Mold Toxicity, the New Standard of Testing, and Remediation with Jason Earle

Is your home making you sick? With an average of 20,000 breaths a day the quality of the air you breathe is making you thrive, or trending towards illness.

Our immediate surrounding (air quality) is a significant factor affecting our well-being, making the unchecked presence of mold in our environment an important health matter.

Jason Earle is a man on a mission. An adoring father of two boys in diapers, an incurable entrepreneur, and indoor air quality crusader, he is founder & CEO of the mold inspection company, 1-800-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, and helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind. He has been featured or appeared on Good Morning America, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur, Wired, and more.

Episode Highlights

[0:00:00] Jason Earle, His Background, and Why He’s an Authority on Mold

[0:12:39] Wall Street, the Dot Com Bubble, and Wealth Gap

[0:20:21] Finding Purpose in Fighting Mold

[0:31:31] Investing in Better Indoor Air Quality

[0:36:06] Where Does Mold Come From?

[0:44:36] How We Can Control the Quality of Our Air 

[0:52:57] On Managing Humidity Levels

[0:56:50] The 1-800-GOT-MOLD Solution

[1:00:04] Mold Remediation and Forming a Good Ecosystem With Your Environment

[1:13:29] On Quantifying and Managing Mold Growth

[1:22:09] The GOT MOLD? Technology

[1:26:56] On How Jason Manages His Body’s Response to Mold Presence

[1:32:04] Changing Perspective on Mold Sensitivity

[1:34:55] Learn More About GOT MOLD?

UPGRADE YOUR WELLNESS

Silver Biotics Wound Healing Gel: https://bit.ly/3JnxyDD
Code: BEAUTIFULLYBROKEN

LightPathLED https://lightpathled.com/?afmc=BEAUTIFULLYBROKEN
Code: beautifullybroken

STEMREGEN: https://www.stemregen.co/products/stemregen/?afmc=beautifullybroken
Code: beautifullybroken

Flowpresso 3-in-1 technology: (https://calendly.com/freddiekimmel/flowpresso-one-on-one-discovery)

CONNECT WITH FREDDIE

Work with Me: https://www.beautifullybroken.world/biological-blueprint

Website and Store: (http://www.beautifullybroken.world)  

Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/beautifullybroken.world/)  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@freddiekimmel

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (00:00.374)
Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about mold. Let's talk about mold, baby. Okay, I'm not gonna sing, but we are going to sing the praises of Jason Earl. He's the creator of the Got Mold? Test kit. Jason has an incredible story, which fits right in the beautifully broken container. He was actually diagnosed with a terminal illness and everything cleared up when he moved out of his moldy home. So we're gonna get into the story and the heart centered mission.

But here's why I love Jason. Jason is providing an at-home test kit, which uses a lab from one of the best microbiology centers in the country. This is an at-home test kit, which looks at outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, and the difference in between different rooms in the home. It's a quick turnaround. And the big one, it's really, really affordable.

And I think it's really important. The last thing I'll say is when you have an understanding that your home might be making you sick, that the 20,000 breaths you take every day are either leading you towards high functionality or they're making you ill. I believe we need to separate the testing from the people who are offering remediation solutions. And so this is an important point we're going to get into in the show. I love Jason.

I met him at the Bulletproof Conference in LA. We immediately hit it off and I was just like, this, you've got to come on the podcast. So as we talk about Jason's testing solutions and how he trained at one time dogs, mold sniffing dogs to sniff out biotoxins around the home, he came up with a beautiful, beautiful discount for the audience. You can use code beautifullybroken10 in the cart of Gotmold. That is gotmold.com.

to get your test kit and see what your home is doing for you or how it may be the hidden source of kryptonite. I hope you enjoy the show. Let's jump on in.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (02:10.146)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on the show we explore the survivor's journey, practitioners making a difference, and the therapeutic treatments and transformational technology that allow the body to heal itself. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes, because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (02:46.274)
Ladies and gentlemen, before we start this episode, I need to mention how I've upgraded my oral health and my immune system response in the last 30 days. I started using a supplement called Silver Biotics, and they have a line of products that incorporate silver, a century old technology, utilizing silver, is a metal with the highest electrical conductivity on the planet. But they've biohacked silver and literally surrounded these particles with a

molecular coating that allows it to work much, better. And when I say much better, mean, they have 420 independent studies, 60 patents, and it is 4x more potent than any silver on the market. So this is going to work on things like bacteria, mold, fungus. My result or my N equals one is my gum health. My gums are like pink and glowing. They look amazing. And then I've just had a better balance or I would say an even immune

response after about a month, I would have you have this in your cabinet. If there's one thing we overlook, it's oral and dental health. And every single tooth is wired to an organ in your body. It's one of the most overlooked things I see people jump around. And this is something that is cheap. It's affordable and you can get a great discount. It's like 20 % using the code beautifully broken. So go over to silverbiotics.com and check them out.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the beautifully broken podcast. I'm sitting here with a guest I have been, I'm like salivating over this interview because today we're sitting down with Jason Earl from Got Mold. Jason, welcome to the show. It's so good to be here, Freddie. Thank you for having me. So we were just at the, I never know how to frame it. It's like the Bulletproof Conference, the Biohacking Conference, the Upgrade Performance Conference. We were in LA.

at the Beverly Hilton at a huge wellness event, which Dave Asprey procures. And you were one of the people that I sat down and I said, I want this guy on the podcast and I want to talk about mold because it is a field rich with information. It's a pain point for thousands of people across the world, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions we might get into.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (05:09.718)
It's something that you're providing a solution for. So Jason, I have to ask you, why are you qualified to speak on mold?

Well, first of all, I want to back up. also have the same problem describing the conference. I stumble and fumble. Is it bulletproof biohacking upgrade? And so, you know, you and I are struggling the same thing there, but it's kind of all of those things, right? And in terms of my qualifications for being the mold business, I'm actually unqualified. I would argue that I'm the accidental expert. One way to look at it, but like many people who are doing, I think, important work in the health and wellness space.

I come to it from a personal perspective with a personal history, which has fueled my unending desire to learn more and more about this. And there's really, there's so much to learn. I can call myself an expert, but I'm just scratching the surface. And the people who I talk with who are also experts and within the sub domains of this domain are also acutely aware of the level of ignorance that they currently move through the world because this is an emerging space and we're just learning the incredible impact of

of mold and underwear quality on health and longevity. Yeah. So I imagine, I imagine there's a time in which you had an initial mold exposure or an awareness that mold was a problem for you. Yeah. So I got into this space again from this personal history. But it was again, very, very sort of accidental. When I was around four years old, I suddenly lost a lot of weight in a three week period.

