99: The ERMI Code - Find out what your ERMI actually means

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, everyone, what's going on? I am really pumped for today because I am going to be sharing with you guys the secret project that I've been working on for the last six months. I initially rolled it out to the text community, my text community, last week. So they got the sneak peek of it. And off of that feedback, I've already made a couple little tweaks to make some of the things look a little nicer and just connect a little better. And now I'm officially ready to tell all of you guys about it. I'm super excited. This little special project is about one of the biggest things that. That people do when it comes to mold, and that's ermi, right? And for any of you guys who have done an ermi, probably know that you collect this sample and the results come back, and you kind of have no idea what it means.

The majority of the people that call us looking to work with us, who have done an army are basically calling to ask for an interpretation of it, because they don't even know if they need to be working with us yet. But they see, you know, everything, you know, we're putting out there, and they're like, oh, these guys must know what it means. Let me call them and see if they'll just interpret my ERMI for me. The problem is, is that we can only do that every so often, right? Because that takes up a lot of time to really sit down and explain all the different things that could be happening. And so what I wanted to do is try to create a resource for you guys that could help do that for you, Right? And it's something that we sat down and put together over the course of six months. And here's what I did to do it. Okay? So first off, I'll tell you what it is. It's called the Ermicode, all right? And if you go to ermicode.com, you can see what it is if you want to, like, scroll along while I'm talking about it. But basically, here was the overall goal when I was thinking of how to shape and create this thing, right? All right? So, like, I Said, we get all these phone calls. I've literally talked to over a thousand people asking questions about their Ermes. And what I realized is that everyone basically has the same three questions. They phrase it in a whole bunch of different ways, but ultimately they're all asking the same three things. And here's the three questions. The first thing you want to know is, how bad is it? Right? So basically I did this ermi. There's a bunch of stuff here. I don't really get it. Like, is my house bad? Like, how bad is my house? Right? Like, is it a big problem? Is it not a big problem? That's the first question that we want to know, right? So that's number one. The second question then always comes up immediately afterwards is, well, I mean, how bad is my house compared to other houses? That's always the second question. So somebody calls me like, yeah, this irony isn't good. They'll be like, well, like, I mean, is it like normal bad? Or are all houses like this? Or is my house like, way worse than everybody else's? Right? There's some version of that question that comes up, right? And so that's the second question. How bad is it compared to others? And then ultimately they're trying to get to the third question or the answer to the third question, which is understanding, like, what should I be doing next? Right? I mean, should we be inspecting this house? Should I just think about moving from this house? What are the pros and cons of that? Like, how do I even think through that process? That's the whole thing, right? And if you take a step back and so that question is, should I stay or should I go? That's the three question. That's the third question, right? And so you take a step back. Let's even talk about, like, why you're doing an ERMI in the first place, right? You're doing an ERMI because your doctor, or maybe even you just being a really good researcher, if you're listening to this show, then you are probably surrounding yourself with, you know, the right people, or at least some of the right people, I would hope. And anyways, you find out that everybody's talking about ermi. Everybody's like, if you have a mole problem, you need to do an ermi, right? And yeah, it's super, super helpful. But it can be really misleading if you're looking at the results and have no idea what to how to interpret them. Right? The problem is that the ERMI score is incredibly misleading and can actually make you think that a Problem is not. Two ways can either make you think that a problem is worse than it actually is, or it can make you think that a problem or that a sample result is not nearly as bad as it actually is because of how the math is calculated. All right, so one is that there's a really big scoring flaw in ermi. And I'm going to give you the breakdown real quick. So I've talked about IRMI before. In other podcasts, I've talked about the scoring flaws, so I won't spend a whole lot of time on it. But basically what's happening is that the URMI score, which is the little. The total kind of score number at the bottom of your ERMI result, depending on what lab you use, some of them are color coded. And like, you yellow, orange, red, other ones just have a number. But basically what it's doing is subtracting the group two molds from the group one molds. Okay? So an URMI sample is split up into two groups. Group one is water damage molds. Now, group two, they label as common indoor molds. And because they label it as common, it gives this connotation that they are not problematic. Okay? Which is not true. If you're mold sensitive, you're mold sensitive. Your body doesn't care, right? And this is just the inherent flaw in how they created the scoring system. They were basically trying to weight the water damage molds as just much, much more problematic molds than these molds that are. Because they're more common, they're not as big a deal. How many times have we heard that, guys? How many times on a podcast have I said, hey, just because sinks leak, they're not that big of a deal. Just because this happens all the time, it's not that big of a deal. God. I said this to a client the other day, like, off the top of my head. We were talking about this just because it's not a big deal concept. How about this? Just because there's a bunch of school shootings, it's not a big deal. Of course it's a freaking big deal, right? And to downplay things that are common is a huge, huge, huge mistake that we do in life across all different things. Okay? So these group two common molds, the way that they're portrayed is that they're actually, like, not okay? And. And more so the way that the ERMI score is calculated, because what it's doing is subtracting the total of the group two molds from the group one. Okay, so what? It's actually doing is saying that Somehow these Group 2 molds are making the Group 1 molds not as bad. That's what that math says. Okay, Think about it. All right? If you have group one, and group one is, I don't know, ten, and you have group two, and group two is five, and you're subtracting group two from group one. All right, follow me. Right, so you have ten is one, group one, five is group two. You're going to subtract five from ten, okay? Because you're tracking group two from group one. Ten minus five equals five. Okay? You had. You actually had a larger load in the house than that five number. But because you're subtracting group two from it, like, somehow it's not only is it devaluing the importance of Group 2 molds, but in addition, it's also devaluing the importance of the group one molds. It's insane. It's freaking insane. The scoring system, it makes absolutely no sense. And this is why so many of you guys call us, and you're like, what does my ERMI mean? I don't know. And here, let's lay something more on the top. So all of the doctors out there, they all know that ERMI is something you should be doing in a house, because in terms of identifying mold in a home, and just to clarify, not where it's coming from, but just if it's present in the home. The technology behind Ermi, it's the gold standard for analysis. It's basically DNA formatting, and it's not limited to spores. It's also looking at fragments. And as we've talked about in some other shows, the fragment load from molds can somehow or sometimes increase all the way up to 500 times the amount of spores that could be present. All right? So if you had 10 spores of stachybotrys there, you can now have 5,000 fragments of stachybotrys floating around. And all of those fragments could be potentially carrying toxins. Okay? That's why the fungal fragment load is so, so, so important. All right? So. So that's, you know, that that's the strength of ermia, and that's why all the doctors will say, hey, you need to do an ermia. Here's the problem, though, is that doctors are doctors, okay? Just like I am not a doctor. I'm a. I'm a mold guy.

