 to Inventing Our Future on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Brittany Zimmerman. And I'm your co-host, Richard Ha. Joining us today is our guest, Stephen Wiscombe, who will help us do a deep dive into our J conversation. How are you doing this week, Richard? Oh, top shape. Nice and sunny. Good, glad to hear it. All right, this week we'll be addressing the JAG method. So to learn more about that, let's get to know our guest this week. Welcome, Stephen, and please tell us about yourself. Hi, how are you guys doing? Thanks for having me. Yeah, my name is Stephen, as they've said. I do handyman work on the island here. And one of the things I, one of the services I provide that feels like it's really, really important is mold remediation, particularly on the west side of the island. I mean, it is an island wide problem and really a problem worldwide in all kinds of environments. But particularly on the west side of the island here, it's, yeah, it's definitely an issue. So yeah, I do handyman work and with the specialization in mold. Oh, wonderful. Is that what the JAG method is? Is that a style of mold remediation? Tell us a little bit about mold remediation, please. Yeah, the JAG method, we can probably go into that a little more in detail after we talk more generally about mold, why it's an issue, some things that I've learned that are helpful for in the remediation process, helpful tips and tricks. The JAG method is kind of our latest, greatest idea and it's very nascent. So it's in the pipeline and it's still something we're fine tuning, but we have to get into that in more detail. All right, awesome. So maybe we can start at a really, really basic level, right? What is mold? Yeah, mold is, it's, well, the kind that we're working with or that we're dealing with is specifically household mold, right? I mean, a lot of people don't know this, but the ambient air we breathe outside is full of mold spores. It's just part of the natural environment and it's a byproduct of decomposition. So anything in the environment that's decaying has a mold counterpart, like a mold specialist that helps break it down. And like any living thing, mold has a way of spreading and reproducing itself and it's a very integral and important part of the environment. And so anywhere you see something breaking down, you're going to also have as part of that mold, the presence of mold, mold spores. And yeah, something important about mold is that the mold spores are really, really small and really light and that's how they move around, right? Some tree seeds and whatnot, they use birds or other mechanisms for movement, mold gets around because it almost doesn't weigh anything. So mold spores are very small, they move very easily. And that's a pretty important piece to understand when we're talking about indoor mold as well. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. I wanted to make clear that M-O-L-D is the same thing. Yeah, it's just one is English, England kind of pronunciation and spelling. Anyway, I looked it up. That's news to me, Richard, but that's what you want to do, okay? If I were doing work in the UK, I'll be sure to get the spelling straight. Yeah, you know what? My sense of mold and I don't know much about it just in general, but I had the feeling that it has a lot to do with humidity and we have a lot of humidity on the east side. Is that fair to say? Yeah, the really kind of scary molds that we encounter in our indoor spaces require basically the same environment that any outdoor mold requires, which is just wet, dark, and mold needs air to survive, but very, very little. So it's kind of like a Goldilocks thing. So one of the ways to combat mold in interior spaces with proper ventilation and typically for where we find mold present in homes is in spaces where there is poor or no ventilation. So mold spores light, just a little bit of air typically. So that's one key factor for mold growth in homes has to do with ventilation. So is mold an animal? Is it a plant? Is it a bacteria? Like at its core, you know, how should we think about? How should we think about? Well, I know the kinds that I know and there may be many kinds of mold that I don't know about, but mold as a fungus, right? So it's in the fungal kingdom. So it's not a bacteria. It's a decomposition specialist. And it's actually the world of fungus is more similar to humans than a lot of other elements of the natural world that we're aware of. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, yeah. Very good. And are all mold, you were saying there's some molds that are specifically bad? Are there good molds? Well, yeah, I mean, I would say that mold is just it's a natural byproduct of the environment. So what we call bad is stuff that shows up in homes where we don't want it and can impact health. Obviously, if we didn't have mold in the natural environment, we wouldn't have soil. You need something that's going to break down organic trees and leaves and all of this stuff and put it back into the earth. So yeah, it's really important. It's not like mold is the bad guy. It's the mold shows up in places and informs in our homes that are not conducive to human health. And again, like when we walk outside and we're taking hikes in the woods or anytime we're outside, we're breathing this stuff