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Oct. 31, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:29:12

Breakthrough in DIY at-home MOLD DETECTION, with critical wisdom on mold remediation...

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	Welcome to today's in-studio interview here on Brighteon.com.
	I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and today we have a very special guest, a first-time guest, an inventor, and he's got a solution that helps you determine whether your air, your indoor air, whether it's in your workplace or your home, Or any other place may be contaminated with mold, fungi, fungal spores, or things that you don't know about but you need to know about because of the health effects.
	So here joining me today in studio is the founder of Got Mold.
	His name is Jason Earl.
	And thank you for joining me here in studio, Jason.
	It's an honor to have you here.
	Thanks for coming.
	It's a pleasure to be here.
	Thank you, Mike.
	I'm so impressed with your product.
	You sent me samples.
	This was a few months ago, and I use them.
	It actually collects a sample.
	I want you to walk us through how this works, and then I send those back to your company.
	You do a full analysis.
	You produce a report.
	It's amazing, the detail of your report.
	And this helps people determine whether they have...
	exposure that they don't know about.
	So tell us, I mean, that was the super summary, but you tell us in your words, what is GotMold all about?
	What does this device do?
	The physical device there and these cartridges, what's it all about? - If you wanted to have your house tested for mold and you decided that you were gonna hire a professional, they're gonna come over with a bunch of different tools and equipment.
	They're gonna do a physical assessment of the building, They're going to look and see whether there's moisture issues.
	And then once they've actually determined that there's a reason to collect samples, air samples or surface samples, then they're going to pull out that specialized equipment.
	And so that includes usually collecting these kinds of air samples.
	So the very same technology that's in here is known as spore traps.
	Spore traps.
	Spore traps, yeah.
	Is that from Ghostbusters?
	It almost sounds like it, right?
	And it's also very self-evident, right?
	What does it do?
	It collects airborne spores as well as other particles, right?
	So it's pollen, it's fiberglass particles, it's spores, it's all the microscopic stuff that we're breathing in that we can't see, right?
	And that's the key here, right?
	Because we're dealing with a microscopic organism.
	And while almost everybody knows what mold looks like when it's growing on a surface, no one is able to identify it in the air with their eyes.
	No.
	Right?
	So that's what we created this for.
	So really the idea here is that most of the time if you call a professional these days, there are lots of question marks.
	Is this person independent?
	In other words, are they not tied to remediation?
	Contractors?
	Right.
	Where there's a conflict of interest?
	That's where the money comes in is the remediation money, insurance money, FEMA money, whatever.
	Right.
	So that's also where the gravy train is.
	So lots of contractors offer free inspections.
	Well, that's not really a free inspection.
	It's really a sales call.
	And so oftentimes the data or the observations that are collected during a free inspection are actually used against you as a sales tool.
	So what we wanted to do was start to take away these impediments to getting unbiased information about the air quality in your home or workplace.
	So we got rid of the conflict of interest.
	By providing a tool that doesn't require a professional, we get that out of the way.
	The other thing is a lot of people are really concerned about cost, and they're also concerned about maybe having to get permission from a husband, a wife, a boss, a partner.
	And so what we did was we took that out.
	So essentially what we did is we took the air sampling technology the professionals use and took away all of the unnecessary elements so that people can test their air.
	And you made it affordable.
	And made it affordable, too.
	And also very scientifically validated, which we'll talk about in a second.
	So this is the trap right here.
	And then this is the trap, but this has the fan and pulls a certain volume of air through the trap.
	That's right.
	So the trap goes on here, and then you put in the batteries, you hit go, and it pulls a certain volume of air, and it causes the spores to be caught in the trap.
	Then you put the seal back on this, and then you mail it back in the pre-labeled postage paid.
	You drop this in a mailbox.
	That's right.
	You're hired.
	Right.
	It's so easy, but my point is that you have this calibrated to have a certain volume of air come into this trap.
	It's called volumetric Air sampling.
	So the idea is that each sample you collect is the same volume of air.
	So in this case, it's 75 liters.
	It's 15 liters a minute for five minutes.
	Okay.
	And so we collect an outside air sample, and you'll see that there's a green cassette.
	I'm not sure which camera.
	Push it forward.
	There we go.
	Okay.
	There we go.
	The green cassette is the outside air sample.
	Right.
	And then this is a three-room kit, so you'll see three indoor samples.
	Right.
	And so once you've removed the seals, run the sample, and then replace the seals, you'll put the cassettes back into the same hole from which they came, and you'll do that for all the samples.
	You pull this adhesive cover off.
	And then this closes out.
	You'll also activate the kit at gotmold.com slash activate where you'll put in the necessary details like who are you, where do you want the report sent, things like that.
	Yeah, your email address because you're going to get a report.
	Yeah.
	And then this has got a prepaid return priority mail label, and this goes directly to our lab partner, which is Eurofins, arguably the number one.
	Yeah, Eurofins, widely recognized.
	We use Eurofins for confirmation testing.
	When we have something in our own lab that we want to make sure that it's confirmed by another lab, we use Eurofins.
	Yeah, they're essentially the gold standard in environmental and food testing these days.
	But you did something special with Eurofins about AI analysis, didn't you?
	Yes.
	So, well, AI is going to touch everything at some point, right?
	And so there are certain tasks that I think AI is really specifically advantageous with.
	And so one of them is the identification of repetitive shapes, right?
	And so spores, of course, are like that, but there's also huge volumes of them.
	And so we were able to introduce an AI technology to Eurofins, which they're now currently adopting.
	Before we get there, let me just mention to those who want to get these kits, we've partnered with your company to offer these through our store.
	So if you go to healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold, it's so simple, healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold.
	Here's the gotmold test kit, and this is the starter kit.
	It's less than $200 for the kit, and that includes the analysis, the reports, everything.
	Shipping both ways?
	Shipping both ways, yeah, all of it.
	Fresh batteries?
	Right.
	Literally everything.
	Yeah, everything you need.
	And you also have, of course, larger kits for more rooms, but this is the starting kit, and this is one outdoor and one indoor sample to give people an assessment.
	Which indoor room should they use this in?
	If they choose one room, what room should it be?
	Generally speaking, you sample in the room where there's the greatest amount of concern, right?
	So this is if you see something, smell something, or feel something in that room on a more pronounced basis than the other rooms.
	So in most cases, a one-room kit is really for people that are on a very strict budget or they're talking about a studio apartment or they're just looking to get a gut check.
	The reason we have two and three room kits is because once you start adding in these other rooms, you start to see a gradient, you start to see a change between the rooms, you know?
	So air is not homogenous.
	What that means is that the particles and gases or the pollutants are not distributed evenly throughout the air.
	If you were to zoom in and look at air, it looks a lot more like weather with clouds and swirls of different things that are floating around.
	And so Having contrast between samples can be very helpful.
	Oftentimes it validates people's concerns, you know, where they start to see that what shows up in the data is actually what they're experiencing.
	Now your reports then identify different species of fungal spores that are present and it estimates the concentrations of them as well.
	That's right.
	So it's not just a hit or miss.
	No.
	I mean, talk to us about that.
	It's a very detailed report.
	The mold testing space is extremely difficult for the consumer to navigate.
	It's almost all junk science.
	And that's really the reason why we created this.
	Honestly, I didn't need another project.
	I know that feeling.
	People kept calling us asking if we could recommend a test kit.
	And this happened over the course of seven or eight years, honestly, when we were getting lots and lots of national attention through our mold inspection business, because we use mold sniffing dogs.
	You have mold sniffing dogs?
	We did, up until I decided to go full force into this.
	That was actually where I got my education.
	I was taught how mold grows in buildings by dogs.
	No kidding.
	They tell you exactly where the hidden stuff is.
	And after you do a thousand of those or so, you start to see patterns.
	And so, essentially, I got my education on where mold hides from our four-legged friends.
	Wow!
	I have an arm disassembling dog over here, but he doesn't do anything about mold.
	No, no.
	Our dogs might be friends, but they definitely have different skill sets.
	Yes, different skill sets.
	So there are drug-sniffing dogs.
	There are urine-sniffing dogs that detect cancer.
	That's right.
	We've covered that story.
	So there are mold-sniffing dogs.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	I did not even know that.
	We pioneered this.
	We started in 2002, and we were one of the first in the world.
	I think number two in the country at the time, yeah.
	So it was great.
	But what we ended up with is, like I said, a lot of free advertising.
	And then we ended up with this onslaught of people calling us from all over the country.
	And you couldn't send a dog.
	Exactly.
	We couldn't package that up, and so we couldn't scale fast enough to answer the demand either.
	And so what I realized was that the big gap in the marketplace was really high-quality, affordable mold testing for everyone.
	And I couldn't find a product that actually answered that need, and so we created one.
	So yeah, over the years I've looked at mold testing kits as well.
	I have not been impressed until I found your company.
	So thank you for, you know, reaching out to us and answering all my questions.
	I know I can be a pain in the butt asking questions.
	But a lot of them were just, I mean, there are some that are just, they don't even draw air through a trap.
