentrations of certain ones, especially if they’re not found in the outside sample, we know that that’s a big red flag. The problem with getting this testing done is that it requires you to find and hire a qualified professional.

 

What we know is that mold testing is expensive and it’s hard to know who to trust. Once someone comes in, they may or may not have your best interests at heart. They may have another avenue of making money from you, which is the remediation side of things, and so that data can sometimes be used against you.

 

These are all very difficult things for the consumer to navigate. What I decided to do was find a way to make this kind of testing available to the consumer without any of those concerns. The first step was to figure out how to make that air sampling pump thing work.

 

How do you do that, right? Because they’re expensive devices. So we figured out a way to make one for a lot less than a thousand bucks.

 

And this interface is directly with these cassettes. This does not have batteries in it, but you press this button here and it initiates a five-minute timer, pulls air through exactly the same flow rate as a professional. You do this in the outside and then you do this in the rooms that you’re concerned with, put in a prepaid mailer, goes to our lab partner, which is the number one lab in the world, Eurofins.

 

They do the analysis and within three business days at the lab, you get a beautiful color-coded report with a green, yellow, orange, red indicator, as well as the actual lab report to tell you what molds were found and what quantities. Then the last page tells you where to find qualified inspectors and remediators in your area. There’s also some other free resources, like we have an e-book that we produce that gets a lot of positive feedback that it’s loaded with inspection checklists and frequently asked questions.

 

It’s really good for people that are early on in their mold journey. We have a one-room, two-room, and three-room kit, and they start at $199 for a one room, $249, and $299 for a one, two, and three-room kit respectively. That includes all the lab fees and shipping, by the way.

 

There’s nothing else to purchase or pay for. Then once you have the pump, and this is the big benefit, is that you get to keep this. We don’t want this back.

 

Then you can buy refills, or you can share with a friend, and this happens all the time. These things make their way around. It’s great.

 

Then you can get refills for less, for $50 less. One-room kit for refills, only $149, and $199 for two-room kit, and $249 for a three-room kit. We’re really excited.

 

We launched it on March last year, and had been building the plane as we’re flying it, but so far so great. We’re getting all five star reviews. People really love it, and we’re seeing a lot of people empowered to take control of their health.

 

And they can test four times in their home for less than the cost of one professional inspection over the course of a year.

 

So question. If it turns out that you have mold in your home, how does it get cleaned?

 

Well, it depends. Again, that’s my famous. So it depends on the size of the problem.

 

It depends on what it’s growing on. So if you’re talking about growing on a porous material, sheetrock, for example, the EPA, the US EPA says a three foot by three foot section of mold is the threshold for professional involvement. That’s a lot of mold.

 

That’s 10 square feet of mold. That’s a lot. My rule of thumb is one square foot of visible mold on wallboard is too much for a homeowner, really.

 

Because what’s behind the wall is anybody’s guess. It’s the proverbial iceberg. What you see typically showing through is usually the tip.

 

So once you open it up, you can take a very small, finite couple of thousand dollar project that would be done by professional the right way and turn it into a $30,000 full house contamination. So you really want to be careful about doing anything that would cause disturbances and would create dust. Because that’s the hallmark of professional remediation is dust control.

 

So just like asbestos remediation or lead paint, all of those things have one commonality, which is that the work is done by people that are trained in dust control and that are wearing proper protective equipment and that they clean the workspaces within that containment meticulously after that removal has been done so that the building in that area is cleaner than it ever will be again. That’s all forms of particulate-based remediation, asbestos, lead paint, mold, etc. The difference between the three of those is that if you don’t fix the water problem with mold, it comes back whereas asbestos will never come back and lead paint will never come back.

 

That’s very important that that be the first thing that you fix. Remediation, just to be clear, the word, I love Latin, remediation, the root of remediation is remediere and which means remedy or to cure and so when you look at this, you think, well, what am I going to cure? Well, the only cure for mold is stop the water.

 

If you stop the water, looking at mold as the symptom, not the problem. Mold is never the problem, it’s always a symptom and so if you want to look at root cause, people love to talk about root cause and mold is my root cause. The root cause is dampness.

 

The root cause is not mold. Mold is a symptom that’s causing symptoms. It’s like a symptom cascade, a symptom waterfall, if you will.

 

It’s very important that people recognize that the first thing they do is stop the moisture problem, and then do an assessment and say, do I know the extent of the mold growth? Do I have the skills and knowledge to be able to look at this and say, I know how much is here. Truly, do I really know?

 

Am I humble enough to say? If you can’t answer that affirmatively, then you got to get a professional involved. And here’s the most important thing.

 

Get a professional that’s independent. Get an inspector that actually does not have a financial relationship with a remediation contractor, that all they do is assessments, mold assessments and remediation consulting. They don’t do other stuff.

 

You want someone who’s really specialized in this. And you also want them to follow the IICRC S520 mold remediation standard. I know.

 

That’s a long name.

 

I know it’s a horrible name and no one thinks about it. No one, but it is truly the playbook. And the people who know, know it and they know it well.

 

And there’s lots of people that talk about it, but those people often don’t follow it. But if they do, then everything goes much more smoothly. The contrast is, so we talked about poorest materials.

 

That’s the whole different world. She rock and these things, if you mess with those and they’re moldy, you can cause a lot of disturbance and you can take a small problem and make it much worse. Hard surfaces where there’s mold growth.

 

So glass, metal, plastic, tile, things like that, where you’ve got even cement that’s painted. These things can be dealt with by a homeowner more so. And that’s generally using HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners and damp wipes.