I was having difficulty breathing. Then my parents took me to the pediatrician who said, you you really should take him to a children's hospital. This looks serious. So they took me to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which is renowned for their respiratory clinic. And based on family history and symptoms that I had presented with, they initially diagnosed me with cystic fibrosis. And that was devastating, devastating to my parents. They spent the next six weeks crying while they were waiting for the second opinion because my father had lost four of his cousins.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (07:14.85)
to CF before the age of 14. So he saw this up close and personal when he was growing up. And this is their worst nightmare coming true. six weeks later, they were relieved to find out that I didn't have CF evidenced by the fact that I sit here and talking to you at 46 years old, because it was really a death sentence back then. Rather what I had was asthma compounded by pneumonia. And then they tested me for allergies, which was one of my formative memories. They put you in like a Papoose or like a straight jacket for toddlers.

where your back is exposed, but you can't really get out of it. I can still remember the smell and the whole sort of sensory experience. Then they draw a grid on your back and test you with these antigens. And my dad said that I look like a ladybug, just with a big red swollen back with dots all over it. And so I essentially tested positive for every single thing that they tested me for. So it was grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats.

cotton, so my clothes were itchy my whole childhood, soybeans. And I grew up on a little hobby farm where we had rescued animals. And I was surrounded by all those things in very high concentration farms all the way around us. So it was grass, wheat, corn, hicks, soybeans. was washing this stuff. And so I essentially lived on inhalers until I was about 12 and my folks split up around that time, which was a benefit to everyone involved. And I moved out of that old damp farmhouse.

and all of my symptoms went away. And it wasn't really even discussed except my recollection was that it was chalked up to what they call spontaneous adolescent remission, which is what my grandfather went through with his asthma as well. And I just moved on. Now, I could skip over a couple of things, but this is kind of relevant to the story too. So shortly thereafter, my mother committed suicide. And then about a year later, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease.

which was my second big dose of antibiotics. They hit me pretty hard with the, when I had pneumonia when I was four as well. And the antibiotics are an important part of the story, which we can circle back to. so Lyme disease and my mother's early demise led me to miss a lot of school. And I was already kind of a recalcitrant teenager. really did. I frequented school. I didn't really attend. I think probably I stopped taking school seriously in like fifth grade or sixth grade, honestly.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (09:37.838)
And so around that time, my mom died, I was nine and then Lyme disease was 10. And so the combination of those two events essentially led me to being forced out of high school. So I dropped out gleefully, honestly, but I would not have been sort of empowered to do that had it not been for the circumstances. And I went to go work at the local gas station with full-time hours. I was already working there part-time and I met a guy there. I fixed his tire and it's kind of a longer story for maybe a, you another podcast, but in essence, I fixed his tire and

We started talking and he recruited me to come work for him on Wall Street. And I was 16 at the time and I had no idea who he was or what that even meant. But I ended up going to work for him, you know, within a couple of weeks of our, of our initial meeting. And I ended up within a year getting my series seven stockbrokers license, which knowingly made me the youngest licensed stockbroker in history with the Guinness world record. And that was completely accidental. mean, this is like, I was, dropped, I failed algebra one.

And then two years later, I was the youngest licensed doctor. I'm no math whiz. I'm no prodigy. You know, this is just completely fairy tale kind of stuff. And I did that for nine years, a really nice career. I took to it sort of naturally. I really love business and I love people and I had to make 400 phone calls a day. So you better like people. And in that experience, I learned a lot about adversity. I learned a lot about tenacity. I learned a lot about, you know, in order to be successful in that field, you had to make 400 phone calls a day. And if one person said yes to you.

That was a path of success. So that means if you do the math on that, that's a quarter of a percent success ratio in order to achieve great success. So you have to fail 99 and three quarters percent of the time to succeed in that business and just never stop. So you had to make those 400 phone calls every single day. And so that embedded a lot of attributes into me that were already there. There was already sort of this buoyant optimism, which again, we can dive into where that comes from and where I think it comes from.

in the work ethic, but it was always an empty thing for me. Always empty. mean, you know, I was making a lot of money when I was just a young kid and more money than any 18, 19, 20 something kids should ever make. And I'm making all the mistakes that come with that. Doing all the irresponsible things and all the self-destructive things that come along with that. Easy money can do that, can do that too. And so I struggled to find meaning. And one of the things that I would do when I could was volunteer for Operation Smile, which is, know,

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (12:00.406)
international medical organization travels around and fixes kids with cleft lips and cleft palate. So I did some international volunteer work there. And I always came back from those experiences very, very fulfilled. And I tried to weave that into Wall Street such that the last few years that I was on the street, I owned my own firm and we were working on environmental and socially responsible investments. And back then that wasn't really a thing. You that was, we call that green investing now, but that wasn't really even a thing back then.

And then the dot com bubble burst and everything kind of went to hell in a hand basket. And I woke up one day and I just wasn't having fun anymore. And I knew I wasn't going to have fun for a while. So I decided to go and walk about. Remind me, when was the dot com bubble?

Up to 2000. was just, I was going to say 99. Yeah. It was up to and then through actually. And then Greenspan started raising rates and there were some weird transactions in the, you know, AOL was bought by Time Warner, which changed the digital, you know, sort of eyeballs metric into like cashflow. You actually have to make money. that's a weird concept. So .com faced, you know, financial metrics right around that time.

And I started, by the way, interestingly, I started on Wall Street a month before the first bombing at World Trade Center. And I quit a month before the last one in August of 2001. Bookends. And I went through that building every day for most of my career. That's incredible. I moved to the city right after, I mean, the tip of the island was smoking, just to give you scope. And driving into New York City and to Manhattan, the

I remember thinking, wow, is the sky always lit up like fireflies, just helicopters, scum in the going across the skyline at night. was was incredible. There was this energy and activity which was undeniable and just felt like you were in a little bit of a war zone. But like also life had to keep going. And it was so surreal driving in there and coming from upstate New York, which is like I grew up on a farm and coming into the city. But I actually worked in this place called it was a little bit of like a boiler room where

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (14:09.984)
Wall Street was shut down, if you remember. So everybody was looking for work. And I was in a room at one time, I'd found this job. I don't know how I found it. Must have been in the newspaper where it was a bunch of out of work stockbrokers because the exchange was like under rubble. And it was a sales, a high pressure sales job in which we were calling people for leads for like, you know, a paper company. It's called Boiler Room, right? Have you seen that movie? Ben Affleck?

