The Truth About Dormant Mold

I can't see microscopic mold behind a wall. I can't see that right. But I can see the red flag. It's like, hey, there's a really good chance there's mold down here. You should check this out.

Welcome, everyone. My name is Kendra Seymour, and I'm joined today by one of our foundation strategic advisors and iep, Brian Carr. Thank you, Brian, so much for being here today.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'm excited now. I am super excited for our talk because you are kind of famous for your ability to take some of these abstract, hard to understand concepts and really explain them in a way that the average person can understand. I am personally a huge fan of your analogies, and I know, I'm hoping you're going to drop a few of those for us in your talk today. But I can't wait to hear a little bit more about the truth about dormant mold, because I think there's. There's a lot to unpack there. So I'm going to let you kind of take it away.

Yeah, this is a. It's a big thing and it's actually a huge problem in our industry in general. And so I was really glad when you had the idea of doing this particular type of topic because it just opened up. I actually created a whole new presentation I've never done anywhere before. So this can be pretty cool. So I'm going to jump into this, share my screen, we'll get going, and I'll kind of move on from there, so. All right, can you see what we got going on here?

You're good to go.

All right, there I am, guys. Truth about hidden mold that most mold inspectors neglect and how it's actually making people more sick. This, this second part here that's highlighted is so important because if we don't understand dormant molds, people call it dead mold, people, whatever they want to call it, people call dry mold, like throw in anything that you want to do. If we don't understand that and think about it in the grand scheme of what's happening in our space and that we still are actually exposed to it, we don't understand that that could still be impacting our health, it gets downplayed, it gets normalized, and then the next thing you know, we continue to be sick and we don't know why. Right. And so that's why I'm really glad to kind of dive into this real quickly. I'm one of the founders of We Inspect. Corey, who I believe is going to be speaking as well, is. Is the Other one. Here we are. Here's just some stuff about us. I won't spend a lot of time on this. So I have a podcast, Mold Finders Radio. We're certified, we have training courses, different things. Okay, so what I want to do is, is I want to start on kind of what a normal person's journey is when they get to us. Because. Because it sets the stage for what we're trying to avoid. Right? So typically, what's happening, somebody has this goal. We're going to find and we're going to remove mold in our home for whatever reason. Usually it's a health driven issue. Otherwise, why would you even be thinking about it, right? So usually that's what it is. So here's our goal. This is what we need to do. So what do you do? I go on to Yelp. I search around like, I need a mold inspector. This guy's got five stars. Whatever. Cool. I'm going to bring this guy in. Side note, guys, Yelp is a great spot for, like, finding a restaurant, a cool happy hour spot, like, some of those things. Yelp is not the place to find people to deal with severe medical conditions, to deal with biotoxin problems in the house. Like, it's probably not the best place to find that, but maybe when you're done, that's a good place to. To get a happy hour drink. So this is what happens. You go find this person on Yelp. They have five stars. You bring them in. Their inspections usually be around 800 bucks. They're going to come in your house. They're going to be there maybe for an hour. They're going to kind of sort of look around, but not really. They're probably going to take two or three air samples in the middle of rooms in different places, which don't actually really tell you what's going on. And I'll get into that later. They'll basically come back to you and they'll say, hey, everything looks good. You don't have a mole problem. Everything's fine. And then in your mind, you're checking that off the list. You're like, oh, cool, my doctor said I had a problem. Or I suspected I had a problem. On my health side, I had my house checked out. This guy who's certified and has five stars on Yelp and seems like an awesome dude says that, okay, there's no problem. Cool. There's no problem. So what do you do? You write it off. You're like, cool. House is not a part of the problem. Now, the issue with this is. Now you start looking other places for the problem, thinking that the house is not it, and it redirects you away from what really is a problem. And sometimes it even makes you question your doctor, because your doctor's like, no, I'm seeing that there's a problem here. And then you'll start second guessing your doctor because you had some Yelp five star guy come in for 800 bucks and tell you that everything was fine. Your doctor, in the grand scheme of things, should have more weight than your $800 mold inspector guy from Yelp. Just gonna throw that out there. Okay, so this might go on another year. You might fire a doctor, get another doctor. You're still sick. You're not really getting any better. You finally realize that. Yeah, okay, I think there maybe is something that got missed. You find another inspector in. Where do you look? You probably go back to Home Advisor and Angie's List and Yelp again. Because, honestly, where do you go? Look, there's not this massive directory of people that know what they're doing in this industry. So you do that. Be like, I need to look for more than, than just five stars. It should probably be a more expensive inspection. Probably. That would mean that they're going to be doing more things. So typically, what happens, you get a second one that comes in. It's maybe around 1200 bucks. You tell this person the whole story of the first one. This person now knows I better find something or they're going to think I'm some sort of sham scam artist or whatever, right? So they're going to go in, they're going to do the same type of stuff. They're going to, like, maybe find something, like, in this wall right here. And they'd be like, this is it. This is the problem. I found it. Your. Your problems are over. It's great. All you got to do is fog. Your house is magic, fixes everything, and you're all good. And you not knowing any better, like, oh, my God, I finally found it. I'm so happy. Like, I, I, yeah, I was wrong the first time, but we found this guy. It's a little more expensive, but it was worth it. He found the one thing in the house. I'm going to tell you guys this right now. If you have health issues, honestly, and your doctor's pointing it out and you have, like, complex problems, I guarantee you there's more than one more problem in your house. There's. There just is. That's how the load in a house gets. So. So to the point where the load is impacting your health, right? There's typically multiple things that are going on. So if you think you hit the mother load because the second guy came in for a little more money and said, I found the one thing and we're going to cut out two feet of wall and fog your house and everything's going to get better. Unfortunately, it's probably not going to work. And I'm only saying all this because I've literally seen this over and over again. And when I've show people these numbers are like, that's exactly what they charged me. Like this is, this is where it's coming from, right? So you go in there like, cool, cut out this piece, fog the house, whatever. Ban 15 grand done like that, you think you fixed everything, you're out 15 grand. Here's the problem though, is that you didn't actually fix anything. You've spent 17 grand at minimum here. Sometimes you're