	It's just like, here's a glue trap, you know, like where you would catch crickets and lizards or whatever, and then you just set this out there.
	I'm like, how do we know mold's going to go there?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, they're relying on gravity, and spores have such—if you were to look at them and compare them to sort of like larger objects, you might say some spores are the size of ping-pong balls and some are the size of beach balls, and so they're going to fall at a different rate.
	And so these plates, they're called settling plates, or they're petri dishes that have been—were once valid before genomics, honestly.
	But we now know that culturing, actually, you lose more species than you find when you culture.
	Yeah.
	It's not a scientifically valid method of identifying fungal contamination in a building anyway, even if you were doing it according to some sort of standardized method.
	But this is so non-standardized, it's ridiculous.
	You could do this with a piece of damp bread.
	You put it on the counter, it grows mold.
	Congratulations.
	You've just proven that fungi and the mold are ubiquitous.
	True.
	So this is an important point, is that mold spores are everywhere.
	Everywhere.
	And that's good because in most cases, they are actually what are known as hormetic stressors.
	They actually provide a little bit of a stimulation to your immune system.
	So we don't want to live in a sterile place.
	We want to actually be exposed to various different kinds of microbes, right?
	And so our test kit is not to tell you if you have mold.
	Everybody has mold.
	Our test kit is to help you determine whether you have a mold problem.
	And so that means you have a moisture issue in the building where mold is growing, and our kit helps you make the distinction between what would be found normally outdoors, hence the outside sample, and indoors where we should have about the same kinds of molds as we find outside.
	And about the same quantities, maybe a little bit less because gravity and infiltration filters out some of that.
	So our indoor air should be a little bit better than the outside air in terms of the quantities.
	But if we see different types and higher quantities, that's a red flag.
	And that's what our test kit is designed to fund.
	Okay, so a lot of people are familiar with the phrase black mold, which is not really a very scientific description, but it's the color of it, right?
	It just looks black.
	But there can be a lot of different fungal species that are black.
	Black.
	But the way people are aware of this, I mean, over the years there have been many stories about water damage, flood damage.
	We've had, you know, recent hurricanes.
	A lot of homes have been flooded.
	Some have been condemned and some not.
	Talk to us about what happens if you have a...
	Even you could just have a leak.
	Like your washing machine in the laundry room could have a little tiny leak.
	And now you have water going into porous surfaces like cabinetry, which is made with particle board.
	And then mold starts growing there.
	You may not even see it, but it's producing things that go into the air.
	Talk to us about black mold, hidden mold in a home.
	Sure.
	It's funny that you should bring that up because we happen to be at...
	We're nearly ground zero for black mold, the whole black mold conversation.
	In Dripping Springs, back in the late 90s, a woman named Melinda Ballard, who was a very successful PR lady up in New York, built this palatial mansion, like I said, in Dripping Springs.
	And her husband, who was an investment banker, and her, I think, nine or 10-year-old son at the time, Suddenly became ill.
	Neurological issues, cognitive impairment.
	She was traveling a lot, didn't seem to have quite the symptoms that they did.
	Anyway, they ended up bringing somebody in to take a look and they found that the ice maker had been leaking behind the refrigerator.
	And so when she called the insurance company, they sent over contractors who botched the job.
	They hid the issue.
	The insurance company denied it.
	They refused to accept any responsibility for the health issues.
	And so long story short, she spent $6 million of her own money suing farmers, got a $34 million award, which ultimately got overturned.
	million and she had to knock the house down.
	She lost in the long run.
	But in the short term, what happened was every contractor decided they were going to become a mold remediator.
	And everybody who had any, even a musty odor, a musty whiff, suddenly started assuming the insurance industry.
	And so as a result, two things happened.
	Number one, stachybotrys, which was the mold that was implicated in this particular circumstance, became the black toxic mold.
	So that's where we really got black mold and toxic mold.
	So that whole narrative began there.
	And also we ended up with a false narrative that only those molds are the ones that produce health effects, which is not true.
	Any mold growth of significance in doors is a health hazard, especially if you're talking about somebody who's got asthma.
	5,000 people die every single year from asthma attacks that are uncontrolled without any particular understanding of what was the irritant.
	And can I add in that I've known that people who are strongly immunocompromised They can actually become like walking petri dishes for mold.
	Absolutely.
	They can grow mold in their mouths.
	That's right.
	They can grow mold in their guts.
	That's right.
	Disseminating fungal infections are a big deal.
	Yes.
	And people often dismiss the compromised immune system as a small subsect of our society.
	And while fungal infections are rare in aggregate, they're rare, the reality is that a huge percentage of our population that suffers from chronic disease like diabetes, Right, that's right.
	which are very common, hay fever, upper respiratory, sinusitis, things like that.
	Inflammation, which overlaps with allergies, of course, with sinus issues.
	You've also got toxicity, which everybody talks about, but actually most cases of mold-related illness are not actually toxicity-based.
	They're mostly inflammation-based.
	And then infections or infectious diseases, where you end up with something that oftentimes starts in the respiratory tract, in the sinuses or in the lungs, and then can become disseminating.
	And you see this a lot with late-stage cancer in HIV patients.
	Right.
	I think, yeah, HIV is especially known for these kinds of, you know, fungal growths.
	Scary stuff.
	Yeah, very scary.
	But, so the thing is, what your product does is it lets people know if they have a problem.
	That's right.
	And then...
	What about remediation from that point forward?
	What does your company do to help people know what next steps could be based on what your reports are finding?
	In between the test kit and And remediation, there are some important steps that need to be taken.
	We like to equate this to a pregnancy test kit in the sense that you wouldn't start buying baby furniture because the pregnancy test kit says you're positive, right?
	You're going to go probably...
	We encourage people to try to find a qualified professional in their area who can actually identify the source of the moisture problem and then develop the repair plan for that.
	Because the key to this is everybody blames mold as root cause on stuff.
	The truth is that moisture is the root cause.
	And because moisture actually allows mold growth to occur, that's sort of the first clue.
	That's the thing that alerts you first because it only takes a couple of days.
	24 to 48 hours is all it takes for mold to grow from the stuff that we build buildings out of, which is basically paper mache.
	We build self-composting homes just to add water.
	And so it only takes 24 to 48 hours for mold to begin to grow, 72 hours according to the industry standard as well as the insurance industry.
	Anything that's porous and absorptive that gets wet and stays wet for three days, it's gone.
	It has to be treated as if it's moldy no matter what.
	So what you need a professional for, if your skills and experience do not allow you to diagnose moisture problems and determine the extent of the problem so that you can then determine what needs to be surgically removed and then to what extent the cleanup is, these are things that are generally outside of the layperson's capabilities, that's when you need to perhaps bring in somebody who actually knows what they're doing.
	Nobody wants to hear this because everybody wants to skip right over to how do I kill this thing?
	How do I treat this?
	But unfortunately, when you get a test result and you immediately schedule, you don't immediately schedule surgery, for example.
	And that's basically what remediation is.
	So in an effort to help bridge that gap, the report itself has the summary data, green, yellow, orange, red.
	Very simple.
	That's the first page.
	The second page actually gives you the raw lab data.
	But it's color-coded and it's organized so you can see the water damage indicators, you can see the typical molds that are present during chronic water damage or from chronic water damage, and then sort of the common background molds.
	So a professional would look at that and be able to make sense of the data.
	And all of that is done according to industry standard.
	It's Eurofin's best practice, right?
	So then when you have, if you bring in a professional, you're going to give them the Got Mold Report.
	That's right.
	And that's their starting point.
	And they're going to say, okay, great.
	Now that's going to help them as a launching point.
	Right.
	The third page actually has resources for them.
	So it gives them links to find qualified inspectors in their area, links to find qualified remediators if they're already past the stage.
	Right.
	If they feel like they've already gotten this figured out, that they've delineated where it begins and where it ends.
	Yeah.
	And then they also have links to some self-assessment tools.
	And then also, very importantly, we have a free e-book that's on our website that's called How to Find Mold.
	And it walks people through the steps on how to find inspectors, what to avoid, how to find remediators.
	And it also gives you inspection checklists so that you can actually do your own inspection.
	So the whole point of this is self-empowerment.
	The whole point of this is teach a man to fish, right?
	Or a woman to fish.
	And also, the results from your mold kit could tell people that they don't have a mold problem, and then they can eliminate that.
	A lot of people might say, well, I'm having neurological issues, or I suspect mold.
	So if they can eliminate that as a possibility, that can save them a tremendous amount of time and energy.
	No doubt about it.
	Now, I will say this.
	There are circumstances where you can have normal spore counts and you can have a mold problem that may be producing health effects, specifically if there's a musty odor.
	So this is the key, right?
	So what you have to look at is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
	So occasionally when it comes to testing, and you can also look at this, I look at buildings and bodies very much the same way when it comes to diagnostics.
	So if you were concerned about cancer, you want to get a cancer screening, you're never going to rely just on an imaging because blood cancers will be missed.
	You would never rely just on a blood test because then you would miss tumors potentially or other kinds of melanoma.
	You would never rely just on a visual or even a physical.
