You’re Not Crazy, Toxic Mold Exposure Is Poisoning Your Brain with Brian Karr | 1066 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. I'm going through on some of these episodes and I'm teaching you some of the things that are in my new book, Smarter, Not Harder. And the idea there is that you can upgrade yourself. And there are things that we know work, like, I don't know, exercise. So you could say, I'm going to go do 90 minutes a day of exercise and I'll. I know I'm going to get results. And the reality is you probably will get some results, but it might take a huge amount of time. In my case, it was 702 hours of exercise over 18 months. That's about, oh, a third of a full time job for a year in the gym, sweating. Now, you think I would have been chiseled and all, but I wasn't. I actually still had a 46 inch waist and still weighed 300 pounds. And it's one of the things that made me a biohacker today because I'm on a low fat, low calorie, at the time, semi vegetarian diet and just hungry and tired all the time and still going to the gym with all of my effort. What I didn't know was that I was also being exposed to a xenoestrogen. This is an environmental estrogen a thousand times stronger than human estrogen. Human estrogen makes you fat. You need some of it. Men and women both need it. But you need the right levels. You also need testosterone. My testosterone levels were at 100. They were less than my mom's testosterone. And we actually have her lab data and my lab data from the same time. So is it any wonder that I looked androgynous and £300 and still have stretch marks from that time, even though today I'm 7.9% body fat as measured at upgrade labs. So what was going on with these xenoestrogens? Was I licking cash register receipts? Was I blending them into my smoothies? Was it my polyester sports bras, which, by the way, do have a lot of BPA in them, although fortunately that's not something I've ever had to wear. But no, it was toxic mold. And toxic mold makes that and a whole bunch of other stuff. And in the episode today, I want to talk about a smarter, not harder way to deal with what's going on. If you have all sorts of unexplained problems in your home or where you work or where you're going to school, they can be very different. One person's fat, another person's always tired. Other people have dark circles, Other people have emotional irregularity and bursts of anger that are out of character. Sudden weight gain, onset of allergies that no one can explain. I had all these things before I was 16. Even so, it turns out toxic mold is a uniting element in that. So our guest today is Brian Carr. He's a second generation indoor environmental consultant and he works with hypersensitive individuals with complex medical conditions. That was me. And I'm actually not hypersensitive to mold the way I used to be. And I know this because I spent several months staying in a place that had high toxic mold levels and I didn't have any reactivity. It wasn't good for me. But I didn't have the immediate kryptonite, like I need to take a nap, my brain turned off. You know, it's like a full system shutdown feeling that I've had for almost my entire life when I walk into a moldy building. So I can feel it, but I could smell it, but it didn't wreck my nervous system. So this is because of some of the resilience practices that I've been teaching. But the guy who helped me understand what was going on is Brian and he's the co founder of We Inspect, which is a environmental testing company who works to help people understand mold. Mycotoxins and even bacterial toxins that exist in your homes, that what's there even down to the genetic level and what it's doing to you. Go back to the definition of biohacking when I wrote it that very first little like kind of steampunk looking PowerPoint slide that I turned into an infographic. It was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. If your environment is moldy and has biotoxins, then maybe you don't have control of your biology. The mold does because it's hijacking your system. Brian's become just the go to guy for a lot of medical doctors across the country. He's helped more than 5,000 people as sensitive as I used to be to create healthier living environments. And you're going to learn a lot in this episode. Even if you're saying, well, I don't have a mold problem, you'd be surprised because you know that marital problem you might have that can be mold. Because one of you can have very different symptoms than the other. If you've Ever had a chance to go to moldymovie.com this is a documentary I shot a couple years ago, actually probably like five years ago. And it's free, it's a gift. And I interview a dozen people affected by toxic mold and a dozen top experts, medical doctors across the country, in order to really show this is real. And my favorite interview is with a couple, they're both medical doctors. And he's sitting there going, I never felt anything, but it's real. And his wife, who's also a medical doctor, she's like, hey, I thought I had hypochondria because I had too many symptoms. It must be in my head. Except my temperature was too high. So I biopsied every organ in my body. They punctured her liver to see what was wrong. And what was wrong is their house had molded. And so that conversation, no medical doctor, even the most skeptical one, can see that conversation and go, this is all in your head. It's not in your head. And Brian's probably the top guy to say, not only is it not in your head, it's in your home. Here's exactly where. So, Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. What an intro. I love it. I'm just honored to have been able to kind of work with you and obviously be able to chat with you here and try to make this hidden thing that nobody can really kind of put their finger on a little more easy to understand because I think that's a big problem with it.

Tell me about the history of we inspect.

Well, so it actually starts before we inspect. So we're a family company. I married into the family. My father in law has a twin brother. They, when they were younger, about 20 years ago, they started mold inspection businesses. They didn't do it because they understood what we're going to talk about today, yet they did it because there was an opportunity and they thought it was interesting and they were kind of into that stuff.

Right.

And so they started these companies and after a while they kept getting the same questions from their clients and they kept seeing the same types of things, which is a lot of what you just described.

Right.

We're sick. My doctors don't believe me. I feel like there's something here, but I'm not totally sure. My husband's fine, but I'm not like there's symptoms. We're all across the board. And then they started asking health questions and. And they didn't know the answers to those yet.

Right.

