Josh Dech - CHN (00:00.625) Is it Rubino? Got it. Well, in that case, excuse me. And it's obviously just Jen Popper chatting with today, right? Who you typically do and all the things you've been on everywhere. So it's basically the same audience. Perfect. In that case, Michael Rubino, welcome to Reversible.
Michael Rubino (00:12.568) Yeah, yeah, perfect.
Michael Rubino (00:19.233) Thanks so much for having me, Josh.
Josh Dech - CHN (00:21.165) I'm looking forward to our chat today, Michael, know, mold is something that we talked about. I mentioned it in previous episodes. I've even had specialists come in, doctors who deal with mold talk about the influence of mold on the body. And that's typically where we stop to here's what you should know about mold being bad, but you're the mold guy. Like you're the guy. You've got this massive company, this great podcast. You deal with mold in people's homes. Number one. Is that right? Or do you do?
Michael Rubino (00:48.557) Correct.
Josh Dech - CHN (00:49.526) just office, residential or home as well.
Michael Rubino (00:52.078) Pretty much everywhere. I I've spent the last 12 years of my life trying to figure out solutions to the problem. And as you alluded to, lot of people, talk about mold. They say mold can cause all these different issues and then it's mic drop and there's no solutions and it just makes people wonder what to do next. And so, no, I've been practicing in the field for about 11 years now, 12 years now, and really putting forth solutions for people. That's the name of the game.
Josh Dech - CHN (01:22.457) I love it. Well, I'm here for some solutions because mold is a very pervasive issue. Am I right in something like 70 % of US homes have a mold problem?
Michael Rubino (01:31.502) Yeah, mean, that statistics hard to nail down. I'd say 70 % probably a pretty good conservative view. You know, based upon the largest home survey ever done in 1994 by John Spengler, there was, they said 50 % of homes that they encountered had visible signs of mold. And so I can tell you just offhand being in the industry and visiting homes, been a part of thousands of home projects. And I can tell you that not every single house
looks like it has a mold problem, but has a mold problem. And so with that being said, I mean, there's so many hidden problems that people don't even know about, problems behind walls or in their HVAC systems that is not abundantly obvious. So I think that number really drives that conservative number up even more, unfortunately. There's another, if we want to get real down to the science here, the US and EPA and HUD, they did a joint study spanning about 13 years.
was called the American Healthy Home Survey 1 and Survey 2. about 13 years shows us that actually every single prevalence of mold went up except one species. So they tested for 36 different species. So 35 of the 36 species they tested for all went up in prevalence. I mean, pretty much dramatically so. So when we look at it from that perspective, we see that conservative number 70%. I mean, it's getting worse and worse. This is definitely...
becoming an epidemic and it's something we gotta get under control pretty quickly.
Josh Dech - CHN (03:02.765) Yeah, this is bananas. So walk me through this really quick, Michael. I mean, you've been on Business Insider, ABC, Forbes, NPR, NBC, Fox. You're all over the place. You've been all over the place with what it is you do just to sort of anchor our listeners, doing your justice in the intro, of course, but to anchor our listeners. What is it you do and why is this so important?
Michael Rubino (03:27.278) So what it is that I actually do, I'm a CMRS, which is a Council Certified Microbial Remediation Supervisor. It's the highest certification you can get in my field and it requires 10 years of documented experience or more. What I actually do is I help people create healthy spaces. I mean, that's the simplicity of what I do. And I do so all through using data and scientific procedures.
Obviously we know mold grows because of water damage, right? It's a symptom, but water has to intrude into the building first. And with that being said, unfortunately, not all water damage situations inside of a home, an office building, or any type of building are always obvious. The other factors that can happen with water intrusion isn't just, you know, as we think of like water rushing into the house, but it can happen in the form of water vapor, such as humidity, right?
Humidity is not something we actually see, but it's something we can feel. You we've all been outside on a hot summer day and we felt that stickiness across our skin. That's humidity. Well, unfortunately, humidity, if it gets too much inside of a home, building, office, et cetera, we can actually start to create an environment where microbes start to thrive. Microbes meaning mold, meaning bacteria, things that we don't necessarily want growing and thriving in our homes, buildings.
working spaces, et cetera. And so we want to look at water as the actual primary condition. And we want to be able to figure, and we have to figure that out. And sometimes it's not obvious. We need different scientific tools and metrics to look at. And then we trace that back to actually testing for mold. And just to preface this, mold is a common denominator, right? It's not the end all be all. If I have mold, I also have bacteria.
Josh Dech - CHN (05:01.625) Mm
Michael Rubino (05:17.728) And so I think we all know that bacteria can make us sick, right? And so we have to look at mold is actually very easy to detect based upon current technological standards. There's a lot more testing capabilities for mold than there is bacteria. But if I have mold that had bacteria, luckily the resolve is the same, whether it's mold or bacteria, you pretty much can remove microbes from a building at the source. However, you want to be aware that we're talking about
Josh Dech - CHN (05:18.328) That's right.
Michael Rubino (05:47.275) Really just a out of balance microbiome in your environment.
Josh Dech - CHN (05:51.671) Right, right. I mean, when we consider that our external environments directly reflect our internal environments, then we have to understand that mold in one, I mean, mold in the gut's not a bad thing in its proper, tiny, itty bitty levels. But these overgrows we're talking about, you mentioned it's an epidemic of disease and I have no doubt about it. We see mold, like I specialize in Crohn's and colitis and severe IBS and we see mold in probably...
40 % or more of cases as one of the primary drivers is typically many things, but mold is there. It changes the landscape of their gut bacteria, causes a bunch of gnarly overgrowth, leads to fungus and parasites and all kinds of stuff. And it's in our homes. How does somebody know if they got mold in their home? The common thing I get asked is, well, my home's a new build. Can I still have mold?