 

You don’t need to kill it. You don’t need to spray, bleach. In fact, the evidence is that you spray an antimicrobial on colonies of mold, especially if they’re toxigenic, you can actually stimulate toxin production.

 

Isn’t that funny? Because they create their own weapons. And so you fire weapons at them, they’ll fire them back at you.

 

And so you don’t really need, and you don’t need to do it because you’re gonna need to remove it anyway. So when you’re dealing with hard surfaces, you can just use some good old-fashioned oil or grease, some detergent, damp wipes, and you can even wash those cloths again and reuse them because mold is, it’s not growing on the cloths, right? So you can actually wash those cloths off.

 

But you know what? A lot of people should look at this stuff with a good degree of caution. And when you’re dealing with it, in any case, you should always wear proper protective equipment.

 

You should wear a respirator and eye protection. Of course, wash your hands thoroughly afterwards. And if you’re going to be doing any of this work, it’s also advisable for you to run air purifiers in the vicinity.

 

And if you can cordon off the area with poly and tape, that’s ideal too. And then testing is also really, really valuable for this. You’re testing before you do a removal, if you’re going to do it yourself.

 

And I don’t encourage people to do this, but if they do, and a lot of people do, if you’re going to do it, at least do it wisely. And so I encourage people to do a little bit of testing before and a little bit of testing afterwards, because sometimes they’ll find that they actually did kick stuff into the other room and they need to run air purifiers in the other room. So again, I don’t recommend it.

 

And I’m not telling people how to do it, but if they do it, at least you can do it with a little bit of precautions.

 

Well, when you talk about that 10 by 10 area or that one by one area, is that visible?

 

Yeah.

 

If you don’t see more, if I see nothing in my home, do I need to be worried if I don’t smell or see anything?

 

Well, so there are cases where you can not see it and not smell it, right? But if you feel it, and so A, you may know what you’re feeling, you may not know. A lot of people will kind of jump to their own conclusions on these things, but some people have a really innate sense of sort of, you know, I used to use mold-snuffing dogs.

 

A lot of people will say, I don’t need a mold dog. I am one, you know, like I know, I know. And so those people, I just say trust your gut, but then get the data.

 

So that’s when I say get yourself some testing. And, you know, the ideal is sport traps, but there’s also, there are also tests available that test for the microbial smell. homeaircheck.com, I don’t know, I’m not sure if they’re doing direct to consumer anymore, but they test for the microbial smell and all spells manmade VOCs.

 

And I always say that our test and their test is like peanut butter and jelly. If you can, because one’s looking at the sports and one’s looking at the musty smell. And if you test both of those and nothing comes up, chances are you don’t have a problem of significance.

 

However, there are cases when you can have mold growth and actually really serious decay happening at a wall, especially stucco, certain brick installations where mold is getting behind the brick or behind the stucco and actually rotting out the wall. And so the mold that you’d see is gonna be very small compared to the amount of damage that’s actually happening in there. Cause by the time you see it, it’s really pretty significant.

 

It’s really bad. Yeah, I’ve had situations where I was like, oh, that’s unusual. I look at it, I look at that little, look at the trim pulling away from the wall.

 

And I go down and poke it and put my hand through the wall, you know? And I didn’t smell it. And it had to do with the way the airflow was happening in the house.

 

Air, you don’t smell something unless the actual VOCs of that scent actually come in and go into your nose so that you’re literally getting those compounds. And so if the airflow is such that you’re not actually being, it’s not making it to you, you won’t smell it. So you do have, that’s why I say, if you see something, you have to be attuned to these things.

 

And we’re so busy these days that we, people don’t walk around their house and look. They go from the bed to the bathroom, their bathroom to the kitchen, the kitchen to the garage, the garage to their office and their back. You know, we don’t take the time to kind of walk around and look at things.

 

And as a result, we oftentimes miss these things. But, so yes, that most of the time though, when I say most, I see 95% of the time, there’s some sort of outward manifestation of a mold issue if it’s making you sick. Because if you’re not actually see, if you can’t see it, smell or feel it, chances are the pathway isn’t there to create exposure.

 

Now, and let me also say this, and this is a really important point, because I talk about mold all the time, but manmade VOCs are also a serious problem in most homes. Almost every home has VOC issue of some sort. Either it’s concentrated or it’s widespread, depending upon how new the building is or whether there’s been a recent renovation.

 

Because renovations and new construction are terrible. New house smell is, I used to think, oh, it smells so good. Now I think that smells like cancer to me.

 

It smells like, that smells like autoimmune disease to me. It smells like fatigue. It smells like mitochondria.

 

So a lot of times when people are thinking that their house is making them sick and they’re insistent that it’s mold, people make their minds up about these things and you can’t tell them otherwise. Oftentimes you’ll find a VOC component. And that’s tricky stuff because you can’t remediate a VOC.

 

You have to install special ventilation to dilute it. And sometimes people have to leave. They have to move out.

 

But looking at these things more holistically, and I mean that, but W-H-O-L-E, right? Looking at the whole thing about what’s in air quality is really important because again, if you don’t see it or smell it, but you feel it, then you may not necessarily have a mold exposure. You may very well have something that’s a little bit more subtle that may require a different perspective.

 

And that’s generally looking at VOCs, the man-made kind as opposed to the microbial. Long answer, but.

 

No, no, this is really such good information, such important information. I wanted to swing back quickly just to talk about the mold in food because you spoke about mold being in food. What can we do, right?

 

You’re saying it’s in like seven, I think you said 60 to 80% or 70 to 80%. I assume you mean things like grains, nuts, all the things that we’re told are healthy, that we should be eating or not depending on who you talk to because most of the people I interview say don’t eat grains. But meaning for people who do, or what about even fruit and vegetables?