And so they started going to, there are Large medical conferences now that focus on environmental health, right? There didn't, there wasn't a lot at the, you know, 15 years ago, there wasn't much as there is now. But they started going to these things and they would go in and be like, you know, two, three hundred doctors are all functional health doctors, this sort of thing. And, you know, everybody networks at these things, right? So the doctors go up to them like, oh, hey, where do you guys practice? Where's your office? All this stuff like, oh, we're not doctors. And everybody's just kind of like shot. They're like, well, what are you doing here? So they explained what they did and the doctors immediately were like, oh my gosh, we need somebody like you to help us put this piece together. Like the, the, the more progressive, like functional medicine community was aware of this stuff. They didn't have somebody in the field that can go into the homes and kind of put two and two together. And the practitioners knew that if the exposure kept happening that their patients weren't really going to get better. And it really just kind of opened the door for what is out there and really how, you know, we can make our impact in the world. Well, fast forward, you know, years off of that. We're now speaking conferences and we're educating the doctors and we're educating our industry and we're doing a lot of that. And with that came a lot of demand and referrals from all over the country and sometimes even beyond the country in many cases. And then that's where we inspect kind of took hold. So myself and my co founder, Corey, who is my cousin, who's the son of one of the twin brothers, right, all of it together. We were kind of the younger generation. We knew how technology worked, we kind of knew all this stuff. But like, we've, we've got to figure out a way to not just say we're only in LA and New York and if you live in the middle of the country, it sucks to be you, right? That's not fair. It shouldn't be like that. That's not the time that we live in. And it took a few years, it took a lot of money and investment and building infrastructure and building, you know, systems and process and, and get to where we are now. We work all over the country. All of our inspectors are trained directly by me and our team and we are able to go anywhere, really at any time. And then beyond this, the future of where we're going next is we are turning all of that into a mobile application that will make things even more accessible for people to where we don't even have to travel to your house. We're in beta on that right now. I'm sure by the time this airs, it's gonna be out. So I'm really, really excited for where it's gonna go and just the amount of people that we're gonna be able to help and guide.

That's fantastic. What was Betsy's role in the foundation of the company? There's a really cool story there that I didn't even know about until you told me at my house.

Yeah. So Betsy works with us. She runs our health partnership division. So we actually have an entire group that. The whole focus of this group is to provide resources and education and guidance to the medical community to help them kind of connect the dots. Betsy had her own health issues that were exacerbated by mold exposure.

Right.

So. And there's a lot of people are like this. Or so there's a lot of doctors that are like this too. Like, the people that are the most forefront people in this industry, I'm one that's included, had their own health issue with mold. And we're like, holy crap, what am I doing in the world? Because whatever I'm doing isn't as important as figuring this out.

Right.

And then people find their calling off of this. And, you know, you started, you know, biohacking. You know, I, we. We moved into mold inspect, you know, all these different things. Doctors start practicing, and that's really how, like, change has started to happen in this world. And, you know, she had her own health issues. She was impacted by mold. She was emailing with you way back early in the days before you were. You were who we know you are now asking for tips and advice and help. Because she read your book and did different things, and you were gracious enough to respond, which is pretty amazing.

This was before I wrote a book. This is a. It's kind of funny. Back in. This must be like the late 90s, I was running this anti aging nonprofit group right outside Stanford University, and I was learning what is now biohacking from people in their 80s. And I'm like, in my mid-20s, and it was such an opportunity, and I started just talking locally. I gave the first big talk about toxic mold and all the different things it did and how it got into the body and how it was in food and how it was in our environments. And then Betsy started emailing me, and people who have mold or people who know people with mold who are listening Are like, oh, I get this. But when you have mold, everything feels ten to a hundred times harder than it really is. And it's not that you're weak. It's not that there's something wrong with you. Actually, there is something wrong with you. You're being poisoned. But it's not a moral failing. Right. It's literally everything looks like Everest. And you forget things constantly. So when you're working with a mold patient or someone who's been affected, you can tell them something, and 20 seconds later, they can't remember it, and then they get mad at you because they can't remember it. So Betsy might have been like that, and she'd email me, and I would just respond anytime I could help someone with mold. To this day, I still do. In fact, just recently, a journalist from a big publication, like, broke down in tears on camera, like, oh, no, you're not crazy. You have mold. And we went through it. So I get joy from helping people not go through what I went through. And she was one of those. And I'd forgotten about it. And then when you reached out and Betsy reached out and sent me this beautiful email going, do you remember? I was that crazy mold person? I'm like, which one? All mold people get crazy. And then I go, yeah, I actually remember this exchange. And so the fact that she's working with you 20 years later on helping thousands of people with mold, that actually makes me really happy. So that's just a neat we inspect story.

It's really cool. And, you know, your story shows people that you can heal from this stuff. But I think a lot of times when they see somebody like Dave Asprey, who is healed from this and he has all the connections that he has, and he has all the toys and the tools and stuff, people start to think like, oh, I don't have access to all that stuff. So that's, you know, it can happen to him because he has access to this stuff. Betsy didn't have access to any of that stuff.

Right.

And a lot of our clients don't have access to any of that stuff. And they can still get there. And so, like, that little micro story there is to just let people understand that it's not just like, you know, the lucky people that happen to know somebody here or there, that it's anybody can do this. You just need a little guidance.

Yep. A little guidance can go a long way. But the most important thing that I think we can share with people in this episode is just, you're not crazy if you Feel like you're hungover all the time. If you and feel like you can't control your emotions and that you keep getting fatter for no reason and you just moved or. That's weird. Yeah, there was that water leak, but the plumber fixed it. Sometimes that's all it takes. One of the stories that was really formative for me that really brought this out. I already knew about mold. And the place where I was staying in Northern California, the dishwasher wasn't working. So we had it replaced. And the guy said, oh, there's been a water leak behind the dishwasher. It looks like it's for years. And they put in the new one and my dogs stopped eating. And then it was like my gut lining shed. I'm like, oh, my God, I feel like I ate Taco Bell. But I didn't go to Taco Bell and then had this worst brain fog and no amount of coffee. All the normal things. It was like something went sideways and it took me a week or two to figure out it was mold. And then instead of moving, even if it's you have to put on your credit card, you just have to get out so your brain can work again. I tried living there for six weeks while they remediated because I couldn't think. And I knew better. And this is why you need almost like a coach or a support system and you need data. And when you came and said, hey, Dave, here's what we're doing at We Inspect, I was kind of blown away. So tell me about the We Inspect process. I know because you did it for me just as an experiment on a place where I was just temporarily staying for a little while. And what all are you looking at and what's different versus just going to the hardware store and buying a mold test?