Michael Rubino (06:41.24) Yeah, unfortunately your home can be brand spanking new and have molded it. As a matter of fact, happened to me. I was building a brand new house, had molded it, it got real crazy, there was litigation involved. I no longer have that house. But to make a long story short, mean, many people have no clue how easy it is for mold to grow in a brand new home if that home is not built properly. And unfortunately, many homes across America are not built properly. I'll just give you one leading example. If you've ever seen
you're the lumber sitting in the soil as you drive through new neighborhoods, odds are because mold is abundant in the soil, bacteria is abundant in the soil, you're gonna see that transfer onto the lumber and you're gonna build a house basically with moldy lumber from day one. And so I can't tell you how often I see this problem as I drive through neighborhoods in America. It's profound. Going back a second, you know, when we look at...
Josh Dech - CHN (07:12.514) Hmm.
Michael Rubino (07:36.33) all these different things and all these illnesses that it can contribute to. I think, I believe that the gut is such a huge important part of health and wellbeing. And one of the things we know so much about mold exposure is how disruptive it is to the gut microbiome. Now, there are obviously many ways you can get sick from mold exposure, but I wanna put something in a perspective for you. Probably the two most
common ways you would be exposed to mold is one called dermal exposure. So that's the skin, skin being the largest organ. The second greatest route of exposure though is going to be inhalation. Now inhalation is really interesting because most people think when I inhale something, that means it's affecting the lungs. Of course, lungs being the first line of defense. However, when you're talking about particles like mold, like bacteria, more often than not, these particles are so small
Josh Dech - CHN (08:22.968) Mm
Michael Rubino (08:33.774) they're actually bypassing the lungs and the self -defense mechanisms, which are gonna be your mucous membranes and your lungs. And when they bypass those, they get right into the bloodstream. And at that point, you then ingest it. So when we're talking about microorganisms such as mold and bacteria, we're actually worried about two pathways here. Inhalation, then leading to ingestion. That can cause disruption two times over.
And then you have this skin exposure where you see so many people that are dealing with mold exposure. And again, mold exposure, when I say mold exposure, I mean overgrowth of mold inside of a home. I don't mean normal mold exposure that you experience out in the world. When you're dealing with that, you're typically seeing skin issues, which skin issues can be representative of that dermal exposure, but it also could be representative of gut issues, right, that you can have through to the microbiome imbalances.
Josh Dech - CHN (09:01.837) Mm
Michael Rubino (09:30.38) What kind of things do we see out there? We see people, yes, with dealing with SIBO, right? We see people dealing with Crohn's, we see people dealing with Sjogren's, we see people dealing with all kinds of different issues. We see just the inflammation that can happen in the gut, which then can lead to the inflammation in the brain, right? And then we start dealing with brain fog, chronic fatigue, things of that nature. But let's just rewind another second. What about just the dysbiosis it can cause? Now, what happens when we have...
Josh Dech - CHN (09:41.654) Hmm.
Michael Rubino (09:57.474) dysbiosis. Well now we can have overgrowth of yeast, overgrowth of candida. I mean we're talking about any sort of infection that can then take shape because of the dysbiosis. And that's not even including some of the more toxic effects we can experience due to the mycotoxin exposure which can actually be created by mold colonized in your body.
And this is where things start to get complicated, where we start worried about the carcinogenic effects of these toxins and cancers and all these things. mean, all the research we're seeing that has really started to come out over the last year is air pollution being the largest cause of cancer outside of smoking cigarettes itself. And this is really, really astounding because we didn't know about this for so long. I mean,
How many people out there think it's no big deal? know, mold's no big deal. Air pollution, not a big deal. there's a forest fire down the streets? All right, I'll just close my windows. It's no problem. I mean, we have to start to wake up a little bit because if you think about this from a health perspective, I cup two different exercises to think about. you can't go more than a few minutes without air.
That's how important air is to the human body, right? Now, let's obviously we can go longer without food. You know, we can obviously go longer without water. Water being the next most important thing, right? From there, there's this other perspective of think about how much you consume. Okay, consumption is another factor here. You consume enough air every single day to fill up a normal size swimming pool with the 20 ,000 breaths that you take on average. A baby takes 65 ,000 breaths on average, right? It's why
It's so important as kids are developing to have good air quality. When we go from that perspective, you're not, you share with me just a minute ago, you had about a pound and a half of steak for lunch. Well, that's not a swimming pool full of steak, right? That's, it's not a swimming pool full of water you're drinking. Heck, I don't care if you're swimming in that swimming pool, you're still not absorbing that much water through your skin. So I wanna put things into perspective. Air is extremely vital for humans.
Michael Rubino (12:18.594) But what's in that air and how that impacts the body, that's something that we have not been thinking about. And it's like, if you're listening to me right now, I am hoping, I'm praying that a light bulb goes off in your head and you're saying, Eureka, wow, how would we miss this? Well, honestly, there's been a lot of studies for many, years, going back hundreds of years on the importance of air quality. But you know, as technology is advancing, we're becoming more aware of it.
And where we are today is, we're getting through the bell curve a little bit, but there's a lot more we're gonna learn probably over the next 50 years, over the next 100 years. But don't wait that long. I start to take this seriously now because this could be just the hurdle you needed to take back your health and wellbeing.
Josh Dech - CHN (13:02.892) Yeah.
Josh Dech - CHN (13:09.805) You know, it's really interesting that you bring this up because air quality, I believe according to the environmental working group, if I'm not mistaken, one of the top three toxins to human beings is recirculated indoor air, which means it's ventilation systems, it's our own exhalation, it's dust, it's carpets, it's all the things we have, the fabrics inside of our homes that are actually filthy. Whereas you get hospitals, for example, in third world countries, they're actually designed.
because the ventilation systems over there, they don't quite have the same tech, but a lot of them, they are designed to actually have air pathways to filter out natural air using outside air, because it's open door, open window. Whereas here, everything's closed off, plastic sheets and this and that. But even though they have HEPA filters, it's not the same as outdoor air. I think there's a lot more to air quality than having the right oxygen and nitrogen and CO2 balances. It really is about even the microbes in the air. know, something we talk about on the show,
is the importance really, it's about how our gut connects to our world and our world connects back to our gut and microbes are in everything. I mean there are more microbes inside of your body than actually make the rest of your body. You are more bacteria and fungi and viruses than you are human. Of course there's microbes in the air, of course there's microbes in the soil, but now we're talking about toxified microbial environments such as your air. And this is something that I don't think we often consider.