Yep. I lived it. It's like always be closing kind of spinoff. Totally. Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. AIDA. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But I was in this and there was like a guy had just a hundred dollar bills tacked up on the end of one wall. And he was like, whoever closes the most sales today walks out with this stack of cash. And everybody was screaming in the morning and get on your phones. You'd call people all day looking for the, you know, just cold calling people. And they had a script and they were like, you know, literally you have this big mafia guy walking around. He's like,

Yo buddy, stick to the script. What are you doing? You going off? And so it was this nuts thing. I was in there and it was, you know, like two or three weeks and eventually luckily I like booked like a Broadway tour. So I got out of there, but I was, you're telling me this and I'm imagining where you said I made a lot of money, Jason. What was a lot of money at that time? What were you pulling in? just fascinated to hear. mean, it was a hundred grand a month was, was kind of standard. Yeah. A hundred grand a month.

Yeah. And by the way, it would also be such that, you know, a month later I could be like scrapping because the, book would blow up because it'd be the stocks would take a crap. next thing you know, I'd be starting over essentially because most of my clients just got smoked and so did I. And so you next, you know, I could make the dog ran in one month and then make like 5,000 in the next month. Wow. But more often than not, it was on the higher end of things.

But you had to restart all the time. I always used say was like there was a hole in the bottom of the bucket because we were doing a lot of hybrid. We weren't managing all of someone's money. We were doing the more aggressive stuff and a lot of IPOs, a lot of early stage companies. So we were the risk side of the portfolio. My clients had lots and lots of available capital and we were the risk. We were the five or 10%. So was for lack of better term, it was their way of having Las Vegas by telephone. A hundred percent.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (16:24.478)
You know what mean? That's what they got that out of it. And, you know, we also invested in really important companies that have gone on to do important things at the early stages. And, you know, those are the unicorns of the the nineties, if you will. The unicorns, totally. And back then it was a public venture capital. We don't have that now. So the whole financial system, basically, in the interest of getting rid of a lot of the scumbags that were, you know, the Jordan Belferts and the guys who own the firms, the firm where I worked in the beginning, because it was a bucket shop.

notorious bucket shop where I first started. But I didn't know the difference and it was just my way of getting on the Wall Street. I I was getting recruited out of a parking garage, believe it or not. I do really well in garages apparently. But I got recruited out of a parking garage to go work for Mario Gabelli, Gabelli Funds, who's a self-made billionaire. And he beats the S &P 500 every year for the past 40 years or something crazy. Incredible. Yeah. I went from bucket shop to blue chip and white shoe. And that whole industry was really geared towards small companies that were seeking

Small funds. We did IPO sometimes that were two, three, four, five million dollar IPOs. Tiny, tiny, tiny deals. But those are now regulated out. So now it's harder for small companies to raise capital because the question about how are your investors going to get their money out, that opportunity, that window closed because of hyper regulation. Got rid of lot of the bad characters, but also what it did, think it also made it more difficult for early stage companies to form capital.

And then now all the IPOs are multi-billion dollar juggernauts. know, they were already way too big and the investor investment public isn't going to see that much upside out of it. You know, the venture capitalists sucked all the air out of the room. that opportunity and just said, see that I'll take all of that. And then here you can buy my stock. Yeah, it's wild. I wanted to go back and frame that just to give people scope because there really is this wild which we'll get into, you know, in the world of chronic illness, which I've lived in for 20 years. Or let me say this.

I played in that container, not identified, but you often experience people that are just, they're trying to scrape together money for electricity or basic food because they've spent so much on their journey to be well. And you hear these numbers, you're like, oh yeah, $100,000 a month. It's wild. It's wild, the energy, what money can allow us to act these different experiences on the planet. Man, what a gap. It's incredible to me. Huge gap.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (18:45.974)
And by the way, we're adding no value to the world, right? All these stock brokers and some of these guys I was working with were making half a million a month. No joke, right? I mean, just like insane, these are 25 year old kids, but they're not adding any value. I always say that the only people that benefited from my success are the people who own the stores where I shopped. And so that always bothered me. And that gap, I mean, my mom, really impressed upon me the idea of contribution to the greater good when I was a kid. She was a nurse. She ran a hospital down in central New Jersey.

that was a rehab center, but physical and occupational rehab. So people with brain trauma, with amputations and things like that, right? So I would volunteer there in the summer. She would take me in there to volunteer because she didn't want me to stay home and burn the house down. And I got this bug in me about, you know, seeing people that were not doing as well as me and finding inspiration in their stories too. You know, so many of these people were buoyant and you could also see the people that had already given up.

And so it was interesting for me, I didn't really articulate it mentally, but I could see the difference and I admired and aspired to be like the person who had lost both limbs and yet you never saw them without a smile on their face. Right? It's incredible. And I was worried about something minor in my life. I have all my limbs, fingers, you know, both eyes, both kidneys. And I was, you know, griping about something probably just completely. Yeah.

Bring us back up to your story, not to bring us off how much money you made on the stock market, but we've kind of got to the point where you had left right after the dot com bubble had burst. Again, I, you know, I had been struggling with purpose and I woke up to the realization that the stock market was going to be dead for a while. And my prediction was about 10 years. And by the way, from the date I quit until the 10 years, if the chart was such that actually it was a down decade, it was a lost decade and date to date from quit.

to 10 year exactly, the Dow Jones was within 100 points. So my intuition about that was scarily accurate. And by the way, my intuition when it comes to stock market predictions is not generally that accurate. So don't start following me for stock tips. there was meaning was missing from the work on Wall Street. And my mom had impressed this idea of contribution to the greater good upon me in my summer times. so I decided that I wanted to do something meaningful in my life. I had reached the end of that road.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (21:08.394)
And evidenced by, the bookends that happened when it came to the terrorist attacks and all these things. just said, you know, this is very clear to me that I need to do something different. And so I put 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack and sold a bunch of stuff. And I bought a train ticket in New York and went across Canada. basically took a train from New Jersey to LA through Canada. So I went up.

to Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Churchill, hung out with the polar bears. Then I went to Jasper and Banff and spent some time there in the glorious beauty of the Canadian Rockies and then Vancouver and Vancouver Island and ended up in, you know, going down the coast, Seattle and Portland and San Francisco and LA. And then I flew to Hawaii. And by the way, it was a great deal. was like $400 all for a month on Via Rail. was a special promotion between Amtrak and Via Rail. And it was just, it was so awesome. mean, I got to see North America in this glorious way. Did they still do that?

Yeah. The last time I looked, there was still a really nice package. You have to go in one direction. The key is you can't go backwards, but it's a, it's a flat feet and you end up sleeping in the regular car. You don't have like a sleeping car. So I made friends with all these people, a lot of older folks that I still keep in touch with and they will protect each other kind of, know, cause sometimes there was some riffraff would get on the trains and we ended up like a pod, you know, and we ended up seeing each other in these different towns. And it was a really, it was a really beautiful experience. And back then I only brought my journal and my CDs.