Doctors are doctors. So what happens is the doctor tells you to go do an ermie, and then you show them the ermie because they're the one that told you to do it, right? And when you're sick and you're going through this process, your doctor really is kind of like your core quarterback that's helping navigate this thing for you, right? And you go to the doctor. The doctor has no idea what I just told you, okay? They have no idea how any of this stuff is calculated. All they do is they look at a score at the bottom, right? But the score can be massively misleading. And if they look at a score and the score says it's not that bad when it actually is, well now what do you do? Now you think that you're not in that bad of a situation when maybe you actually are, right? Or vice versa, the other way around, okay? So that's the first thing on the math of the scoring system. So now get this. And this is even bigger problem in the ERMI scoring system, okay? So I went back and I found the original EPA study of the Environmental Relative Moldiness Index, which is what ERMI is. I went back and I found it, all right? By the way, this took me years to find this study. Like it's not easily accessible for whatever reason. Probably because the EPA buried it. Because now they claim that the ERMI is only for research purposes and that you actually shouldn't use it in your house. Which is hilarious to me because isn't every sample you collect for research purposes just going to throw that out there? But you want to know why? Because people were doing these in their houses and all of a sudden everyone found out that there's an epidemic of sick homes everywhere. And the EPA had to back off of this because they were just about to throw a big frickin monkey wrench into the entire home building industry. So they had to back off of that, right? So now it's just for research purposes. You should actually never use it in your home to determine if you have a mole problem. Which is freaking hilarious because the whole point of it is to determine if you have a mole problem in your home. It's so stupid. But I. Anyway, so I finally get a hold of this study of the write up of the study where they introduced it to the world. And you want to know what is in what is like in the fine print of one of the graphs in the study, it says this, it says the ERMI score, okay? This is the final score at the bottom. Everybody looks at that. Completely ridiculous. The ERMI score has a standard deviation of plus or minus three. Okay? So for those of you that don't remember science class in school, standard Deviation basically means it could either go up or down by this number, right? Like it's acceptable for it to go this far down or this far up off of the same sample. That's basically what standard deviation means. Okay, so now let's think about that. A lot of you have probably seen somewhere out there that if your ERMI score is a two or less, then that home would be healthy for you, right? You've probably seen that somewhere. Well, now let's play the standard deviation game. All right? If your score is a two, okay, and it could go. It could go three either way, off of that same sample. Right? Basically, what they're saying is that there's this error in the way in the calculating. Essentially not an error, but there's just a margin for error. Right? Just like there is in a lot of things, but it ends up being plus or minus three. So two minus three is negative one. Okay, so now a two is the same as a negative one. Well, minus one is like a great Ermes scorer if you just look at their scoring system. Right? Okay, so now a 2 is the same as that, but that means a 2 is also the same as a 5, and a 5 is in the highest level on the ERMI scoring scale. So now, basically, off of that same sample result, ERMI separates its.