	So essentially we look for multiple data points to be able to circle around an area of concern Same thing with the human testing, same thing with the building testing.
	So if you see something, smell something, or feel something, the goal is for us to figure out what kind of a mold problem it is and how widespread it is.
	So then you can start to determine what the next action steps are.
	So in essence, the path of illness is essentially through exposure to the fungal matter, airborne spores, and exposure to the musty smell.
	And so if you have the musty smell, you have it.
	If the spore counts are normal, guess what?
	You have a hidden mold issue.
	And that's where you need to bring in someone to do the actual detective work, where they may be drilling holes in walls, or you may have to bring in one of our mold-sniffing dogs.
	Mold sniffing dog.
	Okay.
	So I tend to be a do-it-yourselfer kind of person, right?
	And I've dealt with water damage before.
	We had a deep freeze in Texas a few years ago.
	Everybody's pipes burst because the weather was unusually cold.
	And then, of course, when the pipes thaw, then there's water everywhere, right?
	Yeah.
	And so what I did in one section of one building, there was floor damage.
	The floor had to be completely ripped out.
	There was wall damage, everything.
	So, of course, we had to rip everything out and redo it.
	But as part of that remediation, being that I'm the health ranger, I know a lot of things to apply.
	I'm not the expert in mold, but I knew, well, I ran like 24 hours of chlorine dioxide gas in the building.
	And then I ran a UV light, like heavy-duty blasting UV light, and then I bought an aerosolizer blaster thing that you can put chlorine dioxide in solution or other things, and you can blast it into walls and things and then run out of the building before you inhale it yourself.
	So I'm not recommending that everybody do this.
	I'm just saying that I always try to do it myself, you know?
	But this was after the water damage was, I mean, the water leak was gone, the water was then turned off, the damage was gone, and I ran a dehumidifier, like an industrial grade dehumidifier, to pull all the water out of everything.
	That's the key.
	Yeah, and it's one of these big units that is used, like storm damage units, right?
	That's on wheels.
	Like you drag it around on wheels.
	Yeah, industrial.
	And that thing pulled a lot of water out of that building.
	I was shocked.
	Yeah, they can pull like 100 liters a day.
	It's a remarkable amount of water that you can pull out of a building.
	Batteries are like water storage.
	The materials themselves are kind of like batteries for humidity.
	It takes a while if you humidify a really dry building because it actually absorbs into the materials.
	And then it also comes out the same way, even without water damage.
	Right.
	So what I want to ask you then is, you know, People live in areas of greatly varying humidity, even in Texas.
	East Texas is very humid.
	West Texas is desert, dry.
	Doesn't that present a different spectrum of risks also?
	Talk about mold risks in Arizona, in the desert, versus Louisiana.
	Well, you know, the big risk is buildings made of sheetrock.
	And it really is.
	I mean, from 1945 or so, World War II, when we suddenly had to build faster and cheaper homes to meet the demand of the baby boomers, we immediately...
	We're discontinued building buildings that were built to last, right?
	Plaster, stone, old-growth timber, concrete, brick, these kinds of things.
	And we went with light-frame construction, which is sugary pine and fluffy fiberglass insulation, by the way, which has formaldehyde in it in most cases, which is a group 1 carcinogen.
	Amazing what they stuff in our walls.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no kidding.
	And then the sheetrock.
	So we build these buildings that get moldy very quickly when they get wet.
	And by the way, we also slather them with chemicals inside in the form of paints and varnishes and adhesives and things like that.
	Oh, and then we also close them up really tight for energy efficiency so that we're breathing the same air.
	That's crazy.
	You've talked about that a lot.
	Yeah.
	To get a high energy rating.
	Yeah, for high energy ratings.
	So we went from speed and profit, which is really what drove the initial innovation, if you will, and then we went to energy efficiency.
	And now we're dealing with the health consequences of that.
	Well, right.
	I used to live in Arizona, and it was more of a Latino-style construction project.
	Of Adobe and so on, and the homes were open.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Because they didn't have air conditioning usually in the 60s and 70s or before that.
	So they were open, they had tile floors, and the air flowed through them naturally, right?
	Yes.
	Today, you have these closed up boxes, I call them tombs, and all the toxins just recirculate because they don't want any air exchange with the outside.
	That's right.
	And that's the...
	I believe that...
	The core, this massive spike we're seeing in asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease.
	We have 100 autoimmune diseases on the books now.
	Cancers, autism, you name it, are directly tied to our disconnection from nature.
	And so we've isolated ourselves, and then we also do this within a box.
	Like you said, these chemical boxes get moldy very quickly when they get wet.
	So they get moldy very quickly.
	We put rubber on the bottom of our shoes.
	We make sure our vegetables don't have any dirt on them.
	We've literally separated ourselves from Mother Earth.
	Meanwhile, the word human comes from humus, which is soil.
	And so we are so far away from that.
	And so the old adobe buildings, these buildings that are essentially built, you know, these rammed earth structures, they also are like batteries.
	They absorb enough moisture and then they re-release it.
	So you don't see mold as a problem in those kinds of structures.
	Now, there is a misconception that in Arizona or, you know, any sort of desert climate that there's a lower risk for mold.
	And I only say that it's a misunderstanding because I get called all the time for buildings like that.
	Because they have water.
	They've got water.
	And oftentimes they're putting in non-native plants around their house, so they're overwatering them.
	Good point.
	And then it goes into the slab, and then it wicks up.
	Moisture will go from the physics of it.
	It will always migrate from wet to dry.
	And if you create a really dry environment inside and you water the outside of the foundation, guess where that water goes?
	Oh, wow.
	It wicks right in.
	And there's also swamp coolers, which lend themselves to all sorts of microbial issues.
	These are disgusting.
	Swamp coolers, yeah.
	It's unbelievable.
	But they work really well in the desert, but they are swampy.
	They are swampy.
	They're aptly named.
	Yeah.
	Well, we're trying to drain the swamp, is what we're trying to do, not expand the swamp.
	That's right.
	Right.
	But, okay, so mold can affect anybody that's got water to their home or their business.
	That's all it is.
	It's a moisture issue, right?
	Moisture.
	Yeah.
	Think about mold as a moisture problem.
	Think about mold as not the problem, but the symptom.
	And so a moisture problem isn't just a problem for health.
	It will ultimately also rot out your building.
	So a moisture problem is the enemy of a healthy building, of a durable building.
	And so we want to be on the lookout for that.
	And that's really the key to this.
	The key is refocusing people on the moisture issue because if we can get people to realize the importance and the urgency with which they should respond to a moisture problem, I will be obsolete.
	And that's the goal here.
	The goal is actually to create a tool that is accompanied by education that's so successful that people actually know what to do and they don't need us nearly as much.
	All right.
	So the Got Mold Kit is available at healthrangersstore.com slash gotmold.
	You can pick up this kit right now.
	Now, when people then, you ship them the kit, they get it, they can open it up, put in the batteries, they can take the air sample in five minutes.
	That's right.
	And then they drop it in the mail, send it back to you.
	How long does it take before they get the results emailed to them?
	Our contract with Eurofins is three business days, but we're tracking it about two days and four hours on average.
	That's very precise.
	Yeah, we track these things pretty closely.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So within a few days, they're going to get the results via email.
	All right.
	Can they buy more cartridges and they don't have to buy the intake?
	Yeah, that's a great question.
	So we call this our BioVac air sampling pump.
	It actually has a lifetime guarantee.
	And we joke around, no one's taking us up on this, but if you drive over this with your pickup truck and then send us the pieces and send us the video of you doing it, we'll still send you a new one.
	That's funny.
	So this is a reusable, infinitely reusable tool.
	And it actually comes inside the kit with its own nifty box that has a handle on it.
	So when you're finished, you just take the batteries out, put it back in.
	We encourage people to share it with a friend.
	I don't know if you can see that.
	There we go.
	There we go.
	So you can share it with a friend.
	And so the idea here is that once you have the pump, you can buy refills.
	And so the refills are essentially another user guide and one of these.
	You can buy one, two, or three-room refills, just like you can buy one, two, or three-room kits.
	And they're $50 less each.
	So there's a nice incentive there.
	So somebody, if they use your kit for the first time, they find a problem, they go through remediation, they solve the water leak.
	Anytime that you pound on the desk, he thinks that's his sign to get involved.
	That's why he's here.
	Good boy, Rhodey.
	Good boy, Rhodey.
	You're okay.
	It's just all part of his training.
	It's very interesting.
	But anyway, so what people can do then is after remediation, they can take another sample to determine the effectiveness of the remediation.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	So we generally discourage people to do their own remediation.
	However, if anybody's inclined, I will direct you to the industry standard, which is very obtuse and it's very dense.
	But occasionally, people will take me up on this, and they'll read it, and they'll actually follow the standard with great success.
	However, it means getting the right equipment.
	It's a big deal.
	So it's called the IICRC S, as in SAM, 520.
	Wow.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	So the organization is the International Institute of Cleaning and Restoration Contractors, and they've got a water damage standard called the S500, and they've got a mold remediation standard called the S520. And it's a consensus-accepted standard.