Cause you know, there was no digital way to do this. Am I still getting the drum, the emphasis with the drum? little bit, but that's okay. Your future podcast interviews, they're going to like thank me. They'll be like, I gotta, I gotta thank Freddie Kimmel. I say own it when, when shit goes sideways on a podcast. I'm like, yeah, it's all good. A hundred percent. Yeah. No, I agree wholeheartedly. Authenticity is great. In fact, my father used to say the key to success in sales is authenticity.

And once you learn how to fake that, you got it made. Mm-hmm. 100%. So jokes aside, when I ended up in Hawaii, I lot of time on my hands. And I was reading a lot of local newspapers. And one story jumped out. In fact, there was a recurring theme. I kept seeing the story about this big mold problem at the Hilton Kalia Tower in Waikiki Beach. I happened to be in Waikiki at the time. I knew nothing about mold. It was just a thing I kept seeing.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (23:31.66)
But a story had jumped out at me and it was about this gentleman who had worked at that hotel and he had developed adult onset asthma and all of these allergies that he had never had before. And you know, 40 years old, this is unusual stuff. And he blamed the mold. And I immediately had like this deja vu moment. And I thought, geez, I wonder if that was what was going on with me as a kid. I wonder if we had a mold problem. So I called my dad from a payphone, which probably isn't there anymore.

And I asked him if he thought we had a mold issue. And he just laughed at me. He said, of course we had mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? And it was just so flippant. so like dismissive in that moment, a light bulb went on that has only gotten brighter, right? Which is that this is a blind spot. You know, the idea that buildings can make us sick. The buildings that we live and work in. So I became fascinated in that moment with the concept that

not so much about mold at the time, although mold is fascinating and it's infinitely interesting the more you look at it. But really that idea that these buildings that we live in, these boxes that we live in and store our stuff in are actually a functional part of our immune system, really. If you go deeper, the buildings that we live and work in are really our exoskin or our exoskeleton. And if we don't take care of them properly, they won't take care of us. And when we take care of them well, they provide a foundation for healing. So I didn't articulate that at the time.

20 years, but at the time I immediately knew that that was where I wanted to spend my time, my energy. So I spent a lot of time on internet cafes in Hawaii while I was waiting to go home and reading about looking at mold, asthma, it was incredible how little there was out there about this at the time. Then I came back to New Jersey armed with a whole lot of curiosity, took a job working for a mold remediation company. was actually a basement waterproofing company.

that was doing mold remediation, but they weren't really doing mold remediation. They were selling people on the fear of mold and spraying chemicals and just doing all sorts of, know, sort of thuggish mold treatments, if you will. But there was no standard at the time. This is a wild, wild West. People were just starting to talk about this and there was the mantra within the contractor trade was mold is gold. So they were just, you know, all these people were coming into the trades to try to make money off of it.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (25:49.922)
By the way, a lot of medical research came out since then. So it's been fascinating to jump in at that time and see this whole thing really mushroom, you'll pardon the expression. But I quickly saw that these guys were not doing the right thing by the consumer. And I thought, geez, if I want to make a lot of money by hurting people, I could just stay on Wall Street. know, I'm here to try to make the world a better place. How do I do that? And so I started offering free inspections at night to help people navigate this and so that I could learn. So I was.

just figuring out what the tools were and I was reading building science books at night and I had literally like the moisture control handbook in the magazine rack in my bathroom because I would literally read that stuff like anytime I had a few minutes I would just be looking at these books on moisture control and building science and biology and what little there was on functional medicine and things like that. And so just under trying to get a better understanding on this because there was really no central resource for this and there were no real trainings of any

repute and there were certainly no certifications or there was no academic track. Anyway, I ended up taking this job and saw that these guys were thugs and started this inspection thing and heard about a guy who had trained dogs to sniff at hidden mold in buildings. I thought, man, that is just crazy enough to be brilliant. I got to go check this out because I had grown up with dogs and you just know that they're smarter than most people and they're certainly more trustworthy.

And so I wanted to go down and see what this guy had done and he'd trained bomb dogs, drug dogs, termite dogs, you name it. He so many different kinds of detection dogs, dogs to find endangered species in the desert and you name it. So mold is kind of easy. It's a static thing. It's in one place. It's not moving around like bombs or drugs in a car. And so just intuitively made a lot of sense to me. And so he introduced me to this lanky little black lab mix named Oreo, who was one of his first trainees. And so I ended up coming home with this mold sniffing dog.

So I went down to go just kick tires and came back with a $14,000 dog. My family thought I had gone crazy. Everyone thought I go here's the youngest broker in history with a mold sniffing dog. Right. So Jason really lost his mind. But within three weeks of being in New Jersey with Oreo, the waterproofing company thought it was interesting to try to get some press because they thought they were going get some press out of it. And they contacted channel six, action news who instead of sending over like a crew to do like a piece on us, they actually sent a consumer alert crew trying to debunk me.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (28:12.18)
and I was just totally naive to it. They set up a house and they hid mold in the house. We went through and found it in like three minutes. Instead of debunking us, we got an endorsement. I hadn't even started a company. had no idea where I was. This is just completely nascent. I started getting all these calls from doctors in the area that had patients that they weren't responding to traditional treatments for whatever they were experiencing. Those turned out to be very powerful. had some significant.

impact on a few families right off the bat. And then that turned into Good Morning America episodes. And then we got invited to do Extreme Makeover Home Edition. And it just kept going and going and going and going and going. And we did thousands and thousands of inspections without ever having to advertise just based upon this idea of that we use rescue dogs to heal sick homes. And so we were really fortunate to have gotten that. But what really happened there was that because of that incredible volume that came in so unpredictably, and that company, we called it Lab Results, by the way, because we use Labrador Retrievers and laboratory testing.

Brilliant marketing. And people loved it. But I got sort of a trial by fire type of education because I didn't have the chance to really, I just got like thrown into these hundreds and hundreds of homes that were mostly driven by medical concerns because there were, I was getting a ton of referrals from doctors and the dog Shorio was my partner. She was like the greatest thing that ever happened to me at the time. She taught me where the mold was hiding. I got an education from her.