Yeah, it's a lot to unpack in that one question. I mean, let's start at the top because I think starting at what people are more used to seeing and then kind of comparing to that helps show it a little bit. So when people think I have a mold issue, the immediate thing they think is all the pictures you've seen in commercials and online where there's black mold covering all of your walls and it's totally visible everywh. And you're like, oh, I obviously have a mole problem. That is not how it works. It literally works like that, like 5% of the time in really small places that you still have to dig stuff out of the way to see stuff like that.

Right.

Is in the all the years I've done this, I can remember the house. There has been one house in the 10, however many years I've done this, where I walked in and I saw that. That's it. And that house, they just had to knock that whole thing down. That's how bad that house was, because it was everywhere. But that is not normal. So if your expectation is, well, I don't see mold anywhere, so I don't have a mold problem, I'm definitively telling you that that is not an indicator of whether or not you have a mold problem or not.

So having mold in your house doesn't mean you have a mold problem or.

Not seeing the mold in your house doesn't mean you don't have a mold problem.

Hold on. That was a double negative. Doesn't mean you don't have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't mean that there's not a mold problem if you don't see it.

No, that's a triple negative. All right, here's what you're saying. You won't always see mold in your house. You can have a mold problem that you cannot see. In fact, that's exceptionally common, Right? It's inside the ac. It's inside the duct work. It's behind a baseboard where you can't see it. But if you had the right eyeballs, like you do, you walk through, and you're like, oh, look, there's mold there. And I'm like, I don't see any. Like, yeah, but you see how the paint is slightly bubbled on the baseboard? That means this room is sat in water at some point, and no one fixed it. Oh, my God, you're right. And then you take a moisture meter with little pins and you stick it into the wall. I'm like, oh, look, that's 90% wet inside the drywall. Then it's like Neo from the Matrix. When he looks around, it's all zeros and ones. I felt like you were that way in the house.

I've actually described how I feel in a house just like that, actually. It's funny you say that here. I guess the point that I'm trying to get to most mold is hidden. You will not see it. So if your indicators. I walked into my house. I don't see any mold. That's not a real indicator of if there's a mold problem or not.

Right?

So then the question comes. Well, that's cool, Brian. So then how do you know if you have problems? Okay. And this is. This is the big thing is And I say this all the time. The secret to finding hidden mold is to not look for mold at all.

What do you look for?

The secret to finding hidden mold is to look for signs of water damage, because that's something the human eye can see. Human eye can't see mold until it's way out of control. And it's like beyond.

Right.

We can see. You just described bubbling paint in a baseboard, a little cracking paint on a wall, a floor that's warped. If you remember, in kind of your main area, there's like a little warp floor that was happening in there.

Right?

These are all signs that water or moisture has gotten into something. And then the big kicker on this, just to clarify, it does not even have to be wet right now. It could have been wet 15 years ago. Mold could have grown. It could have naturally dried because stuff air dries. It could have naturally dried. Mold is like a plant. If you walk outside or a flower or whatever, right? You got your garden outside, and you water the garden and the flowers grow, and they look all great, and you say, no, I'm going to stop watering my grass. I'm going to stop watering the plants. I'm just going to stop watering everything. You walk outside two weeks later, it's not that you just have a bare and empty backyard anymore. It's not like it all just ripped itself out on a search for new water.

Right.

That's not what it did. You walk outside and everything looks dead. It's yellow grass. It's flowers that have wilted over it. That's what it is. And that's what happens when mold grows. It's no different than a plant or a flower that grows. And so when you have these historical areas in a house where there was, you know, we had a flood five years ago in the basement, and, well, we just kind of put some fans on it and thought it was going to dry out. But that water got into the floor and it got into the walls, and then it stayed wet for a few weeks, and then it ultimately dried after that.

Yeah.

All the mold that grew in there is still there. And what's worse is that because it is now dried out, it is becoming credibly brittle and fragmented.

It's like dust, right?

A little gust of wind comes by, and it breaks it into tiny little pieces, and it moves into our airspace a lot easier. And it's easier for us to breathe because they're in tiny pieces that get through our lungs super easy. Like, so these historical issues that get downplayed a Lot are actually some of the biggest problems that occur in houses. And so when we talk about, like, the matrix of walking through the house is me looking through and being like this. This looks like that there was a water leak here at some point. This looks like that water hit over here.

That's all that it is.

And it's something I've taught people on six different continents how to look for on their own. And they find all these problems in their house all of a sudden because they just need to know what to look for.

Do you think most people are going to learn, or is this something that you're. You and your team of national inspectors? I know you guys can come in and look at it, but, I mean, are you going to have, like, AI stuff on an app where you just, like, take a picture of your room and it's like, mold, mold, mold, mold, mold. Please tell me the answer is yes.