	So it is what all the seasoned professionals in the industry agree is the best way to do it.
	And it details out exactly what's supposed to be done, the do's, don'ts, sort of the musts and shouldn'ts, if you will.
	So if anybody wants to go down this path, That is the tried and true time-tested way.
	And so yes, using our test kit, even though we generally discourage people from using this as the sole basis for remediation clearance, in addition to a white glove test.
	So after remediation is done, the place should be cleaner than it's ever been.
	So if you've got the surfaces clean, Then you test the air.
	I see.
	Until you've got the surfaces clean, don't worry about testing the air.
	The surfaces have to be clean because that actually is what harbors most of the settled spores, and so they get retrained back into the air.
	So a big part of remediation is actually surface cleaning.
	It's controlled demolition followed by surface cleaning and air cleaning.
	Okay, that's really interesting, because right now, after this Helene storm in North Carolina, there are a lot of people that are getting sick, and it's suspected that there's strong chemical contamination of one of the main rivers.
	By the way, some of the rescue dogs are dying from exposure to something.
	It's not clear yet what it is.
	And some people that are remediating their own homes are getting sick.
	There's something that was in the water.
	And so because I have a mass spec lab, I've had people in North Carolina take samples and call me and ask me, can I send you samples and can you tell me what's in it?
	And I have to explain to them the answer is no.
	There's no such thing as a lab like Star Trek, where you have a tricorder, whatever it's called, that's like, "Computer, tell me everything that's in this." It doesn't exist, it turns out.
	One instrument can break it down into atomic elements.
	Another instrument you can test for pesticides.
	Fungal spores require a different process and different analysis.
	And different chemicals require different methods on mass spec instruments and dioxins require like a gas chromatography, pesticides, liquid chromatography.
	So actually to do forensic analysis is extremely complex if you don't know what you're looking for.
	That's a whole field by itself.
	Even Eurofins would struggle.
	If you call Eurofins and say, I have an unknown mystery sample, Can you test it for everything?
	What would be the bill for that?
	Like, oh, $100,000, we can test it for everything.
	Yeah, they just run it through all their instruments.
	But, you know, it is true.
	We have a very hard time in science saying, what's here?
	Right.
	We're very good at saying, is this here?
	Correct.
	If you know what you're looking for.
	Yeah.
	But that's a problem because, you know, if you just think about...
	I mean, we just recently discovered...
	This is kind of slightly tangential, but we just discovered a new organ system in the human body called the interstitium, which is actually...
	Yeah, there are little tubules that were discovered next to the bile duct in...
	I believe it was NYU. And this pathologist said, what is that?
	And lo and behold...
	There are little tubules that run through your tissue that actually have an interstitial fluid that's essentially hyaluronic acid that exceeds the volume of blood in your body.
	And this was just discovered in the last five years.
	Yes, because we're so busy looking at what we already know, we're not ever looking for anything new.
	And so this is a classic problem with science.
	We're so blinded by what we think we know that we're unable to really see.
	And our instrumentation sort of Continues to reinforce that, unfortunately.
	So the very same thing that you're talking about with the properties in North Carolina, fungi has a very interesting way of being able to take things and do something called methylation, where they actually take a pollutant that would normally be deadly and then shift it into another form and dispose of it.
	And so it would not be surprising to me if what we're seeing there is Some of the fungi actually processing contaminants and then sending them off in a different form, but not something that would be easily identified in a lab analysis.
	Absolutely.
	That can be extremely difficult.
	But talk to us about what fungal spores put into the air.
	So a lot of fungal species, if they're growing, let's say, black mold behind a cabinet in your home, If it just stayed behind the cabinet, it wouldn't be a problem if it just stayed there.
	But they're always producing things that are coming to you.
	So talk to us about how that works and what that means when you inhale them.
	Sure.
	Mold growth, and I would also say bacterial growth, is a chemical factory.
	Molds in particular, but also certain bacteria, produce chemical weapons.
	In fact, many of the chemical weapons that have been popular, they were used in Vietnam, and T2, yellow rain, these are fungal toxins.
	Really?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	You have to nerve gas.
	What about that?
	I don't know about that.
	I think that's synthetic.
	I think that's synthetic.
	But T2 and yellow rain are both fungal toxins or analogs thereof.
	Well, like aflatoxins are extremely toxic.
	Aflatoxin B1 is the benchmark carcinogen against which all other carcinogens are measured.
	It's actually considered the most carcinogenic substance known to man.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Well, we test for that in our lab because a lot of grains are contaminated with that.
	Big time.
	And so that's an interesting conversation which we should dive into too, which is...
	And actually, let me back up.
	So molds in a building...
	When it's growing, and bacteria as well, produce essentially three things.
	Molds produce spores.
	Bacteria produce additional bacterial cells.
	The spores themselves are irritants.
	They're allergens.
	They can also carry a little bit of mycotoxins if that particular species is a mycotoxin-producing species and is producing them, which, by the way, is very uncommon in buildings contrary to popular opinion.
	So you've got spores and you've got mycotoxins.
	And they get all the headlines, but actually are responsible for a disproportionately small number of cases of mold-related illness.
	The third thing that all molds produce when they're actively growing are called microbial VOCs.
	Oh, there we go.
	And that is...
	Part of their metabolism, their off-gassing metabolism.
	That's right.
	These products.
	They're digesting, right?
	We produce VOCs.
	In fact, the VOCs that we produce are our gases that we produce when we're digesting are blamed on humans.
	Oh, he's got that gas.
	Those are microbial VOCs too.
	Yeah, good point.
	We're actually not digesting our food so much as we're ambulatory composters.
	That's a good point.
	We're facilitating.
	We're providing a vessel for this But I do know that some people, you can smell cancer on their breath.
	No doubt.
	And anyone who's walked into an old folks' home can smell death, disease.
	And dogs can be trained to smell the cancer on people.
	Highly accurate.
	Sometimes in the urine, but also in breath.
	There's cancer breath.
	That's actually a real thing.
	Yeah, no doubt.
	And some dogs actually will, without even being trained, claw at skin anomalies.
	And if a dog ever chews or claws at a mole or a freckle on you, go immediately to the derm and have it checked out.
	99% chance that is malignant.
	And so the dogs intuitively know how to do this.
	They can also be trained to do this.
	They can detect narcoleptic fits as well, epileptic fits.
	I mean, dogs are my favorite people.
	And they're definitely more insightful than almost any human I know.
	Um, but, but yeah, the ability for them to pick that up is really powerful because the microbial VOCs, which we pick up as the musty smell, um, have long been considered to be kind of an aesthetic nuisance.
	Dismissed.
	That's just the musty smell.
	It's grandma's basement.
	Right.
	And what we're finding out now, uh, is that it is, uh, it's extremely unhealthy to be in a musty space.
	The most prevalent researcher in this is Dr.
	Joan Bennett at Rutgers University.
	And she actually had her own mold experience.
	And she had a moldy house or a house that got flooded during Hurricane Katrina.
	And she got a face full of the musty odor while she was wearing a respirator.
	So in other words, she was not being exposed to the mold spores or the microtoxins because she had a filter on her face.
	But the odor can come through because it didn't have carbon in it.
	I see.
	Okay.
	So she was just using a paper-based filter.
	Okay.
	And she got very sick from that.
	Yeah.
	And she had never given any credence to the idea that the MVOCs can make you ill.
	Oh, I've seen cases of people having severe illness from exposure to some kind of fungal spores or maybe the VOCs.
	But I'm talking about there are people who can have severe things that would be diagnosed as schizophrenia or mental health disorders.
	Psychiatric disorders because of exposure to some of these toxins.
	Have you heard of those cases?
	Yeah, that's exactly where Joan's work went, actually.
	So she went back to the lab after having this sort of epiphany that she had been missing this in all of her mold research.
	Here she's a fungal geneticist and a mycotoxin expert, and she had never given any credence to the musty smell.
	So she went back to the lab and started testing the musty smell, the one component, The one-octan-3-all, which is a mushroom alcohol, on fruit flies.
	They're fancy fruit flies, though.
	They actually glow.
	They fluoresce when they produce dopamine.
	It's amazing what you can buy online.
	She began testing these fruit flies with this, and what she found was, lo and behold, they stopped producing dopamine.
	They also stopped reproducing.
	They started flying down instead of the light.
	And they also developed what she called, she characterized as Parkinsonian-like symptoms, neurological disorders.
	So she identified that it's neurotoxic.
	And also found that it was 40 times more toxic than toluene.
	Oh, no way.
	Yeah, and you know how toxic that is, right?
	So that's one of the compounds, or one of the molecules found within the musty odor.
	It's the most common one.
	It's one of the signature notes that makes the musty smell musty.
	Okay, so let me add some context to this, which is that over the last several generations, our species has moved indoors.
	So when I was a kid, You know, the parents were like, get out of the house.
	Get gone for six hours.
	You're like, yay!
	You know, skateboards, bicycles, whatever.
	We didn't have mobile devices and online video games.
	Thank God, right?
	Yep.
	We went outdoors.
	We did stuff.
	Today...