spending more. You're spending two to three years of all of this. I believe this guy. I don't believe this guy. I'm finding a new doctor. I'm not finding a new doctor. I finally got in remediation, took a while, whatever. All this time comes back at the end of this, you're still sick, or you might even be more sick because you didn't actually fix the problem. You're still getting more exposed to what's going on. You've wasted thousands of bucks and you don't get that time back. Right? You've lost that time. This is usually when people find us. And the reason that I wanted to set this up for you is because this framework of what happens here, this is kind of the rational thought process of how you handle a mold situation. Okay? Both from a consumer perspective, but also from the inspectors that you're bringing in. They're. They're thinking about this and like, well, this is the normal way to do it. So rationally this makes sense. And the reason I bring that up is because I want us to get off of that, right? There's this quote from Albert Einstein that says, I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. If Albert Einstein just like took what everybody else said and was like, oh, I guess that's true. We wouldn't have half of the cool stuff that we have right now, right? So for us to make progress and to actually learn and, and heal ourselves and do these things, we can't rely on these old antiquated things that are 20, 30 years old thinking that that's the way you do stuff forever. Like, newsflash. We learn things and we adapt and we grow. That's how we grow as. As people, as communities. I mean, think about 50 years ago, I could go into the delivery room when my wife was having a baby and smoke a cigarette, sitting right next to my baby coming out. Like, I could have done that 50 years ago. Now, you do that, you might be sent to, like, jail for. For, like, child abuse before the kid even came out. Like, that's a learning process. We learned, oh, this stuff is, like, not good. Let's change how we view these things, right? We need to be doing that on this side. And there's enough information and research and data to support a new way of thinking, let me say, an irrational way of thinking, right? I want us to think of things like that as we go through this. So what I want you guys to do is open your mind to the idea that what I'm going to be showing you is not what every mold inspector tells you. It's not what every Facebook group tells you. It's not what all this stuff tells you. But this is actually what we see and what is working and what is happening. All right? So. And I also really like this picture, so I figured out a way to use it. So. All right, so here's the first irrational thing I tell you guys. We have an epidemic of sick homes and buildings. It's not just your house that happens to have a water leak. It's most of them that have water damage. Now, if you just listen to what the EPA says, they say at least 50% of all of these houses on this screen have some sort of water damage issue. Okay? Now, we said half of every building I walk into is going to have some sort of water damage. Why is water damage an issue? Because where there's water, that's where mold comes, right? That's why water damage is such an important thing for us to understand. This is the epa, who honestly guys is, like, way behind the curve on understanding all this mold stuff. They're telling you 50% of places are water damaged right? Now. It's interesting because let's think about what is water damage. How can the EPA possibly know what's water damage? Right? Well, think about it. The way that they understand this, it's like, how does stuff get reported to them? How do they know this? Right? Well, there's got to be probably big floods. There's got to be, like, restoration companies probably that have to come in on, like, government contracts. Like, there has to be Some way of tracking all this stuff for them, for them to even be able to create a number like this. Cool. So that's your 50%. What about, what about my dishwasher that just leaked two weeks ago? Am I reporting that anywhere? Did I even have somebody come in and remediate it? Probably not. I'm saying I as like a general person, right? Like probably not. We're probably just dried it out ourselves because we didn't think it was a big deal or whatever might be going on. What if you live in a 50 year old house? Who was living in that house before you got there? Grandma was living in that house before you got there. If we don't know how to handle this stuff now, what do you think Grandma was doing 50 years ago when her sink would overflow or her tub or overflow or whatever? She would put a fan on it probably and go like this and say everything's fine. And that would be it. Right. And if that has happened in a house at some point in time, that's part of the history of that house. Now if mold grows, it doesn't go away, it stays. It just becomes dormant. Which we're going to get into. Right. And so this is why this is a problem. The reason I bring up all this, like, what is water damage? Because frankly, the EPA has no idea how many buildings are water damage. Of everything that I've been in, I would say this number is closer to 90. Literally nine out of every 10 houses I go into, there's going to be water damage. That's more than like one little thing. In all of the years I've been doing this, I can absolutely count on one hand the number of times I walked into a house and didn't find one sign of water damage. That's thousands of houses over the course of like almost a decade and I've only been in maybe five places that didn't have one thing of water damage. Okay, now this isn't to like freak everybody out and say like, oh, molds everywhere, there's no getting around it. That's not what the point of it is. The thing is that we have to understand what our challenge is and we have to not downplay it. Because if you normalize it and downplay it, there's no way you can get ahead of it and actually, you know, kind of coexist with it. Right? So that's that piece. And what I said here is in the next piece is this is, this is absolutely true. This isn't an exaggeration, this isn't me throwing things out here to make an impact. If a doctor has ever referred us a patient. Every single time that has happened, you know, as a result of a mold issue. Right. Every single time that's happened, we have found sources of mold in their house. Every single time. 100 of the time, not 99.9. This isn't a commercial where I'm giving myself a little out and say it's like the 0.1%. So literally every single time we have found something. Okay. So again, if your doctor is like, hey, I really think there's something going on. Trust them. They've kind of done this before. Right. And just as like, a secondary opinion on our end, they're usually right. Okay. So it's just a matter of, like, how. How much is going on, how significant is it, and what do we have to do to address it? So now the last piece on the challenge that we have to deal with is mold inspectors. Most mold inspectors don't think like this. Most mold inspectors think that, oh, if you had a leak over here, but it's not wet right now, that it's fine. Right. I literally had something that happened in my house. I had a leak in my ceiling. Happened a couple of months ago. Insurance person came out and the insurance person's like. And I just kept my mouth shut. I wasn't. Because I wasn't going to say anything. Insurance person comes out. They're like looking around like, oh, no, everything's. Everything's dry. Everything's dry, so there's no problem. And then they turn and look at me. I didn't prompt this at all. They turn and look at me and they. Because I have kids and it was in my kids playroom, they're like, you shouldn't be worried about mold. Mold can't make anyone sick. And there's no way there can be mold if there's. If it's dry right now.

Wow.