 

I was told the other day, my daughter’s friend is picking apples on a kibbutz in the North. And she was saying how, yeah, these apples, they get stored for a year.

 

Yes.

 

Before they come to the shelf.

 

Yeah, and it’s all about the conditions that are being stored in. So it’s everywhere. Mold in our food supply is a major problem.

 

And I just did a huge deep dive on this for the masterclass. And it’s really driving my wife crazy. Because I’m like, no, no, I’m not for the class.

 

She’s like, no, you’re leaving. Stop it. Stop it.

 

But these are the things I can’t unsee. And I’ve known this stuff for a long time, but when I really got into the recent research, it’s really disturbing. So yes, it’s the typical things.

 

It’s nuts, seeds, spices are a real problem, by the way, because they’re harvested in third world countries and laid outside oftentimes on dirt. I mean, it’s really, there’s no standards. There’s no, I mean, except in very rare circumstances where you’re paying for artisanal spices that are, it’s just, this is a serious problem.

 

That’s where a lot of the micro toxins in meats come from, by the way, because they’re using the spices to cure the meats. And that’s where it ends up in. And so whether it be sausages or any sort of cured meats.

 

So spices are a major problem, a small, but also major problem. And these things are cumulative, by the way, I should mention this, this is very important. So you can have stuff that’s passing the mycotoxin tests on imports at the various different food agencies.

 

And by the way, they’re very under-regulated and they’re not doing nearly enough testing. But the ones, the places where they do test, if they pass things through and it goes below the threshold, that’s not good enough because these things are bioaccumulating. And so you can have five things on your plate, all of which passed testing.

 

By the way, no time in your life will you have five things on your plate that were tested. However, if you did and they all passed, in aggregate, you’d be in excess of the allowable amount because they add up. They’re cumulative.

 

So it’s nuts, seeds, grains of any sort, especially corn, wheat, rice, oats, barley. These things are notorious. So it’s very important, especially to eat as much local grain if you’re gonna eat grains.

 

But really it’s a no sugar, no grains diet that will get you in most of the way down. Also no conventional meats, no conventional dairy for reasons I discussed earlier because those animals are eating these things. By the way, they’re eating food they’re not supposed to be eating in the first place.

 

They’re eating grain. Cows don’t eat corn. However, by the way, my son’s book, you open up the farm book and it shows cows eating corn.

 

It’s even made it into the children’s book. But cows eat grass, people. I’m just gonna remind everyone that cows eat grass and grass doesn’t get moldy while it’s growing, okay?

 

So grass-fed cows are healthy cows. If you’re gonna eat dairy, if you’re gonna eat beef, eat grass-fed stuff and local as much as you possibly can. Berries are a major problem, especially the ones that are imported.

 

And by the way, we are in a lot of, I mean, listen, we get berries in November, that’s Peru, that’s wherever, Mexico. And if they’re more than 10 days old, they’re highly suspect and very rarely do you get them sooner than that. And so there’s a lot of issues with that.

 

Coffee, wine, any alcoholic beverages in many cases, but wine in particular. And you know why? The same reason the apples are a problem is because what they’ll do in tomatoes, tomato sauce, they’ll take, they’ll harvest them and they’ll take the uglies and they’ll toss them into a special, they’ll take the pretty ones and they go to market.

 

They take the ugly ones, they throw them into the bin that could sit there for a couple of days, maybe longer, getting uglier. And then they take them and they spin them up and they throw some salt and sugar in there and some spice and next thing you know, they put that on the shelf and you’ve got apple juice, apple sauce and you got tomato sauce and all that stuff. Boom, guess what?

 

And the real kicker on this stuff is that you can’t kill it with cooking. These are heat resistant. And so there really is no way to avoid them completely.

 

Also restaurants are a major problem because food costs drive profitability. And so how do you get cheap food or a low food costs? Well, you get the stuff that someone else didn’t want.

 

And so it’s all hidden in things that are boxed, bagged and processed. So processed food is bad. I often tell people when they show me their micro toxin report and they wanna know where the mold is in their building, I say, look in your pantry.

 

How do you know it’s in my pantry? I don’t have any plumbing in my pantry. No, it’s in the boxes and it’s in the boxes and the bags and the cans, unfortunately.

 

And so what does that mean? It means you gotta eat local, organic, seasonal, fresh. When it comes to berries, you know what a great solution is?

 

Is frozen berries. It’s not the perfect solution, but guess what? They’re usually frozen really quickly and they tend to be at their peak of freshness.

 

And I would even argue that a lot of frozen vegetables are actually preferable over local, over stuff you buy at the store because you’re getting it sooner. You’re getting it sooner and it’s freshest and just cooked minimally. So it is a legitimate challenge.

 

Coffee is a big one too, but coffee, fortunately there are a couple of purveyors out there, like Dave Asprey, who’s built an entire business around mycotoxin free coffee that’s been tested for this. And so I imagine that in time that we’ll be, A, we’ll have lower cost testing ability for these things. And also I think consumer awareness will drive, consumer demand will drive food companies to start doing more testing, start marketing their products as tested.

 

But for now, the biggest problem is the globalization of food. Just a quick little tidbit. There was a group of food scientists that looked at this.

 

There’s a stat that 25% of imported food stuffs were contaminated with mycotoxins. And this has long been held by the United Nations. And a group of food scientists recently looked at it and said, well, is that really true?

 

Where do you get that number from? And so they decided to do a big study. And they looked at tens of thousands of samples collected from all these different countries.

