128: Top 5 Mold Metaphors of 2022

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, guys, Today's episode is kind of a special treat. I mean, at least for me anyways, I guess, hopefully for you, because I'm going to be running through one of my favorite things to do, and that is a solid metaphor. So what today's episode is going to be are what I think are my top metaphors from 2022 that I actually think out a lot and think through and workshop in order to help explain concepts in a way that you guys can understand. So the five metaphors you are going to hear today is number five is going to be dust is like a spider web. Number four is going to be your body is like a car. Number three is going to be how mycotoxins are like a volcano. Number two is how URMI results are like drunk math, which is actually one of my personal favorites. And I had a really hard time deciding if that should be like, number two or number one. But for number one, I went with a tried and true original that I've been using for a long time, which is mold is like a factory to help cement that core concept in for you guys. So that's what you're going to hear on today's episode. If you've heard them before, maybe take a listen again, if you haven't heard these before, they can be really, really helpful for explaining core concepts, for understanding how to wrap our heads around what's going on in our space and how we may be getting impacted. All right? So enjoy today's episode. Number five, dust is like a spider web. So I just saw a spider web and it, like, got stuck on me and I couldn't get it off, and I hated every second of it. But it gave me an idea to explain something to you. Okay. Sometimes these real life things, they make it work. So here's the deal. So spider webs, when you look at a spider web, you can see it. You can see what gets stuck in it, right? You can see the insects and all the things that are stuck in it, right? Something our eyes can see. The problem is, when we're trying to understand concepts that our eyes don't see, the. The connection to our brain and understanding it gets broken somehow because we don't trust something we don't see. So here's, here's how it works in your house. The same concept happens, except instead of spider webs, it is dust that acts as the spider web, meaning anything is floating around your house that settles down in dust. The dust grabs it and holds it just like a spider web would. And it's, and it just stays in there, right? Mold, mycotoxins, bacteria, insect fragments, whatever's floating around, it gets down in the dust. So that's the first piece. Now the second part of the issue is that when we walk around the house, we're continuously popping that stuff back up into our breathing zone. Think of Charlie Brown, remember that really dirty kid that walked around and had a cloud of dust around him all the time? Well, that happens to us as we walk around the house. Except instead, instead of dirt, it's dust. Right. And we can't see it again. But the problem is that the dust, which is like a spider web in our house and holding all those things gets popped up into the air, gets into where we breathe it. And that's how we're exposed to all of this stuff in our house long term. And that's why it's so important to be doing really thorough dust cleanings in the house. Number four. Your body is like a car. I was thinking about cars, I'm looking at cars, I'm thinking about people on their, on their health journeys and all this stuff and, and just starting to think about all the different that people are told to do in order, you know, in order to get better, in order to start functioning better. Right. In order to start working better. Our body is this complex machine like a car. Right. You need to do more than one or two things for your car to work properly. Think of it, your car needs more than oil. Just does your car needs more than oil? Does your car need oil to work properly? Yes. Is oil the only thing that your car needs to work properly? No. And that's the thing that I think a lot of us get caught up in when we're deep diving the Internet and social media and trying to find the answers and all this stuff is it's not as simple as reading a five line post and saying, oh, if I do these three things, I'm going to get better. You're not. Because there's so many other things that go into the functionality of your machine, of you, of the person. Right. Does sauna help? Sure. Does red light help? Yeah. What I think that we all need to realize is that there isn't one thing. We are this complex machine, and there are little tweaks that you make to your to machines in order to keep them functioning properly. And when a machine gets really out of whack, you need bigger repairs first, and then after the repairs, you then need to be continuing to make tweaks. These aren't things that happen like that, right? They don't happen like that, unfortunately. I mean, I wish it did. And even on my end, so many of the doctors and the health coaches and the practitioners, they will tell you that the first thing that you have to do if you want to heal from mold, you got to get out of the moldy space. Whether it's finding it, remediating it, moving, whatever. A lot of you, even if you have us come in and we find everything that's going on and you fix all of it, you're not going to feel better right away, but you're going to have made the major repairs that are needed in order to then start tweaking and optimizing your machine. Your body number three. Mycotoxins are like a volcano. So the way that molds use toxins, it's a defense mechanism. All right, so this is your mold. It's not going to create this toxin byproduct unless another mold or bacteria starts to infringe on its territory and it feels threatened. If it gets threatened, it's going to do something to protect itself. Potentially the protection it does is it created creates this toxic chemical that covers the whole mold. Like lava coming over a volcano creates like a toxic moat. Basically. Other molds or bacteria come in, it kills it, and that's how it protects itself. So a common misconception is it like spits toxins, right? That's not what it does. It covers the colony itself. But the way that it gets airborne is that as spores or even particles or fragments now break off of this colony, let's say the colony