and we're breathing it in concentrations that are more or less harmless, right? And if you're very sensitized, sometimes people can even be outside and desensitized by mold in their environment. But typically for the average person, you're not going to experience that just with breathing normal circulated outdoor air. It's on our interior spaces where we do have poor ventilation, higher concentration of mold spores that we get issues related to human health. And we also get funky kinds of mold that you don't get in the national environment as often. It all exists out there, but to get it in those kinds of high concentrations, it just shows up in our environments where we have bedrooms with drywall and all of the things we use to build conventional living spaces. Digging into that a little bit, do you think that the way that we're building homes today, as opposed to the way that homes used to be built, make us more conducive to growing mold, or do you think that mold is something that's been dealt with in interior spaces regardless of how a home is built? It's a good question. I don't know what the longer history of mold would be in homes built, for example, 100 years ago, or homes built in cultures of the past. I mean, mold can really form on any surface and it's interesting even in modern homes to see mold forming on places like latex paint. It's non-porous. It doesn't seem like there would be anything for the mold to take root in, but we see it commonly and a lot of that I think has to do with just like there's just enough of something for the mold to eat. A little bit of dirt and dust on the wall collecting over a few years and all of a sudden you get the right conditions and the mold will take off. So, yeah, it's a good question and it's an interesting one. It's hard to answer by comparison. What kind of mold would people have been dealing with in homes before? Probably it's always been present. Probably it's always been there and it may be true that our grandparents had issues with mold. Maybe they didn't know about it. Probably they didn't have the same kind of sophisticated methods to deal with it, which has been spray and wash. But yeah, I mean, I think it's safe to say that it's always been around. Like these moldboards have always been around. It's just that, yeah, when we create homes that are more and more airtight, right, we have homes that are like double-sealed windows and those kinds of factors, they create a unique environment in which mold can grow. So we just, yeah, as our methods change, those aspects of nature change with it, yeah. Seems like we could save some money, yeah, make it more simple. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Can you see the mold? I mean, is it visible when you're looking at it? Can you, identify it just by looking? Typically, yeah. I mean, there's some, mold spores come in all different colors, right? So you, in some cases, it can blend in a little better than others. If you have, you know, for example, some kind of a white mold growing on something with a white background, you might not see it as readily. The infamous black mold is hard to miss. It's very black and typically when you see that, you know. You can always do testing. That's something that we provide as a service, is mold spore testing. If you're interested in getting a lab report that characterizes specifically what kind of mold is in your living environment, it could be a short list of one of 20 different kinds of mold that are the most common culprits for indoor mold that could be, you know, harmful to someone's health. So in a lab report, you get a detailed summary of what all those are, but it's not necessary to know that. If you have mold in your house growing on anything, whether or not you're sensitized to that, whether or not that's creating an immediate health concern, it's not healthy for your home. That's the other piece, right? It's not healthy for human, for humans to be breathing or anything else. That's animals to be breathing. But it's also not healthy for this material because it's decomposing something. So if you're getting mold growth on a substance in your home and you let it go long enough, you're that thing is going to decompose. So for that reason as well, yeah, it's important to keep an eye on it. But yeah, you can see it. You can see it in the environment. It can be confused with, obviously, people can, I've been in homes and done inspections where people are like, oh, is that mold and it's not, it's dirt or scuff. So it's, you know, and it also can be confused with mildew, which is kind of, I would say, stage one. You can get grimy mildew starting on a wall, and we're not quite to the mold stage with the mildews yet, but it's usually an early indicator. So if you're paying attention to your environment, your internal environment in the house, and you're looking for those things, and you're seeing mildew growth superficially on your walls, that's usually a good indicator to start tidying up, clean up before that starts getting worse and turning into a mold issue. You know, I've been a farmer for many years, and we did hoop houses. So during the dry season, you know, if you're driving by, dust flies up in the air and lands on the top, then the rainy season, I have a funny feeling that that's something growing there. And the reason why that's a concern is whatever's there is blocking the light. I'm wondering if that's a mold, because, you know, when I go to the university and look at their hoop houses, that's the first thing I look at, look up and see what's coming through, what's blocking the light. Is that possible that it could be mold on top? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the wet side of this island, it's everywhere. And you see it. I mean, the most obvious example that I see a lot is solar panels. Solar panels grow 10 years into it, you've got enough dust collected, got enough grime collected on the panels, you can get growth right on the panel. And that's definitely blocking your light intake. Yeah, it can grow all kinds, and it's very pervasive on the wet side of the island. It grows, I mean, it grows all over you. You have people in Kona and other parts of the island that are drier that have issues as well. Those are typically related to, you know, plumbing issues in the house or flooding issues, they get standing water in the house and then they get a mold issue. But a lot of the exterior mold growth that we see is just, yeah, it's just the way it is on a wet jungle. Yeah. So the next question is, what can we do? That's simple, you know, and I'm thinking what can we spray on it that's reasonable to do and effective stuff like that? So, yeah, the first thing I would say about that is if you're not comfortable dealing with mold or if you feel like you know yourself best, if you feel like you have a health related issue or you're sensitized by mold, then definitely talk to someone who can help. The DIY approach, a lot of people want to do that and that's fine, it can be done. So you can work in a good way to eliminate mold in your space without sophisticated equipment, but you do need to prepare yourself and probably talk to a professional at least before you do. Yeah, I mean, the Reader's Digest version of our process, we have three primary chemicals that we use to mitigate mold in the environment and just a quick sidebar on that, there's in my line of work, there's kind of like two primary kinds of services. I fall into the middle ground. I try to do work where we mitigate or mediate mold without demolition. Typically if you have a water issue, flooding issue in the house and you have to extract water and then treat after the fact, that's more of a water damage restoration and that's kind of a different niche, that's a different service. They're related because a lot of mold issues in homes come subsequent to a flood or subsequent to a plumbing leak or there's some kind of standing water behind the wall. So, but my services specifically are targeting non-demolition related mold remediation. So if you've got a mold issue, but it's early in the game or it's not like taken over the house or it's not a major flooding issue, but you've got maybe an air quality issue or a sense that there's mold in the environment or you're experiencing some of the typical symptoms like itchy eyes, nose, respiratory issues, headaches, brain fog, those are common symptoms of having mold in your environment. Then in terms of conditioning the interior air quality and preventing mold blooms or kind of like reducing the amount of mold in the environment, that's kind of the specialized niche within which I work. But to your question, Richard, about doing the work yourself, you can just talk to someone who can help, talk to someone who has done some professional work and mold to get some tips. On the, in a farm context, that's new for me. So I wouldn't know exactly how to answer that question. 90% of my work has been residential interior spaces. And within those spaces, we have a chemistry set that works for us, probably for outdoor applications, we'd have to go back to the drawing board or for greenhouses or different kinds of farming applications, we'd have to go back to the drawing board and explore and find out what chemistries, I mean, maybe what we're using would work there as well. I just don't know, I don't have a lot of experience in that arena. But yeah, we use three different kinds of chemistry that are effective. The first is to neutralize all mold spores, dehydrates them. And I really like the chemistry because it's working. On that level, it dehydrates everything and it leaves the internal airspace microbiologically neutral. So it's a pharmaceutical clean room technique. And when we're done treating the space, it's basically an aerosolized peroxide, it's a version of peroxide, hydrogen peroxide. We aerosolize that and it brings all of the dust and any of the microbiology in the space is neutralized and comes to the ground, basically. So it leaves the inner air quality really neutral, really fresh. And it's kind of starting at ground zero with your any kind of living microbiology in the space, you're just starting at zero. Like there's no living things in the space at that point. But then we open our windows and doors and we ventilate. And once we do, we're reintroducing all of the normal air, the ambient air, air outside of all of those spores and everything that are already in the environment are reintroduced into the space. So people are like, well, how does that work? Well, we'd like to start with the ground zero. And then we follow that up with this the second