 

And their conclusion was that it’s less at the port when it’s being exported, but the actual destination, when they receive these shipping containers, between 60 and 80% are contaminated. And so it’s a huge number. Yeah, it’s a huge number.

 

So I cannot emphasize enough the importance of being judicious about the food that you eat. And then of course, you know, this also comes down to like, what are you doing in your refrigerator? When you’re seeing stuff start to go, do yourself a favor, just let it go, talk to it, you know?

 

You know, three day rule is a really good rule. And then once you’ve gotten a test result and you’re concerned about it, do yourself a favor and don’t rush to go into some sort of major treatment protocol because they can actually create other challenges. Your best bet is to try to get your body into equilibrium, reduce exposure environmentally and also dietarily, drink a lot of water, sweat, do those kinds of things.

 

And if you don’t see any improvements in your health profile, then consider getting some assistance from someone who might be able to help facilitate and push things through. But your body knows, we’ve been around this stuff for a long time. And so it will do its best if it can, and should allow it to do so.

 

And then if you do, and if that doesn’t work, then you might want to consider getting a functional care practitioner involved to help you shuttle some of those things through.

 

Well, it all sounds like a lot of really good advice. I like that. Okay, two questions.

 

One is, I don’t actually know where I’m talking to you from. Where do you live?

 

I’m in New Jersey. I’m sorry. Oh my gosh, I’m from New Jersey.

 

I’m in Minnesota. I just had a nostalgic moment.

 

Do you know why I’m asking you? Because I feel like I remember the 1-800-GOT-MOLD commercials as like late night local television commercials, because I lived in New Jersey from 2002 to 2010, and I feel like I remember commercials or radio commercials or something for 1-800-GOT-MOLD. Is that possible?

 

It’s funny. Yes, it’s absolutely possible. Yeah, I know.

 

We ran it from 2007 until, gosh, we stopped doing inspections last year in New Jersey, 2022.

 

But I just remember it sounds so familiar, 1-800-GOT-MOLD, and I did live in New Jersey in those years. So I just wanted to see if I was remembering correctly, because I really thought the first time I heard you say that, I’m like, I really think I remember that from New Jersey.

 

No, I love it. I love it.

 

Yeah. So, okay. Then my last and final question for you, because I could really talk to you all day, but I’m sure you have plenty of things to do as well, is what does spirituality mean to you?

 

Well, you know, I mean, for me, in essence, well, so actually spirit, the word spiritus, Latin again, means breath of life. And, you know, the root, actually, the root of spiritus is spear, S-P-I-R. And so you’ll see that in spirit, of course, but you also see it in respiration, right?

 

We spire, where this breath, we respire to breathe. Transpiration is breathing through, right?

 

And we are inspired when something fills us in a meaningful way, right? And then, of course, you know, the, oh, one of my favorite ones is when we breathe together, we’re actually conspiring, isn’t that fun? And then, of course, breathing is the first thing you do when you’re born, and the last breath is when you expire, right?

 

So that’s how I look at this. I think there’s real wisdom in language, but for me, the distillation of spirituality is really recognizing the divinity in all things.

 

Okay, it’s amazing. I love everything you said because you take the Latin and everything you just said, and again, I’m going to ruin it probably for whoever is going to do this, but I’ve spoken about this before. The Hebrew word for breath is nishima, the Hebrew word for your soul is nishama.

 

And we know that in Hebrew, whenever a word has the same root, that there’s an association between the words. Then when a baby is born with their first nishima, with the first breath, they also get their soul. And when you die and your nishima, like with your last breath, that is when the nishama leaves the body as well.

 

So it’s everything you said just fits in so beautifully with that, that I was just getting excited listening to you speak. So that was really amazing. You know, everything you said from beginning to end of this, of speaking with you, I just loved every minute of it.

 

And I just thank you so much for sharing, sharing all this with us.

 

Thank you. Thank you. And you know what, it would be actually, we began the conversation, we normally touched on the Leviticus, but there’s a lot more we could talk about.

 

I think that this is an ancient issue. And it’s something that I think we’re only now seeing, come back around because of modern construction. But I think that this is something that will be with us forever.

 

So learning how to navigate this is, I think, sort of table stakes. I think understanding how to live in buildings and breathe air is kind of basic, right? Since it’s literally the linguistically, it’s the core to our, it’s our spirit, right?

 

Breath and spirit. So in many ways, I think that the work that we’re doing has that spiritual component, right? To enable people to breathe well and live well.

 

I think it’s fantastic. I just love this. Thank you so, so much.

 

Really, I appreciate all of this. I loved speaking to you. This was really such great information that I know that everybody’s going to hopefully enjoy listening to.

 

It may freak them out a little. People may have to test their houses. I don’t know, but I do think it’s really important because most of the people listening are really people who are looking at their health and ways to help their health overall and exactly what you’re talking about.

 

People with autoimmune disease, when you’re looking for that poor issue, it’s the gut, but there could be other things that are driving this issue as well. I think this is such an important topic. Thank you so much.

 

Let me leave you one more thing. We actually made a welcome page for your listeners. And so anyone who’s listening to this that wants to learn more about the subject, you can go to gotmold.com/holyhealth.

 

And you’ll see there that we have that ebook that I mentioned, a link to that as well as a coupon code for anybody who is interested in our test kits. And so it’s just a little bit of a way to say thank you to you and to your listeners for having us here. But it’s been a real pleasure for me too.

 

My thoughts and prayers are with you and everyone that you love and care for going through this very challenging time right now in your part of the world. And I also applaud you for having the wherewithal and the ability to focus in the midst of all this. So thank you for having me, especially during this very challenging time.

