Water Damage and Mold Inspection with Brian Karr

I started noticing I was like, slower. My speaking was slower, my thinking was slower, everything was slower. and then a little bit later, one morning I go to my bathroom, wash my face, and I have like peeling eczema on my face. Right. And I’m like, what is going on? So I’m talking to my girlfriend about it, who’s now my wife, you know, my wife is like, hey, this sounds like what my dad’s clients always talk about. Like, you probably have a mold problem, right?

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This is the Dr. Haley Show podcast. I’m Dr. Michael Haley, show host and today’s guest, Brian Karr, who is an expert in the area of mold, finding it, detecting it and what to do about it and even preventing it. Brian, thank you for joining me today.

Hey, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Now, where in the world are you right now?

I’m currently sitting in Southern California. I live in Orange County. And I’m in my little office at my house, which is where I work out of. So that’s where I am.

Is that the Orange County like Orange County choppers?

Yeah. All the orange. Like the movie or like the TV show the O.C. from back in the day. It’s all of it. That’s. That’s where we are.

Nice. I’m a little jealous, actually. My son is visiting my 20 year old son, and he’s out in, well, he’s between California and Mexico, out in the water, out there on a boat most of his life. But he happens to be visiting here, and I have never been to California. I’m a little jealous. He likes to go surfing down there, and he’s, you know, spending most of the time on the boat. But

that’s the way that that’s the way to do it.

Here’s what he’s doing. I’m jealous that

he’s doing it the way you’re supposed to do it.

He’s living the life. And so you grew up there?

No. So I was born in Vegas. And I was in Vegas until my mid-twenties or so, and then I moved to LA, and, when I moved to L.A., that was kind of the catalyst for me even, like, getting into this world. Right? So that, you know, people don’t go to school to be a mold person.

That’s not the thing. Anyone wakes up and it’s like, I’ve aspirations to be a mold expert. Nobody in the history of the world has ever said that. So normally people who get into this, they had something that happened to them or somebody that they know, and it kind of open their eyes to what’s going on. And, the people who are, really successful in, you know, mostly the medical field is where most of the people really dig into this. They help a lot of people. Right. And, and it’s a huge impact on the world and people’s individual health.

And, the environmental side, on my side of things, there’s not as many people that kind of fit that same bill as you have growing on the medical side of understanding how mold impacts people and how to handle it and how to navigate it and all that stuff.

And I was dating at the time, my now wife. So this is, you know, decade ago or whatever it was. And, I had a really significant leak in my apartment that I lived in, and It was a pipe in my ceiling, and it burst down water all onto my bed. It was a really big water issue. And I, you know, call the landlord like everyone does. And, if you have something again, this is pre any of this. I don’t know anything. Right. And I, I call the landlord the landlord or they have somebody on site at the apartment building. So they come and they stop the leak and they come and they dry out the, the ceiling where they think the water was right and they’re like, okay, everything’s cool.

And what do I know? Right. So I’m in this place for a month,

for a second. I gotta stop you for a second.

Yeah.

Because you’re at that time, like, what do I know? You know. And I was there too. I didn’t understand it. But now if that same thing happened, now there’s almost like, we gotta do something.

Oh, yeah.

Fast.

Yeah. It’s like, now I know it’s like emergency response at this point, right? But, you know, I’m a I, you know, I say a kid I guess because I’m in my early 40s now, but I’m like a kid in my like mid to late 20s and I don’t, you know, what do I know. Right. Like, I don’t know any better. Right. And they come in and they try it out and whatever. And so I’m in my apartment. I live there. Obviously a month goes by, not a month goes by, and I start noticing, people start people probably hear this as we go through this. I’m a fast speaker.