And this isn't to be a doom and gloom. Right now you're listening to this like, shit, I'm going to die by breathing. You're going to die anyway. Let's just, you know, slow down the process a little bit. And so walk me through Michael, how on earth would I know if I got mold in my home?
Michael Rubino (14:50.722) Yeah, so that was a question that I had to figure out how to solve. As my career started going on and on, I started realizing, wow, this is actually tricky. prior to, I'm about to tell you how, prior to this revelation, the way in which you found out if you had poor air quality is you would call a company, you'd probably pay them at minimum about a thousand bucks. They'd come on over to your house.
they'd set up tripods, and on those tripods there'd be air pumps and little cassettes, and they'd collect about 75 milliliters of air, and through that collection, they would look at how many spores they picked up, and then they would compare that to how many spores are outside. And as long as there were less spores inside than outside, everybody said, guess what, you're in good health, this place is great, it's clean, we have no issues here. But here's a problem.
And it's something that we actually learned from COVID actually, how big this problem actually is. And that's the fact that during COVID there was this magic number, right? You had to stay six feet apart. Six feet apart's a magic number. Well, what happened was they figured out the reason why six feet's really that number is because when you're dealing with particles that are so small, that are so light, it actually takes a lot of force for them to travel through the air. They're a lot lighter than the air. And with that being said, as long as you stayed, you know,
six feet away from somebody, the odds are, if you actually getting exposed to whatever it is that's in their body, a lot less. Now, there's a lot of variables in here and we'll get through that. But that was kind of the science behind why you wanna stay six feet. So these particles are so small, so light, traveling through the air at great velocity, that just doesn't really happen. Well, in actually learning from that,
When you're testing your air quality through this method of collecting 75 milliliters of air, I want you to think about one thing for a second. Most of the people that come and do this air test, they're gonna test in the center of the room. And typically, they're just gonna test whatever room you're concerned about. More on that in a second. Now, when they do that, they're typically way further than about six feet of any usual problem. mean, usual problems in an interior plumbing wall,
Michael Rubino (17:14.316) An exterior wall, maybe because you have a leaking roof or a leaking window, something to that effect. So they're more than six feet away. Now, the further it is that they are away, the less likely you are to have these particles in a higher concentration. Therefore, it typically looks less than outside, and typically these people are telling you, you don't have an issue. There has to be a significant problem. One that would be so obvious that you walked into the room, you wouldn't even need to test it because you'd see
mushrooms growing on the walls or something, for that much spores to reach that center of that room for it to look like a problem, for them to prompt them to do something. And so we've run in circles on this, obviously, trying to figure out, how do you do this then? Well, air testing's great, but you have to test close to where you think the problem is. Otherwise, it's really gonna make it look like a false negative, when it actually could be a pretty significant issue. Now...
Josh Dech - CHN (17:44.898) Sure.
Michael Rubino (18:10.572) With that being said, there are two main reasons why, based upon a, how far particles travel. Here's the variable. One other thing we have just learned through microbiology is that there is a lot of dust already in the air, in most places. If you ever sat near a window on a sunny day and you saw the ray of light refract off the dust, you know exactly what I'm talking about. mean, we've all had that like cognition, my goodness, there's a lot of dust in our air.
And when microbes actually attach to the dust, which they will, like virus particles, bacteria particles, mold particles, they will attach to whatever is already aerosolized, hitching a ride on that particle. Now, that allows particles to travel much further. Here's the kicker, though. These air cassette machines, they're designed to capture small, isolated particles. They're not designed to capture dust. As a matter of fact,
If you get dust inside the sample, it'll cloud the sample and make it difficult for the technician to actually observe what's going on underneath that microscope. And so it's designed not to capture dust. So you're going to miss a lot of particles that would already be airborne with the dust because again, it's designed to capture isolated particles, which again, the further away you are from the source, the less likely you are to actually have.
because by that time it reaches the...
Josh Dech - CHN (19:39.811) So the dustier the, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, what you're saying is the dustier the room, the less accurate the air quality test then.
Michael Rubino (19:47.246) correct because again, you're just not going to get enough isolated particles for you to actually get a good read. so with that being said, countless air tests are done, still done to this day, all giving people this false sense of security when they may have a problem. Same school of thought applies to HVAC vents. know, people do air tests by an HVAC vent, good.
How far is that vent from the actual unit? Because where the mold would be is in the unit where it condensates, right? Again, we need moisture. So, you know, going back to this, realizing, wow, how many inspection reports have I seen over the years of people thinking their house is fine when it's not, or I get this phone call from a client who says, hey, I know I have mold, here's my report, what do we need to do? I was like, well, your report is inconclusive. It doesn't tell me that there's anything.
wrong with this house. Well, I know there's something going on here. I can feel it. Okay, well, we need a better inspection because I can't just come in there blindly and start swinging hammers, right? This needs to be a data -driven process. So, going back to realizing, okay, particles travel within a six -foot, but after that, they're already attached to dust particles. Dust particles are too big to capture in an air test, therefore, we're missing a lot of stuff. I realized, well...
There's gonna be a lot in the dust though, right? Because you have a lot of particles that are attaching to dust and then what? The dust settles. We know this because our floors get dusty if we don't mop, you know, vacuum or mop them after a while. Our furniture gets dusty if we don't vacuum or mop that after a while. We know that dust as it aerosolizes eventually falls its way to the floor. Well, then we're gonna test the dust and we're gonna see what's in the dust and we're gonna use that as a tool to understand how normal or abnormal our house
and our air quality inside that house may actually be. And since switching to that as the first line of defense as a screening tool, we have been able to help people uncover the most trickiest hidden problems you could ever imagine. You know, I'll give you a famous example, Gwyneth Paltrow, client of mine, we found mold underneath her bathtub. We found mold in all of her HVAC systems, eight of them, eight HVAC systems. All of that, first off, the bathtub thing, I mean, this is like every day she takes a bath.