 

Thank you so much, Jason, really. And thank you. I think people, there are many listeners that are listening from America, or most of us here in Israel.

 

It’s English speakers, obviously, because this is an English speaking podcast, have ways that if we needed to bring this test get over, we want to bring this test get over, we could get it over here as soon as all of this is over.

 

Yeah, and our team can help you with that too, if necessary. We don’t advertise that, but we can help you make it work.

 

Thank you so, so much.

 

I’m with my friend Lara Rhine today. You guys remember her. She’s done this podcast with me a few times.

 

I always love Lara’s insight when it comes to Torah. She is just a great ability to connect anything to Torah. And when I kind of in passing mentioned this episode to her, she right away started spewing out things that it reminded her of.

 

And I was like, please, you know, you have to do this episode with me. So I’m excited to have her here today. And Lara, what do you think?

 

So I’ll get right in. So but I’m going to do a lot of reading. So my eyes might be down, but I don’t think people watch so much anyway.

 

So it’s okay. That’s okay. No one cares.

 

They didn’t.

 

They don’t watch.

 

I mean, exactly. No one cares.

 

So Jason was talking about mold. That was our topic of conversation. And this entire like what I mean, whatever.

 

This is the Torah Act show. So I can get into, you know, religious issues. I mean, we’re in the midst of a war here.

 

We’re over three months into a horrific situation. And you know what? It’s not just a war in Israel.

 

The whole world is turned upside down. And it’s not just turned upside down for the Jews. It’s turned up for all nationalities because certain, I don’t know, just respect of people all over the world is being broken.

 

And I think that it’s not, although there is a lot of anti-Jewish talk, I think every decent person feels the plight of humanity, whoever you are. So when this all broke out, I’m just going to start with this, that what’s going on in our lives is the immense amount of anti-Semitism that has just become so prevalent, I mean, we deal with our own things here in Israel, we don’t call it anti-Semitism, it’s just, I don’t even know what we put a name to it, but outside Israel, the world is dealing with this, especially in America, I think that Europe has been dealing with it a lot over the years. America, I don’t believe has had such blatant anti-Semitism exist since the times of the Holocaust, which is in the 1940s, late 1939 and then into the 40s.

 

So for me, just the crazy amounts of anti-Semitism that has been going on in the world, to me, it was always like it did exist and people just didn’t want to face it. And so it’s kind of what I tied it in with the way Jason was saying. When you’re living in an environment with mold, it’s there.

 

And if you ignore it, you’re going to have problems. And the one thing that Jason said was that he said that mold is a healthy part of the environment, but not when it’s living inside your house. So, I mean, no type of anti-Semitism is healthy or good in any way or no type of anti-any person is healthy in any which way.

 

But I think that for people that wanted to ignore what was going on in the world, it’s completely impossible to ignore nd for us as Jewish people, we believe that God Hashem is the creator of all. And if God is the creator of all, and there are different religions that exist in the world, so then God is the creator of all those religions, Jewish, Christianity, Catholicism, whatever your, you know, whatever your certain religion is, it comes from God, because he is the one and all and he’s the creator of all. And if different religions are part of God’s world, then this is the healthy mold that Jason was talking about, because it exists, it comes from God.

 

And so there is a healthy part of every religion as we should coexist, because if God created it, that’s the way he wanted it to be. And so we need to deal with how to live with each other, love each other, and most importantly, respect each other. And I think just, you know, mutual respect for all people of all different religions is really that I know is the basis of Judaism.

 

You know, haqqara haqqal, thanking others, acknowledging others, respecting others and understanding that we can learn from everybody. And you know, in the Bible, in our Torah, there are many references to different nations of the world. You know, even now, we’re like our weekly portions that we learn, we’re in the book of Schmott, in the book of Exodus, and in the book of Exodus, we had two instances where different religions did exist.

 

You know, we have the example of Batya, Paro’s daughter, saving Moshe, so Moshe was a Jew and she was an Egyptian, and yet she had sympathy for this baby Jewish boy. And that’s an example of, I mean, some sort of coexistence, but she knew he was Jewish for reasons that, you know, he was obviously thrown into the, you know, the river by, you know, because of the decree by her father, but we’re not going to get into that. But she had an acknowledgement of just, even if he’s not my religion, you know, I have pity and love for this little innocent baby.

 

And also we learn about Moshe’s father-in-law, right, Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitzro, Jeff Rowe, he wasn’t Jewish and he had such support and admiration for the Jewish people. And that’s really an example of how we are supposed to coexist. And I just thought it was like very, it’s funny because we waited to do this, you know, Darren, you and I, like we waited to do this extra, but yet we’re now in the book of Exodus where we do have this example of nations, you know, coexisting.

 

There are also examples of nations not coexisting, but that is not, that’s not our go-to. And even, you know, what we learn later in the prophets in the book of Nevi’im, when we learn about Joshua, Yahushua conquering the land, we’re always supposed to come in peace first. We’re not supposed to come in violently and take things we’re supposed to come and look for peace.

 

That’s like the first thing that God looks favorably upon. So we are a peaceful nation. We look for peace.

 

It’s not about violence.

 

I will say one thing that I like that you said that I think is really true, you know, it’s sort of like, you know, when mold is out in nature or it’s somewhere, it’s outside of your house, or even if it’s in someone else’s house, like it’s not bothering you, right? Like nothing bothers us until it’s in our own backyard. And I can tell you, I was living here during the nineties, right?

 

During the second Intifada when there were like buses blowing up in Jerusalem all the time. And like it didn’t affect people in Tel Aviv. People in Tel Aviv still were all about like, let’s give back land and we just want peace until it happened on Deezingwall.