group five years ago when it was growing, it created the toxin that covered all of it, and then it dried out. It's no longer producing spores, but now it's gone from like a sturdy, healthy colony to a dry, like really brittle colony. Right. Air current comes by and hits this, it'll break this into tiny pieces and it'll fly around. Those tiny pieces will now have the toxin on them because the toxin covered the whole colony. So that's how the stuff gets airborne. Whether it's a spore, the color comes off, or the fragment that breaks off. If the toxin happened initially, that's how it moves around. That's why testing for mycotoxins is really important. That's why we don't just do a mold species test and think that we know everything. On the flip side, that's why you don't just do a mycotoxin test and think that it tells you everything. That's holding on the mold species side, because as we said, the toxins are a defense mechanism. Number two. Ermi. Results are like drunk math. Alright, guys, we're going to give you a little math lesson today, okay? And the way that we're going to talk about this math lesson is actually through the use of alcohol. Whoever thought that you would be better at math with alcohol? But I'm going to tell you how this works together, it's going to make total sense when we're done with it, okay? All right, let's say you walk into a bar. Let's say your favorite drink is tequila. You walk up to the bartender, you're like, man, I want five shots of tequila. I'm ready to go. The bartender is like, all right. And they pour you shots to get. You go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You take all the shots, right? In about a half hour, who's drunk? All right, in about a half hour, you're probably going to be drunk, right? And that's okay. That's what's happening. Okay? So now let's say that your goal is to not be drunk anymore. Let's say that's your goal, okay? And if that's what you're trying to do, then conceptually you probably don't want to drink any more alcohol, right? That's not what you don't want to do. But let's say instead the bartender gives you now 10 beers. And. And the bartender tells you if you drink these 10 beers, you won't be drunk anymore. You just had five shots of tequila. But by drinking 10 beers, it's actually going to negate the effect of all of this tequila. And not only is the beer not going to get you drunk, but it's going to get you less drunk. It's going to make you sober. Does that make any sense? The answer is no. Obviously, you know, alcohol is alcohol, whether it's not in a shot or it's in a beer. The more you drink, the drunker you're gonna get. And honestly, if you drink those 10 beers, I'd probably be at the hospital getting my stomach pumped at that point, right? Like, there's no Way I'm getting better from that. Okay, so this is a simple mathematic equation. Alcohol plus more alcohol equals more drunk. Just is what it is, right? It's very simple. Can we all follow this now? We got that, right? Okay, so now let's take this mathematical concept and apply. Apply it to our home. Okay. And specifically, we're going to apply it to an ERMI test. All right, here's how the ERMI mathematical formula works. Mold 1 alcohol. If you have a lot of that, you got a mold problem. Mold, two different types of mold. This is the beer. If you have more of that, it actually tells you that you have less mold in your house. It tells you that that house is less likely to make you sick. It makes no sense. Okay, this is what I want to get across. Forget the molds and forget the groups. Just be a smart, logical person and look what it's telling you. You have molds over here. You have more molds over here. If you have a bunch of these molds and even more of these molds, it doesn't make your house less moldy. It makes it more moldy. And that means that you're going to be breathing in more mold and you're going to get more sick. That's just how it's going to work. Okay, so this is the big fatal flaw in the ermi, and this is the reason why so many people run ERMI test, and they get so confused, and they don't know what's going on, and they don't know how to read it, and they start paying people hundreds of dollars to try to interpret for them and get, like, the magic answer of what's going on. Guys, you don't need to pay hundreds of dollars to somebody to tell you what's going on in an IRME test. You have a bunch of mold over here. Okay. Do you have more mold over here? Okay, add those together. Is that more mold or less mold? It's more mold. Does that seem like a bigger problem or a lesser problem? It seems like a bigger problem. It makes sense. But here's what Ermie does. Ermie flips the script. They say this mold is a problem. But in their world, this mold is apparently not a problem. Instead of using the formula alcohol plus beer gets you more drunk, they're using the formula alcohol. Beer plus beer makes you more sober. That's the formula they're applying. So now change it back. They're saying, group one, mold plus group two, mold. Mold plus mold makes you less exposed to mold. That doesn't make sense, but that's how your ERMI score is calculated. They're subtracting this mold from this mold, and somehow that makes it all better. That's not how it works. Our body doesn't understand this mold versus that mold. All our body understands is I'm breathing a bunch of stuff in I'm not supposed to, and I'm going to freak the F out. That's what our body understands. Number one, mold is like a factory. Mold's like a factory, right? You're driving down the road. There's a factory off the side of the road. You can't see what they're making inside, but smoke is coming out of the top of the factory. That's the byproduct of whatever's being made inside. Let's say you live in this house, like, a half mile away, and you walk outside and you're breathing this air pollution. Now, some people might say, oh, you have an air pollution problem right here. Not really. You have a factory problem where you live, right? If the factory goes away, the air pollution is no longer getting created. The problem is the air pollution is the toxins and the fragments and the VOCs and everything you're talking about. So that's more the exposure that's happening, but the source is where it's coming from.

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