Michael Rubino (22:11.114) Every day she's soaking in that tub. Maybe she has a glass of wine while she's in there. Point is, she's spending time there. And all the while there's just, as she's trying to get clean, she's just breathing in and it was toxic black mold that specifically she was just breathing in. Every time she took a bath, and it could be hours of time she spends in there. And that's supposed to be a place of tranquility, not a place where you're inhaling toxins.
going back to the HVAC systems and all eight HVAC systems, meaning no matter where she went, some level of toxins she's breathing in because they were contaminated in the HVAC systems. And so when you put in that perspective, how many, I couldn't even tell you how many people she had come in telling her the house is beautiful, the house is immaculate, there's no mold problem here. I can't tell you how many times I went to...
meet with the professionals in her house and they were all in disbelief and thought I was taking advantage of her or ripping her off or something to that effect. It wasn't until we lifted up the bathtub and they saw it firsthand for the first time that they all just kind of like shocked. Started texting 911, we found mold, we found, well of course we found mold, we knew there was mold. We found mold and told you about it and you refused to believe that we found mold, right? And so it's one of those things where, you know,
Josh Dech - CHN (23:22.37) Sure.
Michael Rubino (23:29.966) People are so confused at the process. that are supposed professionals are confused at the science. it's having to break things down and make them simple. The dusttest .com where you can literally get a test yourself. It's like a Swiffer cloth. You go around and you collect dust from various parts of your house. You send it into a lab. And for something that simple, a fraction of the price you would pay a professional to get real information.
Josh Dech - CHN (23:49.111) Yeah.
Michael Rubino (23:59.214) using PCR technology that you can then discern that your house is a problem or is not a problem, giving you either peace of mind or an answer to, my God, the health issues I've been dealing with, this might be it. It's been a godsend. mean, every month, probably 250 or 300 people get that satisfaction. Every month, people are finding out that their house is either the problem
Josh Dech - CHN (24:22.252) Yeah.
Michael Rubino (24:27.412) or it's the exact place they need to heal. And that kind of information empowers people to take action and to live their best, healthiest life. Because before that, it was very confusing.
Josh Dech - CHN (24:39.949) Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I got a client of mine and coming just circling back to its connection to bowel disease. know it. It mold, for example, creates a condition called pleomorphic. So it'll change the landscape of the microbes inside of your gut, causing an overgrowth of the bad guys or the opportunistic and letting in, you know, parasites and other things like we mentioned. I had a family who came to see me. A little boy was five years old, dealing with severe ulcerative colitis, quite severe, and wanted to go in and see the doctor and
course he says well it's autoimmune, it's genetic, here's the drugs, here's what we have to take. Nothing we can do about it. A little boy, five years old and so his parents are really reluctant but his quality of life is miserable. He's got 15 bowel movements a day with blood, he's gray and pale in color, this little boy is in so much pain and inflammation he's limping around the house and laying in bed. He's five. He should be out playing outside, being a kid, throwing mud balls at his friends and he can't do any of these things and so we took a look at him.
and they did some research around themselves. They just couldn't quite figure out what might be driving it. They said, well, we want to get a GI map done. So get a stool sample of his gut bacteria to see if we can measure it. And we got this test back and it was, mean, Michael, I've never seen one so bad in a child, let alone adults. I've had adults with stool samples like this who are this blown out with this much overgrowth, this much exaggerated overdevelopment of nasty bacteria. But
You know, they're drinking, they're doing drugs, they're traveling around, they're eating junk food, they're sick, they're medicated, a lifetime of antibiotics. Of course, the gut bacteria is going to be a mess. This kid's five. Breastfed for a year and a half, born naturally, clean home, healthy food, something's going on. So we took a look at the rest of the family. Excuse me. Took a look at the rest of the family and mom is dealing with scalp issues like eczema, psoriasis, dad's having asthma, he's got two other siblings.
both younger siblings who are dealing with really bad behavioral issues. So angry outbursts, ADHD like symptoms, just really uncontrollable. Pans and pandas, you nailed it. And so I thought we got a house full of mold. And so we did run a mycotoxin test, just a urine test on this kid, 16 different strains of mold, all the common nasty ones you'd expect them to have plus some bonuses. And so they did some digging around. They thought, it's just a little patch of mold in the bathroom. We cleaned it up, it's not that big of a deal. Well, they did some digging.
Michael Rubino (26:38.743) Like, Pans and Pandas?
Josh Dech - CHN (27:00.172) They ended up peeling back the walls. There was mold everywhere. The insurance company came in, Michael, they remediated everything. They completely ripped the whole kitchen apart, the bathrooms apart, re -did everything. Here we are four months later, he's getting sick again. So I the mold is probably not dealt with. So they brought in a mold dog who did some sniffing around. They peeled back the walls. It's in all the wood, all the lumbers, all moldy, which is probably what you talked about at the beginning. It was lumber likely sitting in dirt and moisture before the build.
And so the very fundamental, like the foundations of their home, the bones, are full of mold and their kids getting really sick because of it. What do you do? Do you just tear the house down? Do you knock it down, start over, move? Like what is an option for someone in these situations?
Michael Rubino (27:45.495) Yeah, I mean, it can be obviously very expensive dealing with it on that scale. Obviously the cheapest way to deal with that is when the house is being built. And that's where, you know, it's so frustrating to see that happen to families, including my own. With that being said, I mean, you you would probably want to open up a lot of those walls and treat. Do you have to treat necessarily every wall? No, I would recommend doing a wall cavity sample on every exterior wall. You'll notice that some walls will be worse than others, you know.
I think costs and consideration go together, right? And so I always try to tell people, we use the information that we have, the data, and we use scientific data, and then we put that with what is it cost? And you have to be able to justify the value, right? I'm not gonna tell you to open up a wall to get rid of one spore. That would be crazy. The cost versus value, we just wouldn't be there.