I’m really sharp. I’m quick. Like, I was just kind of how I’ve always been. And I started noticing I was like, slower. My speaking was slower, my thinking was slower, everything was slower. I just didn’t feel I felt dull, kind of. I didn’t have like a lot of the brain fog stuff that people talk about. Right. So it impacted me. It was still a cognitive issue, right? But it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t as severe as other people. But for me, it was right. And so, you know, in relation to me, it was like, what is this? Right. So that starts happening.

and then a little bit later, one morning I go to my bathroom, wash my face, and I have like peeling eczema on my face. Right. And I’m like, what is going on? So I’m talking to my girlfriend about it, who’s now my wife, like I mentioned, and the lucky thing for me and the reason I say moving to LA is we start all this. That’s where the problem happened. But her dad, who’s my father in law, is literally the top expert in the world on this stuff.

And so I just happened to have like, like if somebody brought me in now, like he was that for me, right? And I had somebody who actually knew what was happening. And what’s interesting is that the landlord brought in their own, like, mold inspector to come in, and he comes in because when I started complaining and I, you know, my wife is like, hey, this sounds like what my dad’s clients always talk about. Like, you probably have a mold problem, right? I was like, oh, crap, I never even thought about that. So I asked the landlord, I’m like, hey, I think I might have a mold issue. He’s like, oh, you can’t have mold because it’s dry, but I’ll send someone in and they’ll test the house, right? Or they’ll test the room.

They come in there in my apartment for like 15 minutes. I do an air test in my room and they leave, and next day they’re like, no mold. You’re good. And landlord’s like, sorry,

air test.

Yeah. So they did an air sample and just kind of like, quote breathing room, like air quality tests in the room to see if mold was in the air. Right. Which is a fundamental flaw in how you test for this stuff. And it’s what most people in our industry do. So that’s what the guy did. Right. And those types of tests have a very high false negative rate. And so it comes back it’s like, oh you have no problem. Right. And then my again my future wife, she’s like, yeah, that’s she knows more about this than 95% of the world, right. Like I can literally probably throw her at a house right now. And she would outdo the top people in this industry.

so anyways, I have my father in law ultimately come out. He spends two hours of my 800 square foot apartment as opposed to 15 minutes. And the big takeaway out of this, to summarize it is like if you imagine your, you’re like pouring water on your kitchen island, you have a pitcher of water, you pour water in a kitchen island, it hits the island, and it’s going to go sideways because there’s nowhere else for it to go.

And it goes as you pour more water, more water goes sideways. And then when it gets to the end of the island, there’s no more place to go. And it goes down right. So my room, the ceiling was like the top of my island and the walls were the sides. So what happened is all that water went down all my walls because it was so much water. Nobody ever looked at them. Nobody ever thought about it. Nobody ever did anything about it. Lo and behold, they were literally still wet months later when he came in. No visible signs of water damage, no staining, no anything. And they were literally still wet all of my walls. So I was sleeping in a toxic box for months.

And that’s what was impacting me. Right. And, this is around the time where there’s like an economic kind of downshift, you know, at that period of time in the early 2000s and my life before this was I was in marketing and advertising and, I had just been laid off because there was a downstream of layoffs, you know, from kind of like middle, upper management or whatever.

And so I was kind of looking when this happened, when the water fell on me, I was on my computer actually looking for a job. I was on Monster.com, and I was like, looking for opportunities. The opportunity literally poured itself on top of me, and I didn’t quite know it at the time, but that was the opportunity effectively. And so after, Mark, who’s my father in law

Yeah.

Like walked me through all this, I got on it.

And you got the wife. You got the father in law. You got the career. This is.

I mean, honestly, it’s aligned. It’s like ridiculous what happened? And so afterwards, I was like, I want to do this. I would just like immediate is like, this was I saw the difference I saw with this guy. Did I saw what you did? I saw how I was feeling. What else am I doing right now? I want to do this.

this is awesome. And so I ended up shadowing him, learning from him. He became my mentor. I worked with him for a long time. And then ultimately we expanded. And now we have yes we inspect That is a national footprint of the same service anywhere

you say a national footprint of the same service, how do you do it nationally?

So, we have a team of inspectors. They all work directly for us. We don’t outsource or anything because the process is very important and most people don’t know how to do it. So we’re really meticulous in how we train to make sure our quality stays up. But we have our team, placed, you know, strategically throughout the country. and, you know, kind of targeted regional hubs. And then we service everywhere. So that’s how we work.