Its results into four different levels, Level one through four. You would have a negative one that falls into level two, you would have a two that falls into Level three, and you would have a five that falls into level four. So you basically have one URMI sample that could be interpreted as three different levels across the ERMI scale off of that score. Does that seem helpful to you at all?

That's a dramatic pause because the answer is a big fat no. If you said that in your head, then you're 100% right. Now, let's go back to. We've heard that a 2. We've heard that a URMI score of 2 means that a home is healthy for us. But now we know that a 2 could be the same as a 5 or a 4 or a 3. Really? Because it goes up till 3, right? So can you use that as a determination on whether or not a home is a good spot for you? No. 100%? No. You can't. Okay, so these are like very core systemic problems in urmi, but the problem is that nobody knows how to actually interpret it. And you want to know why? Because when we go back to those three questions that we talked about at the beginning, how bad is it? Right? How does it Compare to others and should I stay or move? You need more data, you need more information to actually answer those questions. And ERMI is impossible of giving you that information because all Ermie is doing is looking at, at a dust collection sample throughout random places in your house. It has no context for what is actually going on in your house. How many sources of hidden mold are contributing to that dust collection sample that you picked up? Right, that's the big question we talk about. How bad is it? It's not just like how much mold is floating around in my house, but it's how many sources of mold are in my house that I'm going to have to remediate. That is the true answer to how bad is it? Because at the end of the day, if we could remediate our homes and money wasn't an object, we would all freaking do it. Right? So it's not about, yeah, how much is in this dust sample? Is it a lot? Is it a little? Because.

Because if we had all the money in the world, we would just go remediate it all and be totally fine. So the real question, because we don't all have all the money in the world, the real question is how many sources of, of mold can I expect to find in a home with an Ermie that looks like mine? Okay, so again, how many sources of mold can I expect to need to remediate in my house based on my ermi? That is the answer to question one. Okay, how bad is it? All right, so that's the answer to question one.

So how do we know that? So what we did that was when I went through the three questions that I outlined earlier, I really poured down to what, what are you really asking? Right? So I just broke down question one. What you're really asking is how, how significant is the remediation? That's what you're really asking.

And so I was like, okay, how can I, how can I figure this out? We've been doing this for years. We have thousands of samples that we've done. Like how I have more data in our company database than anyone does because nobody collects their data at all. They just run the samples and throw them out or whatever. Nobody can actually go back in and extrapolate all of it and put context to numbers, okay, Context to ermes. So my entire goal in this whole project and why it took me six months, is that I went back through every single inspection that we have done over the last three years and I compared every ERMI sample we did because keep mine. We do ERMI testing in every house, but we also do a full inspection, and in that full inspection, we identify how many sources of mold we found. Right? Because any of you that have listened to me know that it's all about source identification. If you don't know where it's coming from, you can't fix it. So the core of our process is finding out how many sources are there, right? So now I've got an ERMI result for house, let's just call it, you know, 123 Main Street. Right. I've got. I've got the ERMI result. And then I also know how many sources of mold were actually in that house. Well, that's pretty cool, right? But guess what else we know, because we also do mycotoxin testing and we also do actinomycete bacteria testing, and we also do endotoxin testing, all in that same house on 123 Main Street. Okay? I now have an ERMI that I can correlate to all of the other testings that we do in that same house to get some context. Now, it's hard to do off of one sample, right? You can't get context off of one sample. But how about three years worth of inspections across the entire country? Can we get context off of that? And the answer is 100%. Yeah, we did. We could. Right? So now I'm not looking at just one house. I'm looking at every house that we've looked at over the last three years. We did an army. We also know how many sources were in the house. We know if there was mycotoxins. And down the line, right? So now.

When you ask the question, how bad is it? I know the answer that you're really looking for is how much do I actually have to remediate? How big of a remediation project is this?