But I will tell you to open up a wall and deal with 100 ,000 or a million sports, right? And so we want to start looking at how much is it there? What types of mold? What toxins can that produce? Are these the toxins that are specifically abundant in your body? Because if you aren't aware, you can actually test for different mycotoxins in your body. You can attribute those to the specific molds in your home. That's another reason why I love the dust test that pairs very well with mycotoxin reports. And you could actually see.
Okay, have high levels of ochratoxin A in my body. Guess what? I have high levels of aspergillus in my home, Eureka, we figured it out. There's the exposure. If I lessen the exposure, I'm gonna get better. It's a very foolproof process to be able to correlate and look through. Now, with that being said, I would actually pay more attention to how it's uniquely affecting the individuals inside the house. And so, maybe I have high levels of cladosporium.
and maybe I have high levels of Aspergillus, but I've only got Ochratoxin A, and that seems to be the driving force of my body's having trouble with. Well then, I'm gonna say, let's put a pin in the cladosporium, let's focus on removing the Aspergillus, because I could see that that's actually creating an issue for you. molding, creating a healthy home, it's never a one step fix all type of deal. It's a step by step process. so, depending on your situation,
Josh Dech - CHN (29:53.911) Hmm.
Michael Rubino (30:09.07) what history your house has, the funds that you have disposable to you. All these things play a role into how we actually put together a program. And I've put together programs for people that like, here's 7 ,500 bucks. If you spend the 7 ,500 bucks, we can knock out this really bad problem. There might be other issues across the house that we might want to improve, but this is your budget. This is what we're gonna do. And next year, let's revisit all this.
Let's check things out, let's revisit the data and see how you're feeling and compare and see if there's anything else needing to be done. We take a step -by -step approach because none of us have money trees in our backyard, but we also can't afford to continue to get worse and worse and worse. And so it's putting together programs that fit within people's means to be able to give them the relief that they so desperately need. And I've been doing this since about 2012 and it's been invigorating because
I've never seen such a hidden topic have such a profound impact on people's health and well -being and to see them go through the transformation and come out the other side, it's been remarkable.
Josh Dech - CHN (31:26.297) It's really amazing what the body can do and it's given the tools and resources to do so. We talk about this all the time. Short or long story short I should say, back when I was in my early 20s I was a personal trainer and I had a woman who came in to see me 57 years old. Her daily dose was 26 pills, two shots of insulin on disability, CPAT machine that works and...
She had never exercised in her life by age 59, simply on exercise and nutrition. She was off all her medication, all of her drugs, no longer on disability, no longer on CPAP. And at age 59, I entered into a powerlifting competition here in Canada and she ended up breaking a world record. Two years from disability to breaking world records as a weightlifter. This little lady, you know, lifting 300, 320 pounds off the floor at five feet tall, right? But that's what the body can do when it's given the tools and resources to heal itself.
In this same scenario, we don't often talk about the environments required to heal. We don't often talk about the mold. We don't often talk about the toxins in general in our home. What are your clothing made of? Or what are your clothes made of? What are your sheets sprayed on with fire retardants? We're covered in these chemicals and these toxins, but then you start to add mold on top of it. And now everybody's sick and nobody can figure out why. Or getting rid of all this junk in our system and our bodies slowly starting to clean out.
but it's still the mold that's lingering causing these issues. And then the residual damage, it's almost as if your body's a glass of water, it fills up, it overflows. Yes, we know it's filled the glass, the toxin, the mold, et cetera. But now it's not able to empty out the bottom like it should to drain properly. And then everything else is wet. Now there's more damage within the body causing more problems. And you're dealing with these environments in a way that I don't think is really commonly considered. Again, going back to the very beginning where he said, well,
I've got a new home. I can't have mold, but you very well could. And there's ways to test simple dust testing, simple ways to test to begin remediating that mold. I'd love to ask, and we talked about mold symptoms, but I'd to see your experience with this. What symptoms do you see that people typically experience when they're exposed to mold? They're thinking, maybe I got mold in my home. Is it even affecting me personally? What if I got a certain genetic?
Josh Dech - CHN (33:42.145) chain or genetic snips where the mold is not that big of a deal. Maybe it is. How would I know symptomatically based on my body if the mold is affecting me and in what ways?
Michael Rubino (33:51.885) Well, for one, based upon experience and working with so many different people, I can tell you that I notice it is a profound trigger for pretty much any autoimmune disease. I'm not gonna go so far as to say it causes autoimmune disease. I think it definitely is a trigger for autoimmune disease and exacerbates the heck out of any autoimmune disease. I think that its symptoms pretty much mirror those of Lyme disease.
Josh Dech - CHN (34:06.114) I might.
Michael Rubino (34:18.774) And so a lot of people get confused if they have Lyme disease or mold exposure. Typically I see that they sometimes can have both and be confused about that and get a lot of false positive, false negatives for one or the other. Probably the top things that people complain about, and this has changed a little bit after COVID, but brain fog, chronic fatigue, weight gain, weight loss. So like for me, I deal with weight gain. Some people, they can't put weight on.
And so it's a little bit tricky to kind of discern the two. those are two things. You'll see skin issues are another massive thing that is displayed. Chronic inflammation. There's a whole disease called Sears that has been named after the chronic inflammation you can experience. I'd say those are probably some of the more common things. Lately though, post -COVID, for some reason, long COVID.
symptoms being, you know, literally you just like, like you just got COVID and have never recovered. The, the frequent illness, perpetual illness, sinus issues, things of that nature, know, difficulty breathing of course can happen. But I would say to be honest, a lot of the other stuff that you would never think could be mold is typically the stuff that gets displayed first.