Yeah. Help me understand, because if I recall, there’s two sides to mold. There’s the testing and there’s remediation. Can you do both or there’s can you?

you could there’s a handful of states that actually it’s illegal to do both. I think it’s like 7 or 8 states.

That’s was thinking that’s what I was

yeah. Like

I’m in Florida and I think here I don’t think you can do both. I could be wrong.

I actually I think you’re right. I think Florida is one of the states where you can’t do both. it’s a good thing. To help protect people from, like, a general just kind of philosophy of, like, conflict of interest. Right? So, like, if we went in. Listen, we’re really good at finding stuff. We go into homes and we find a lot of stuff, right? Even when people don’t think anything is going on and our purpose when we go in is first to find as much as we could find, and then second to help, then guide people on like what of what we found is the highest priority that’s most impactful in your exposure.

And then to help them create a remediation plan that isn’t necessarily every single thing that we found, because it’s not necessary for every person. But you do need to know the landscape of what you’re dealing with. So then you can prioritize, right? So then we look at all of it. We say, hey, let’s say we found ten things in a house, found ten things. We think these 3 or 4 like your top like 80/20 concept. These top 3 or 4 run at those. Here’s your plan on how you would fix everything. Here’s your priority plan on how you would prioritize them. And here’s your remediation strategy. And that’s what we put together. Then a remediation company takes our plan and they execute our plan.

So it’s a separate company that does it. So we have no I actually had a client yesterday. I was talking to the like what I really like about this is that you found a lot of stuff. But I know that, like, there’s literally no benefit for you to tell me that there’s 25 things at my house. It doesn’t benefit you in any way because I don’t make anything off the remediation. Like I could tell them there’s two things or 100 things, right? Who cares? Right? So like, our true intention is really just to help people the best way that we can. And sometimes it means there’s a lot, sometimes there’s not enough. And it’s to have the conversations to help guide through all that process.

I like that. What is some of the, scariest things that you’ve found where, you know, you burn the building down

very, very I could, I could literally. So again, like ten years in this, I could think of two places that that has ever popped up in my head. Everything, for the most part, is fixable. There’s components, there’s costs, and there’s time. Right? So if you have the means and you have the time, then you can do it right now you layer that on top of people’s thought making processes.

And now maybe not everything is fixable for everyone because there’s a constraint. One of those two things. Right. And that’s why it’s really important to understand what your goals are and your intentions are, and to be able to then say, okay, if this is the goal, here’s how we’re going to kind of frame everything. And then after the fact, once you have all the information, you then have real life conversations about stuff.

It’s like, hey, we found more than we thought, okay, here’s your paths. Here’s what this might look like to fix. Is that in the realm of possibility financially, it’s like, well, no, not really. It’s like, okay, well, if you can’t do that piece of it, then that’s a key piece of this. And again, back to the priorities. And so now maybe we need to talk about other alternatives on how to either find or create a space here that would be more suitable for your health goals.

Right. But like to your point, one in particular, it was actually a smaller place. It was in an older area in LA. And the I remember these people really well, it was an adult daughter. So she’s probably in her 40s or something, and she was kind of running the process. Her dad had just passed away from cancer. Who had lived in the house forever. Her mom was really sick living in the house. She lived in the house. She was having some stuff. Right. So the house was killing them? It was killing all of them in there, and it had already killed one of them. Like, this is my opinion, but this is what happened, right?

Yeah. You can’t say that the house caused the cancer, but it probably significantly attacked the immune system. And with a defective immune system, this person got cancer.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there’s clear in my opinion, this is not a healthy place to be at. And I walked in and the reason why I walked in. Most people when you search mold online or you’re looking for it, you’ll see pictures of like black all over stuff. That is not how it works. It never, or it rarely looks like that. I should say, when you actually walk into a house, right? But if you’re searching stuff on the internet, you need visuals because it’s a visual medium, right? So like they need to show you this is quote what mold looks like. So you will buy my cleaning product, right? Like otherwise what am I cleaning? Nothing

I get, but in your case, you know, let’s go back to your apartment experience. With the pipes bursting, there was probably visible damage here, but like you describe that table and then it going down the sides. Well, that’s on the other sides of the wall. You can’t see that. You can’t see any of that came through.