step, which is it's a microbiostatic film. And this chemistry set I really like because it's working with microbes on a mechanical level. I mean, you can use all kinds of things to kill microbes, right? And bleach, for example, bleach is probably our famous most overused chemistry for killing little bugs that we don't like, right? Just spray some bleach. Well, that also comes at a price because bleach is also toxic to us. And at concentrations, right, we can get away with it. But bleach is killing microbes chemically. And so it's like chemical warfare against microbes. What I like about the second step or the second set of chemistry we use is that it's a film. And we basically do a spray and wipe. So we just coat the surfaces of the house or the room or anything that's having a mold issue. And it makes that surface antimicrobial. And also the way that it works at the microbiological level is those little spores that are floating around in the air. When they hit the surface, they rupture. So it's a mechanical kill. So relative to a biological kill, it has more longevity. And it's being like a nature nerd and someone who's kind of sensitive to like all kinds of chemicals myself and wanting to do things more naturally. I much prefer that something that's eliminating microbes mechanically versus something that's chemical. So yeah, that was probably actually not the reader's digest version. But yeah, that's an introduction to the chemistry we're using. And then there's one which is we do use bleach in cases where the aesthetic is important, which is very important to many people because mold stains are very persistent. And once a stain gets into a fabric or into a substance, it can be very difficult to remove. And those first two chemicals we use do not remove mold stains. So in the event that like it's got to look great, we can do a third step and follow up with a bleaching, essentially, of the mold stain in certain cases. In some cases, we just can't. But yeah, that felt like a fire hydrant information, but hopefully that was... No, that's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So what are the long-term effects of living with mold? Even whether we're doing it intentionally or unintentionally, I know we were talking about how it's detrimental both to the human and to the house in terms of decomposition. But what are the long-term effects in terms of human health? That's a great question. And it's something I don't know as much about because the people I work with are typically taking those issues to the doctor, which is where that should be. The short-term and acute effects of mold in the space are some of the things I mentioned. You're going to have allergies. People who have allergies, you're going to have those kinds of symptoms, itchy eyes, nose, any kind of respiratory issues, ongoing chronic coughs, like shallow coughs are common, things that I've heard from people, headaches. And then if you're just getting by and you're like, oh, that's more or less normal for me, more of a long-term thing is it takes a toll on your immune health because it's one more thing that your body has to constantly work to clean filter. Yeah. So if you're in an environment sleeping where you're breathing that all night long, you can just imagine how much your body has to work to try to. So it's not something that anyone needs. If you have a mold issue in your house, it really should be something that you consider, something that you're thinking about and asking questions like, how do I deal with this? How do I improve my... Yeah, for sure. Are there any deadly molds? Are people risking their lives by living in places that are heavily inundated with different types of molds? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, if you get into the nitty gritty of the different kinds of molds, each mold has, in the data, has more common, specific things that it will cause in the average person. But I mean, the human health system is so complex. It's really more about like, how does one affect you and your living environment? And again, when we come in, a lot of times people are interested in having an air sample taken, or a surface sample. We set it into a lab and then they'll tell you, they'll break it down parts per million and tell you what, according to the lab, is considered a risk. This is a medium or a high spore count based on the sample. But nothing trumps just what it's like for the individual in the space because there's such a wide spectrum. There's people who can live in really moldy environments and be more or less unaffected, just how it is. And then other people can get very little exposure to specific kinds of molds and be very sensitized, be very sensitive to that. So it really depends on the individual. So regardless of what comes back from a lab test, it's just confirmation for people. Sometimes that brings people peace of mind to actually get a lab report. The treatment's always the same. So if I come into a space and we're looking at a mold in the environment, we're going to treat it the same no matter what, which is just like, let's get the mold out of your space. Could be 20 kinds, maybe one kind point is you don't need to be breathing mold when you sleep. Yeah. And Stephen, what got you into mold? Like how does a person end up being a mold guy? I was