I was so shocked that I didn't even say anything. Like, what am I going to do to this? I'm going to sit here and give this person an hour presentation on why they don't know what the hell they're doing and they should reevaluate their life. Like, no, I didn't do that, but it blew my freaking mind. And this is the normal person that's coming to look at your house. Right. I want us to know that because we have to kind of educate ourselves to get off a yelp where all these people are and to get into a place to surround ourselves with People that view this in a much more progressive way, that understand that this is more of a health challenge than it is a building challenge. And the approach that we're taking to address these things are the same mindset of somebody has cancer and we have to be really freaking serious about this. Like, that is the mindset because at the end of the day, we're dealing with things that trigger really complex health issues. We're dealing with biotoxins in certain cases, which are, in their own right, carcinogens anyway. Like, this is why we need to be thinking of stuff this way. All right, so that's the doom and gloom on what's going on. It gets better, I promise. So let me. Let me set it up and just sort of tell you what are we dealing with, right? This is all the stuff that's kind of out there. That was all the rational thought. That was the current rational thought that's going on. So I actually think this is super rational. But for some reason, a lot of normal local inspectors don't. Kind of blows my mind. But this analogy has been one of my go to's for years. So think about mold like a factory. So here's my little cursor, right? So say all these little buildings down here. This is a hidden mold colony that's somewhere behind a wall in your house. All right, now let's imagine you're driving down the street. You see a factory on the side of the road. You can't see what's happening inside the factory. You don't know what they're making. Right? You can't see what's in all these buildings here. Right? But smoke is coming out of top of the building. The smoke is the byproduct of whatever they're making inside. Now let's say that we live, you know, down the street, half mile down the street, we walk out on our front, you know, our front yard. There's air pollution from all the smoke we breathe in that air pollution. That air pollution makes us sick. Somebody might say, man, you live in a place with a really bad air pollution problem. Kind of, yeah, my place does have a bad air pollution problem, but that's not the real problem. The problem is the factory half a mile down the road that's creating all the air pollution that I'm breathing. That is the problem. Okay? So when you think of mold, we have to think of it in two ways. Mold is the. Is the actual factory that's creating the smoke, and then the smoke is what we're actually exposed to. Okay? And so when we're thinking about a house and what we need to do and what the goals are of an inspection, we have to do these two things. We have to figure out where the source areas are in a house. I'll talk through that a little bit. If you don't know where it's coming from, you can't fix it. If you had an inspector come in and they spent an hour and they took a couple air samples the middle of rooms, and they said, cool, we're going to fog this house and clean it up. No, it 100% will not work. It will work for. You might see a reduction in symptoms for a couple of weeks or a month or something because the fogging is going to reduce the current. Smoke that's out, it's going to pull it down. But the factories are still pumping smoke into the room. So it's going to come back and in a couple of weeks, in a month, you're going to start getting sick again. Except remember, you just dropped 15 grand on that earlier for that to happen. You just set that money on fire, right? Like, that's what happened. So if you have an inspection and they're not identifying, you have mold in this wall, in this wall, in your ceiling, under the sink cabinet, and in your H vac system, let's say, and instead they're saying you have a mold air quality problem, that means zero. I mean, you might have a mold air quality problem, but what the hell are you going to do about it? Like, imagine if I took an air sample in a room. It's like, oh, yeah, there's high mold in this air sample, let's say. It didn't give me a false negative for the 30% of time, it doesn't. And it actually shows that there's a mold problem in a room. And I say, cool, what do I do? Do I just gut the whole room? Where the hell is it? What do I do with it? Gut the room, fog it out, knock your house down, build a new one. Because I have no idea where it's coming from. Like, that is the equivalent of what that would be. Right? So we have to know where the sources are. But then the second piece, which is just as important, is understanding the cross contamination. Because the thing we have to realize, there may be mold behind this wall, and this might be the reason that the contamination is happening. But this mold isn't actually what's triggering our symptoms. The air, the smoke that flowed out of it that we're breathing, that's triggering our symptoms. So we have to understand how this has created the smoke that's in our airspace, what the composition of that smoke is, how significant it is. Meaning, is it mycotoxins, is it bacterial toxins, how much mold load is in that in its entirety? And then how do we clean the. In its totality to get rid of that stuff? So a remediation has to account for removing the source. Let's say there's source behind this wall. Remove the source, clean the mold, get it out of here. But then also, that doesn't remove all the smoke that was created. Imagine if you bulldozed a factory down. We're going to shut the factory down or bulldoze the whole thing. Everybody's fired. What about all the smoke that went out before that? It doesn't like it's Right. And that's what happens in our space. So these are the two goals of an inspection. This is what we have to be thinking about. Okay. And if you're not addressing both of these, then unfortunately there's. There's going to be things that get missed, and you're probably not going to be feeling as good as you want to. Okay. So now let's start getting into the biggest mistake that happens and kind of start talking more about this dormant mold thing that we're going to be getting to. This is literally the biggest mold inspection mistake. And it's kind of what I said about the insurance adjuster person that came in before. If your only method of doing an inspection in a house is to rely on fancy tools to tell you where problems are, you're going to fail almost every single time at finding what's going on. And the reason is that most things that are happening in a house, most water issues that have occurred, are not still occurring and are not still wet. Okay, so you have two devices here. You have this one, which is a moisture meter. A moisture meter does just that. It detects moisture in a building material. Okay. And then the one over here on the right, this is called an infrared camera. This is not even a moisture detection device. It looks for temperature differences behind surfaces. Some people see this and they think you can see behind walls and see what's going on in terms of, like, water and mold and stuff. That's not how it works. It's. It's temperature differences. So, like in this one, like the. The more orange and the red, that's warmer, and then like, the purple stuff is cooler. So, like, the way that you use this, and I don't want to discount these, these are part of an inspection, but they can't be the entire thing. They're actually a small part of the whole thing, but they're an important part. So an infrared camera, if you're going through a space and you see something that looks cold or abnormally hot, then the next question is, why would this area be cold or hot? So if you're on an exterior wall, you're like, it's probably an insulation thing. Let me continue to look and see what's going on. If you're in a bathroom, for example, though, maybe there' water leak or something that's going on, Right? If you see things that are inconsistent and the cold spots are, like, spotchy, and they're not, like, consistent throughout, then it triggers, hey, maybe this could be a water intrusion thing. My next step is to take this moisture meter and go stick it up on the wall where this thing looks off and see if it's wet, right? So you can't even just use this tool on its own. You have to couple it with a moisture meter. Otherwise it's not doing anything. So that's what the infrared does. Now, a moisture meter, you know, you put on the floor on a wall tells you if it's wet or not. People are like, oh, if it's mold needs water to grow, so if there's no water, there can't be mold. Again, rational thought. I'm going to give a industry irrational thought, but honestly, it's the most