 

Give away land.

 

Give away land. Not give back land.

 

Oh, excuse me. You’re right. You’re right.

 

Give away land. They wanted us to, you know, give stuff away until it happened on Deezingwall. And when it was in their own backyard, that’s when people really cared.

 

And it’s the same thing here. You know, you have all these people all of a sudden waking up. Like, you know, like I said, like, I know there’s anti-Semitism in the world, like, but often like growing up, my mom would be like, this one’s anti-Semitic and that one, I’d be like, you know, come on, like, you know, you’re nuts.

 

Like this is like, you know, this is 1992. Like everyone loves Jews. What are you talking?

 

You know? But like now that it’s so apparent and it’s in people’s house and it’s on their doorstep and it’s in their alma mater and it’s Harvard University and it’s Yale University, like people can’t look away because it’s in their backyard, you know? So I hear exactly what you’re saying.

 

Like if the mold’s in your house, it’s not really affecting me. But if it’s in my house, then it’s really affecting me, you know?

 

Yeah, and listen, it’s easy to turn a blind eye, but like again, we’ll say the theme over, you know, God is in charge of all. And if we don’t wake up on our own, he’s going to wake us up, you know, the extreme violence and just horrific things that happened over three months ago that we can’t get into, that everyone is familiar with anyway, we don’t need to get into it, because it’s just too painful to talk about. There’s got to be a reason why it had to be like that.

 

You know, there’s no justification and there’s no, you know, consoling people over that. But without it, people wouldn’t have believed it. Do you know what I’m saying, they wouldn’t believe what was going on.

 

And sometimes things just have to happen in a way that it can’t be argued. And the truth is, is that even the things that are going on in the universities now, and you know, my friend, she lives in Manhattan, she said that she lives on Upper East Side, she said there was a pro-Palestine demonstration, you know, crazy screaming last night outside her window. What’s going on in the universities, like it’s just so out of control.

 

And I think that if October 7th wasn’t so violent and crazy, people would, I don’t even know, they would be excusing the rallies that are going on as free speech. But when anybody comes out and defends what happened in any way on October 7th, you have to be psychotic. Do you know what I’m saying?

 

So it’s like Hashem had to create a situation that anybody that can find any defense for it is psychotic. There’s no.

 

It’s very clear which side, it’s very clear who’s who.

 

Yeah, yes. So right. Okay.

 

So another thing that Jason discussed was the unhealthy mold, which we can equate to anti-Semitism, right? Like we could, you know, like, you know, he says to find the moisture source and start from there. And like misunderstanding can be a great source for anti-Semitism, like in the book, in in British in Genesis, we find that in partial told on in the book, you know, in the chapter of told, it’s the book of told of the chapter 26, the history of Isaac our second forefather and he there was a famine in the land and he went down to grow, which is actually if you look in the commentaries, I believe that Grar is Gaza, which is interesting just to know that isn’t just yeah.

 

So he went down to grow because there was food there and so, you know, to kind of, I guess, you know, get out of his part of the land that had famine. And once he went down there, he he became he became very wealthy. It’s tough.

 

I can’t remember the exact story. I’m not sure if he came down with money, but he made more money in Brar and his cattle grew, his family grew, his riches grew. And Abimelech, who was the king, he saw this was happening and he got very upset and he wanted to throw Yitzchak out.

 

He said, because what did he say? He said, you got rich on our our account. Now mind you, Abimelech was also getting very rich and, you know, from Isaac’s, from Yitzchak’s success.

 

But he didn’t see it that way. All he saw was Isaac’s success. And that was too much for him and he wanted to throw him out of Grar.

 

But then he, you know, then I guess later on the story, he realized that he also benefited from Isaac’s wealth and Isaac’s success. And so he regretted that. But that’s not that’s an example of like anti-Semitism where it’s a misunderstanding that, you know, Yitzchak Isaac didn’t get rich on Avimelech’s account.

 

He got rich because Hashem blessed him, God blessed him. And God blessed also Avimelech to become rich because of Isaac. So that’s just an example of where we can see anti-Semitism.

 

But then, you know, I guess Avimelech was able to realize after that he benefited from, you know, Yitzchak’s success also. And so, you know, one other thing that I want to say that there’s a rabbi that I listen to, his name is Rabbi Daniel Katz. He’s an incredible rabbi.

 

He has classes on YouTube and I’m not sure where else, but you can definitely find a lot of his classes on YouTube. And one thing that he says that’s like very, it’s very poignant. You have to kind of say it slowly and then go over it.

 

A lot of times he’ll say these beautiful things and you have to like press pause, say it in your head and take the beauty and the knowledge that he’s sending out. And so he says that when one thing he says is that when you get the gift of the darkness, God doesn’t have to give you the darkness anymore. And so the challenge will go away.

 

So what does that really mean? It means that when you’re going through something challenging in your life, Hashem, because we just, you know, we said it before that God is the creator of all. So if you have a challenge in your life, God, you know, sent that challenge to you to learn from that, the challenge of the darkness.

 

And once you learn from the challenge, Hashem can take, you know, can he can resolve the challenge because you’ve already learned your lesson. And this could become political, this could become whatever, but we’re just going to say it that we have a Jewish homeland. We have a place where we are safe.

 

Now people can say, oh, it’s dangerous to live in Israel. I can argue and I don’t think that people, as many people will argue back at me, America is just as dangerous. Europe is just as dangerous, not just as dangerous.