I mean, listen, the. The dream is there to figure that out, right? But I, you know, it's not something that's happening tomorrow. I talk about internally at company. We have this internal concept that we talk about as pack, and everything that we do in the company needs to fill this pack. And the pack is P, A and K. Price, access, knowledge. Those are the three things. The only reason that somebody doesn't make an action that improves their health, it's too expensive. That's price. They don't have access. This is too hard to get it. Or knowledge. They just don't know any better. If everything that we do addresses each one of these three things, there's literally no reason that every single person in the entire world wouldn't handle this. And so we are trying to fill our pack with every single advancement that we make, every single division that we create. Everything that we do is in an effort to provide more into this pack so we can ultimately help more people. So it started with us going into the houses and doing it all on our own.

Right.

To get back to your question, are we just expecting people to, you know, learn all this stuff?

Right.

The next step was I created a training program. It's called Mo Finders Method. Literally broke down our entire inspection process to the point where you could do it as if you're doing paint by numbers as a kid. In every room, there's only so many places that things typically manifest, and there's only five signs of hidden water damage, the five signs of hidden mold growth that we just talked about.

Right?

There's five types of water damage. And in every room, there's a Majority of places where. Where things manifest. If you know what to look for and where to look for it, you'll find it every time.

Right.

So my team is trained like, this is like the method. The molefinder's method is how our team is trained to go through every single space in a house. So I turned that into a training program and we actually taught people how to do this. Did not go into their house. I didn't look at a single picture of anything they had going on. And people are finding 10, 15, 20 things in their house and they're testing them and they're finding all these problems because we taught them how to. There's like all this stuff, but that requires work. You have to learn how to look at this stuff.

Right?

You have to.

Here's a training program. Go learn. What did we talk about earlier? People that are impacted by this, their brains don't work very well. So to expect them to sit down and go through a course to teach them how to look for what they need to look at is not the most beneficial way to help them. So that was the starting point, which then turned into the app that I sort of talked about at the beginning of the day, which is called We Inspect Together. And what that does is it takes molefinder's method. It sticks it into an app on your phone. You say, hey, Brian, I've got two bathrooms and a bedroom and a kitchen in my space. Okay, cool. The app pre populates. Just take pictures. You don't know what you're looking for. Just take pictures of these spots like this. The same way like if you had a car insurance claim and they're like, go around your car and take a picture of your bumper and take a picture of your fender and just send it to our guys and we'll tell you if you what. What it looks like.

I like that.

That's what it is. And that's. That's the. That's basically what we are in testing on now by. Like I said, by the time this comes out, it'll be out fully rolling. But we've been developing that for two years. And that's going to fundamentally change the way that this industry works, because people now don't have to rely on Yelp Mold inspector who doesn't know what they're doing and they're looking for mold on walls and they think that something has to be wet right now for there to be a mold problem. They have all the wrong information on how to do this. You don't need to worry about. You don't have to use that anymore. You can have something that lower price point. There's price, it's accessible. Anyone with a phone can do it. And knowledge, wow. All that I do is talk all day about this stuff, so. And you get access to our consultants and our team. So it's not like you're just doing it and hoping it all filters back to my team of inspectors and consultants that are reviewing all of your information and giving you guidance on protocol and all that stuff. It lumps it all together. It's going to be incredible. It's not for everyone. Some people want someone in their house, right? And that's always going to be there. And we'll. And that's obviously the core of what we've done, and we will do that. But to make the big, big impact on humanity, which we really want to do, it's not by going into 100 houses a month or 200 houses a month. It's by having a platform like this that turns that into a thousand or two thousand a month where you can help that many people. And that's. That's where we're going.

I like that a lot. Because asking mold people to learn how to be mold experts. When you're in a place where your brain can barely learn, by the way, this is affecting tons of students. People think they have ADHD or behavioral problems. They just have brain poisoning from, from mold. But when you, when you try to do that, it's not going to work very well. But let me ask you this, okay, let's say I have mold and there's a study or a report that just came out that 53% of people in the US right now don't have a thousand dollars of available cash. This is not how the country was 20 or 25 years ago. Like, there have been. Well, there have been. I'm just going to say people who are, are ethically challenged making changes in our, in our alleged governance of the country. And this isn't a political thing. It's just like it's a government thing, not a party thing. And in the behavior of large companies and just like censorship and all the other stuff. So if you're in a situation like that and you're going, good God, I just found that there's four things, which is a relatively small number, where there's water damage in the house, like there's a rotting windowsill above my bed that's probably actively making you sick. But not only are you overwhelmed with mold, that makes everything feel harder than it is. You are actually financially right on the edge. And you're on the edge and it feels 10 or 100 times worse than it is because of the mold. And now are you going to sort of drop into this helpless feeling like there's no way I could afford to fix this thing and I have three other things to fix and if I don't, I'm going to die.

That's where a lot of people are.

Yeah. So what to do about that, by the way? It's not that you're going to die, it just feels like you're going to die. What's going on is you have mold in your home. It's a manageable problem. It can be very serious. It makes you feel really bad sometimes, but not always. And it may be why your kids are throwing food at you and they're much angrier than they should be for being five or whatever it is. So it matters. But how do you deal with it when you don't have big dollars to throw at fixing mold that you've identified, say with your new low cost cost app. Right.

Yeah. Well, listen, so that is why we're trying to figure all this stuff out, right? Like two years ago, yeah. We had to fly to your house, we had to go through this whole thing. Cost for that is more, right? Drop cost, drop cost. There's even the low. The training course still exists if people want to get in that, but at even a lower price point. But the, the thing is, is like, what do you do about it?

Right.