	A kid goes outdoors, you know, the parent freaks out, you know, once you get kidnapped, you know, it's like, stay indoors, and everybody's indoors all the time, it seems.
	And you've also got, of course, economically speaking, a lack of affordability of housing.
	So a lot of people, even older adults in their 20s and 30s, are living in the basements of their parents' homes, and that's not a cliche, that's real.
	So you've got people now living More indoors, darker, more musty type of spaces and spending more time indoors than any previous generation on this planet of human civilization, by the way.
	Yes.
	So, aren't those factors that are just going to amplify everything you're talking about?
	Yeah, I mean, what you just said, there's so many things there.
	If you look at our experience on planet Earth as a human species, we spent 99.99% of that time outdoors.
	Right.
	Yes, mold was present in caves and things like that, but not to the degree that it is now because there was air exchange.
	There was dilution.
	You also spent more time out foraging and doing what you needed to do.
	We've only spent this tiny little rounding error Right.
	With artificial light, too, by the way.
	Right.
	With artificial light and, again, these hermetically sealed buildings.
	And if you start to think about it, it's just insane.
	In fact, Rob Dunn, who wrote this beautiful book called Never Home Alone, is suggesting that we should call, we should rename our species Homo Endoris instead of Homo Sapiens.
	I like that.
	Yeah, that's great.
	Because we've really turned into an indoor species and to our detriment, right?
	Absolutely.
	So, yeah, not only are we lacking the wavelengths of light that come from sunlight, which is why I make a point.
	I'm outdoors every day for some period of time.
	It's still tiny compared to my ancestors, you know?
	But...
	Then when I'm indoors, seasonally, I throw the windows open.
	That's what I try to do.
	But it's so hot in Texas that you can't do that for most of the summer.
	This is a major problem.
	In my climate, too, I live in Minnesota, where six months of winter does not allow for air exchange.
	So there are tools for that.
	Energy recovery ventilators and heat recovery ventilators are a really good tool for people who want to have forced air exchange, but don't want...
	You can't open the windows if it's too hot, too humid, or too cold.
	So that is a major issue.
	But I'll tell you what, one of the things that I think is really important to talk about here is the idea that we all know that buildings can get moldy.
	But a lot of people who are experiencing mold-related illness are now going to functional care practitioners who are not sort of like typical AMA allopaths.
	They're going for more data-driven things.
	Yeah.
	And they're being given these mycotoxin urine tests.
	Yeah, it's very popular.
	There are three labs that sell them, real-time labs.
	And I'm not endorsing them, I'm quite on the contrary here.
	Real-time as well as Mosaic and one other, Vibrant.
	And they are essentially junk science.
	Because what they're sold as is a way to determine whether or not you've had environmental exposures.
	But mycotoxins don't become airborne the way people think they do.
	And we're certainly not inhaling them in quantities that are sufficient to excrete them through urine.
	So where are they coming from?
	Well, it turns out that we have a major problem with mycotoxins in our food supply.
	Yeah, sure.
	So this is, you know, 60 to 80% of imported grains have between 8 and 10 mycotoxins in each sample that are collected.
	And so this is not just imported grains.
	We also have a major problem with conventional meat and dairy, right, where these animals are being fed moldy corn and moldy grains because they're not human-grade grains.
	Well, what makes them not human-grade, right?
	But yeah, somehow or another, we are supposed to eat that even though it was eating something that was not suitable for us.
	And so a lot of people are having health effects from this that they're not aware of.
	The mycotoxin panels are bringing light to this, but that also amplifies your response to a mold problem in your building.
	So you can be having a double whammy, an amplifier effect by eating these sugars and grains and processed ingredients.
	Essentially, the solution to this is a no sugar, no grains diet with local grass-fed meats and things like that.
	This is not always accessible to people, unfortunately.
	Well, right, and I'm also aware that when water levels get low in the rivers, like the Mississippi, The barges don't run on their normal schedule.
	And so this happened a couple years ago when the farmers were just dumping their crops on the sides of the river to wait for barge traffic to pick it up.
	We're talking about beans and I think some grains as well.
	And so think about it.
	It's sitting on the side of a river just growing mold.
	It's unbelievable.
	Right?
	And then three weeks later it gets put on a barge and taken to some processor and then turned into breakfast cereal.
	Absolutely.
	Right?
	This happens all the time.
	All the time.
	And there's no way to identify this.
	There really is no cost-effective way.
	And there's a misnomer that somehow or another that this is highly regulated and that the FDA is protecting us.
	And we all know that that's really probably not true.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, the FDA does have some standards, but you're right about whether they enforce them.
	I think they spot check.
	But, you know, even the FDA allows, of course, certain levels, because otherwise no food would ever pass.
	Even in the EU, which is very, very strict about food contaminants, the EU also has allowable levels.
	So there are allowable levels of heavy metals in food.
	They're low, but...
	If you said that you can only sell food that has zero detectable lead, there would be no food in the world that you could sell.
	So it comes down to levels of exposure and your ability of your body to deal with it and detox it, eliminate it.
	That's right.
	And so that's the key element here is that, A, it's got to be an acceptable level so your toxin bucket doesn't get too full.
	Right.
	So the allostatic load doesn't get so high that you end up with autoimmune disease and other dysregulations, the cancers and things like that.
	So yes, there's a certain allowable amount.
	But in the EU, the number one reason for foodstuffs to be stopped is bacterial contamination.
	Number two is mycotoxins.
	Yeah.
	You know what happens when they get flagged for mycotoxins?
	They ship it to us.
	Yeah, they ship it to us.
	And we say, sure, come on, come on.
	Bring me your tired, your poor, your mycotoxin-contaminated grains.
	Right, right.
	And so what people need to understand why your solution, Got Mold, is so critical is because...
	You're getting some load of fungal exposure in the food supply no matter what.
	You're getting some load in just regular outdoor air.
	You might be at 50% of what your body can handle.
	If you then add to that Massive indoor exposure of 100 times greater, now you're over the limit of what your body can handle.
	That's right.
	It's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
	And what we see consistently is that that's the case.
	Mold is the thing that pushes people over the edge.
	It's the thing that they can detect, that they can smell it, they can pin it to an event that after the flood happened, I've never been the same.
	So you can see it's got more evidence around it in most cases, so people can actually connect, so you can pin the tail on the donkey better.
	But it tends to be the thing that overflows the toxin bucket.
	I've also heard of homeowners having a major detrimental health change after home renovations.
	Oh, yeah.
	So, you've heard of this.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, especially bathrooms, right?
	Yeah.
	You start ripping out walls and things.
	That's right.
	Because sheetrock, of course, isn't just used in your hallway.
	Yeah.
	When most of these houses were built, the ones that haven't been renovated yet, they used regular sheetrock.
	Even green board supports fungal growth.
	It has a little bit of an inhibitor in it that slows it down.
	But if you add enough moisture to anything, mold will grow.
	It grows even on the dust on concrete.
	The concrete doesn't support it, but the dust does.
	And so when you've got tile backer as a porous, absorptive substrate with organic matter, it's going to be moldy.
	And then people say, well, those tiles are falling off.
	Time to redo the bathroom.
	Well, guess what?
	Those tiles are falling off because the kraut and caulk got compromised, which means water's behind there, which means you have a bumper crop back there.
	By the way, chances are your kids or your bed is right up against that wall.
	And so if you just retrace that, you'll see that you've been sleeping next to a chemical factory.
	And oftentimes, that's where people get the sickest.
	Would it make sense to use your sampler, like to put it on your bed where you sleep, and just run it there?
	In some cases, the mold is so sequestered in the wall that the spores are just...
	There's millions, perhaps billions, in the wall, and it actually hasn't become airborne until you break it open.
	So the musty smell is your key.
	So here's the way to test your house.
	You use our test for airborne spores, and you use your nose for the musty odor.
	Those are the two tests.
	And of course, if you have symptoms, they get better when you leave the building.
	Those are the three best tests, right?
	And of course, if you see anything visible...
	If you've got water damage, condensation, water bugs, anything like that.
	Water bugs?
	Those little bugs, the little round ones that ball up sometimes.
	We call them rolling polies.
	Rolling polies, yeah.
	So those are a dead giveaway.
	Spiders, by the way, in many climates are a dead giveaway because they need water too, right?
	And they actually eat the little bugs, the little water bugs.
	And so there's a whole ecology and they're at the top of that chain.
	Did you know the roly-polies are the only land-based crustaceans?
	No.
	Yeah, they're crustaceans.
	They should be in the ocean.
	Amazing.
	But they're on land.
	Okay.
	A lot of people, though, may wonder if they have symptoms in their home.
	Suppose they don't smell a musty smell.
	They might be wondering about electromagnetic exposure.
	They might be wondering about 5G towers or power distribution panels in their home.
	They're going to be asking this question, am I suffering from a mold exposure or am I suffering from an electromagnetic field exposure?
	High voltage power line, right?
	Sure.
	So that's what I like about your kit is it kind of helps them narrow this down, too.
	That's right.
	The other one you want to look at is VOCs in general.