 

It’s dangerous, right? Like we, we live here in Israel. Yes, we are at a constant risk of war, which now we’re at war, but we always have an enemy coming at us, but we’re ready, right?

 

We have an army. We have, we have a nation that is together, you know, and, and it’s not the same in America. And you know, Jason speaks about like the warning signs of mold, right?

 

Like you’ve seen mold growing, you can’t like ignore it’s just going to get worse and worse. So I think a lot of people around the world need to kind of heed what’s going on very, very carefully and use this as like warning signs of, you know, whatever you understand.

 

Maybe it’s time to come home.

 

Right. Like mass aliyah, mass just acknowledgement of, okay, we’re not so comfortable far from our homelands. We’re not, you know, there’s a place that we are supposed to be.

 

And it’s not, I know it’s not easy and it’s very, it’s, it’s much easier to say it, having been here, you know, for many years now, thank God, but you know, like the world is not what it was. It’s just not. And then we need to kind of like wake up to what the current reality is because there are warning signs that are being sent daily.

 

It’s not an offense. You know what it is? It’s not like, you know, people have come at you, oh, you have to make Alia, you have to make Alia.

 

Like, I know it’s hard. I know it’s difficult. It’s difficult at any age.

 

I came in, you know, when I was 32, I had four kids at the time.

 

And let me just say, it wasn’t hard for you. Try 1984. No phone going to Cairdart, but guess what, 1984 compared to my friend who came in 1974.

 

You know what I’m saying? Like 100. It’s hard at any age.

 

It’s different types of hard.

 

I say it all the time. I say because I came in 2007, the Blackberry was like just the thing, right? So we’ve had, you know, we had emails at our touch.

 

We had phone. We have traveling. My husband travels back and forth.

 

I mean, that didn’t exist. I say that 100 percent when I came, it’s, you know, it’s not like when people came earlier. And also, I will see this just to give, you know, a huge, huge, huge blessing and have her on the top, which is I had you say how far I told just gratitude, gratitude, gratitude with my entire being that I came with four daughters.

 

And, you know, we had our subsequently we had our fifth daughter here. So thank God we have five girls. But and I could get teary when I say it.

 

But the truth is, is that the one thing I said was, you know, when it was very difficult for my parents to that we moved here, it was much easier because I had four daughters and I knew they were, you know, whether they chose to go to the army or not, it is not going to be the same. The combat, a combat soldier as a man is different than as a woman. It just is.

 

And so I will acknowledge any one of my friends who came here to make Aliyah or any of them who were born into being here with sons. It’s, you know, they’re the two heroes like they really are the two heroes. But all that being said, like, you know, the world is not what it was.

 

And we can’t pretend that it’s it. You know what I’m saying?

 

Like, we can’t pretend that I have one son and people used to say you have one son. How do you let your son go to the army? And I say the same thing.

 

Like, why is it okay for me to say, No, my son can’t go to the army because God forbid something happens to him. It should be your son. Okay, you have two sons.

 

So one of yours is dispensable. Every child is precious. It doesn’t matter who they are.

 

And I would, you know, A, I would never keep my son from going because he wanted to go, you know, but B, it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s not just my son, like everybody’s sons, all of our sons, you know, so, and it’s not okay to say like, you know, oh, because you only have one kid, you know what I mean? Like, it could be anybody’s kid. There are families in Israel that have lost two or three or, you know, like, and it hurts all of us, painful for all of us, because we love every, every kid, every soldier, it’s all of our kid, you know, it doesn’t matter if we know them or we don’t know them.

 

Right, right, right. Exactly. 100%.

 

So, um, the last thing I just wanted to say in terms of Mold was like the obvious thing that you and I discussed, you have been mentioned that Jason was about leprosy, was about Sarah that, um, that, you know, what this, I don’t know the story with Sarah, you know, leprosy, but the first, if it afflicted you, um, first, it would show on the walls of your home. So leprosy basically in the Bible was a punishment, um, for, for speaking, you know, for, for speaking badly about other people or, um, or about the lands of Israel is still considered. Also, we call it lashon hara.

 

It’s bad speech. And if you engaged in that, then leprosy was your punishment. And what leprosy was is that first it would show up on the walls of your home, like mold.

 

It would be a warning sign to you that you did something wrong. You said something wrong. You have to do, you have to repent for it.

 

And if you repented, then it will go away off the walls of your home. But if you did, which and it probably was very similar to mold, what mold looks like. But if you didn’t repent, then it would it would travel from the walls of your home to your furniture that you would sit on.

 

And you would see, I guess the the equivalent of mold on your furniture. And if you repented, it will go away. If you didn’t repent, then it will get on the clothes that you wore.

 

And if you don’t repent, then it was the final stage was it would reach your body. And once your body had leprosy on it, the the high priest would come and look at you and, you know, declare it leprosy and then you would have to go off to isolation. I think it’s a period of like seven days or I’m not sure how long I’ve got for some reason that stands out of my mind.

 

But it’s just like a clue. That’s like a clear, you know, correlation of what mold looks like and how we can see it in the in the Bible. So yeah, that’s my that’s my do you have anything to add?

 

No, it is short. And so I don’t know how sweet it was.

 

That was great. It was great. And I think that it’s it’s comparing it to the reality of what’s going on around us.

 

And it’s very appropriate for what you know, these days and these times that we’re going through.

 

And yeah, you know, yeah, my first my first feeling was like when all the this was going on in America, because it’s not I mean, obviously, what happens in Israel October 7, that was kind of the the door that opens for everything else that’s going outside of Israel now with anti semitism. But in reality, it existed before and we and I guess we didn’t see it, but they also didn’t have the opportunity to just come out and feel, I don’t know, feel so good to be there.