logical thing that I could ever think of. So I don't really understand why it's so irrational. Mold grows. It's like a plant. It grows. It's a living thing. Just like a plant's a living thing. It grows, you water it, it gets roots, it grows, it releases spores the same way that other plants release, like, pollen and stuff. Like, it's a very similar type of thing that happens. Okay, so let's say you're out in your yard, you got your plants. Let's just say you stop watering them. Stop watering all of them. You cut off the water source, right? So you water them. They grew. Then you cut off the water source. That would be the equivalent of us fixing a leak in a house five years ago, saying, okay, we're stopping the leak. It's done. There's no more water. There can't be any mold. Go look out in your backyard. Are the plants still there? Yeah, they're still there. Did they pack up all of their belongings and goods and rally their tribe together to go find another water source so they can live and survive? No. They grew into the ground. You stop watering them. And what happens? They, like, frail over, and they live there, but they're still there. This is the equivalent of what dormant mold. Mold is, okay? So all that dormant mold means is that it's not growing right now, but it doesn't mean that it's not still there. Okay? And so this is where we get into this concept of understanding what happens behind the walls and all these places where there's a water issue, right? So another, like, quick little example. Like, when I was dating my. My wife, at the beginning, I'd buy her flowers all the time, right? So I was trying to get her to like me. And, you know, she would hang the flowers upside down. Why do you hang the flowers upside down on the wall when they start drying out? So they don't bend over and start breaking and falling apart like this one is, right? Because they lose all their structural integrity and they fall off and they start piercing and shattering all over the place. And that's what happens, right? So she hangs them upside down on the wall so they don't start doing that because they become very weak and brittle, right? So I walk into her room one day, 100 flowers on the wall. I'm like, all right, I think. I think we're at the point where we like each other. I'm going to get rid of these things at the. Feels like some weird. Like, more like death room or something. So I go to grab the flowers off the wall, scrub just like this. What do you think happened? They just shatter. I just grab them and they shatter. And she lived in a place in California where there's no air conditioning. So everybody has oscillating fans that do air movement, right? So right when I grab this, the fan kind of turns. Like, it was all very, like, perfect timing or whatever, and I grab it, it breaks. Fan hits it, blows it all over the fricking place in her room. It's in the fibers of her carpeting. It's in her bedding. It's in, like, her vanity area where she had all of her makeup brushes and stuff. It's like, all in all that stuff. And it took me forever to clean all this stuff up because every time I thought I got it, there was another little piece somewhere. Another little piece somewhere that I didn't miss, okay? Replace those flowers with a mole colony. It's exactly what happens in your house. It's exactly what happens in your house, okay? The mold is the dry flower. You turn off the water and it starts to frail and get Brittle like this, okay? The fan is the equivalent of air pressure in our house. If anyone's ever opened up a door and you hear, like, a door slam shut somewhere else, that's not a ghost in your house, right? That's an airflow movement in your house. There's constantly airflow happening in your house. Your air is going this way, it's going this way. You turn on your air conditioning, you're sucking up into the air conditioning. You turn on your exhaust fan in your bathroom, your air starts sucking up in your exhaust panel. Where does that air come from? It comes from other places of the house. It gets all moved and circulated. As that's happening, your air moves through the walls and through different places, breaks these little tiny things apart and flings them all over the place the same way her oscillating fan flung them all over her room. And it gets embedded in everything. And it's exactly what happens with mobile. Okay, so if we know that that happens, then the question is like, well, if it's dead, it can't, like, impact me, right? Like, that's not how it works. Our body is not that smart. Our body doesn't know. When I breathe something in, oh, this particular piece is active right now, and this particular piece is dormant. So this one's fine. No, our body breathes it in, and it's like, oh, this thing isn't supposed to be here. This is some sort of foreign thing. I'm not supposed to be breathing. And bam. Immune reaction happens. And it depends on who you are and what your immune issues are and what your health issues are. So they manifest in a bunch of different ways, but that's what triggers them, right? So the other thing about it, when they break this small, this is why these. Like, the dormant mold stuff is sometimes. I mean, it is. It's. It's like, more important than what's actively happening. The stuff that's actively growing, so much easier to find. Your moisture meter pings it. Cool. It's wet. I know there's something here. The stuff that's dormant, it's so much harder to find. For people who rely on just a single tool to do whatever they need to do, they can't find it. But the problem is, when these things break off into tiny pieces like this, they're much smaller than mold spores, right? And because they're so much smaller, we're talking like. Like a thousand times smaller than a mold spore in terms of size. When they're that much smaller, our body has a natural filtration System that kind of filter stuff out as we're breathing. Stuff in our nose has filters, our throat. It's all to protect our lungs and protect things from getting into our bloodstream. These fragments get so small, they fly right through all that stuff, right? Imagine you have this, like, big, wide net of something where the net holes are really wide, and then you're trying to catch like a. Like a BB or something, like a little like a marble right through it. Can't catch it, right? That's what happens. That's how it gets into our lungs, it gets in our bloodstream. You start getting systemic chronic problems in different places because you getting a chronic inflammatory response. Because your bloodstream now acts like a highway to move it all over the place and trigger every single alarm that your body has to go off, right? And that's. That's what's happening. That's why this stuff is so important. If you're overlooking it, it's just such a huge, huge mistake. Because this is the bulk of what we find. Most houses, we go into maybe one or two areas where moisture is getting picked up, yet we're finding 10 or 15 areas of like, maybe previous water damage where we can see the signs of it, where there's been a water issue, but it's dry right now, and that's where all of this exposure is coming from, right? And if you're not looking at that, then you're missing such a big piece of it. And. And that's why people don't get better. When you go down the Yelp path of finding these, you know, these inspectors, right? So. All right, so let me get into here. So the secret to finding hit a mole, now that we talked about that, here's the secret. Everybody write it down. I'm going to tell you all exactly how to do it. You don't look for mold. Secret number one. No, you don't look for mold. If you're looking for mold, you're going to miss almost all of it, because most mold is hidden behind walls in different areas. So if you're walking around your house, I'll tell you one thing, you see all the pictures of black covering everything everywhere, right? Like, you have. You search like, what's mold look like? Or how do I do this for mold? Or whatever. They find all these graphic, ridiculous images because you want to know why mold is microscopic. And how do you. How can you visually tell somebody what's going on in. In an advertisement or whatever if you're not making it this big? Most thing that they can actually see and understand. Right? So they, like, drown, like dramaticized dramatize, whatever the word is. Like how significant this stuff looks like in a house. It almost never looks like that. It almost never looks like that. So don't do that, because if that's all you're looking for, you're going to miss it. So this is the secret. You look for signs of water damage, not just things that have moisture, not just things that the infrared camera is looking at. If you have a water leak that happened a year ago, when you stop the water and the area dried out, your moisture meter will read zero. And your infrared camera won't show any temperature difference because there's nothing