We were able to look through all of these ermes, and it wasn't simple, right? Because the ERMI score is completely useless in this process. Okay? We had to kind of figure out where are the correlations, where are the things where we see one thing in the ermi, that it starts to correlate to how many sources we're finding in a house, and it starts to be universal form. And as the different things we're seeing in ERMI and the different pieces of the formula that we're putting together, how is it consistently basically increasing the number of sources? So we know that we start interpreting ERMI the right way. Right? In other words, what I did or is, is we went through all the Hermes. And we basically created, like, this formula, this algorithm that took different elements out of the Hermes. And we then started comparing it to how many source levels of mold we were finding in each home. And then I started sorting those numbers from lowest to highest. And I started to realize when we did certain things in the formula on the ERMI interpretation, all of a sudden the number of sources in the home started lining up and it started going from lower to higher. And I was like, oh, my God, this is it. We figured out how to actually interpret this ERMI to give us an idea of how many sources are in the house. Because at the end of the day, the only reason an ERMI is bad is because the. There's sources in the house that are contributing to the ermi, right? To that, to that level, that load, that every, you know, the. The severity of the problem. The source level issue, which is the whole core of our entire inspection process, is also the core of how to understand and interpret ermi. Does that make sense? Make sense? Like, if you did an ERMI sample, wouldn't it be nice to know, like, what you could expect in terms of how many sources are in your house versus. Oh, man, this army doesn't look good. I guess you should figure that out. That's what you're going to hear everywhere else. And so that's what we did. So we did that. And then with that, we were then able to identify the frequency in which mycotoxins were in homes based off of this algorithm that we made. Right? So now we could say, okay, based on an army that looks like yours, there's, you know, on average, we found nine sources of mold growth in that house. And in that house, we also found. I'm throwing a number because I don't have it on top of my head. We found 7% of the time there was mycotoxins present in that house, and X percent of the time we found that there was actinomycete bacteria, which, by the way, Dr. Shoemaker just came out with a big paper that really connects actinomycete bacteria to health. It's a really important component. We've been looking at it for years, so we've probably been looking at it longer than most people because we're so tied in with the doctors, and we understood that it was important. So I have years of data on that stuff, too, so. And endotoxins as well. So now the way that this works is by inputting just every individual mold on your ermi, right? In the group numbers. And all that stuff, right? You can just input it all straight from your report. It runs it through this algorithm that we created, and then it generates out what the expectation could be for what's going on in your home in terms of the average number of sources that you might find in that house. The frequency that mycotoxins were detected, the percentage of the time that actinomycete bacteria was detected at an above average level, because there's a scale that you analyze that off of.

In the elevated level or above, and the same for endotoxins, the percentage of time that you find endotoxins in the elevated or above category. So now when your doctor says, go, run that ermi, because I got. We've done testing on you. You have a urine mycotoxin test that shows you multiple mycotoxins in your system. You got inflammation markers in your blood, you got Marcons. You failed the VCS test. Like, whatever. Throw it all out there, whatever it is, that shows that you have a mole problem, right? Now, when you go run your ermi, you still run your ermi, right? But then you could take that ERMI and run it and process it through the ERMI code just by entering it all in. And we're basically like an added layer. We're going beyond whatever the ERMI score can give you. The URMI score is crap, guys. It's complete crap. We're going beyond the IRME score and actually giving you reasonable statistics and expectations about what you can expect in your house. Now, is it going to be exactly what you're going to find in your house? Of course not. Because there's averages, Right? Right. Thousands of inspection or thousands inspections, Three years of inspections, thousands of samples. Right? So of course it's not going to be exactly your number. Right? You may be a little above, a little below, but it's going to give you essentially the average of what we found based on an URMI that looked like yours. So now you go in, you process it through the ERMI code, and you have an idea. Let's talk about the three questions again. Okay? Question number one. How bad is it? We just talked a lot about through that, right? So how many mold sources are there? How often were mycotoxins present? Here, let me wrap my head around what the scope of this project is. Is this going to be a big remediation, is it not? Right, We've answered that question. Now, question number two. If you recall, I said, how does my house compare to others? This is the natural. Next question that comes up because you're like, oh, my house is, you know, X of a situation. Is this just my place? Like, if I just move, could I find something a lot better or not? So this is the next challenge that we had to figure out. When we were putting all this together. What I wanted to do was create some sort of grouping system based on essentially the. The number of sources that we were finding in a home off of the algorithm of the scale. Right. So what we wanted to do was separate this out so you could look at your ERMI code and it would generate out a number. This is my vision. Initially, you would be a number you know, of. It ended up being five groups. So there's. There's five groups. Group 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So you end up being one of these groups. And then we created essentially a chart that shows you where you fall, what group you're in. But in addition, where that group falls in the overall amount of homes that were looked at in the study. Okay, so think of it this way. So I'll tell you now, group one is the bottom 9% of all samples that we did. So if you fall into group one, basically what that means is that your home is in the lowest 9% of, for lack of a better term, let's just call it moldy homes. It's not exactly how you do it, but just to talk it through, that's what it is. Okay, so let's say that you ran your ERMI through the ERMI code and you fell in group one. Well, you would look. And I actually personally wrote. Well, I personally wrote every single word in this document, and it's actually a long document, and I'll break it down for you in a second. But I wrote a specific breakdown of your actual ERMI interpretation portion of it.

And I say, listen.