 

I actually you know, what I could say is that one of the things I remember Jason seeing, right, like, sometimes you can smell it, sometimes you don’t see it, right? You don’t always see it first. Sometimes it can be there and you don’t see it.

 

So I can tell you that I had a situation with somebody that I thought was a friend, you know, who I’ve been friends with for years. And she came out with such toxicity and kept sending me reels and all of these other things. But like, I never saw it.

 

Like, I would have never thought of this person as an anti-semitism. You know what I mean? Like, I was shocked.

 

Like, I’m not shocked by anti-semitism, because I know that’s there. I was shocked by it coming out in someone that I considered a friend. And that was what was shocking.

 

So to me, exactly like you’re saying, like, that’s that mold that’s like behind the walls that you can’t see, you know, and people can have symptoms and things going on in their body because like certain types of mold can be absolutely toxic to the body. And anti-semitism is certainly toxic to the world, you know. And, you know, you have to get rid of things that are toxic.

 

And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get rid of Hamas and every other faction that supports what happened on October 7th, right? So I don’t want to say that’s all civilians, but I want to say that might be some of them, because we know that some of them partook.

 

So it’s anybody who does not want to live in peace, anybody who can support that. We have to get rid of that toxicity.

 

And I was saying, you know, it’s a very dangerous statement. And it’s not and I’m not saying to blame the victim and not. But the fact of the matter is, and this is why it is a commandment of ours as Jews to behave with utmost respect for all people of all nations, of all anything, because, you know, you can’t we can’t what’s the word we can’t justify anti-Semitism at all.

 

But if we don’t act in as the best that we can be, what example are we showing? And so you can say that to this friends of yours, you know, you were a good friend, you were a fun friend, you had good conversation, do this and this. You gave her no reason.

 

You acted with respect to her. You gave her no reason to react to you with that anti-Semitic, you know, stuff she was throwing at you. Right.

 

So, so if you can say that, then it’s wrong. You know what I’m saying? So we, we are responsive, you know, what is going on in the world today?

 

Like, obviously, we’re not going to take responsibility for that, because like we said in the beginning, these are psychotic lunatics, to say the very least. But yet we still have a responsibility to act respectfully. I mean, and you know, part of acting respectfully is also standing up for ourselves and not standing for injustice.

 

That’s part of respect also, you know, it’s not a black and white thing. There’s there’s breeze and you can still act respectfully and not and not accept injustice.

 

I agree with you. And like, despite it all, I don’t educate my children to hate all Muslims, like at all, you know, we don’t educate our children that way, you know, and and just as like a final thing, you know, because I don’t know who listens to this. I know it’s mainly people from our community, but often there are people from like, you know, the community of the person speaking.

So hopefully people from Got Mold will help promote the podcast a little bit as well. And so, you know, I just say this to anybody that we I lost my train of thought and I forgot what I wanted to say, but that we, you know, that we’re saying that the other other people other than your community that will be listening, right? That meaning that we don’t we don’t educate our our children to hate anyone.

 

We know, you know, that’s not what we do. Oh, that we want to live in peace. We are tired.

 

We do not want to send our children to war. We are tired of our sons and daughters fighting. This is not a war of territory.

 

We want to live in peace. We don’t want to be pelted with rockets. We don’t want our southern and northern communities having to be running to bomb shelters all the time.

 

Our kids, like half of them are missing the beginning of their university because the university is put off as long as they can, you know, this is not what we want. We truly agreed to give back Gaza, not give back, excuse me . We truly agreed to give over Gaza, even though there were always historically Jews in Gaza, because we were hoping that it would bring true peace and that is truly what we want.

 

We would do that again, if it meant that we could have true peace, we do not.

 

No, but you know what I even think like this whole, you know, before I came on, you had a whole over an hour long conversation with Jason and I don’t believe that.

 

But you guys aren’t going to hear, but it was a good conversation.

 

You know, I don’t think that he’s Jewish from what he’s not, you know, right. And his reaction again, it’s like two different nationalities speaking to each other with respect for your professions, with respect for each other as human beings. And he was horrified with everything, his reactions to what was going on because you spoke to him very close after.

 

It was like two days. I think it was October 10th. Maybe it was three days afterwards.

 

He was the first person I spoke to, you know.

 

And so that’s a perfect example of mutual respect, mutual coexistence, you know, good versus evil, right? Like it doesn’t, you know, even if, and it wasn’t even directed at him, right?

 

Right.

 

No, I’m saying, I don’t know what his, his religion is, if he’s religious at all or hasn’t, but it didn’t matter if he’s a human being.

 

Right. And he behaved like a human being. And that has been what I have, you know, seen anybody I’ve interviewed since then has been nothing but sympathetic.

 

Right.

 

And, you know, and it’s incredible. And that’s all, you know, people are asking for, is that for people just to see reality, yes, you should feel bad. If there are some innocent civilians in Gaza, you should feel bad.

 

You know, I feel better if, you know, Hamas let those innocent civilians get out, like we asked them to, but we won’t go there. Okay, we could talk about it all day, and I don’t want to go there now. We don’t want to turn it to political, but basically that’s the bottom line.

 

It’s okay to feel bad for people on both sides, but we have to be able to stand up and say that what happened on October 7th was, there’s no justification. There’s no saying in any way that it was okay. Like if you can justify that, there is something wrong with you.

 

Right.

 

Right, thank you. Anyways, Lara, thank you so, so much. As always, this was a great conversation.

 

I really appreciate it.

 

Thank you. Thanks, Sara. Bye everyone.

 

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