there to trigger them. You'll scoot right over them. Right. But if we understand that if we look at us, if we're looking at a wall and we see, like, bubbling paint or a baseboard that's. That's bowing, or a floor that's bowing, those are all signs of water damage. And then if we say, oh, mold needs water to grow. Oh, mold isn't a nomadic tribe that just follows the river to somewhere else when it runs out. It's more like a plant that just lays there like my wife's flowers did, and it blows all over the place. That's how we find it. That's how you go through those. Those are easy for our eyes to see that you can see. I could look down at the ground right now and see if there's bubbling on a baseboard if I know how to look for it, which anyone can do. You just have to know what you're looking for. I can't see microscopic mold behind a wall. I can't see that. Right. But I can see the red flag. It's like, hey, there's a really good chance there's mold down here. You should check this out. And that's the secret of how. How we go through houses. I mean, that's what it is. It's understanding a water damage looks like and how water moves and not dismissing something that happened previously. Right. So let's talk about what these look for. Okay, so there's five signs. We call them five signs of hidden mole growth. There's five types of water damage. All right, so what I'm saying, look for signs of previous water. You know, previous water. This is what they are. Okay, first sign is bubbling. This picture over here is a sink cabinet. This is like the bottom of a cabinet. Under the sink, circles are showing you literally right now. Pause this. If it's possible, I Don't know. Or take a note and do this later. I don't know how it's being presented to you guys down the road, but whatever it is, go pull everything out of your sinks, of every sink cabinet you have in your house. And I'm going to give a 90% guarantee that there's going to be something like this under them. That's how often this happens. Okay? So I'm not going to do 100, like I said earlier, but I, I, I would say probably 90 ish percent of the time we see something like this under a cabinet. Why all of your products are under here? You're like, oh, they're products. They're. That's not water. What do you think every product is base made out of that's in your cabinet? Every single base ingredient. Every product on your cabinet starts with water. Bam. Water source. You now have a hundred bottles of water source under there. You have your sink that could be leaking. You have all this stuff that's going on. This is super common for us to find. I'd say most houses we go into, there's probably one to two of these things happening. Sometimes there's more. But bubbling isn't only under sink cabinets. I got like sidetracked. Bubbling could be anywhere. Okay, it could be flooring, it could be walls, it could be ceilings. But this type of bubble that you're seeing here, this is one of the clues. Okay, the next one, buckling and separating. All right, so this is a baseboard at the bottom of a wall. So all houses, most houses, you look at the bottom wall, they have this little baseboard down there for aesthetics. So when they first put it on, it's flat. It's flat against the wall. If you look at it later and it's like bowing off, you're like, why the hell is this thing pulling away from here? Well, what happens to wood when water gets into it? It bows, right? So if water gets into either the wall or the baseboard, it causes it to warp, it causes it to bow, and it'll separate and it. This, Right? So you can see this a lot in baseboards, see a lot in flooring. You get buckling and separating, you know, different, different areas like that. So this is another one of them cracking and peeling. This is a double whammy because up here there's also water staining. So this is a pretty easy one to see. But I wanted to show this water staining. Just so you know, this wall is under a window. This window was leaking. So you came down, you See all the water staining all the way down here? But forget that. What if this is all that I saw? That's your paint cracking and peeling off of that. Right? This stuff doesn't happen for no reason. If you're going through your house and you see something like this, but then you look over, like, two feet and the paint looks fine, inconsistencies are red flags. Why is this different over here for no reason than it is over here? Right. Let's not just settle for, oh, the house is old. Oh, the house is settling. Right. That's the same for us with our health, saying, oh, I'm getting older, so I shouldn't be able to remember things anymore. No, that means you have cognitive decline that you need to fix. Right. That doesn't mean I'm getting older. My brain stops working. Right. Like, if we're going to accept that, then you're probably not open to what I'm talking about here. But there are literally proven methods to reverse cognitive decline. You can actually not lose your mind and get dementia if you don't want to. Right. There are things that you can do instead of just settling for the fact that this happens. Because I get old. Well, guys, in your house, this doesn't just happen because your house is old, okay? There's a reason this stuff is happening now. Now, is every single one of these things I'm showing you 100 water all the time. No, this could be sun damage, for example. Right. I'm not going to tell you that every single time. It's a water thing, but water causes these things to happen, and these are the things that we see a lot. Right? So these are the things to keep an eye out for rust and efflorescence. This is a nail head. Nail head is rusted out. There's always a big one. Like, rust doesn't mean water. No, rust is rust. But, like, why is rust that's there? Oh, rust is a chemical reaction because when something gets wet, there's corrosion, and then the corrosion creates rust, and the rust is there. So rust is a sign that there's some sort of elevation in moisture or humidity or something. Oh, yeah. Rust isn't mold, but if there's rust somewhere, then there's been a moisture, something somewhere that's caused that to rust. What's going on in this area? Why could that happen? If it's rusting on the front of the nail, what about the rest of the nail that's in the hole? Hole did that rust out? Was there moisture or condensation? On the back of the nail that went in the hole, that's moisture. Now there could be mold growing behind the wall. These are the pieces that we have to put together as we're starting to pinpoint stuff to go around. The other big chemical reaction thing is the second part I have written here. This powder, this like white powdery substance on concrete. That's what efflorescence is called. So if you go in your basement, your crawl space, you see like a white like stain kind of going across the foundation walls. What that means is that at some point in time, moisture has come in through those areas. And that was a mineral deposit that basically happened as a result of that. It doesn't mean stuff is wet right now. None of these things mean that something is wet right now. Right. It means that something has been impacted by moisture at some point in the history of its lifetime. But we know that mold needs water to grow, mold needs moisture to grow. And we know that if you don't properly remediate and remove it, it's just going to stay there forever, right? So that's the thing. That's why you go into a 90 year old house and you're like, why is there so many problems? Because 90 years of grandma and great grandma thinking there was nothing going. Like, of course this is all happening here, right? Last one is standing super obvious. But if you see a stain somewhere, you should probably be concerned that they're staining and that there's a potential mole problem. So that's it. These are the five signs of hidden mole growth. This is it. This is like the core training of all of my inspectors. This is the core training. Know what to see, know what to look for. Don't dismiss things that you have been normalizing your entire life stuff. That's it. It's reframing how we look at stuff. It's retraining what our eyes do. It's very easy to do once you do it. But we've been taught for so long that these things are normal. This stuff happens in houses. Ah, leak under, sink us. Sinks leak. What are you gonna do about it? Yeah, sinks leak. We probably should be maybe more concerned about that instead of less concerned about that, right? Not because I'm gonna have to. Because they link so often, I'm gonna have to fix them more often. Sucks for me. No, it's because they leak so often. Maybe I should be thinking of preventative things so they don't leak as often. And then if they do, maybe I should actually consider them and address Them instead of dismissing it and then continue to be sick and then go on to yelp and then find a guy says, you're not a problem and have the whole sequence start