Josh Dech - CHN (35:44.311) Yeah, absolutely. It's really kind of scary when you start thinking about how pervasive and invasive it is. You know, there's something that's been trending around actually. It was Jordan Peterson who brought it up on one of his shows talking about sick building syndrome where there's so much toxicity, mold, recirculating air. It's like this entire apartment complex or office building. Everyone seems to be ill.
everyone seems to get these sicknesses or diseases or they have commonalities in their symptoms or diagnoses and it comes down to what's in our environments and it's such a pervasive topic and I'm so glad we're having a chance to talk about from a remediation specialist. I mean you're working with some of the we'll say A -list celebrities for sure you're working all over the country and that's something that I think on one end can be really encouraging to know that there is help no matter where you are.
what your finances look like. On the other hand, I think a lot of people will go, well, Michael Rubino works with Gwyneth Peltrow. How on earth could I afford this? And so you mentioned some customization. What are some of the, we'll say, cheapest options, dare I say the word, that you've seen people be able to fix the mold in their home versus the most expensive tear the home down and start over options?
Michael Rubino (36:56.385) Yeah, so it's a great question. First off, do, I am aware of that. Sometimes people think, it's because I've worked with some of the top people out there and celebrities and athletes and CEOs of amazing companies. Everyone goes, well, he just must be too expensive. It's actually quite the opposite. So my goal over the past decade has been trying to get this process to become more affordable and more affordable, more affordable. So much so that I helped co -found a
an amazing charity called Change the Air Foundation, which how we make things more affordable there is by appropriating funds and pushing the government for change because we need change. I I can't fix one house at a time, every house in America, every house in the world, it's impossible. We need systemic changes that actually allow us to have better protections and better funds if and when we have these problems that occur.
I'm very much so aware of how expensive things can be. Unfortunately, sometimes you do need to tear down walls and tearing down walls can be expensive. Now you're in renovation. Anyone who's ever been a part of a construction project over the last four or five years knows exactly what I mean when I say construction products can be pretty expensive. You never know what you're gonna get. You open up a wall, it's like just like an HDTV show. I opened up this wall and guess what?
Josh Dech - CHN (38:11.424) Mm
Michael Rubino (38:22.653) the plumbing's no good, we need to change all the plumbing. All of sudden it becomes like this never -ending cost suck into what you're dealing with. And yes, that can happen, doesn't happen often, but it does happen, right? And so I think it's really important for people to understand a couple different things. One, when you have a bad problem, you should fix it, and you should fix it quickly. Because the longer you allow that problem to exist, the more expensive it actually gets. So that is one piece of advice.
that I want everybody to be imparted with. The second thing is, if you absolutely can't fix certain things, this happens with people like in rental homes, this happens in people with home ownership. had a young couple once last year just bought a house at the top of their budget. Prices have been crazy post COVID and they didn't have any money for remediation. So we had to help navigate through that process of this is their first home and
Unfortunately, there were some things that, you know, whether the homeowners disclosed it or didn't know about it, it's just they weren't prepared for it, right? And so we always have to kind of figure out what do we do with this situation? And so when we can't fix something right away, what do we do? Got to open windows and doors as much as humanly possible. Why is that? You may have heard this little scientific slogan, the solution to pollution is dilution. And what we're actually doing is we add more air.
Josh Dech - CHN (39:45.718) Mm.
Michael Rubino (39:50.177) we're diluting the amount of particles present that we'd be breathing in. And so, obviously that air has to be clean, fresh air, right? So I say open windows, open doors, bring fresh air in from outside. That means that you will have a less concentration of particles entering that body with every breath, okay? So that's why that's a solution. Another thing is we talked a lot about dust today. Getting air purifiers can be very helpful. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg on them.
Go to homecleanse .com right now and you'll find air purifiers that I like for like 150 bucks or less, okay? It doesn't have to cost you thousand bucks or more. Good air purifiers that you install into the home, they can be really beneficial on reducing the amount of dust that you're breathing in. With that being said, we already talked about how microbes hit your eye on dust. You're gonna also be reducing the amount of microbes you're breathing in, right? Which can be very helpful if the microbes you're breathing in can be toxic, right?
That's another thing you want to do and last but not least, sticking with the dust theme here, do not let dust build up and accumulate in your house. Because with dust comes formaldehyde, mold, bacteria, VOCs, microplastics, all the chemicals, everything you don't want to be breathing in on a daily basis, you'll be breathing in on a daily basis unless you have some sort of routine cleaning regimen. The more we let dust accumulate, the worse it is for our health.
Those are things that I think are really important, things you can do right away. Now, another thing is, if I know I have a pretty bad situation in a room, I'd probably crack a window. I might put like a filter on the outside or something so I don't have like water coming in, but I'll crack a window, engineer something to make sure that I'm not gonna get wind driven rains into the room, and I'll probably seal off that room with plastic from the inside.
So I'm letting those particles go outside, not inside across the house. I'll probably seal up the HVAC vents in that room as well, and I'll spend time on the other side of the house. Now, obviously you can't live like that forever, but in a temporary situation, you need relief. You're renting, you're stuck in a lease for another three months. You're just trying to make ends meet and get out of there. These are solutions that can absolutely help you in a crunch.
Josh Dech - CHN (42:14.792) I love it and I want to do some myth -busting here as well because oftentimes There's an assumption that if I just leave the mold alone, it's not going to be a problem But I mean mold can eject their own spores the slightest breeze can carry them What are the ways that mold can spread it's under your sink. Can you just close the cabinet and just pretend it's not there?
Michael Rubino (42:35.755) Unfortunately, no, I mean, I would look at mold like an erupting volcano. It is constantly, constantly spewing out spores. If mold feels threatened, it will also spew out mycotoxins along with those spores. Now, what makes mold feel threatened? Typically other types of molds. You might have like Stachybotrys and Cotomium fighting for the same real estate underneath your sink, and they're trying to kill off each other. We're innocent bystanders from this chemical warfare happening, right?
Josh Dech - CHN (43:02.936) Sure.
Michael Rubino (43:04.973) But no, think about it from that perspective, it constantly spewing. If I just close the door, it's gonna be constantly spewing in there. look, every time your HVAC system turns on, every time you open your front door, open a window, do anything, even move through the room, you are pushing and pulling air around. So that crack and crevice that you have in your cabinets is enough for something so small, 25 to 50 times smaller, smaller than what the eye can actually see. Think about that for a second.