This is the thing with. If you're a mold inspector, you're not really a consultant. You're someone who's coming in. We like to call them pump jockeys. Like internally, like they just come in, run air sampling pumps, pump, pump, pump. I'm in and out of your house in 30 minutes. I collect my money for my samples, 70% of which are going to give you false negatives and we run off and we do our thing. We do five of those in a day, right. Their business is based on volume of low cost stuff. Churn, churn, churn. The problem is that the data that comes in is wrong all the time. And then they don't because they're doing five a day or whatever they're doing is a single individual person running all around town like that. They don't have time to actually talk to you short even learn what they need to learn to be able to talk to you and give you guidance on what has to go on.

Right.

So on our end, we actually have a team that works on every project. So you have the inspector that's in the house, but then there's what's called a lead consultant, which is in our main office, and they're overseeing the inspector, but they're the one that does all the communication with the client, all the guidance, all the consulting.

Right.

And it's really, really important to separate out those two roles, because if you don't have enough time to have conversations with people about what the information you're giving them actually means, and you saw this yourself, when the information comes, it's like, whoa, there's a lot happening, right? And if you don't have the guidance to walk you through that, you can start to spiral. And that's where you start to get to the feelings that you're talking about. It's hopeless. There's nothing I can do. I'm just going to sit here and die. Because you see a report that identifies problems, and that immediately is going to elicit a feeling of either fear or hopelessness or overwhelm.

Right?

And so what we have to do and what we've learned with working with people that are sensitive is you have to. You have to apply context to stuff, right? The. The information that, that we're finding and just testing and reports, it's all just hard data. That's what it is. This is what the problem is. This is the best way we know how to fix it.

Okay?

It's not applying priorities. It's not understanding their living situation. It's not taking into account their goals and what they're trying to figure out or their limitations or anything like that. You start getting into these conversations like. And even in renting, there's like all these sub goals. I'm renting, and I just want to get out of the house I'm renting. But I want to. I want a little something for leaving because I feel like all my stuff is contaminated. So I need. I feel like I need to get some sort of coffee compensation before I get out of the house. It's not just wanting to leave, it's about getting compensation. Just those two goals change the entire way that you test a space. So you build a story in terms of your testing around the goals that you have. And then we talk through how do you prioritize? How do you leverage certain things? How do you have conversations with the key players in the game to help you get to where you need to be? And it all, like, I was the first person I saw this happen to before I even knew that mold was a Thing Mark, who's my father in law, who was with me when we came to check out your place that you were in, he. He went through my space. I knew nothing about it. I. My landlord sent in somebody who said everything was fine and was, you know, one of these pump jockeys that were there for, you know, 30 minutes. Mark comes in, he's in my house for like my 800 square foot apartment for like three hours, finds eight things that are going on, and then asks me, so what do you. What's your goal? What do you want to happen here?

Wow.

And I'm like, what do you mean? Because you don't think about that stuff when you're going through it. And he asked the questions, you want to stay? Do you want to leave? What do you want to do this or that? And so he helped me get out of the lease, partially because I was dating his daughter. I think he's a little more hands on at the time.

Yeah, that might help.

He might have been with someone else. But he showed me, like, how you can. How that piece, the consulting piece, the guidance piece, is just as important as the identification of what the problems are in the space. And when you marry the two of those things together, that's where all the stuff you just talked about starts to diminish. Because somebody feels like, oh, I have a plan, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Here's my approach. This is how Brian got out of his three leases in LA and all the death pits in LA that exist out there, right? Every single time I moved in LA because there was a water leak and I had to get out. And it was a formula of full inspection test. Two to three things that I felt really confident that were a problem. And then I have a letter written by an attorney that says, here's how this is going to go down. And that will scare pretty much any landlord into just letting you out of your lease because they don't care.

Right.

There's a framework. I see it at work. Share that with somebody in a consult. Here's how it works. Here's what you can do to achieve that goal. That's like one example.

This is a major problem. And I, I've heard this for probably a thousand times over the last 10 years because I did the documentary because I've been pretty public about what mold did to me until I fixed it. It's part of my biohacking journey. People call and say, my landlord doesn't believe me. They came in, they sprayed bleach on the mold, by the way, does that work?

No.

Yeah. Spraying bleach on mold feeds the mold because there's water in it.

Pisses it off. Yeah, exactly.

Makes more toxins.

Yeah.

It's like, hey, let me punch you in the face, and then give you a lot of food to recover. It's like weightlifting for mold. That's what bleach is. But that's actually not true. If it's on a. If it's on porcelain or something, that'll actually kill it. But if it's on any porous surface, you can't do it. So, all right. The landlord doesn't want to admit there's a problem because then they would have to disclose it to someone else or.

They'D have to pay to fix it. Either way, it's terrible.

And it can be very expensive for landlords. And if you're a landlord and you're saying, well, I turn the AC off because no one was living there for three months, you've just created a mold bomb. Like a house with no environmental circulation, that's closed off, stuff will grow. That's how Mother Nature recycles. Right. So you have to keep at least a minimum level of circulation. There's all these things that people don't do. Even Airbnbs, I don't stay in them very often because most Airbnb owners just turn off the AC until you're there and you walk in, you're like, oh, it smells a bit funky, and. And you open the windows, and then the next day, like, I don't really feel that good. So there are solutions that's like air filters. There's Home Biotic, which is a company that I started specifically around this problem. It's a environmental probiotic. You spray around and it's a bacteria that lays dormant and waits for mold. And then when mold comes out, it's the same stuff that competes with mold in the soil, but now it's in the home and it's not going to fix inside a wall or something. But I know that if I'm in a hotel room that's on the edge and I miss that around and I come back a couple hours later, it's actually much better. So it is something that's very low cost, like 20 bucks, and it's not one of my biggest companies, I barely talk about it, but it's one of the things that certain mold people just know about, and it's something that I travel with. So I don't know what else to do, though. So let's I'm going to go back to that. I don't have $100,000 to spend, and I might be able to move out, which is going to be financially devastating. I have to leave my mattress or maybe just get a airtight mattress cover and keep your mattress. But anything that mold could have settled in isn't going to be safe unless I clean it. What's the lowest cost way to get rid of, say, mold in a room?