Yeah. Now in this house we’re talking about worst house I’ve seen, it was all over the walls on the front of them in the whole house, every room I walked in and I walked out. I wouldn’t want to be in there. I was like, we’re not testing anything in here. Like, this is the deal. This is what I’m going to tell you no matter what. Like I already know what it’s all going to tell me. But here’s what I’m going to tell you.

I sat down with her out in her front yard and had a 45 minute conversation with her about all of that, and I was like, you know, long story short, you gotta get out of this place. Like there’s like, unless your gutting the entire house down to studs and rebuilding it from scratch, there’s nothing here to do. And who knows, maybe this is for everyone. This is for everyone listening, though literally one time in like a decade. So just, you know, done thousands of these so that that is a very, very rare case. But in most cases, your problems, while you might have multiple issues that are like source level in different areas of the house, things are fixable.

Yeah.

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I’m curious what state was that in. And the reason I ask is not all states are the same in California. Things are a lot drier than in Florida thing. I don’t think, there was any populating Florida prior to Hvac. We needed climate control because things are so humid here. where did that happen?

So this one was in LA, Florida and some of these southern states. so it’s interesting. it’s a very like common line of thought where you start thinking about external climate and moisture and the external climate. And yeah, it can have an impact. I’m not like downplaying it can have an impact. But the majority of mold issues in homes have nothing to do with outdoor climate. If you think about our houses, we have showers, we have plumbing, we have sinks, we have kids, a splash, water all over the place. We have a dishwasher that overflowed ten years ago when grandma wasn’t paying attention to it.

We have all of we have toilets that we have all these things that happen. That’s our water sources. And those water sources are the same in Vegas desert as it is in Florida. Super humid. Right? That’s in every single house. So you know, it is. There are times where we’re like, well, do we just move to Vegas or Arizona or something like that? And it’s like, no, because 90% of the contributors are still going to be there. So maybe you remove your exterior humidity component, which is great. That’s one piece. But the majority of stuff is happening. And sourcing inside of the house.

They must have had one big flood, something to take over the house like that. That’s crazy.

Yeah, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened in there. It was it was not good. I mean, it was on a crawl space. So the crawl space is. I didn’t go in there because I had seen enough. But typically when you have a crawl space like that, and moisture gets under there, you kind of have almost like, this microbial like, toxic ecosystem under the house.

And then standard just kind of air movement in a house pushes air from the bottom of a house up to the top of the house. So the crawl space is your natural bottom. So that will always feed up into the living spaces. So if you have a really significant water issue where there’s mold and bacteria and all this stuff in the crawl space because of bad drainage or whatever’s going on, then you can have that move up. My guess for that house is that was probably really bad down there and that, that had continue to move up. And then they probably had poor ventilation, some other things that contributed to some of that.

Yeah. So for you, maybe a little bit of, cognitive decline, which could have been because you weren’t getting rest because of the mold or whatever. Who knows why, you were experiencing that, that any lack of clarity could be caused by a number of things. You perceived. Somehow it was connected to mold. What are some other indicators that people might have mold, even though they can’t necessarily see it?

Yeah, there’s a couple. There’s some on like the body side. And then there’s some things about the house. There’s like kind of two sides of this, like on the body side of things. So like your body, how you’re feeling like that sort of thing. There’s like three things that kind of stick out as ways or like I should be considering this. The first one is if you have symptoms.

So this is what was me right. So I had multi-system. So body systems are neurological system that my skin completely separate from neurological. Right. So two different systems of my body and I had symptoms in both. So multisystem, multisymptom problems okay. This is an indicator that there’s more of like a root like systemic inflammatory trigger that’s happening. And when that happens it can impact multiple areas of the body, not just one.