all over again. That we talked about. Right? So, so this is, this is kind of how you find the dormant mold. And we've talked about how it works and how it moves through the space. Okay. I wanted to do a quick little follow up on this thing. I was just kind of talking about this. Right? So like leaks happen, right, with the sync stuff. I just told you all this assigns a mold. Does that mean it's always a mole problem? So the answer is no, it doesn't mean it's always a mole problem problem. But like there's a good chance that there's something going on there. So for a year, every house that we went to, we. We kind of pulled, you know, we looked at samples over the course of what was going on. So we pulled 200 samples. And I actually, I was going to reference a different study here. This one wasn't a year long study. I had a different one and I pulled it out. This study was literally. I went back, looked at the last 200 samples we did and just pulled of them. So I wasn't like hand picking samples or anything. I was like, last 200 samples kind of took us back like a month or so. And like what we had done or whatever, I just looked at all of them, saw what was going on. Okay, so kind of ignore this up here. My bad. Water damage samples. Now when I say water damage samples, the areas were not wet. There was nothing currently happening there right now. There was no visible mold growth. Okay, no visible growth, no current moisture. These are examples of things like I just showed you in the other pictures, right? Little chipping paint here, a little button there, something under the sink here. 78% of these, there was a mold problem there. Okay. So we tested them. That's why you have to test these things. You can't see this stuff. So 78% of the time when there was a sink cabinet that had water damage in it, and there was a wall with a little chipping paint or this and that put all those together for the most recent 200 samples we did at the time of this, and 78% of them came back and there was a hidden mold issue issue in that space. Okay. So if you think about that and go back to what, you know, the local inspectors are doing when they come in and they're not looking for any of this stuff or they're saying, oh, leaks happen and normalize this or that. Well, rounded up eight out of ten times, they're wrong. And so how many of these things did you find when you went through the house? Did you find 10? Well, that means maybe seven to eight of those things are, are potentially an issue. Right? And if you think of it that way and then you realize like, what those, you know, kind of what the normal mold inspectors are doing when they go, go through the space, it starts to put together why so many things are getting missed and why, when I spout that entire mold journey thing that I talked at the beginning and know exactly what they're all charging and exactly what the cost flow was for all of the people that talk to us, it's because the same exact story comes to us every single time this happens. I hear it, I've been doing it for like a decade, and I've internalized what the costs are that these guys charge. Right? Because it's the same story over and over and over and over again. Because we go in and we look at it this way and we find all of this. These things. Right? And so, so that's, that's kind of showing, like, how those turn into these dormant areas. And then we talk about how it moves through the house and how it gets into our body. So I just want to wrap up with some testing stuff because I think it's important because when you're talking dormant mold, there's a lot of tests that you actually shouldn't be using to try to like, figure out, like, what that is. First off, ambient air samples. I've been spitting at this the whole time that I've been on here. An air sample in the middle of the room doesn't work. Don't do it. 70% of the time, they have a false negative. It's only collecting a sample for five minutes. That's it. And it's only collecting it right here. Right. So what happens if I'm in a room and it's completely still and I take a sample and then I go in that room and I send my 4 year old in that room and tell her to go freaking nuts in that room. She's jumping, she's throwing stuff, she's doing all these things. You're going to have a different amount of stuff that's airborne at that time. Right? So like a snapshot, five minutes is not really giving us a good look at what we're breathing over the course of an entire day with the ups and downs of what's on, going, going on Right. But that's how they're collected. So they're snapshot in time. They can only detect spores. Now the reason this is an issue because these dormant fragments we're talking about, they're not spores, they're way smaller like we talked about. So this type of test can't even find that. You can't say where the source is. Again, if I have a sample in the middle of a room, it says there's a problem. What do I do? Got my whole room and burn it down. I don't know. I don't know where it's coming from. You can go figure it out, that's what they'll tell you. And then 70% false negative. This was the year long study that I was going to throw in that other slide and I swapped it out. So for a year, I've said this 100 times already here, so I should explain it. For a year, every house that we went into, I would pick out one potential source area that looked like one of those five things that we talked about that I thought was going to be an issue. I would source test it like we do cavity in a wall, sort enclosed sample, like identify if there's a problem there. And then I took three steps away from the wall and I put an air sample pump, pump at air quality breathing height and I took a sample literally not very far away. 70% of the time when there was a problem here, this said there was nothing going on. And so that's the problem. See, the further away you get from source, the less effective air ambient air testing gets. Right? I mean it makes sense. Like the further away you get from something, the less accurate you're going to be from it. If you're not, if it's not the type of test that's meant to do something in a bigger way like that and that's just not what they're meant to do. It's not. But the rational thinking part of it is I'm going to do an air quality test. I'm going to take an air sample of what I'm breathing. So that's, that's like what the inspectors are pitching when they're coming in. We're going to do mold air quality tests. We're going to see what you're breathing, we're going to see what's going on. Yet it's only a five minute shot. It's like far away from where things are. It can't even detect these tiny things that are going on. I mean why, why even do it? So. So that's. That's. That's what could be misleading, because then they tell you there's no problem. You go down that whole cycle. I said before, where time and money gets lost. Now another one. These are, like, even cheaper. People go to, like, Home Depot or they order these online. There's all these plates and petri dishes and stuff that you can do. They're a waste of time. Don't do them. All right, first off, it only detects what happens to settle on the dish. Your dishes this big. Okay, I'm going to set my dish right here. It's going to tell me everything that's going on. Well, what if. What if something fell right here that missed the dish? Oh, that sucks. I guess we don't get that. All right, cool. So. So we're literally only, like, looking at a, like, 3 by 3 inch area, apparently, with these dishes. So that's cool. Really good, representative sample. What's going on? Two, it can only detect spores, and it can only detect active spores that are ready to grow. So this whole thing is about dormant mold. If a inactive, dormant spore lands on that thing, it won't grow. It's not ready to grow. It won't. So it completely dismisses that piece of it. And that's frankly the most important piece of everything that's going on in the house anyway. Just because of the amount of those. This, the. The frequency that. That is the biggest problem as compared to, like, an actual active problem. Right. So it wipes that out, and then the volume of growth is misleading. If you see these dishes, again, this is how they market these things. Look at all the stuff that grew on this. This is all the mold, guys. This is it. We found it. All of it. It, like, cool. So visibly it's alarming, and it triggers something, and we think that we found something. The problem is, guys, like, you can't see a lot of this stuff. You can grow stuff in labs. That's cool. Put me in a lab. I'll just live there. If I could just live in the lab and not live in my house, then all this stuff makes sense. Right? We don't live in labs, so you can't, like, rely on these, like, culturey things and say, that's going to tell me everything that's going on. Because there's so many other variables and external influences that are going on. Right. So petri dish is