I was trained on where buildings leak, where buildings fail by a dog. It was the coolest thing. So we were able to find these hidden issues and then get them remediated. And since all these families just healed incredibly, that company became 1-800-GOT-MOLD. And so I've been running that for 20 years. over the years, what's always bothered me is that despite all of the satisfaction you get from helping families, individuals, it was mostly driven by a sick kid or a

or someone with a really mysterious, a lot of autoimmune stuff, the satisfaction that comes from that is powerful. But what I noticed, we're really only helping affluent people. And you know, the people who can afford a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollar inspection, and then the resulting remediation, because it's all cash, insurance doesn't pay for this stuff. So we were servicing people in Manhattan, Short Hills, and French Connecticut, and Princeton, New Jersey. And we turned away thousands and thousands of people, or they opted out because they simply couldn't afford it.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (30:34.1)
And that always about my parents could not have afforded the higher 1-800-GAUM Mold. Yeah. I mean, I'm aware that you might have the data quicker than I do, but it's like most people are living in credit card debt. Actually, most people are in the negative. Like when we look at these things as like an elective spend, it's just an extra. And I've had so many people say to me, well, I don't have the money to test for mold. And it's certainly one could rationalize. Well, you have the money. You're having the money to manage your long-term chronic illness.

You know, and, I'm what from my lived experiences, it's very possible mold could be playing into that, or at least a big driver of your inability to get better. So it's something that until you understand its impact into the human body, I don't think you understand the gravity. So only to go up on a little sub box of like, you know, expensive, right. It's an investment. What else are we spending our money on that's worth it? no, in terms of ROI.

there is no greater investment than investing in your indoor air quality. You know, we spend 90 % of our time indoors and we breathe 13 to 15 times a minute, which if you do the math is 20,000 times a day. We breathe 20,000 times a day. I mean, that's insanity. And so what else do you do that much? I mean, the only thing that you can think of is your heartbeats more than that. But biologically speaking, in terms of, you know, what we do repetitively,

You know, if your indoor air quality is either nutritive and healing and energizing, or it is energy draining, inflammatory and leads to disease, there's no neutral. This is a really important point just because you can't sense it. That there's something wrong. Doesn't mean it's neutral. There's no neutral. It's either giving you life or it's causing you leading to illness.

And so it's very binary and all the things in this world, if you really look at it, we don't have control over anything really. I mean, we have so little control. If you're humble enough to admit that it's very hard for the biohackers and the people who are, know, the type a people to recognize this. I definitely fall into that category, but if you're humble and honest enough to recognize that you don't control most things in your life, you have to look at the things that you do have control over.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (33:00.656)
And one of the things that you do have a disproportionate amount of control over is your indoor air. It's the thing that you can invest in and move the needle on in a really significant way and you can measure it too. So this is not a squishy thing. This is not a nebulous thing. There is a nebulous nature to it and it's difficult sometimes to get the data, but it can be done. And so I always argue that, you know, if you can exert control over something like this, which has such a huge impact. I mean, the American college of asthma allergy and immunology.

stated that 50 % of all illnesses are either caused or aggravated by poor indoor air quality. That's insanity, right? 37 million Americans with chronic sinusitis, according to the Mayo Clinic, that's a mold issue. That's 11 % of the population. Asthma, 24.6 million asthmatics, of which 10 million are kids, and that number's up 100 % in last 10 years. Autoimmune diseases through the roof. There's just all these things that are directly correlated to or caused by poor indoor air quality. And yet we have a blind spot.

on that because, well, it's the law of familiarity. Whatever you're exposed to long enough, eventually you take for granted. And, you know, can you think of anything that you're exposed to more than air? Right? I mean, it reminds me of the David Foster Wallace commencement address where he begins, he calls it, this is water. He talks about these two young fish swimming along and they pass an older fish who says, morning boys, how's the water? And they kind of, they go,

Good. a couple of minutes later, they look at each other and they go, what the hell is water? And that's our air. Yeah. And so we're swimming around in this stuff and we just take it for granted. We don't realize that this is our water, right? We can't live without it. And of the four basic human needs, know, air, water, food, shelter, shelter, we can live with that for a while. We don't do well forever, but we can live for a while. Food, you can go a few weeks. No problem. You know, some people do that electively. Water, you know, you can go a few days. Air?

a few minutes. And yet of those four things, the thing that you think about the least is air, right? The thing that you plan around the least is air. The thing you invest in the least is air. And yet it's the thing that we can live without for the shortest period of time. And so it's that blind spot that motivates me every day is to get people to shift their perspective because

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (35:25.426)
I believe that once you shift, you know, it's like the quote, the mind that's stretched to a new dimension never regains its original shape. Yeah. So like the idea of showing people this is something that they eventually hopefully can't unlearn or you can't unsee. Yeah. It's a brilliant new level of awareness around air quality. And I think once you hear this information, it's hard to look away. Sometimes that information comes in the form of a

of a horrific mold exposure for people in which they experience a decrease in functionality, energy, know, all the myriad of different symptoms that you just mentioned. I think most things are tied to mold, or it's at least a part of it in your air quality. When you said you walk through the homes with a labrador that was trained to identify mold, and that the animal had taught you where mold forms in the home, what did you learn from the dog? Like, where does mold grow and why?

Well, I mean, it grows wherever buildings fail or where the defects in their original construction were present. Right. So, typical things are around windows, windows leak, you know, they all leak to some degree where the roof meets siding is a very typical place because they don't flash those. A lot of contractors forget to put in flashing. There's also typical sorts of.

You know, split level homes where the basement is not really the basement. The living room is kind of subterranean and it's not really fully a basement. Also finished basements notorious. You can see by the lay of the land where buildings are built into a hill and you can just see that, well, that back wall is going to probably be a problem. You know, the one that's built in. And so you just see these patterns emerge, right? Crawl spaces are a problem. don't even need a mold dog for that. Crawl spaces are a building defect. All crawl spaces are a building defect if they're not built.

correctly in the first place. And I've never seen one built correctly in the first place. if, you know, if anybody wants to chime in on that and send in a note that let me know if you built a house with a crawl space built the right way, which means sealed to the outside and actually heated in air conditioned, believe it or not, you heat and air condition your crawl space, just like you do your living room, because you're to put your mechanical equipment down there. can put your HVAC system down there. And a lot of people put HVAC systems in dirt crawl spaces. Why would you run all your air through a space that's A, too hot, too cold or too humid, and then also dirty?

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (37:45.248)
It just doesn't make any sense, but yet we do this at scale. build developments like this. Build, you know, it's just insane. So, you know, just common sense eludes so many builders, architects, designers, all of them, all the professionals all together don't even see the building code officials. Nobody sees it. It's just insane. And I agree with you that mold is the underlying cause of much illness, but I would even argue broader than that. It's just poor indoor air quality. And so if you look at the statistics on this, and this is really fascinating since 1965 to about 2014 respiratory illness.

is up 165 % in America since 1965. And during that same period, roughly the same period, death related to respiratory illness is up 30%. This isn't a time of great innovation in the healthcare field, right? Like why is this happening? And not only that, in that same period of time, smoking is down, right? You think respiratory illness, well, it must be smoking. Smoking is down dramatically in that same period of time. And so you say, well, what is that, right? What could be possibly going on?