being a mold guy. I keep asking about that sometimes. So actually, yeah, I went to school at UH. I studied linguistics somewhere along the way. There's that guy who talks about trade skills, right? He's always preaching trade skills to people. He's like, you know, education's cool. Get yourself a hard skill. I can't face to face with that. Just a chapter of life where it was very difficult finding employment. And on top of that, 2020 came. So around 2020 was when all of this started for me and it was one of those kind of several little things fell into place in a surprising way with a lot of support and a lot of directions and myself and three of my brothers started this company back in 2020. And initially it was to treat ICU's. So we were doing, we were doing hospital lobbies and ICU's specifically during the season of COVID when everyone was, you know, super concerned about these kinds of things. So the chemistry set we use works on mold, but it works on any kind of microbiology. So the little viruses or COVIDs or whatever is out in the air, the people who are scared up, it works the same for all of that. So that's where we started and worked in that arena until it didn't make sense for us anymore. And then we pivoted to residential service with mold remediation. So yeah, it kind of came as a backdoor surprise for me. It wasn't, I didn't have dreams of working in mold as a kid. But yeah, my brother who does the same thing in Portland, it's a cold, wet environment, right? So north facing addicts in Portland, almost universally at mold and different environment here, but similar in the sense that mold is so pervasive, just you find it everywhere. There's a huge need for it on the island. And I think there must be like a ton of people walking around the island who whatever they're dealing with with their health may have some connection to mold and have a connection or maybe they have, but don't know what to do about it. You know, from a farmer standpoint, I'm thinking is, well, first let me ask this question. Is fungus a mold, a type of mold? Is fungus a type of mold? You got me there, Richard. I want to say yes. I mean, well, I would say, I would say mold is a type of fungus. A mold is a type of fungus. And the reason I ask is because there are plants that are susceptible to various types of fungus, you know, like in bananas, for example, they grow what's called a black cigatoga, which is on the leaf. And it's a mold, it's a fungus. So I don't know if there's any way to kind of deal with that outside of the regular chemicals that people use. Um, yeah, I don't know. I would. It's a good question, Richard. I don't know. We're going to have to run some experiments. That's what I hear. Yeah. All right, Richard, you bring the bananas. Steven, you bring different types of mold remediation and fungus remediation techniques, and we'll put some controls up and we'll see what happens. Sounds like plants. All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Steven. I think as a recap, we now know that mold is a fungus. We know that different types of mold are extremely important in our environment and help us in our soil sciences. There are also some molds that we as humans are relatively sensitive to. And in these very wet environments that we live in, in Hawaii, in many places, we experience them residentially. There are different ways of dealing with those both chemically and nonchemically. And yeah, any other major takeaways you want us to leave with Richard or Steven? Yeah, so mold is something I'm happy to work in right now. And it's, like I said, I believe it's there's a real need here on the island for for these services and for people to learn more about it. I think there's a lot of room for growth there. Just one small seed, I think it's important for us to to be more mindful of what kinds of materials we're using in building structures. One of the headscratchers for me is that we're using typically it's just an industry it's supplied by the industry gypsum and dry the gypsum in drywall is something that mold likes it's like a mold food almost so it's it's a little bit of a catch 22 and and manufacturers are not unaware of this and they put things in the manufacturing process to help mitigate that but I do think as time passes we can do better we can go further in creating houses with materials that are more harmonious with the environment where we build them. Without a doubt and maybe that's a good topic for another day because I know you're have really involved in some very exciting work on that side of things. So if people wanted to get a hold of you, is it okay if we share your email or your contact information so if anybody has any mold related questions they can reach out. That would be great. Yeah, happy to help over again. All right awesome. Well thank you so much Stephen. Thank you so much Richard. With that then I think we'll wrap up. This is Inventing Our Future on Think Tech Hawaii and thank you again Stephen for joining us today and thank you to you our viewers for watching. If you want to get on our email advisories to see a complete listing of all of our shows you can sign up for them on thinktechlight.com and we'll be back in two weeks so please tune in to deep dive into our Kay invention. Until then I'm Brittany Zimmer. I'm Richard Hall. All Hall.