honestly hard. Now. This is just, you know, my opinion. Everyone, do what you want is my opinion. All right. It hurts me, too. So a Lot of people are hurt. It hurts me, too. This was really created specifically for people that are diagnosed with sirs. There's a chronic inflammatory response syndrome. I won't name who created it or anything, but the, the thing that a lot of people do is they, they say, oh, I have some sort of mold illness. And like, okay, so I found that this hurts me. Two tests is supposed to be for people that have mold illness. Guys, SIRS and mold illness are not the same thing. They are absolutely not the same thing. Okay. SIRS is a very specific diagnosis. Mold illness is a very broad scope term for somebody who's impacted by mold exposure. But it could be triggering other things. You could have Lyme disease, and that can be classified as mold illness. You could have an autoimmune condition that's classified as the mold illness because mold is triggering those responses in your body. Right. That's not surge. Okay, so first off, like, if you're going to go to this and think this is going to tell me what's going on and you're not a S person, that's the first thing. You probably shouldn't even be thinking about it. But let's say that you are a search person. Say you're one of the 24% of people in the world that are a search person. Okay, that's you. All right, what about it then? Can I use it then? Well, here's a problem. The way this whole thing was put together. So you have the doctor who created this thing, and he had all of his clinical testing that he was doing from his patients, and he was trying to put a correlation to, like, the homes that they lived in, what was going on. Right. So what he did did is he looked at the ERMI panel of molds, which we'll talk about in a second. There's 36 molds on this ERMI panel that was created by the EPA. And he went and he picked out three of them that grow at different amounts of water that are required to make them grow. So there's three types of mold types. There's little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. I won't give you the science terms. So some molds don't need a lot of water. They could literally grow just humidity. Other molds need like a significant amount of moisture, like Stachybotrys, for example. It needs more moisture to grow. That's how it thrives. So he basically picked like one in each and then also picked out Stachybotrys and Cotonium, because those are, you Know, pretty bad news, molds in general. And that became this panel of five mold species that are here. Cool. We're looking at five. Awesome. What about all the species of Aspergillus for example, that trigger all the same crap in our body that I described tribe before? And a bunch of them are also mycotoxin producers. So there's a whole biotoxin component to that. What about all that stuff? No, we're not gonna look at any of that stuff. That's fine. We're just gonna look at these couple little ones over here and that's going to somehow tell us what's going on. An original study that I did on army stuff way back in the day, I was looking at when I was still even looking at the army scores, which now we've, we've gone off of that. But this is way even before then I was looking at like ERMI scores and I was comparing it to the Hurts me two scores. And like what the correlation was, the Hermes were almost always so much worse than the Hurts me because the ERMI score was showing so many other mole types that was accounting into what was going on to the load of exposure. But if, for example, you had super mega high counts of, let's say Aspergillus niger, let's just say it was like off the charts. And that mold produces a mycotoxin called Otratoxin A. Both of those are very bad. Bad. Right. Well, if that was off the chart, it doesn't get shown in a Hurts me panel. So let's say you had no stack and no cotonium because those molds weren't growing. And your Hertz ME score is like a four and it says, oh, this home is super healthy. You could go in here, yet you go in there and there's still mycotoxins in the house. You have massive loads of acidilis in there. These people are still getting sick. Right. So you have to be really careful about how we like create correlations of data and stuff because. Sure. Like again, in a lab looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, you can make correlations. But what's like the real world implication of, of, of stating something like that and then making it some sort of like de facto standard that everybody starts looking at, which is what ended up happening with this. And there were so many times that we had patients that were coming like, well, my Hurts me was like a four and it was okay. And we walk in and find like a million things going on in the house. Right. So you can't look at it like that. So that's why the scoring can be misleading. That gets us into Ermie. So here's the thing about Irma, guys. Ermie is actually not even a sample. It's an interpretation of data. Just really funny because it's been marketed as an actual sample type, but that's not what it is. The name of it actually is even the, the I stands for index. It's not even the sample of what's going on. It's an environmental relative moldiness index. It's an interpretation. The whole thing's interpretation. What it's interpreting is MSQPCR sampling. So it's a fancy word of saying DNA formatting that was developed by the EPA at the same time they developed ermi. This is why it gets confusing. So they went and they did this study that they call like the, the moldiness. The relative moldiness study, right? In that they actually created DNA formatting technology for mold species. Never existed before. They created it in 2007. And honestly, it's awesome. And it's such an amazing tool, that data. Then they put a score on the back of it and they put some interpretation to it because frankly, if you look at a bunch of moles, you're like, what the hell's all all this stuff? I don't know. They had to create something where people could like point to like a single number and say, oh, this is good, this is bad, like, whatever. Right? What was my next bullet here? I wrote. Yeah, there you go. So the problem with that is that score system is misleading. All right, so I'll get into the scores thing because I have a thing on the score thing here in a minute so I can show you an example of it. The last thing I want to talk about on here is that there's no contextual relevance for what that means. Needs, right? So like, if I get a sample and I look at the er stuff and I have all these moles, I have the score, that literally means nothing on it. Well, what does that actually mean for me? Like, what does that mean for my house? How does my house compare to other places? Like, like, should I be leaving? Should I be going? Like, what should I be doing? It doesn't tell you any of that stuff, right? And so it, it gets, it gets alarming kind of in some ways. And it also gets misleading because sometimes the score is either over representing or underrepresenting the significance of an issue issue. So I want to like talk about the score piece real quick. This is an example of an Army. I know it's, like, really wide. I'm going to zoom in in a minute. But what I want to do is just real quickly show you how it breaks down. So this top section, these are called the group one molds. These are called water damage molds. On the top, the group 2 section, which is these little ones down here, these are called common outdoor molds. These are called indoor molds. These are called outdoor molds. Molds. First problem. Every mole that's ever existed is an outdoor mold. Every single one. Okay. There wasn't, like, mold that just, like, appeared when we started building buildings. Like, that's another thing that happened. Right. So the fact that we're already, like, devaluing, like, certain molds to other molds and the way we're calculating stuff just absolutely makes no sense from the start. So that's the first thing. Okay. But, like, if you dive more into it here. So you can see, this is their scoring system they have here. So you got these two samples. Examples. This score over here is minus 1.3, which sounds incredible. This one over here is 1.2, which, hey, doesn't sound bad, I guess. Right? That sounds, you know, it's not as good as this. Right. But it's, you know, seen worse. Right. Let's say that that's our initial thought on this. Okay. I'm going to show you why these scores mean absolutely nothing. So let's. Let's go here. Okay. This sample, the sum of all of these molds up here, you add them all together is 14.22. You add all of these together, and it was 10.8. So say 14 and 11. Let's just say. Right, well, this one's less than this one. All right. Okay. Well, maybe these ones are worse on this side. You add all these up, and this is like a logarithm formula that adds up into this, and it's 15. Well, this one's