	And so that means in addition to the renovation and being concerned about ripping out walls behind cabinets, all that stuff should be treated, cabinets and bathrooms, that should be treated as if it's a mold problem.
	whether you know you have one or not because the likelihood is very high so that means putting up containment you know poly zipper doors these kinds of things ideally removing these things carefully yeah and and if you see significant mold you may you may tighten that tighten that up a little bit right you may bring in a professional or you may go buy the s520 and do some homework on your own right um but but also anytime you have an opportunity to do a renovation or if you're moving into a place that's brand new that new house smell
	It's very alluring.
	But that new house smell, when I smell it, I smell cancer.
	I smell autoimmune disease.
	Absolutely.
	And so we've been trained like Pavlov's dogs to think that the new car smell is the badge of, you know, we've won and we've arrived.
	No, you want to ventilate that thing.
	That's right.
	And same thing with houses.
	So when you are doing these things, you want to make sure you're choosing no VOC and low VOC materials as you renovate.
	And also be cognizant of that when you're moving into a new house or if you're specking something.
	It's not just mold.
	You have to look at air quality more holistically.
	Alright, so our audience is very well informed about detoxing and avoiding exposure to a lot of things, but this is a new tool that they can use, and it's affordable.
	So let me give out the website again, healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold, and it'll take you right here.
	You can pick up this kit.
	This has one indoor and one outdoor sample or collection.
	What did you call it again?
	Trap?
	Air sample of sport traps.
	Yeah, the Ghostbusters trap.
	That's right.
	All right, and I want to show here, we also sell the one, two, and three-room kits.
	So you can get a three-room kit right here.
	Boom.
	And that's only $2.99.
	So, you know, it's less per additional room.
	And you can get a refill kit right here.
	You can just choose that and get a refill kit.
	If you already have the Ghostbusters intake fan.
	That's right.
	Save 50 bucks.
	Yeah.
	So, anyway, that's all available at healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold.
	Now, I want to ask you an interesting question.
	Thank you for your time, for being here.
	You still doing okay on time?
	I'm great.
	All right, awesome.
	I'm wondering if remediation professionals suffer much higher rates of exposure and therefore health effects.
	And the reason I ask this is because I know that firefighters, they have much higher rates of neck cancer because firefighters are obviously dealing with very toxic VOCs, burning materials, plastic insulation material from wires and Nylon burning, you know, whatever.
	It's horrifically toxic, right?
	A house fire.
	And dioxins that are in all the burning PVC materials.
	Being a firefighter...
	Well, yeah, I suppose you're right.
	But anyway, the firefighter, you know, the fire suit, whatever it's officially called, you know, there's like a headpiece with a neck covering, and then there's the torso piece, but fumes can get up under that neck piece.
	And so firefighters have much higher rates of, like, neck cancers than any other profession, and that's why.
	But are you aware of any of that in the remediation professional industry?
	Yeah, I've known many remediators.
	I've been in this mold space for 24 years, so I've known a lot of remediators.
	Probably half a dozen that had to quit the industry.
	Really?
	That essentially went to just do work at the desk.
	They can't be exposed anymore.
	What happened to them?
	Well, there's a combination of things.
	First of all, arrogance in the beginning.
	Well, like thinking that this won't hurt me?
	I don't need to wear a respirator going on this job.
	I'll just leave it in the car.
	I'll just pop in real quick and leave.
	And so there's a bit of this.
	In fact, the first job I ever went on, it was before I was really in the industry.
	I was brought down into the basement of a remediation project, and there was a Polish crew, and they were all working really hard.
	And the guy who was bringing me down wanted me to meet the foreman.
	And I smelled cigarette smoke, and I was a little surprised by that.
	But then...
	When he tapped him on the shoulder, he turned around, and he was wearing a respirator, but he had a hole cut out for a cigarette.
	And I just thought...
	That's awesome.
	It kind of speaks volumes, right?
	The arrogance, this won't affect me.
	And in fact, I'm just going to smoke a cigarette while I'm pretending to protect myself.
	And I think that kind of arrogance is typical within many trades, where it won't affect me.
	I know enough about this stuff.
	But those are the ones who get taken down, right?
	This is an equal opportunity pollutant.
	Think of it like kryptonite.
	It will affect everybody eventually.
	The hardiest of us may take a little bit longer, but eventually it will bring everybody to their knees.
	The other thing that happens with remediation contractors is that they are very liberal with the use of biocides.
	So chemicals that are used.
	And this is, I think, probably...
	They spray the crap out of the walls and everything.
	That's right.
	And they fog.
	And so, you know, especially the ones that there are lots of compounds that are EPA registered, not to be confused with EPA approved because there is no such thing.
	EPA registered.
	The EPA says, yep, we register, and it's totally toxic.
	It's in the catalog, but we're not approving anything.
	They don't approve anything, right?
	They allow for registration.
	And so you submit your SDS sheets.
	So some of these compounds are known to be hormone modulators and endocrine disruptors and highly carcinogenic.
	Yeah.
	And oftentimes they're stable in their application form, but then once they dry, they become airborne very easily.
	They crystallize and then they can be retrained.
	And so there's lots and lots of risk associated with adding a chemical to try to get rid of a toxin.
	So it's like adding, you know, you're trading one toxin for another.
	Absolutely.
	In some cases, just adding it on top.
	But it reminds me of the pest control professionals.
	They are spraying highly carcinogenic chemicals and neurologically damaging chemicals every day, all day, all over people's homes.
	But they're breathing that in and they're handling that in.
	And I know from being in the lab, working in the lab, there's no such thing as a person who's never made a mistake handling liquid.
	I've had nitric acid on my skin accidentally.
	I've got clothes with holes in them where the nitric acid splashed.
	Absolutely.
	And if you handle anything, and nurses and doctors know this too, if you handle needles, you're going to get stuck sooner or later.
	It's going to happen.
	If you handle toxic pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, glyphosate, eventually you're going to get it on your skin.
	No doubt.
	It's inevitable.
	Yeah.
	So you're playing with fire, and again, people in the remediation trades often think that chemicals are necessary.
	And again, go back to the book I referenced, the S520, specifically says no need for chemicals.
	Just remove it.
	Remove the materials that are supporting the fungal growth, sheetrock, carpet, carpet padding, ceiling tiles, things like that.
	Clean the surfaces and clean the air.
	Some people want to do a little sanitization, especially when it comes to floodwaters.
	There's actually reason to sanitize, which a chlorine dioxide would be useful for.
	I love chlorine dioxide for that purpose.
	So you'll kill the bacteria.
	And that's the key, is that after floodwaters, you really want to make sure that the bacterial issues are taken care of.
	But it also oxidizes.
	I mean, it kills the fungal spores, too.
	It does.
	It's still important to remove them.
	In high concentrations.
	Yeah.
	You still will end up with some partially oxidized fungal matter.
	And so it's important, I think.
	Yeah, you can't get all the way into the fungal mass.
	That's right.
	The mycelium.
	The mycelium.
	There we go.
	You can't penetrate that just with air.
	That's why you remove the materials.
	Ideally, you remove the sheetrock because it goes in.
	And then all you need once you've got a substrate, meaning a material, that has mold growing in it that's porous, Right.
	Then all you need is humidity to bring that back.
	Even if you clean that surface all day long and you inhibit it and you spray it and paint over it.
	Oh, you're adding nutrition, by the way, at that point.
	So don't paint.
	Don't spray.
	You want to cut that stuff out and give it a foot or two feet from visible water damage, staining, or mold growth.
	Did you...
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but did you know that the FDA, and I'm going to give you a tour of our facility, by the way, and you'll see that there are no porous materials allowed in our food manufacturing and food packaging, tincture packaging area.
	All the walls are made with FRP, which is completely non-porous.
	All the floors are epoxy, which is very expensive.
	You can't have wooden walls.
	If the FDA shows up to inspect you and you have wooden walls, they're going to shut you down.
	Because that's just mold material, right?
	Absolutely.
	That's just going to grow mold.
	But also, you know, cardboard.
	Cardboard obviously can grow mold.
	And any kind of wood, any kind of substrate material like that.
	So, I mean, you're going to see when I give you the tour what we do.
	But I'm aware that there are a lot of companies in the space of manufacturing supplements and food that are not, they have not spent the money.
	To have all non-porous surfaces everywhere.
	And some of them, you know, don't even clean the machines between batches, right?
	So you're getting a little bit of the last batch in this new batch, and that's why they have the warnings, like, it's made in a facility with nuts and almonds and all these allergens, because that might be a little bit left over from, you know, the previous batch.
	Absolutely.
	No, and you've seen this, so I forget which company it was.
	Because I don't buy their food.
	But we're just shut down for mold and pests.
	And it was a big deal.
	At Boar's Head it was.
	Oh yeah, the meat company.
	Didn't they have listeria?
	Listeria.
	Contamination?
	And they had all sorts of visible mold and water damage in the ceiling.
	Are you kidding me?
	It was so bad that the company has decided to abandon the facility completely.
	Whoa!
	Yeah, so it wasn't even...
	It was beyond repair, apparently.
	Wow.
	But they were still operating like that.