And in that same period of time, all in the same timeline, I'm working on a visual for this, by the way, you'd see that what we started building was in the forties and fifties, we started building very quickly because we had the baby boomers. needed to build fast and cheap housing. So the introduction of new fast and cheap building materials made its way primarily sheetrock, drywall, chips and wallboard, which is paper and a very absorptive mineral in the middle. So it gets wet, stays wet and paper is a great nutrient source.

But we also started building with lot of petrochemicals. We started using a lot of our paints and finishes and even the hardwood floor finishes. We started using a lot more industrial solvent-based building materials. In the 60s, we started building much tighter to save energy during the oil crisis. So we started building with faster, cheaper materials, and then we started closing things up, a lot more plastic. So we built these chemical boxes.

And when water gets into these chemical boxes, it can't get out easily the way it used to, because we have insulation on the walls now, which we didn't have. So now we're comfortable, but now we've got this sealed unit that when water gets in, can't get out and then build with very, very mold friendly materials. In fact, we build out of paper mache. You know, I mean, literally, mean, sheetrock is like paper mache. And my mentor likes to say we build self-composting homes, just add water. It's insane. We used to build with plaster, stone, brick, you know, these things, old growth timber.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (40:13.47)
This stuff would last, it's stand the test of time. Buildings now, if they're not occupied, they'll collapse in a very short order. mean, like within half a year, you'll see the roof came in, if it's not lived in, if it's not loved. So we built these boxes that are essentially, and then we don't leave the house. Technology has given us this luxury to get anything we want, and information and goods and services. People just come to us.

And so, know, Rob Dunn, who wrote this beautiful book called Never Home Alone, which I highly recommend, it's all about the critters that we live alongside. And he advocates, you know, to encourage diversity, biodiversity in your home, because there's a direct correlation between a higher biodiversity, in other words, more microbes, and lower incidence of asthma allergies and autoimmune disease. And lower biodiversity, you know, less critters in the house, actually leads to higher incidences of asthma allergies and autoimmune disease. So,

The building materials that we're using are very, very mold friendly. And so this is a primary problem is that we're building houses out of mold food. And then we're also building lower quality houses. The construction quality has gone down. We've lost the artisan. we, flashing is missing and the things are slapped together more quickly. And so when that fails is the first thing that happens is moisture intrusion. The buildings are designed to shed water and wind. That's what buildings are for, to shed water and wind.

When they fail, they fail to shed water and wind. And when they fail to shed water, the water gets in and then things get moldy. And here's the key, and this is really an important takeaway for your audience. Mold is the predictable byproduct of stuff getting wet and staying wet for as little as 48 hours. This is very important. People think about the timeline as this longer term thing or this thing that happens like lightning striking or an earthquake.

It's not like this. It's not a random thing. It's very predictable. Stuff gets wet and stays wet for 48 hours. Between 24 and 48 hours, mold can start to grow at 72 hours, according to the industry standard. Everything that got wet that's porous should be treated as mold and should be disposed of. Why is that important? Because in the first 24 to 48 hours of a water damage issue, you can remove that stuff. It's free or cheap. You can do it yourself as long as there's not a pre-existing mold problem there, because then you'll make it airborne and cause all sorts of problems.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (42:35.68)
If it's a new issue that just happened, you can tear that stuff out yourself. You don't have to wait for the insurance adjuster or for the contractors to come in. But we have 24 to 48 hours. And by the way, insurance will pay for that up to an almost unlimited degree. mean, up to like the replacement cost of the house for water damage. But if you wait those three days and you decide not to take action, because you're waiting for advice from your brother or your uncle or the contractor or the insurance agent or whoever you're waiting for, paralysis of analysis, whatever it is,

If you wait at the 72 hour mark, everything changes. And now you have to hire a mold remediation contractor, which means you have to find a qualified one that you trust, but you have to, you have to get involved in mold remediation and insurance doesn't cover it. And the cost just went up 10 fold or more. And so now you're in a cash pay situation and you're on your own and it's now a health hazard. Now, but mold remediation done perfectly. It takes about a month between the assessment and the report and getting the contractors. If everything goes perfectly.

Mold remediation takes about a month. So you've just gone from freer, cheap and fast to completely disruptive, budget busting, potentially insurmountable because of the fact that you wanted to wait and see, or because of the fact that you weren't sure what to do next. So it's very important that people act quickly with this because it is literally a matter of days or hours.

Yeah, when I went through this with my insurance company, know, what they were looking for was when they initially sent an inspector out, it was like looking for some type of a damage associated with an event. That event could have been a storm, a branch, a hurricane, some type of a leak. But if it was water damage and there's no date and there's no incident, then they're like, oh, buddy, that's that's all on you. So I learned that the hard way. And it wouldn't matter to either way with the home that I was living in.

but it was really interesting that really the only thing the insurance company cared about was like that storm or the branch falling. They're like, show us that and you're good. We'll cut you a check. Yep. That wasn't the case. So mine was actually out of pocket. Jason, going back to air quality and you you had mentioned a couple of times, the only thing we have power over is really, well power over. have a little bit of control around choice of air quality. So what I'm hearing is possibly there's an ability to

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (44:53.248)
manage that better through the moisture we allow in the home? Because it sounds like building materials since 1950 or 1960 are all problematic. Most of the homes we're living in, we're dealing in these paper mache boxes. So where do we have the control point? What can we do? Well, there's a few things on that. So looking more broadly at air quality, mold is a super important part of it. But the gases that are produced or that emit from building materials, as well as our furniture,

and our cabinets and the finishes that we put on these things and our cleaning products, our personal care products, our desire to use air fresheners, which don't freshen your air, by the way. There's a $2 billion mark of carcinogenic chemicals that people buy every year to make their house smell good. Guys, don't spray stuff in your air to make it smell better. Please. Public service announcement. Please. We'll save that for another episode.

Seriously, mean, it's so fundamental, yeah, have to, people are just amazed by that. know, scented candles, stop that stuff. This is bad news, you know? Bad, bad, bad. Yeah, bad humans. Again, because we build super tight homes, we don't have air exchange, you know? Residential construction, there's no regulations saying you have to have air exchange. Commercial buildings have these regulations because of sick building syndrome in the 90s. But we never, that never made its way down to residential. One of my missions, by the way, anyone listening who wants to join in on this with me.