You know, it's interesting because I. If you look at it just in a vacuum of. I have mold in a space. How do I get rid of mold in a space? Well, let's define what getting rid of it means, the levels of getting rid of it. Like, how much am I. Am I getting source, or am I just. It needs to be a combination of two variables. What is my health condition and what of my body? And what is the health condition of my house? And they need to be able to balance, okay? Now, somebody who is really resilient can be exposed to more mold in a space because their body can handle it and they find an equilibrium. Other people who are incredibly hypersensitive and like, one hit of it just kills them for two days, right? Their bears, way low. So now that means that your exposure needs to be way low to find your equilibrium until you start building up your resilience. And then, just like you said, with the space that you were in, right? Like, you used to be really bad, but now you're not because you've done some work and you can handle being in a space for a little bit without completely crashing, right? And so I think as we're talking about, well, like, what's the cheapest, lowest cost, fastest way to handle something in a space? We'll get there. Where's your starting point? Because if we don't know where your starting point is, I can tell you. Listen, the. The three easiest things you could do right now, get a really good air filter, open up your windows for 10 to 15 minutes a day, and do a super spring cleaning on steroids to get rid of all the subtle dust in your house. You do those three things, and you're getting rid of a lot of the kind of everyday exposure that's going on.

So this might be the one time you want to wear a mask is when you're doing a deep spring cleaning in a home that has had some mold. So you wear maybe an N95 mask. And I actually owned an N95 mask for that purpose before all of the nonsensical use of Masks came up, and you actually really do put that on, and then you clean. Or you have a cleaning service to it, if you can. But it has to be like, you lift up everything, you dust all the books, everything, and magically you feel way better.

Right.

And it's not dust mites necessarily. They could be a problem for you, but it's these little particles that just happen. So if you see dust building up, especially around the bedroom area, like, you gotta just get it handled. That makes a huge difference, I think.

To expand on that. Cause I think we didn't talk about why the dust is an issue.

Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah. The reason that having a really thorough dust cleaning, you can feel a big impact is because what happens when mold spores or toxins or even bacterial fragments, all stuff we're talking about. And it's not just that stuff, it's everything. It's insect fragments, it's skin fragments off of all the stuff that floats around our house. Airborne pollutants. Gravity brings them down and they settle in dust reservoirs. And dust acts like a giant spider net or spider web, basically, and it holds all this stuff. Well, there's this thing that's called the human cloud effect. There's studies that are done on this. So the visual of this is, if you ever watch Charlie Brown and there was the kid that was, like, super dirty all the time, and he always had this cloud of dirt just, like surrounding him all the time. That happens to us literally every step we take in our house, every time we sit down, every time I bump my computer desk. Except instead of dirt, gross, smelly dirt, which is what that was supposed to be, it is invisible particles that come up from dust settlement on your counter, on your couch, on your carpet. When you're walking, it pops up into the air and it becomes part of your breathing zone, and it creates what's called a human cloud.

Okay.

When we're exposed to mold in a house, the source of mold may be behind a wall. That might be where it's coming from. The source of the mold that's hidden behind the wall is not actually what we're breathing. Our face isn't behind the wall.

Right.

It's creating what we're breathing. Think like a factory. There's a factory a mile down the road. You're not walking in the factory, but the smoke coming out of the top of the factory is the air pollution that you breathe when you walk outside. The air pollution in our house is the spores and the fragments of stuff that come out of the factories. That are hidden behind the walls and in these water damage areas that we talked about. Your direct pathway to exposure, therefore, is what's floating around. And a big chunk of that, huge chunk of that is settling in your dust and constantly getting resuspended into your breathing zone through the human cloud effect. So if you remove the dust that is carrying all of the toxins and the contaminants and stuff, and then you walk around your house, there's less of that to pop up in your breathing zone, less exposure, you start feeling better for a short period of time. So that's the connection between dust and why dust cleaning can help you get a short term, you know, feeling better kind of thing. But it doesn't mean the factory that's back there isn't still creating smoke.

Right.

And that's, that's the thing. The part that we have to understand is if you truly are trying to long term fix it, you have to bulldoze the factory down. You have to shut the factory down, fire all the workers, make them stop creating stuff. And if you can do that, then you can do a final clean of the house and the dust cleaning like we talked about, and then you're not going to have any more that gets built in anymore. So it's just understanding like. So we get back to what's your situation, what's your health situation and what's your goal? I'm sensitive, I'm in a rental and I'm not trying to be here long term. Cool. So the two things that you need to do are, one, you got to try to package your testing and your data in a way that's going to give you leverage to get out of your lease. And the second thing you need to do is short term interventions to help reduce your exposure and make you feel better for a shorter period of time before you get out and go somewhere else.

Right.

And then that's like, that's the consulting package basically in my mind that I would put together for somebody that I'm talking to there.

Okay, I'm liking that. One of the things that I did run into, I am actually a fan of doing an air test, because if it's in the air, you know, you have a problem. But you probably want to like stomp around and kick up some dust before you do the air test, so at least you'll get a reading. But what I did, that was a mistake. Before I stayed in a place for a little while, I ran an air test and I didn't find much. I'm like all right, it's fine. But what I should have done was stomped around a bunch or now from learning from you and talking with you, if I'm going to go stay in a place, I want to do, like, for a long period of time, I want to do a swab test to find the dust. Like, what's in the dust, because that's such a problem. And I want to do an air test and kind of have both. Is that a good approach?