	I mean, it's not like that wasn't visible and obvious.
	Yeah.
	Well, we had...
	I know there was an FDA inspection of our facility.
	They couldn't find anything, so at one point they wrote up that there was an unidentified fleck of something black under the tape that was sealing a cardboard carton.
	So with a black fleck under a piece of tape of a sealed cardboard carton that was not even in the food production area.
	So they had to find something.
	Yeah, really?
	Right.
	It's like, really?
	You're worried about what's under the tape right here?
	Perfectly contained.
	Yeah.
	Essentially isolated.
	Right.
	But I've heard stories of crazy things in food.
	And I don't mean to get off topic, but mold affects...
	Food manufacturing and mold are very important issues because you don't want to have something new introduced into the food during manufacturing.
	That's right.
	No, we have a major issue with, like, it's air, I would say air, food, and attitude, but the air and food part is a Venn diagram.
	Right.
	And that overlap is what I say is the overload, right?
	And these can be happening, you know, in a completely non-visible manner.
	You're just moving through your world.
	No big deal.
	You don't have to have a flood.
	You don't have to be eating fast food.
	You could be doing what you think is the best for your family, taking care of things, and still end up with a significant issue coming at you from both sides.
	Right.
	Absolutely.
	And what makes this even more complex in the food industry, and I'm sorry if I'm getting off topic, but Safety is described by the FDA as sterilized.
	So then we get to the issue of beneficial microbes, right?
	Beneficial substances in food, raw foods, agricultural products that have things like enzymes or even positive microbes.
	You don't want to eat E. coli, but there can be a lot of beneficial microbes.
	Whereas our system today describes safe as sterile.
	And that's not nutritious in many cases.
	Like milk.
	Raw milk has digestive enzymes.
	But if you pasteurize it and homogenize it, you destroy the enzymes, and now you have milk allergies because the digestive enzymes, the lactase, is not in the milk intact.
	And then people drink that, and they have allergic reactions.
	That's right.
	I mean, we shouldn't be having sterile food or sterile buildings for that matter, right?
	You know, this idea that bacteria is bad or even the fungi is bad.
	We need fungi.
	We are microbial, by the way, right?
	So, you know, 36 trillion human cells, 34 trillion microbes, something crazy.
	Who knows?
	More stars than there are in the universe.
	But the reality is that only about 100 bacterial species are known to produce significant human disease.
	It's such a tiny, tiny, again, rounding error in the ocean of known microbes.
	Forget about the unknown ones.
	There's a lot more of those than there are known.
	And also the same could be said for fungi, right?
	There are very few pathogenic fungi, molds specifically.
	In fact, most of them are beneficial.
	Most of them are actually occupying space that would otherwise be occupied by something a little more nefarious.
	And they're on every surface.
	They're all over the place.
	And without them, we'd be in real trouble.
	Absolutely.
	So we don't want a sterile building.
	We don't want sterile food.
	We want to learn to sort of embrace the microbes because we are microbes. - Well, I live on a ranch.
	So I see microbial action everywhere and what it does in nature.
	So if a cow dies, first the predator birds or the carrion birds come in, pick the bones clean.
	So that's part of recycling.
	And then, boom, the bacteria go to work.
	And the fungi go to work.
	A tree falls over.
	Well, how does the tree disappear?
	Otherwise, the world would be filled with fallen trees.
	But how does the tree disappear?
	Mycelium.
	That's right.
	Takeover.
	It's recycling everything in nature.
	And then it's creating different states of that tree for different bugs, ants to move in.
	And different kinds of armadillos can now burrow under a weakened tree and make a little armadillo home.
	Now they have shelter of a partially digested tree.
	It's like a scene change in a play, right?
	Absolutely.
	So this is all normal and natural.
	This is the cycle of matter in our world.
	But it's only when it gets out of balance that it becomes toxic.
	That's right.
	And when we're doing this stuff indoors, right?
	So mold is doing its job when it's breaking down leaves and sticks and twigs in your yard.
	Right.
	Not so much when it's doing it in your living room.
	Particle board.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so that's what we want to avoid, right?
	Exactly.
	And so, you know, I describe it very much the way you just did, which is, in the woods, you know, a tree falls down and it begins to decay, and you get this changing of the guard that comes through.
	And as these...
	The first microbes will set the stage for the next ones, and eventually you get the larger fungi, the mushrooms that come in, and eventually it all breaks down.
	The same thing happens in your house, where you get an initial water damage event or a dampness dynamic, and you get the initial, the primary colonizers.
	They're the first ones that come in.
	And if they persist, you'll get these molds called secondary colonizers.
	They actually eat the old molds, too, right?
	And they come in.
	And then the third ones are the tertiary colonizers.
	They're the ones with the chemical weapons.
	We get caught in the crosshairs.
	But they're the ones that are ready to take down the big stuff, the cellulose.
	They're ready to start eating the wood and then make room for mushrooms.
	So given enough time, they'll eat your house.
	And I often think the mold makes you sick because it wants you to move out so it can finish the job.
	Good point, good point.
	I like that.
	But I also think that there might be a slightly benevolent aspect to Molden buildings.
	If it really wanted to kill you, you'd be dead already, because it's smarter than you, it's got more time on its hands, it's got better weapons, and it's been around a long time, so it knows what it's doing here.
	But it doesn't want to kill you, evidenced by the fact that you're still alive.
	But it may actually be giving you a signal that there's something wrong in the building.
	So more and more I think about the building as an extension of your immune system.
	Like an exoskin or an exoskeleton.
	When a building gets sick, it shows up usually as a moisture problem.
	In other words, the building develops aches and pains and leaks show up.
	And the pain signal is the musty odor.
	There's a signal being sent to the building saying, hey, look over here.
	There's something wrong that needs to be attended to.
	If you ignore that...
	The same way if you ignore pain in your body, pain becomes chronic pain, becomes chronic inflammation.
	That's its own disease.
	Chronic inflammation, chronic dampness in a building is cancer.
	Eventually it can take down the building.
	So if you want to kill a building, let that continue to go.
	And in the process of that, the occupants get sick.
	So a sick building, sick people.
	That's right.
	It allows for the people to heal as well.
	So there's a symbiosis there, right?
	You look at this building as this inanimate thing, but it can't survive without you, and you can't survive without it.
	So my philosophical suggestion to people is learn to love your building.
	Take care of your building because it takes care of you.
	Run towards these things the same way you would someone who takes care of you or someone you're in charge of, right, in charge of their care.
	Because it is a benevolent loop, right?
	You're ultimately helping yourself by doing that.
	So your mold kits got mold.
	It's kind of like taking the temperature of your building, in essence, like to look for a fever.
	But in this case, we're talking about fungal spores.
	Yep.
	So it's just a great way to spot check where you are with that structure in which you spend so much time.
	Let me mention again the website, healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold.
	And we've got numerous kits available here.
	You can get the three room, the two room, or the one room kit.
	The one-room kit, sorry, that's the refill, but the starter kit starts at $199 for that.
	And that includes the results.
	It includes the mailing it back.
	It's all prepaid in the United States.
	You get the results.
	You will have expert-level information about what's actually happening in the air in your home.
	All right, Jason, in terms of just wrapping up this conversation, but this has already been fascinating.
	What would you like to leave our audience with?
	What's the big takeaway from this?
	If people are concerned about their health, maybe they have symptoms right now and they're not sure where those symptoms are coming from.
	Or they feel more tired than they think they should.
	Yes.
	What should they do?
	Well, there's a couple things come to mind.
	First of all, I want to circle back on the kit as it relates to being proactive.
	So you can test four times or seasonally if you wanted to for less than the cost of one professional coming over to collect samples one time.
	So you could be very proactive on this if you were to do this on a seasonal basis or a couple of times a year.
	My suggestion to people who are having symptoms...
	Is go take a few days, go somewhere else.
	And see what happens.
	Yeah, go somewhere else.
	And hotels are tricky because they're often loaded with chemicals.
	So you want to go somewhere where ideally you're in nature for a few days.
	And if you feel significantly better, then that's a big red flag.
	And the other thing is that I will also suggest that one of the detox protocols that we recommend has nothing to do with Yes.
	Yes.
	light.
	Take your shoes off and walk in the grass so that you get that ionic transfer, so that you actually get the grounding effect.
	What we find is that it's highly anti-inflammatory to do those two things.
	Just getting a little bit of morning sun and being barefoot, actually, there's 22 peer reviewed studies just on grounding alone.
	It's amazing, right?
	But because there's no profit in it, nobody promotes that.
	But if you really want to start looking at how you can take care of yourself, you want to, again, attune your senses.
	If you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something.
	And that may mean taking some time away.
	It may mean identifying the source of that musty odor, finding the moisture problem.
	In other words, you've got to take action.
	And then begin doing the things that we know will get you better, and that is eliminating mold from your foods, mycotoxins in particular, so that's sugars and grains and processed.
	You've got to get rid of that stuff anyway.
	but then conventional meats and dairy also.
	And then spend time in nature, again, recalibrating your body so that you're exposed to the fungal spores in the air.