nine. Wait, so both of these on this side are less than this? Which means there's actually less mold here here than there is here. But this says there's more. Like, why? Why? First off, who created this and then ran it a couple times as, like, a test drive and saw this. It's like, no, that's cool. That's fine. That makes sense. Blows my mind. Here's what they're doing. They're subtracting your Group 2 number from your Group 1 number to get this. Okay. This is where the flaw in the interpretation is. You could see just because this particular sample had more outdoor Molds in the house. Now, you're subtracting a larger number from a smaller number, and it gives you a negative. But it doesn't mean there's less mold in the house. It actually means there's more mold in the house. And their formula is just probably the stupidest thing you've ever seen. Now that you're looking, could you imagine teaching your kids this in, like, second grade? Like, if this was the math class that your second graders had to go through, and they brought this to you, hey, could you help me with my homework? Can you help them? And then they take it back to school, and it gets graded, and it's like a big red X on. And they send it back to you. And you look at this, you're like, how the hell is this wrong? But that's what they were telling you. That's what this is. I hope you guys feel like you're taking crazy pills like I do when I look at this, because that's what it feels like. All right, so this is the problem with the score. This is why the score is tough. But all of these, all of the data behind the individual moles, this is honestly, this is all great. This is really, like, the gold standard of understanding. Complete load and fragmentation load in the house. The way the sample is collected, dust collection, sample throughout the house. Okay, why is that important? Because all the particles and toxins and all the stuff, and there's studies out here that prove all this stuff, it all settles into the dust of the house. The dust becomes the net that collects everything that's going on in your house. Okay? It's like a spider web. It's literally sticking to everything. It's all in the dust, right? So if you have this mold factory that was sending stuff out into the airspace, gravity will bring that down. It will settle in the dust. Now, the cool thing about the technology of this PCR testing is not only looking at spores, it's also looking at those tiny little pieces of fragments that we talked about that broke off of them. It's accounting for the dormant mold. It's accounting for the dormant mold that's so small that it gets into our system and triggers all of our health problems. Right? So the information here is great. It's just the interpretations because kind of crap, Right? And so we just have to kind of understand that while we're looking at it. So what do you do about this? I'll talk about this a little bit at the end. Like, I don't want to say, hey, score sucks. Go figure. It out. I'll. I'll get to it a little bit at the end. I want to talk a little bit about, like, what types of samples should be happening in your space. Okay, first off, source testing, source areas. This has to happen. Okay, now, there's a few different types. Oops. You basically have targeted air tests, and you have like surface tests, which could be like a swab or you take a little piece of something or whatever, you send it to the lab. Now what does targeted air tests mean? I just been bashing air samples for like an hour. Targeted air test means that you don't stick it in the middle of the room. But if I think there's a mole problem in this wall, I put a little hole in this wall. I put a tube through the hole, I connect it to my air sampling pump, and I pull the air from behind the wall. Wall. Wherever I see that sign of water damage, I get as close as I possibly can to that and I sample behind that area if I can, or at least in a tight enclosed space right next to that area to figure out if that water damage spot is hiding the whole problem. That's what a targeted air sample is. So, like when we. When I go through a house, there is. It's like no ambient air samples in the house. Literally. Not like the plans have none of them. Right. Because why they don't do anything. That's actually what the Ernie dust test for that we just talked about. That shows us exposure. That shows us what's floating through the house. Right? So you kind of put them together and have them work together. Surface test for like, hey, this looks like mold. Swab it. Cool. Take it in. Figure out there's a source. So now you get into dispersion samples. And this is where you get into dust testing is what I just say. Where I was just saying mold. You could also test for mycotoxins, bacterial toxins, all this stuff. The dust is awesome. You could test for a lot of things in the dust. The reason the dust is important is because every time you take a step or you move or you shut your door, you take your jacket off or whatever you're doing, you create a little mini disruption of airflow that pops settled dust up into your breathing zone. I'm at my desk right now. If I bang my desk, all this stuff is popping up into my face and it becomes part of my breathing zone. That's your exposure. So if you're concerned about what you're being exposed to, it's not an air sample in the Middle of a room that's only collecting for five minutes. It's a dust collection sample that accounts for these tiny little fragments that we talked about. About. That also provides a historical perspective of what's gone on in the house over a long period of time. Because it's settlement that's come down. You could be sampling areas that have been collecting dust for three months, six months, because who lifts up their chairs and cleans under them all the time? Right. But that is telling us way more about what's moving through your house and the ebbs and flows of the airflow and everything. Because it's settling and collecting that we can get a much better understanding of what exposure looks like and then in turn, how we have to clean the house and what that means for your items, your belongings and all that stuff. Right. So that's the truth about dormant mold that most mold inspectors are neglecting. And that's how it's making you more sick. That's what I got for you.

That was fantastic, Brian. Thank you so much. I. I think I probably fell into that camp early on where if I had a mole problem, I was going to see it or smell it was going to be just obvious, giant wall of mold. And that's really not the case. And I love that. Your secret is you're not looking for mold. You're looking for the signs of water damage. So if you take nothing else away from this talk, I hope it's that and going along with your theme of grandma. Not to throw grandma under the bus, but, you know, grandma would have just bleached it. So high level. Real quick, why is bleach not your solution?

This is always the first thing I say to this. The EPA is way behind the curve on mold stuff. I think anyone who knows anything about it would probably agree with that. Even the EPA says not to use bleach to clean mold. So if you just want to say, listen, Brian, you're full of crap. I don't believe anything you're doing. I'm a quote, rational thinker, Go look it up. And the EPA is telling you not to do it. So there's like your first answer, but honestly, you're introducing harsh chemicals into a space. Chemicals react with other chemicals, right? That's why there's chemical reactions. Why when you're watching these cartoons, whether you're in the lab and you're mixing stuff and like the coyote blows something up in his face because he mixed something he wasn't supposed to mix. Mycotoxins are a chemical bleach is a chemical. You mix them together, it creates a secondary byproduct chemical that is also not very good for you. So, like, it's. There's just. We have to try to be more natural and more source in how we're addressing stuff. So from a cleaning perspective, you don't want to be using bleach. You want to be using more natural ingredients that are maybe more botanical blends or more even like vinegar and things like that that aren't like heavy chemicals that are happening. But the truth is that even cleaning it, it's like the Titanic. You clean the top of it, like, cool. The tip of the iceberg is not. What took down the Titanic was all the crap underneath they couldn't see. If you clean off the surface of your wall and then you don't see it anymore, and you got this out of sight, out of mind thing going, like, oh, we took care of it. It all this stuff could still be back here and it's still coming out right? So it's just really important to kind of keep that in mind.

Not to mention, like, bleach is mostly water, so you're also adding moisture to a source that you don't want to be moisture to. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

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