Honestly, I'd leave out the air test. We don't do. I mean, you probably saw this when we were in your place, too. We don't do air samples in the middle of rooms anywhere. There wasn't one. There wasn't one that we did in the middle of an open space anywhere. Because I know. And this is from. The reason I know this is because I did this in a study for a year on every house that I went into. 70% of the time, an air test is going to give you a false negative. When there's a hidden mold source in a wall or under a cabinet or under the floor three feet away, because it just can't pick it up because there's too many variables. When you start thinking about air currents and this and that and all that stuff that's moving around. Air sampling, the further away you get from the source, the less and less and less effective it gets. So the only way that we really do air testing, we actually call it source identification testing. It's to know where the source is. So what's an example of that? I look at a wall, and I see the paint is chipping and there's bubbling on the baseboard like that. But there's no mold on the front of the wall. So you can't swab the front of the wall. There's nothing there.

Right.

Nothing's going to come on a swab. So how do I know if there's mold behind the wall? Because the water damage is the clue and the red flag that tells me there might be something here. We do what's called a cavity air test. Put a little hole in the wall, put a tube through the hole, connect the tube to the air sampling pump. Now I'm collecting air from behind the wall. Instead of random air floating around 5ft, 10ft away from it, and I get right on top of where I think the problem is. And if I see there's something there, I know there's a problem. Right here. It's right here. I found it. It's right here. This is where it starts Right. And if you get in there and there's nothing that comes up on the sample, you say, okay, I sampled an area where the water damage was most significant. We know that water plus organic material equals mold. Okay? That was my reason for testing it. I get in there, sample says there's nothing there. I feel pretty confident that there's not a big problem back there, if any. So we leave that alone now as we're starting to go through lab results and remediation plans and protocols and what that looks like. But to get back to your question, if you're first getting into a space and you're just like, I just want to know if this place has a problem, how significant is it? If it is, so I can tell you where it's coming from. It's going to let you know if there's something going on here. You do what's called a dust test, and it's literally a dust collection of the dust in the house. And it's the same reason that we talk about all this stuff settles down into the dust, and the dust acts like a spider web and it grabs all of it. Now, the thing that in addition to just the home science of how things settle and all that, the other reason that dust sampling is way more effective than air testing is because air sampling can only look when. For what's called a spore. Okay? So if anyone's familiar with mold that's listening this, they probably heard of mold spores. That's probably what they've heard of.

Right?

So think of. Think of that like a. You know when you're a kid and you pull up the flower and you blow on it and the little things.

Fly this face, and then she, like, starts crying and she punches you in the face. And then you realize that that's your entire relationship with your sister until the end of your life. Because of that one deadline like that, you mean?

Well, I would have a sister, so.

It'S messing with.

I know. For real. Sorry, guys. Listen, this is going a whole other way. The last half of this is all relationships, health. No, think of that as the spore that comes off, right? That's a spore that floats around. But what if the entire. Let's not use a dent, let's use a tree. It's easier to visualize. The leaves on the tree are the spores in the fall leaves come off. Those are the spores from your colony. But you still have the entire tree. The tree has a trunk. It has roots, it has branches, it has bark, has all this other stuff that's on there, Right? None of that gets identified in a regular air sample. But in a dust sample, it can get all the way down to a piece of bark that happened to break off of that colony that has the same DNA signature as that mold type. And it can identify that within there. And why is that important? Because that is the true load of what you're being exposed to. Our body, when we breathe something in, doesn't look at it and says, oh, it's a spore. So I don't like this, but anything else is fine. It breathes in whatever it breathes in. And if it's any part of a mold colony, or even the toxins or whatever, it triggers the immune response. It's something that should not be in our body and air samples. And so one of the studies that are out there says that the amount of fragment, okay, so think the bark, the little piece of bark that broke off the tree, as compared to the leaf that fell off the tree. The amount of fragments in a home can be up to 500 times the amount of spores that are there because they break off like that. So our true understanding of exposure is better identified in a dust sample because you take out the variable of airflow patterns and all this stuff, you just go straight where you know it would be located, which is in the dust, grab the dust, now you know you've got it if it's there. And the analysis on it is way more in depth and it gets all the way to the same species of mold. So let's say you're somebody who knows that you have mold toxicity and you've done a urine mycotoxin test and you've got ultra toxin A, or you've got, you know, fill in the blank of whatever toxin you have. You can now correlate that directly to the mold species that are in the house. And just from that, you can start making understand or start getting understandings of what your environment means for your space. But if you're screening a new place, you do that. There's a test that's called the dust test, which is one of my companies, the dust test dot com. And what we did in that test is in addition, just telling you what molds are present.

Right.

The other thing that we did is we went back over three years of all of the inspections that we did, and we figured out where your home would rank on the scale of every house that we've ever been into over that three year period and give you more understandings of how contextually your space would relate to that in terms of, like, the percentile that you would fall into. Because if somebody. If somebody's doing it for that reason, they're like, I want to know if this space is a place that I should even move into, or is it too far gone or like, you know, I should look for another one. The only way, you know that is with context. And so, again, just like I said earlier, I could give you all the data, but if you're not getting consulting, then there's no context. And what do you do?

Right?

The same with these lab tests. I mean, even human lab tests are like, here's all these numbers. What the hell does this mean?

Right?