It's like a theme park entrance, all these cracks and crevices you have in your home. I mean, if it's behind your wall, it's coming from underneath the baseboard. It's coming through the paint. That's how small we're talking. So no, there's really no way to just kinda, you know, out of sight, out of mind this type of thing. Not if you don't wanna be affected by it. So the key would be, how can I redirect it, right? If I can't remediate it today, how can I redirect it until I can remediate?
or how can I redirect it until I can get out of there? Because if you're renting, you can't remediate that space. You need the cooperation of the landlord. And that's its own podcast, probably.
Josh Dech - CHN (44:13.794) Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Are there any other myths about mold that you often see circulating around that we can take a minute here just to break so that if you're listening right now, we want you to know that you might read it online. There might be something common that's being said that from one of the top experts in North America straight from the mouth of Michael Rubino. What are we talking about?
Michael Rubino (44:35.853) All right, so bleach does not work for mold, despite what you may have read on the CDC page back in 1996. EPA has already updated their websites to tell you don't use bleach to kill mold. CDC, they're a little slow. Hopefully they'll get there one day. Same information's available on the World Health Organization and pretty much anywhere you read online. But unfortunately, back in the 90s, bleach was very popular for pretty much everything.
I could literally associate the smell of clean with bleach, even though the smell of clean really should just be the absence of smells entirely. You know, unfortunately bleach will bleach it, it'll make it look like it's gone, but it won't actually do anything. And then just to add on top of that, pretty much anything designed to kill mold, you shouldn't be kind of buying into. Because the objective actually shouldn't be to kill mold, it should be to remove it.
Josh Dech - CHN (45:13.814) Yes.
Michael Rubino (45:34.942) And to give you more of a perspective on that, you if you had a weed growing in your garden, you wouldn't just like chop the head off. You wouldn't just like try to wipe it off, right? You'd pull it from its roots out. mold has roots too called hyphae and they grow into things. So if I see mold on my wall and I just try to wipe it off with some bleach, unfortunately, it may look like it's gone. It's still contaminated into the structure. It's probably growing. It's already behind the wall and it's just going to continue to grow through the wall.
Josh Dech - CHN (45:42.434) course.
Michael Rubino (46:02.857) And so you'll be wiping that down forever, but more importantly, all that mold that's still behind the wall would still be affecting your health. And so you want to actually remove it. Now you can do this in like shower grout, of course, because it's growing through the grout. You can easily remove it, but you you want to scrub it clean. You don't want to just pour some product on it that that's a miracle product that kills it magically and it all goes away because those products do not work as intended.
Josh Dech - CHN (46:33.066) Gotcha. So bleach doesn't work, closing the door is not going to work for you. Are there any other major mold myths that we want to just hit off the top of the head or these really are big ones?
Michael Rubino (46:43.713) Those are huge ones. Don't kill it, remove it. I think that's something that people should get behind. UV lights. A lot of people say, I've got to put a UV light in my HVAC. That'll solve that problem. I got this UV lamp that I bought off Amazon. I don't need to do anything. mean, UV lights, UV technology has some benefit. It definitely slows down microbial growth. It's not going to be your end -all solution.
A UV light is not penetrating through every crack and crevice in your HVAC unit to prevent mold from growing in the entirety of the unit. As a matter of fact, you might notice that a coil has two sides. Well, that UV light can sit on one side or the other. So the other side's already vulnerable. Now, using a UV lamp, again, you might stop some growth in that general vicinity. The fact that some of these marketing materials tell you that a UV lamp can penetrate walls and kill everything in its place,
That's not scientifically true. so, you know, just be careful with a lot of the marketing terminology on killing, anything that says killing or O -zoning or this or that. I mean, just stay clear of it because there might be some benefits in some contextual situations. However, from an ideology perspective, you always want to try to remove it and stop it at its source. And when you do that, you actually gain lasting results.
Josh Dech - CHN (48:11.609) Yeah, I think that's so important to understand. Don't kill, you have to remove. It's so pervasive. It's such an issue and there's so much myth. I think oftentimes mold, just like any topic on the internet, gut health, right? It gets oversimplified to the nth degree. We'll just do this thing. Here's this seven day detox and you'll be fine. A 24 hour detox, you're fine. Here's a spray for the mold and it'll go away. But it really is layers and layers deep. You mentioned it comes through the bloody paint. Air's not gonna do that.
but mold will because these spores are so tiny. And I'm so glad we had a chance to cover this because mold is something that we talk about, like I've said, but it's not something that we've really had an opportunity in the show to go into in great detail about how to deal with your environment that can be toxic full of mold, how to know that it's toxic and what to do about it. And so I want to pass the ball back to you here, Michael. Is there anything that we haven't talked about? Anything we haven't mentioned that maybe is a really must know?
for our listeners before we start wrapping things up.
Michael Rubino (49:10.503) there's many different things we haven't talked about. Unfortunately, we don't have all the unlimited time here. But I think with mold, with air quality, first off, just being aware of it, you can be an adverse effect of anything you're not aware of. If you're not aware of sugar can kill you, you're going to continue to eat sugar. If you're not aware that you can drink too much to excess, you drink too much to excess.
Once you're aware of something, you you now are in control of that to some degree. And so now the fact that you've listened to this, you're now in control of the fact that air quality is either something you're gonna care about after listening to this episode or something you're not. And that's totally within your control. And then once it's in your control because you're not aware of it, now it's just, what do I do about it, right? Start with a dust test, really simple.
It's easy to do. It takes all of an hour to go around your house to collect dust, to send it in, get the results from the lab. Now you have scientific information on the quality of air that you're breathing, right? And you could take it step by step from there. Okay, let's figure out where it's coming from. Okay, let's fix that problem. Okay, good, let's retest. Great, my environment's better. These are simple steps. I'm not gonna oversimplify it, but they are simple steps that you can take one after the other, just like...
putting one foot in front of the other, and from there, you can have measured results. With those measured results, you're gonna say, how do I feel now compared to how I felt before? And I've met even the most biggest skeptics that I've ever encountered in my life have always said, whether they were the ones that felt any sort of symptoms in the beginning or not, it's always been, hey, not gonna lie, had the best sleep of my life after that, hey, not gonna lie, didn't realize.