This ERMI is about as good as it's going to get, right? If you're in group one, the average number of sources, at least today, before, you know, we may update this at some point, but at this point in time is five sources that we found in a group one home is the average number of sources that we found. Now just take that in for a second, guys. That means those are the best homes that we went in, right? And on average, there were still five sources of a problem in there. So you're like, oh, my gosh, you're telling me that there's always mold that you're gonna have to deal with? Hey, guys, unfortunately, we have an epidemic of sick homes and sick buildings, okay? And things are built Wrong. And things aren't maintained properly and people don't fix things the way they should. And next thing you know, homes have mole problems. And yeah, every home, I tell my clients this and I actually wrote this in the document. I wrote so much of what I do in terms of consultation into the results packet that you get because I didn't want to just give you numbers, I wanted to give you context and, and explanation and reasoning behind why things were done and why they were thought out and what you should be thinking about as you decide your next steps. Right? I wrote all that stuff in there. I spent so long writing this stuff out as if I was talking to you as if you were my client. Right? But here's the thing, and I always tell this to my clients now I'm like, listen, you can move if you want to, right? And we talk through kind of what their house looks like and everything. But at the end of the day, every home that you go into is going to have, you got to plan for at least three to five areas that are going to have, have to be remediated. You just have to. I've literally, in all the years I've been doing this, can count on one hand the number of times I walked into a house and didn't find a single mole problem anywhere in that house. Okay? I've been doing this for a long time. I can think of the houses in my head right now that that has happened and they are less than I can count on one hand. Okay? So there is always going to be some level of remediation, things that need to get done. Now whether or not you need to do it depends on your health situation and all these different things, right? So I'm not here to tell you that you have to or you don't, but I'm here to give you the guidance and the information to help you understand if a, if a home is a suitable spot for you or if it makes more sense to go somewhere else. So now let's play out question two again, right? So question one, how bad is it? Right? That's how many sources are there, Frequency of toxins in my house? Question two. Okay, how does my house compare to others? So if you recall, I said we have five groups. Let's say you fall into group three. All right? So again, there's five groups. You're at group three. Now, the way the percentages work out, group three fall, and you'll see this on the chart, the percentages of each group are there. Group three is the lower 50% of all the ones that we've done. So if you're in group three, you're in the bottom 50% of all the homes that were included, you know, in this, in this analysis process in the army code, it's like, okay, but you're not in the. You're not in the lower one and you're not in the lower two. So you're kind of in this middle range, and it shows you the exact percent range that you're in. Okay? So you're basically somewhere between 25 to 50% is how it works out right now where you are. So you're in this range. There's 25% of homes that are definitely lower than you. And then you're in this range is 25 to 50%. That is that it would be group three. So you'd be looking at this, there'd be this chart. You would see kind of the size of these graph of these line charts. So you know exactly where you fall. And there's an arrow, and the arrow just says, you are here. Makes it super, super easy for you to understand what group that you're in. Okay? So then you say, okay, so now in that write up, something that I included in that write up is, listen, this home falls in the lower 50%. Right? So, you know, on the grand scheme of things, this isn't the worst house we've ever seen, but to find a place that's going to be better than this. And this is just in my experience, again, that's what this whole document, and it's an interpretation, slash, consult, consultation with me. That's what this whole thing is. You might have to look at 10, 15, 20 homes to find something that's better than the home that you're in. Okay, because of where it falls on the scale, right? So it's not that you can't find a group one or a group two home somewhere, but we know that those are the lower 25% of homes across the board. So it's not going to be super easy to find those homes. So then you have to start asking yourself the question, okay, well, does it make sense for me to stay knowing that, or does it? Or do I feel like I want to go and look for some in these other homes? Right? And that is the third question. Should I stay or should I go? Okay, so what this is doing is helping you sort of frame and understand your next step and your next move. Now, let's talk about should you say or should you go? Because it is not a flat out Answer. All right. I don't tell you yes or no, you should stay or should you go, just in full transparency, okay? But I tell you essentially what your expectation is going to look like if you are looking to leave. Right? And in addition, when people are looking to leave, they don't really understand a lot of the things that go into moving in terms of the expenses that happen and the people that you need to consult with along the way. You need your realtor, you need this person, you need that person, you need to account for costs X, Y and Z. What I did is in the should you stay or should you go section. I wrote out an entire page of every question that you need to ask yourself and know the answer to before you make that decision. The should you stay or should you go is really like a formula. Okay? It's like a math formula. Obviously emotions come into play, but let's pretend emotions are out of it, right? Let's just say you're looking at this completely objectively and you know you're not connected to the house that you grew up in, right? It's just House 1 versus House 2. It's not as easy as just looking at the ERMI code and saying, okay, I'm going to move, right? How much, how much do you owe on your house? Okay, how much.

How much could you get for your house? How much could you sell it for right now? Okay, so what's that profit number look like? Okay, have you talked to your remediation contractors and gotten a bid to fix whatever's going on in your current house? Well, if you haven't done that yet, you need to do that so you can compare that to the cost that you would sell your house for. Does that balance out? Right, but you're not going to be able to get the remediation estimate if you haven't had an inspection of the house. You have to balance in the inspection costs under that formula too. Right? So, and these are just a couple things. So I work an entire page. I write all the questions that you need to ask yourself and you need to write down answers to. And again, guys, this is ERMI code isn't just about telling you stuff about your house. It's about how I communicate with my clients about what their ermies are. Okay. There's essentially a built in consultation into the document that you get. All right? I forget how many pages is off the top of my head. I think it's like a 10 or 12 page document. The results are just on two single pages. Super easy to get to the results. But if you actually want to learn stuff and feel like you're talking to me and I'm helping guide you through this process, I wrote all of it down. I wrote it all down, guys. So I want to make it as easy for you as you can. And because ermes are literally the most prescribed home testing kit from every doctor that exists out there, there needs to be a way to actually know what they mean. You know what I mean?