It's the same thing. Without context, that doesn't mean anything. It can actually be more scary than not scary, without an understanding of sort of what's normal and what's not normal and all that stuff. So what we did is I took the last three years of inspection data, what we found in the homes, all that stuff, and integrated it into the report that comes out with the dust test. So now when you get a result from the dust test, you get all the actual, you know, raw lab stuff like you normally would with any sort of dust test. But the other thing that you're getting is the context. Where does my house rank on the scale and percentile basis of all the homes? We did. And then the third thing we lumped into this, because again, consulting in context is key in all of this. Free phone call with our team afterwards, you tie it in directly into the dust test report. There's a link in there. You do it. We have your information up in front of us, and you actually, actually get a consult with the people that know how to read these things on what it means for you. And then what happens in that talk? The same things we said. Well, what are your goals? What are you looking for? Where'd you come from? What are you wanting to do based on all of this information? Here's the advice we would give you, right? None of that exists in the environmental world. There are some health lab companies that do stuff like that. But our side of it, nobody does this stuff. And it's so important. It's so important.

It really is important. And it's also. It's hard to put words to it. I mean, that's why there's the documentary. That's why I keep mentioning it just a little bit here and there in the world of biohacking, because the data I had from recording the movie was that about 100 million structures in the US have meaningful mold problems, and it's concentrated in schools, including colleges, college dormitories, libraries, anything government funded they just don't do maintenance on. Right. And so it just feels like your kids are healthy over the summer. Maybe it's the sunshine. It probably is, but maybe it's that when they go back into that classroom where the ductwork hasn't been cleaned in 30 years and they can smell it's a bit funky, and you can see stains on the ceiling tiles, we got to not do that to our kids and our teachers. And so things like that are happening all over the place. What is the number or percentage of homes and offices that have a mold problem that you would estimate in the US today?

So many. So EPA says about 50% is wildly underrated. I mean, just the EPA.

Are they still working? Because I haven't seen any results from what they're doing for the last 50 years. So sorry, guys. You're allowing glyphosate that's never been tested on any bug except for honeybees, that's causing seizures and earthworms, you know, the things at the base of the food web. So I guess the EPA estimates 50%.

So that I would tell you, from the homes that I've been into, it's. It's 90. Yeah, it's very close to 90. I can actually count on one hand all the years I've done this, five places that I've walked into. Like, I don't really find anything in here. That's it.

I believe that now some meaningful percentage of people are going, well, wait a minute. If you find something everywhere and everyone isn't sick, therefore you're oversensitive and you're measuring things to, you know, an extreme level of purity. Like, even when I'm talking about, you know, mold free coffee, which is, you know, something I created. And now I'm on Danger Coffee, which is my. My new brand that also includes minerals and a new level of testing. The definition of free. If you're measuring parts per trillion, which no one does, is it possible there's one molecule of mold in an entire shipping container of coffee? It's not only possible, it's guaranteed. So it's like, how pure is your water? Well, if you had really truly pure water like they used for semiconductor manufacturing, you can't drink it. Like, you put one drop on your tongue and it messes with your cell integrity because it's so pure. And so what we want is, we want a home that is free of the really toxic Stuff, Right. And some molds are worse than others. And we want a home with generally low levels, but not zero, right?

Yeah. Zero doesn't exist.

Right.

And it's. There's a few of these. You said one like, well, if there's mold everywhere, not everybody is sick. Not everybody has cancer. Not everybody has this. Not every. Does that mean it's not real? No, it doesn't mean it's not real. It just means that everybody's body is different, Their exposures are different, their genetic makeup is different, their upbringing was different. And where they lived. There's so many variables in somebody. There isn't one. Not everybody in the world got Covid, like, not everybody's gonna get every single thing that goes on. Right. It just doesn't work that way. The another one of the big arguments is like, well, moles been around forever, and we're just now, you know, all of a sudden, now we're getting sick for mold. When we used to live in caves, here's the first thing. Those caves were not airtight sealed. Those caves had big, wide open doors in the front, so there was fresh air coming in. So when you were in the parts, like, air was coming out.

Have you ever gone caving?

I've been once, yeah.

Okay. So where I grew up in New Mexico, I was in the gold prospecting association of America. And yes, I was the New Mexico gold panning state champion when I was like 10 or 12. So I spent literally my weekends as a child exploring 18th century Spanish minds in New Mexico with a group. And I'm sure it was dangerous, but, hey, that's why it's called danger coffee. We had fun and no one died. Therefore, it was good. Kind of like skiing.

Is that the tagline for your coffee? Have fun, don't die?

It's actually. Who knows what you might do, because people who are at full power do all sorts of things that might be dangerous, but are also the things that make life worth living. So all of those things are full of mold. All those subterranean spaces, including subways, including. I've been in lots of caves for meditation and things like that. And way more often than not, there's moisture. But this is interesting. There is mold, there is bacterial growth, but it's usually in balance in that it's like the soil. So the mold doesn't make a lot of toxins. And if it does, bacteria eats it. And it's kind of like a fermenting of a cheese or it's like kombucha. Right. And it's not that harmful, but if you're hypersensitive, you'll feel it. And then there are other times where there's, say, bats in New Mexico, and there's, you know, 10ft of guano, which is bat poop, that's built up over the years that's full of biotoxins, and if you breathe that stuff, it's probably not good for you. And the people who'd mine guano would actually get miner's lung, which wasn't from coal. It was from bacteria from bat poop growing in their. In their lungs. Most of that, though, has been exported to Wuhan, so. It's okay. You weren't supposed to laugh, man. I can't believe you laughed. What does that. What does that say about you?

I'm a terrible person. If you couldn't tell from this interview so far.

First you make fun of my ex sister, and then.

Wait, you unknowingly were trying to talk about my. My imaginary sister? Don't put it on me. Don't put it on me.

You've heard the show a lot, but one of my sense of humor love languages is putting words in other people's mouths. So I succeeded.

You did. Here's the last thing I love.