	You're also exposed to earth, doing the grounding thing, and to sunlight.
	These things in aggregate do more for people than almost any protocol that I've seen from a functional care practitioner.
	And don't even talk to me about allopathy.
	They don't even know what to do with mold.
	Oh, and let me add to that.
	As a food scientist myself, you can do this experiment.
	Turmeric halts mold growth like nothing else I've seen from the natural world.
	So you can take, if you take like a glass of water and you mix in some kind of thickener, like guar gum, let's say, or xanthan gum, you're creating a little petri dish, right?
	If you take a jar like that and put in half a teaspoon of turmeric powder, stir it in, it's slightly orange, compare that to a non-turmeric jar, let them both sit for four weeks, Massive molds and everything in the non-turmeric jar.
	The turmeric jar looks the same as it did on day one.
	It won't grow.
	It doesn't surprise me.
	Many cultures have perfected the art of using food as medicine.
	And garlic.
	Garlic will halt mold growth like crazy.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And also, garlic used internally is very powerful for detoxification.
	The sulfur is a precursor for glutathione, which is the master antioxidant.
	So I encourage people that are struggling with this stuff to swallow whole cloves of garlic, the small ones, seriously.
	Not on an empty stomach, by the way.
	And don't chew it, because then no one's going to want to be within three feet of you.
	But yeah, nature has given us lots of solutions.
	What we do to outthink nature is largely what's caused the problems that we're experiencing.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	No, I was approving stories this morning for our website, Natural News, and there was an article on UTIs.
	And it was, what's good for UTIs?
	Of course, everybody knows cranberries, right?
	Fresh cranberries.
	But it also mentioned garlic.
	And vitamin C and water.
	So a lot of people are dehydrated.
	They're not getting the right nutrients.
	This is all connected.
	If you have a fungal burden in your body, your body is programmed to have a mechanism to solve that problem, but you've got to have proper It needs to be clean water.
	You have to have proper elimination.
	And, you know, your liver has to work, right?
	So you can't be just drinking alcohol all day and taking acetaminophen and damaging your liver all day, right?
	You've got to take care of yourself so that you can deal with all these exposures and all these toxins.
	And that's not to mention the 5G towers and the electromagnetism, you know, toxins, in essence, that are kind of adding to this burden and sometimes creating Like peroxynitrate, which are free radicals in your body.
	We're living in a very toxic world, man.
	We are, we are.
	And here's where I'll leave this, okay?
	Because I think this is, I like to leave things on a positive note.
	Yes, let's do that.
	So first of all, here's the not-so-positive note, and then I'll end it on a positive note.
	So amongst many symptoms that mold presents with, The most frustrating are the cognitive impairment and the fatigue.
	And the reason that's so frustrating is because it's so hard to get a diagnosis, and it's also such a disruptor to quality of life.
	People get divorced.
	They lose their jobs.
	People commit suicide.
	My own mother committed suicide in the moldy house I grew up in.
	No kidding.
	I moved out of the house when I was 12.
	All my symptoms went away.
	My symptoms were serious.
	I was falsely diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when I was four, and I was allergic to everything in my environment.
	Whoa.
	And it went away when I was 12 when I moved out.
	My mom stayed behind, and she committed suicide two years later.
	And so now there's no way of knowing what the causal—you can't pin the tail on the donkey on that one.
	But I certainly know for sure it wasn't going to help, right?
	That's right.
	That's right.
	So I see cognitive impairment and emotional dysregulation with mold— Psychiatric effects from fungal exposure, that's very real.
	It's very real.
	Mold rage is a real thing.
	Hallucinations, man.
	People can see ghosts because of exposure to mycotoxins.
	In fact, the whole gray gardens, the whole haunted house thing, It's largely blamed now, in retrospect, on moldy buildings.
	No kidding.
	Yeah, the whole idea.
	Well, think about the way those buildings look, right?
	The typical haunted house.
	It's moldy.
	Yeah, they're all moldy homes.
	Wow, I hadn't thought about that.
	And people have hallucinatory experiences, and they also tend to become fatigued.
	They tend to become paranoid.
	True.
	They don't leave the house.
	The old man or old woman looking out the window, right?
	This is such a, as we approach Halloween, rethink that, maybe.
	Like haunted houses might be Or maybe evil spirits are attracted to black mold.
	Have you ever thought about that?
	Maybe that is the possession.
	Maybe demons love mold.
	I don't know.
	Maybe that is the dark side.
	You gotta fight the mold and have like Jesus in your life, you know?
	They're like, stop the mold!
	They're like, out!
	Demons, you know, from the mold.
	You put the cross up and the mold runs out.
	Totally.
	It scatters out.
	But the psychological aspect and the psychiatric aspect is a big deal.
	Depression is now being described as an inflammatory disease in many circles because you find cytokines and other inflammatory markers in people that have depression in very high concentrations almost consistently.
	And so this is something that I think is near and dear to my heart.
	And the reason that I want to leave on this note is because I think that people who are experiencing that often feel very hopeless, very isolated, and they also get stuck in the building that's making them sick.
	Right.
	And so that's my call to action, is if you are experiencing Any sort of psychiatric issues, depression, anxiety, deep fatigue, you may be in cell danger response.
	Look that up.
	It's powerful stuff.
	This is where your mitochondria stop producing energy and instead go into cellular defense.
	And as a result, you are not producing energy.
	So the call to action is there, get out of the house.
	Again, go back to nature.
	But here's the good news.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but doctors put people on antidepressant drugs, but they're still living in the same house with the same exposures.
	Not being told to change anything.
	Right.
	So the cause is still there, but now you're just on more drugs to deal with the psychiatric symptoms.
	That's right.
	And nobody who's depressed has a Prozac deficiency.
	That's right.
	They may have other issues going on, but nobody has an antidepressant deficiency.
	Right.
	So what's root cause on this stuff?
	It all goes back down to dampness and spending too much time in our buildings.
	But here is the good news, and there is good news.
	Okay.
	Unlike all the other environmental toxins that we talk about, right?
	Outdoor pollution.
	We can't control that.
	Even if we did a great job here in the U.S., which we don't.
	We've got Russia and China and India to deal with.
	There's no way we can stop the outdoor pollution issue.
	We're not going to stop all the cars doing whatever.
	This is just not realistic.
	However, the indoor environment is an area where we have enormous potential for control if we choose to accept it.
	And so that's where you start really looking at what are you bringing inside the house in terms of chemicals, being vigilant about moisture control, Getting good air purifiers and using them all the time, but then whenever the weather allows, opening your windows.
	Opening windows, right?
	Absolutely.
	So this is the opportunity for you to really look at that environment as your sanctuary, right?
	As a place where you can not have it be a source of illness, but rather be a source of healing.
	And this is where being proactive really matters, right?
	So if you can reduce the pollutants to an acceptable level, stop bringing toxic stuff into the house, test on a regular basis, and then be vigilant around moisture control, you're setting yourself up and the future generations to come for a much healthier future.
	All right.
	That's a great wrap-up message on this.
	I completely agree with you.
	And, of course, what you offer, the Got Mold Kit, can help people get started with this assessment to assert proactive positive control over their indoor airspace.
	So let me mention it one more time, healthrangerstore.com slash gotmold.
	And Jason, this is really amazing.
	I've never seen a mold testing kit like this, backed by such good science, a reputable lab, an outstanding, easy-to-read report.
	You don't have to be a science geek to read it.
	The instructions are easy.
	Nobody gets messed up.
	Actually, your out-of-box experience, as it's called, the Ubi, is really great on your product.
	It's so great.
	You open it up and it just tells you what to do.
	It's so simple.
	Very easy to use.
	So you've done a great job.
	You put together something really amazing here.
	I appreciate that.
	We have an amazing team.
	Well, I second that.
	You do.
	So thank you for coming today.
	Thank you for visiting us in the studio.
	And please keep us posted about what you find, what you learn, especially after these storms.
	There's going to be a lot of remediation of flooded homes.
	And they were flooded not just with water, but water mixed with crazy chemicals, by the way.
	That's right.
	So I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of homes condemned in many regions, including parts of Florida, after that storm hit.
	So people are going to need your solution.
	No doubt.
	And we have some other tests being developed, too, both for the building and for human diagnostics.
	So we'll keep you posted on that.
	Please do.
	All right.
	Thank you, Jason.
	Thank you.
	Take care.
	All right, thank all of you for watching here today on BrightTown.com, and thank you for your support.
	And take proactive steps to clean up your indoor environment, clean up your diet, clean up your intake, your exposures, your personal care products, everything.
	And you will thank yourself for doing that.
	And the healthier you are, the more your body can be resilient in dealing with any of these insults from things like fungal spores or VOCs or toxic chemical exposure or outdoor pollutants that you can't control like dioxins from train fires in East Ohio and places like that.
	You can't control that.
	So you've got to be strong and resilient in your biochemistry to be able to deal with that.
	But thank you for watching today.
	Mike Adams here, brighteon.com and healthrangerstore.com.
	Take care.
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	You can find it all at healthrangerstore.com and thank you for your support.
	I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
	God bless you.

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