You can't have a test. Imagine this. Imagine I told you that I know that a GI map gut stool sample is the best sample that you can get from to understand what's going on inside of your gut. And I'm like, you have to do that. Everyone knows that you have to do a GI MAP to get the best sense of what's going on in your gut. So you could then decide what to do next. And so you go and you do that, and then you come and you give me the results. You're like, brian, you told me to get this GI map. What does this mean? And I would look at it, I'd be like, I don't really know. I mean, I see a lot of bacteria here. Some of them say they're high, but I don't really understand, like, what this means in the context of all other guts out there. And I don't really totally get it. Right. I just know that it doesn't look good and that you probably need to talk to a GI specialist or a functional medicine doctor to get in there and really understand. Like. Like, is there bacterial overgrowth? Do you have sibo? Do you have leaky gut? Is, like, what. What's happening that's causing this to happen? Is it a diet issue? Is it a parasite issue that's absorbing all of your nutrients and therefore it's allowing other bacteria to grow? I don't know. I don't know the answer. Right? Okay, so take that scenario and flip it around, because this is what happens with every single doctor out there and every single, you know, Instagram, social media mold consultant that says they're going to consult with you on your ermi. This is what happens. All right? None of these people have inspected homes ever. No doctors are home inspectors. They're great. They're super smart. They get it. They understand that mold is a problem, and they're helping you fight the good fight. I'm not, like, bashing doctors. Right? But they have no idea for context and what happens in a home. They don't know how to inspect a home. They don't know how to fix it. They don't do any of that stuff, right? Maybe they've done it themselves and they have an idea about it. But that doesn't mean that you know how to do it for all of them. It just means you figured it out for your own house. You know, it'd be like saying it'd be like having a car that needs to be repaired. And you're like, well, my buddy fixed his car. I'm just going to take it to him to fix it. Except his car was like a 1967 Ford Mustang and your car is a 2021 Tesla. But you're like, but he fixed his car so he should know how to fix cars. And you go take it to him, right? Of course it's silly. It doesn't work that way, right? And so that's the same whether it's doctors or it's these, you know, consultants online that are going to say, hey, buy an ermie through me. And. And then we're going to do. And I'll consult with you afterwards and I'll help, I'll guide you through the whole thing. Let me tell you what's happening in that process. All right, first off, the buy the ERMI through me thing, they're basically just passing on an ERMI from one of the labs to you and essentially not up charging it at all, right? So you could have bought that ERMI yourself. You didn't need to go through them to buy the ermi, and you could have done the sample on your own, right? And then secondarily, they're charging you anywhere from 1 to $200 to get on the phone and look at your ermi. And keep in mind, these people don't inspect houses for a living. That's not what they do, right? Maybe they had their own house they had to look at. Maybe they talked to a couple other people. But have they done thousands of inspections? Like, you know, just think about it. Like, who are you asking for the information? You have to, where's the source coming from? What are they the expert at? You want the expert at the thing to be helping you diagnose the thing, right? I want a Tesla expert to tell me how to fix my Tesla. Right? I don't need a 67 Ford Mustang Expert to help me fix my Tesla because they're gonna have no freaking clue what's going on. Because there's all computers in there and there's probably not even real machine parts in there. It's probably a spaceship inside of it. Right? They don't even know it's in there. So you need the actual expert to help you do it. Who's the expert? It's the person that's been doing it forever and knows how to interpret it and does it every single day. Right. So what you're going to do is you're going to go to one of these, you know, social media mold consultant, influencer people, and they're going to tell you how bad mold is, and they have all the buzzwords and they're going to say, hey, do this. Ermie, get the URMI kit. Buy the URMI kit through us, and then you can do this. Right? You buy the kit and it comes with this consultation. You end up paying, I don't know, 100, 200 bucks for his consultation. All that they can tell you when they get on the phone with you is information about specific mold species, which is great. Wonderful. This mold grows under this condition. Awesome. Cool. Thank you. And that. Well, it looks like you have a mole problem, so you should probably figure that out. That's all they could tell you. They could say, this mole species creates mycotoxins. I don't know if it's creating it because I have no idea if it is, but it can. Hey, guys, by the way, mycotoxins don't always get created. All of our numbers now show that mycotoxins are only created 20% of the time. We've updated everything. We only find mycotoxins 20% of the time. We test for them. So if you get all one of the calls of these people and they're like, oh, you have Stachybotrys. That's the toxins, or. Bet you got it. It's. It's. Your house is terrible. You got to burn it down. What the hell do they know? They don't know. They don't know what's going on in your house. Right. Do they have data to tie your ERMI to, to actually show them how bad your house is? The answer is, no, they don't. It's all, like, just looking at it and, like, just going by gut, I guess. I don't know.