One of my missions is to get all, all chemicals that are carcinogenic or otherwise it affects human health adversely removed from building materials used for construction and buildings, whether it be a home or workplaces. seems like a no brainer, right? But unfortunately the chemical companies are who run the show, especially on the building material side, building material companies are chemical companies mostly. And they've got powerful lobbying. They've also trained all the contractors. So the contractors only know how to do one thing one way. So what can you do to, what can you invest in?

Yeah, let's go to that. Invest in your awareness, first of all. so looking at what are the issues in your home, moisture is number one. And so whenever you've got a mold concern, a musty smell. So I always say if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something. And so you're looking for odors and that odor can be the new house smell, by the way. This achievement actually, it's actually I smell cancer when I smell a new house smell, the new car smell, by the way, similar. So you want to be aware of the fact that

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (47:20.72)
Odors are often a pollutant source in your building, even if it's an odor that you like. A building should be odorless, except for wood and the natural aromas that come from construction and healthy building materials. Moisture is super important. So you're looking for any indication of moisture. So that would be condensation on windows, blistering paint, discolorations of any sort of kind, especially the kind of geometric.

discolorations because that can actually be mold growth itself. But also things like water bugs. You know, you see the corner of your basement, you see those little round guys. Or if you see spider webs, by the way, spiders, they need water just like we do, except they get it a little bit differently. So spider webs in your indoor environment are a dead giveaway that you've got a moisture condition somewhere. Again, you see something, if you smell something, the musty odor is the dead giveaway. Many people look at the musty odor as an aesthetic nuisance.

It's just this thing, it's just the basement smell. But the emerging medical research shows that this is actually neurotoxic. Fruit fly studies done by my friend Dr. Joan Bennett at Rutgers University show that exposure to the musty odor in animal studies causes them to stop making dopamine. So they get depressed, they stop reproducing, they start flying down instead of the light and develop Parkinsonian-like symptoms. Further studies have shown that the musty odor can cause mitochondrial damage. And so this is really powerful stuff.

And so if you smell that smell, this is not something to ignore. This is a very powerful message being sent to you by your building, by the mold. My building needs attention. This area needs attention. So you should follow that the same way you follow pain in your body, inflammation in your body. I look at mold as inflammation in the building. Acute inflammation is an acute message. Chronic inflammation is its own disease. If you ignore acute inflammation, it becomes, and it opens up a whole host of other.

opportunities for disease. Acute dampness in the building, a moisture problem, if it's not dealt with, it will ultimately become chronic. And that chronic dampness is where you start getting the toxigenic molds, by the way, they're late stage colonizers. And so they come in to kill all the other molds and take your building to dirt. And also, know, late stage, that stuff is really kind of like cancer for the building. It's like necrosis, the tissues of the building decay, right? Mold is the precursor to rot. So it's not just health. It's also the longevity and sustainability of your building.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (49:47.136)
Okay. So the musty smell is very powerful. And also these are chemicals that are industrial solvents. Many of these are group one carcinogens. So it's not just neurotoxic. mean, these things are bad news and we're breathing in 20,000 times a day. This is a repetitive stress, if you will, right? And it accumulating your tissues, some very powerful stuff. so, so the VOCs from the building materials compounded with the VOCs from the microbes is a serious problem and it causes all sorts of issues.

headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating. Our schools are loaded with mold problems that are causing our kids to not be able to learn. Okay. You can't learn if you're breathing in VOCs. People drink VOCs, alcohol, and it costs you to get disoriented. If you breathe VOCs, you can have that same sort of experience. And then feel something, you know, if you feel something, if you're having any symptoms, especially if they abate when you, when you go.

So what can you do about these things? Well, obviously you need to manage moisture. So you need to monitor humidity in the building. I like to put flood sensors in areas which are prone to leaks around hot water tanks and corners of the basement where you know you're getting occasional moisture intrusion. You also want to be proactive. If know your basement leaks, you shouldn't have carpet in it. Like little things, like you just be aware, plan for the leak. Be aware of the fact that mold is a fact of life. It's up there with death, taxes and gravity. If stuff gets wet, it gets moldy.

So just be aware of that, be humble enough to recognize that his mold precedes us and it will be here after we're all gone. know, mold is, is, is the survivor. It's the top of the food chain, honestly. And you also want to invest in air purifiers. And this is very important. HEPA filtered air cleaners are super important. They have to be true HEPA, which means that they're a sealed unit. There's a gasket that prevents air from bypassing the filter. You also want to make sure that there's activated carbon.

sufficient amount of activated carbon because that removes the VOCs. HEPA filters only take up particles, so the spores and other airborne debris. But the VOCs, which are super powerful and are a major part of whole mold issue, they're not taken out by HEPA filters, so you need to use the activated carbon. The other thing you want to do is make sure that you stop bringing in chemicals. So that means if you're going to do a renovation or if you're to do a repair in your house, stop using VOC-based paints.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (52:03.538)
really look at these things and examine whether they have emission issues. You can look at websites like greenguard.org, and that's a place where you can look for building materials that don't have these attributes, these negative attributes. It's really just investing in that awareness and raising your game to recognize just like you would not go, and many of the people listening to this podcast won't go to a conventional grocery store and just buy

sprayed berries. Do you have to treat your indoor air quality and the building materials that you use and even the stuff that you buy, the furniture that you buy with the same sort of discernment that you do with the food that you eat? It's the same thing. What you wouldn't drink, dirty water, right? These are obvious things, but because the air is so not obvious, it's hiding in plain sight right under the tip of your nose. And yet you don't even notice it. Yeah. Jason, what about humidity levels in the home?

Because what we're saying is, building materials are problematic. Moisture happens. This is just where we're at. Does managing your humidity levels assist with what problematic molds may develop? Yeah. So thank you. When I was saying you manage your moisture, what you want to do is you want to get the humidity gauges with the remote sensors and you want to put them in the places that are out of sight, of mind. Crawl spaces, attics, basements, you know.

rooms that are unoccupied, of course, in your bedroom, in the kitchen as well. And what you're looking to do is maintain relative humidity, which is the most common output for these sensors, RH, between 40 and 60%. Below 40%, you start to get uncomfortable, dehydrated, you'll wake up kind of like, you know? Sure. And also your mucous membranes will then dry out and you can actually get sick from that. The microbes can get through and...