Right. So like if I have an infection somewhere that’s like in one spot, that’s like triggering an infection per se, right? Where yeah, it’s more localized. Whereas if I’m breathing in an immune trigger that will create an depending on the individual, the severity of the cascade or whatever, but that will create a response and it will manifest differently in different places.

So the very first thing and I see this in the majority of the people we work with is multisystem, multisymptom neuro, my gut dysbiosis, my skin stuff. My hair’s coming out of chronic fatigue everywhere. I’ve got pain over here. I like fill in the blank. I’ve got reproductive problems. I’ve got hormone problems, I’ve got adrenal problems. Like you start going through it. And when you start kind of picking up, like there’s one thing over here and then one thing over here that’s not even connected to that same system. That is a huge, huge, huge red flag. So that’s one big thing that we’ve seen.

Now that doesn’t always happen like that. So now the second thing, like body wise, is if you have multiple people in the house, first off, not everybody always gets sick in the house, right? You might have only one person that’s impacted. Everybody else is fine, right? However, there’s also circumstances where, everyone in the house is kind of dealing with something different. Right. So you see this a lot. So you’ll have kind of the main person who has the most significant health impact is usually driving the show, which is usually the woman in the scenario because they’re generally the ones that that show symptoms first.

So that’s usually one kind of driving the ship. Then you have like the husband who’s like, I mean, I’m fine, maybe I’m a little tired, you know, maybe this or that or whatever, or maybe they’re even more aware. Right? Maybe the first person is having, neurological stuff. the more significant one. Maybe the husband is having gut issues. Maybe that’s what’s happening. Maybe one of the kids is having, like, behavioral challenges or something that’s going on there. Maybe one of the other kids is having, you know, something else that’s going on. Right? And so you look, you look at everyone in the house and it’s like everyone has something going on and it’s not really going away.

Like it might go in and out, but like it seems like not healing or clearing up as like you would want it to with whatever treatments happening. How does everybody have something different going on? The connector is we’re all in the same house, breathing the same air. Now, the thing is, like we said, it will manifest differently in different people. And that’s what makes diagnosing a mold exposure really, really difficult is because you can’t just look at a symptom and be like, oh yeah, that’s a mold thing, right? It’s almost like a preponderance of evidence. Like if you’re in court and it’s like, well, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. It had to be this guy, right?

Like I have all the evidence. I didn’t see him pull the trigger, but I’ve got his fingerprints here. And I could put him at the side of the scene. And I’ve got this witness over here, and that is enough to convict somebody, right?

Right.

It’s kind of the same thing. It’s like, does all the evidence lead to this thing? We don’t actually see it. But does it lead to that conclusion that we feel confident about? And when you see it like across multiple people like that, that’s another big thing.

Now, the third one I would throw out, if you leave the house, you go on vacation for a week and or something like that. A lot of times people will feel better when they leave and they’ll attribute that to, I’m off from work. I’m not stressed from work on vacationing. I’m out by the beach. Just relax or whatever. And I’ll be like, that’s why I feel better. And then they come home and then they realize they kind of feel like crap again. Right? And we just attributed to what vacations make me feel good. And when I come home, I don’t feel good because I have all of life going on.

It’s not that usually. Usually it’s your body is reacting in real time to what’s going on and the promising thing off of someone worth that is the situation is that in a short term reduction of exposure and you start noticing like a benefit, that’s like a good sign that you can bounce back from this. Right? And you’re.

Yeah, because not everyone is that way for sure. You know, the people that really suffer from the mold exposures, cause it almost can be like someone with Lyme disease or, the chronic pain, chronic fatigue that just seemed to, loom for years. But if you’re one of those people that you’re removed from it and things clear up quickly, that’s a great thing.

What’s interesting is even with like Lyme and autoimmune issues and all the, you know, all the things that connect, there are still times where people leave and they feel that it might not be perfect, they might not be healed when they leave, but they feel like less of a weight or like I’ve even had people say they’ll say it more when they come home than when they’re gone. Like when I came home, it felt like the air was like thicker.

Yeah.