All they can do is tell you, oh, well, you have this kind of mold. And then they can say, well, this looks like a lot. You probably need to figure out what's going on in your house to get it fixed. Does that help you at all? Did that answer any of the three questions that we talked about? That. That deep down you know you really have to. Whenever you do an Ermie, how bad Is it actually. And what does how bad is it mean? It means how significant of a problem is this to fix? It doesn't mean just generally, how bad is the mold situation in the house? Sure. I could look at your ERMI without running it through the ERMI code and be like, ew, this looks bad. You got a problem here? Is that helping you at all? Not helping you, Right. What would help you is like, yeah, listen.

You know, on average, you can expect. You might have to remediate like, 9, 10 different areas with something that looks like this. So just keep that in mind. Doesn't that seem more helpful? Yeah, that's the difference, right?

The difference is, oh, looks like you have a problem. Go call now. Go call somebody and pay somebody else to come to come figure out where it is. Or you just find all of it out at the beginning, right? And, oh, keep in mind, guys, here's the fun part at the end of it is that they're charging 100 or 200 bucks for that. I'm putting all of this out there for you guys for $27. That's it, 27 bucks. This isn't about making a bunch of money, all right? This is about empowering you guys to understand what your next step is. Because here's the deal. If you decide to go down the road of inspecting and remediating your house, we all know what that means. That's tens of thousands of dollars. But the inspection itself is thousands of dollars up front, right? Wouldn't it be nice to know before you drop a few thousand dollars on an inspection what you could kind of expect already and then decide if you even want to go down that road in the first place? Like, what if you. What if you did an ermie in the house and it said, hey, you're in group five, the worst of the groups, you know what you would do? You would probably just leave.

Even if you were in group four, you might consider just leaving, right? And there's, again, there's a whole conversation I write about the things to think about if you want to, you know, for that purpose, right? You want to say you want to go. That's where the value is, guys. That was my entire vision for this. For years and years and years and years and years, Urmi has been the thing that everyone's doing, and we've been doing it forever, too, because you need to. And I was always, like, interpreting these kind of, like, by gut feeling and looking at them. And granted, I've seen so many of them that I could have a Pretty good, accurate idea what was on. Going, going on. It's not like I'm one of these, you know, random consultants that have never inspected houses and don't really know what's going on. But. But it wasn't enough, you know, like, what? Like, what did it really mean? It always bothered me, and I just wasn't able to figure out how to answer that until I just kind of. I don't know. I just woke up one day and had this idea. I named it. Before I even started making it, I named it the URMI code. I was like, it's called the ERMI code. We're breaking the code of ermi. This is what we're doing. These are the questions that we're going to answer. And this is the value that people are going to get out of it. It was built around understanding the value that you needed out of it. That's how it was built. It wasn't built with some preconceived notion where I was like, well, I want to be able to tell this, this, and this. It was built out of all the questions that I got and how consistent they were all the time. And I said to myself, if I could answer these three questions, then I told somebody it was only $27, they would get this thing. They would look at it and they would be like, I can't believe I just got all of this for $27. And that was what I wanted to do. I wanted, by the time that you opened this thing, saw what was in there, and then saw everything else that I wrote to you specifically from my own hands, of all the different considerations and different. Just consultating. It's even a word, consultative conversations that I have all the time. I want you to look at this and be like, you know what? For 27 bucks, I couldn't have thought of anything better. I just spent $250 on this ermi sample, had no idea what it meant, and for $27, it broke the whole thing down for me. Now I feel like I have direction. Now I feel like I know what to do next, right? And that is the ERMI code. So I am. I'm really, really, really proud of it and all the work that went into it. And just quick shout out to my team, Kyle and Rachel, for helping me get it all put together and just all of it. It was a lot. It was a big, big project.