That's why people get sick in the winter, by the way. It's not because it's cold, it's because it's dry. And then above 60%, you end up with a high likelihood of condensation. So we end up with, you know, small water droplets on surfaces that you can't see in many cases. Sometimes you can see them on, you know, pipes and windows if you're in a cold climate, like I'm in Minnesota, right? So we have a lot of condensation, but you want to maintain that between 40 and 60 % all year round.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (54:26.511)
And so dehumidifiers are very important. Also running air conditioning, but running air conditioning consistently and not having it just be on off, on off, on off. So, you know, being vigilant around maintaining a healthy humidity range is super important. People love to humidify their kids rooms, but they don't have a humidity gauge in there. So I like to say, don't modify what you don't quantify. You know, don't be adding water to air if you don't know what the baseline is.

in the first place, because you're humidifying the air for your kids' room and you could be creating a mold problem in their room. Yeah. Again, you you can kind of, you go through your head, you're like, my God, remember when my grandparents used to do that every time I was sick? Let's add humidity. it's wild. There's so many things we regurgitate as something that could be good for our health, beneficial for our health. And we just don't have a deep understanding around what we're doing. So a lot of what I'm hearing from you is just to deepen our education and awareness.

about how the body functions, how important air quality is, how important the environment that we culture for ourselves that we're in every day all day, especially everybody from working from home right now, post pandemic, I'm intuiting, there's going to be a lot more people experiencing the symptoms of mold toxicity after working in their homes. as you said, the regulations around industrial buildings are different than what we do.

for our bedrooms. So it's a deeper level of awareness and I think really important for people to understand. Where does mold testing come in? Which is, it's a huge broad topic. There's so many different ways to go about it. I'll personally give you just my experience. Like I have tears that I tell people. Like there's always a way in for everybody. We've got those really affordable little dishes that we can put out and look and see if something grows. And if something does, maybe we want to do another level, level two.

And so typically it would have been something like an ERMI test and environmental medial mold index test, which I would send away and have again, a deeper level of awareness. Okay, there's a lot of stuff going on now. I've got to, I got to start looking for the water damage, but you, you provide a different solution for people because I think what we said at the beginning was not everybody can have that team come in with the Labrador seeking mold and a deep evaluation. So I'd love you to speak to the solution that you provide.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (56:50.707)
Yeah. mean, we at 1-800-GAM-OLD again, you know, this sort of like picks up where we left off before, which is that most people couldn't afford that service. So that always bothered me. We would get calls from people all over the place and they would ask, you know, if we could do an inspection, because they were either outside of our coverage area or was out of budget. They would say, well, then if, is there a do-it-yourself test kit or anything like that on the market that, that you can recommend? And so I went on a search to find something that I could actually recommend and I couldn't find anything. The Petri dishes.

are almost always false positives. They tend to be confusing to people too. And you know, I always joke around that the first thing you want to do if you're concerned about a mold problem is not grow more in your house. And so the Petri dish encourages you to do that, right? Right. You know, of course I had professional equipment that we use Petri dishes occasionally in professional air testing and you draw air through a pump and it's metered and it's calibrated and you bring in the air and you slam it onto a Petri dish. And so, you know, the idea of a passive sampler

didn't make sense to me. the research on that has shown that the results are inconsistent with the actual conditions in the building environment. So they tend to not necessarily correlate. And then the ERME test, which is something that I hear a lot. In fact, I got so many people coming up to me at the conference. So how is this different than ERME? That was like the most common question I got. Actually, the most common question is, is this for the building or is this for my body? Is this for mold tests for me or mold tests for my building? I'm like, well, if it's for your building, but that also is for your body. We're not testing your blood or your urine.

The ERMI test is also a bit of an issue because it was designed by the EPA as a research tool 20 years ago. And it looks at 36 molds, 26 of which are considered the primary identifiers of water damage and then tenor background. But it was based on a study of 37 homes in Ohio. That's it. 37 homes. They don't tell you that. If you look at the literature, it talks about a thousand home study, but they use the data from the 37 homes to make the ERMI index.

which is what that is. And then they used it in a thousand homes. So they, they leave out the 37, that tiny little geographically limited study and they have not updated that index since. And so in a world where we have the DNA based technologies have done incredible things. You can now collect the sample, a dust sample. And I'm working with a lab to develop this where you can, uh, for the same amount of money as an army, which looks at 36 species, we can find all known.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (59:16.271)
microbes. We're talking tens of millions. And get a report that shows the whole gradient scale of all microbes that are in that dust with the spikes and concentrations of the ones that are of greatest concern because they're the high. In a perfect environment, everything is balanced. If you have high concentrations of certain microbes, that means that there's an environment conducive to their growth. So what you want is diversity, not concentrated. What we want is these microbes in our environment. We don't want them growing in our environment. This is a big distinction.

You've said that a couple times, Jason, you've said, you know, modern day construction that I would have in my home doesn't allow for like an air exchange. I happen to be in a home where the builder is very intuitive. He's very smart and understands working with the land. So there is an exchange with outside air. So the home is actually breathing through the membrane. It's not this hormetically sealed box, which I think that

until you've gone in it and until you've been one those lucky people to get Lyme or mold, you understand after enough failed attempts that sterility in the body or blasting away microbes doesn't always make you feel better or healthier. There'll be repercussions from going in and waging war in the human terrain, which were outnumbered microbes to human cells. So can you speak to that on a little deeper level? The idea is that we don't want these

sterile boxes, but we might want them to have like an ecosystem. And how do we develop the good ecosystem? Yeah, so that actually brings me to where I wanted to go when you were talking about the sort of like the wise tales or the, you know, the things our grandparents and parents have told us over the years about mold and air quality and stuff like that. And one of them is that we need to kill them all. get bacteria, got to kill it. Got to kill that man. You just pour bleach on it, Jason. Bleach, just put bleach on it. Just go get a bucket of bleach. What are you worried about? Why do you think?

dealing with all this mold remediation stuff, all these guys that have to me, I just go, look, spray some bleach on it. I've been dealing with that for 20 years. And there's a lot, and lots and lots of stuff that's wrong with that. Number one is that bleach is, it will bleach the surface, but it leaves behind dead mold. Dead mold is still allergenic. So killing mold actually leaves behind dead mold. But with bleach in particular, it's kind of funny because it's 97 % water and 3 % sodium hypochlorite. The sodium hypochlorite is the bleach smell that evaporates quickly.

Freddie Kimmel and Jason Earle (01:01:37.391)
leaving behind what? Water, right? So you just added water to a water problem and you've killed the mold that's on the surface in the sense that you've rendered those spores non-viable, they can't reproduce, but you've also left an environment filled with dead mold. So mold spores are always in your environment. They land on that wet surface and they eat the dead mold. You actually get something called competitive release where you actually get a more aggressive, the more