I thought I was getting older, had less energy, but honestly, ever since you did this, I'm feeling like I'm energized again, like I was in my 20s or 30s. You hear the most remarkable transformations even from the naysayers in the house that are like, no, I'm just gonna do this because my wife really believes in this or my husband really believes in this or what have you, right? But I would argue that you should be doing this because the benefits...
Josh Dech - CHN (51:22.69) Mm
Michael Rubino (51:35.935) of breathing better air, similar to the benefits of eating better quality food, similar to the benefits of going and running on the treadmill or going outside for a run or starting to lift some weights, right? You don't know it until you start to actually feel it. And when you feel it, it's gonna be something that you never look back and say, I wish I didn't do this.
Josh Dech - CHN (51:57.377) Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I think a lot of the times again, coming back to oversimplification, it's so easy to detox.
from mold, it's really not, can sometimes take years for adults, but in children, a lot of the time, typically before seven to nine years old, if you simply remove them from the environment, their bodies will often just heal themselves and get rid of all this mold, whereas adults is a bit more of a lengthy process. Is that something that you do as well that you have a branch of what you do and actually helping people recover biologically or systemically from mold, or is it more just the housing and environment?
Michael Rubino (52:31.758) So I personally deal with the housing and environment. Obviously there are many amazing doctors out there, as you've already alluded to, that really help people heal their bodies. As you mentioned, you see kids bounce back pretty quick. They don't have this longevity issue of exposure. Whereas adults, they might have been exposed for many years as a kid, maybe again when they went to college, maybe again as an adult. You're compounding all that exposure. You're also dealing with...
Any alcohol the person might drink, maybe the drugs that they did when they grew up, all these different confluence of factors that you just don't have as a kid. I mean, you see kids, they could be sick as a dog one day and like perfectly healthy the next day, right? It's remarkable. But the fact remains is that you can get better no matter how much damage has been done. I've seen people literally reverse all their symptoms. And I've seen that happen over the course of a year, seen it happen over the course of two years.
Josh Dech - CHN (53:10.006) Mm
Michael Rubino (53:30.829) I've seen it happen over the course of six months. Everybody's different, right? The other thing that, you know, different camps have different regimens, they put people on different detox, things that they do. I would say that if you are with a doctor and just doesn't really seem to be working for you, try something else, right? There's other things you can do. There's other supplements you can take. There's other binders you can take.
Josh Dech - CHN (53:34.241) Mm
Michael Rubino (53:55.873) Right? You're having these reactions, let your doctor know. Maybe you need to switch the supplement to something else that's gonna work better for you. Because we're all individuals. You know, you haven't tried saunying yet? Give that a shot, right? There's so many different biohacking things you can do that might actually help speed up the process. And it is so individualized, like I... My personal belief is that medicine is going to continue to go more into that individualized route, which is where I think we need to go because...
We're all individual people. right now, modern medicine has really been like, as long as it works 67 % of the time, guess what, guys? This is what we're putting down people's throats. And we've lost sight of the other 33 % of the time, right? And so I think for where we're at, give it a shot, be resilient, go into it with a positive mindset. The mind's a powerful thing. If you go into this, I will get better.
Josh Dech - CHN (54:36.983) Mm
Michael Rubino (54:55.117) you will get better. If you go into this with this attitude, like you won't get better, you're gonna take 10 times longer to get better, right? And so I think it's really just be resilient, try, don't be afraid to try new things. If something isn't working, get rid of it, try something new and just be upfront with your doctor, find the right doctor that listens to you. I think that's, you have to have that relationship and...
Josh Dech - CHN (55:00.834) Mm.
Josh Dech - CHN (55:08.695) Yeah.
Michael Rubino (55:23.447) you'll get through this. And this will be something that doesn't matter who's telling you, this ain't a thing, air quality's not important, blow through the noise, and when you get to the other side, you'll understand exactly what I meant.
Josh Dech - CHN (55:36.395) Yeah, I love that and I do want to emphasize please don't try to take on mold detoxing from your body by yourself I have seen people put themselves in the hospital. It's really nasty. It can be very very dangerous. So please seek a professional Feel free of course to reach out to me and my team if you need help with that but here's what I want to do Michael because My field of expertise by no means is it dealing with the home? For someone who's looking to get a hold of you, of course, you got the dust test calm to start there
If they want to get a hold you there's a known mold issue or suspected mold issue. Where can they do that? Where can they reach you? How can they get help with their home and dealing with that environmental issue?
Michael Rubino (56:14.123) Yeah, so go on over to the MichaelRubino .com if you're looking, you know, if you need help, there's a lot of great resources there. You can contact me directly there. I'll always point you in the right direction. If you, if you were, you know, resonating with anything that I said, please check out changetheairfoundation .org. It's a 501c3 nonprofit. There's tons of amazing resources and free information out there, free guides. How do you find the right people? How do you find the right team?
No matter where you are, these are things that I think can help you along the way. And you'll find a lot of research papers we've done, a policy brief we've done to help our government understand the complexity of the issues that we're dealing with. We just passed a law in Illinois reforming some of the laws around air quality. We still have 49 states to go, and this is just one part of the laws that we're trying to accomplish. So lots of work left to do, lots of sleeves to roll up, but...
I think you'll find it worth your while going on that site as well and seeing what we're actually trying to do systemically, not just fixing your house.
Josh Dech - CHN (57:20.277) I love that. think what you're doing is really amazing and it really is massive in the world over when it comes to health and health care and long -term diseases, recovery or even prevention entirely which I think is fantastic. thank you for doing what you do Michael. It's a very unique field of work but obviously very needed, very pervasive what's going on and you're at the heart of it right now and we love that. Thank you so much for being here.
Michael Rubino (57:44.503) Thanks so much, Josh, and thanks for having me on and helping me spread this important message.