And, yeah, I'm super excited about it. So Listen, guys, it's ermicode.com. if you've run a URMI and you're not sure what you're doing, Just go there, put it in there. Right? If you run them on different houses, you could put them in multiple times. You can see what each one looks like, right? It's that simple. And the way it works, you go to ermicode.com, you push the button that says interpret my ERMI or whatever it says, and it pops up a thing. And on the pop up, it's just each mold that's on your ERMI report, and all you do is just fill in the number and it's in the exact same order of all the molds on your report too. So you don't have to, like, actually read the mold and make sure you're filling in the right one in the right place. I was like. I was like, guys, this has to be in the exact order. Like, it's hard enough to know these molds when I look at them every day. Can you. Can. Can we expect somebody who ran their first army to have any idea, like, what all these molds are and not get them confused? So honestly, guys, like, you only have to look at the molds on the side if you don't want to. Just enter each number in order. It's. It's 1 row, 2 rows, 3 rows, 4 rows. It follows the exact same format of your report. All you have to do is enter the numbers in order. And then once you do that, the formula takes play. And then it immediately tells you what's going on in your house. You get. You get this PDF that I talked about, gets sent to you, and there's a breakdown in there, and it just helps bring so much clarity to everything. The feedback on this has already been super awesome. I've had doctors running this for their patients. I've had multiple doctors run multiple of these for several of their patients because they're finding it so valuable, right? You want to know why? Because remember what I said earlier, the doctors don't really understand what ERMI means. Like, what the ERMI score means. It doesn't mean anything to them, right? They think it does until we explain to them how the ERMI scores trash. And they're like, well, then how do we interpret these things? Because once we explain it, it makes total sense. There's actually medical offices that are processing these on behalf of their clients to understand what's going on. Right? That's the power of the ERMI code. And if they're doing it over and over and over again, then they must be happy with what it looks like. You know what I mean? So, anyways, I told you that the next podcast was going to be a special one for me. It was going to introduce my special project that I've been working on for such a long period of this has been on my roadmap for something to get done this year. I initially wanted to have it done by July and it just. It took longer. Cause the data was there and we just had to figure it all out. It wasn't as easy as I thought it was gonna be, so it ended up taking until October, but it's here. Got it done this year. Super excited about it. Super excited for you guys to actually, like, finally know what your ERMI means. You know, not to look at it and be confused, but to finally know what your ERMI actually like. I'm very, very excited for you guys to do that. Would love to hear your feedback on it as well. Because like I said, we are still making little tweaks where needed. Not in terms of the information. The information is all the same. But if something. If I see that something needs to be designed a little differently for people to grasp it a little easier, then we're going in and tweaking little things like that. I want this to be the best thing that it can be for everyone. So this isn't something that we're just putting out and like, washing our hands of it. Right? Um, if you have feedback, please, please give it to me. All right. You could text me on the Mole phone. The phone number is on my Instagram @molefinders. The phone number's right there. You could text me, just tell me what you think of it and. Or you could. You could, you know, DM me on Instagram, tell me what you think of it, and we can go from there. But everyone, thank you so much for listening. I hope that you guys find value out of this. Right? Like, the whole reason I did this was to help empower people. You know, one last thing, and then I'll jump off this. I've been talking forever, really thinking through. Been really thinking through what. What our mission is as. As a company. Right. Corey and I are really sitting down and really trying to define that. Like, we've always known. Like, we love helping people, and I. But with that, we weren't always as focused to make it as efficient as possible. You know what I mean? And I think that happens in any business. You get so caught up in it and you just want to help everybody that you kind of. It's not that you forget where you came from. But you just. You get so caught up in it that you lose the ability to do it as effectively as you probably could, right? And so we've really been sitting down and sort of diving through that, and there was this constant phrase that kept coming up, and I've said it all the time, but this single word is really what drives me, and it's empower, I guess. Two words, empowering people. Okay?

Businesses go out and they do their service or they sell their product, right? And they want you to buy it, and they want you to do their thing, right? Not a lot of them actually talk about what that does for the person. For me, everything that we do, I want it to empower you, okay? And so when I was thinking ermi code, I wanted the information to be so beneficial that it empowered you to understand what your next step is and not feel so lost and not feel that you're at the whim of some local inspector that doesn't get it or something, and that you don't have the information to really start making decisions on your own because you didn't understand it. It's all about empowerment. That's why I priced it so cheap, right? I priced it so cheap because I just want you guys to get it, right? I want you to get it, and I want you to learn from it and feel empowered, right? If I charged, you know, $79 for it or even. Or even $49 or whatever it was, I just feel like not as many people would have done it. And it's, again, this particular thing, it's not about the money coming in. There's not that much money coming in from a $27 product, right? Like, that's not the point. Point. The point is to get you something that's accessible. I know that finances are not the easiest. When you're going through this thing and you just shelled out, you know, $250 for an army, right? Like, the last thing you want to do is then pay a consultant another 150 or 200 to tell you what the hell it means. So stupid. Like. Like, here. Here's 27 bucks. Super affordable. Just. Just don't go out to eat one night. There you go. It's all done, right? And you've paid for it, and now you actually have context for your house, and you have an idea of what you should be doing next without feeling so lost. And that's the goal. It's all about empowering you guys, all right? I always say that I'm done, and then I just keep rambling so thanks for listening. Anyways guys, that is the URMI code that has been my passion project for the last six months. I hope you enjoy it. Tell me what you think about it. Text me, DM me, leave a response on the podcast. Do anything. I just want to hear what you guys think. I hope you guys are having a good one.

So that's it for today's show everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment, subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most. It.