Your body’s like figuring this out, and It’s trying to communicate that to your brain to put some sort of like frame around it to explain what’s going on. Right. But like, your body’s realizing there’s something in the air, right? And then it’s like triggering your brain to somehow rationalize like what that is.

Yeah. I like people to understand. And you’re bringing this to, my awareness right now. You’re kind of saying the same thing that I like to teach people. The answer is there. it’s there, you know, what’s causing the problem? But it might be, you know, a little quiet voice right now that you’re just not listening to, and you want to bring that into your consciousness, recognize the problem and deal with it, and the sooner the better.

I 100% agree, and I oftentimes tell people I’m like, you need to trust your gut. Your first gut instinct, because your body is going to react without any sort of rationalization. First your body is going to react. And I think this is just my opinion is that, like our gut is actually the thing that really knows what’s going on.

And so when you get these gut feelings, I’m 100 like, you should be trusting your gut feel because then when your gut then talks to your brain about something, your brain is now this thing is trying to create frameworks and rationalization and is adding logic to it. When in this scenario, my mind, your gut is just a response is telling you the truth. Your brain is trying to make the truth make sense with all of these other frameworks that you believe in on top of it. And a lot of times that’s what misguides you.

Brian. It’s funny because as you’re saying that, I’m thinking, you know, that expression. I got a gut feeling, came before we knew the gut connection. And literally there’s microbes in your gut that are communicating with the rest of your body. We didn’t know that. We knew there were microbes there, but we didn’t know about the communication that they were doing and how they would literally talk to other parts of our body.

And what’s interesting just on that real quick is that, you know, a lot of people think that like breathing it goes in through your lungs. The breath way is maybe the only exterior kind of pathway into your body that impacts two major systems in your body. It goes into your lungs, but through your sinus and post nasal drip, it goes straight into your gut. Drinking doesn’t do that. Eating food doesn’t do that, right. They go straight to your stomach in your gut. Breathing is direct impact into two very important body systems in your body that no other external, input into our body does.

They typically go to one body system. So it’s really like the air quality is so important because you’re like you’re doubling the pathway that it goes straight into the body right away from when it comes in. And it triggers that gut stuff right away because it goes right in there. And then the microbes, like you’re saying, they’re going to react to all that stuff. That’s why you get like fungal overgrowth and gut dysbiosis and all the stuff is because you’re putting stuff in there shouldn’t be in there. It’s overloading it or is doing whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, what does that testing session, look like? I’m having someone come to my home for proper testing. And what are we testing for? Are we testing for mold, or are we testing for mycotoxins?

It depends on the person and the goals. But I would say like generally what we’re looking for is two things. One, we’re looking to find the source of where mold is growing, where it’s where it’s located. Right. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, you can’t fix it. This is in my story. This was the biggest problem that happened to me.

And this is the biggest problem in our entire industry, is that we’ll they’ll go into a house and they’ll do like an air sample in the middle of a room and they’ll be like, let’s see if there’s mold here. Most of the time that gives you a false negative, because that’s not even the right way to test for what’s floating around in the air, even though logically it seems like it is. But science has supported that you should not be doing it that way. So you’re going to be getting a false negative most of the time. But let’s say there’s the percent of the time that it actually does say that there’s a mold issue going on. What are your solutions off of that? Where’s it coming from? I don’t know, it’s just floating in the air.

So now the only solution that person can give you is one of two things. Got your entire room because I’ve no idea where it’s coming from, but it’s in here. So let’s just rip everything down, which is stupid. And then the second thing is, I had this magic fogging solution that just magically makes everything disappear and kills it all, which also does not work. These are literally the only two options they can give you. If you do an air tests in a room without knowing where the source is coming from, it’s like on your side of the thing. you’re diagnosing somebody and you don’t know what’s causing it. And that’s like the fundamental problem with our entire medical industry is that it’s take this pill.

You know what the pill is? The fog, the fogging in your house is the equivalent in the indoor environmental space as take this medicine to feel better for a minute, but you’re going to be on this for the rest of your life because we don’t know what’s causing it. It’s literally the exact same problem. And so we frame our entire process around, well, functional medicine has already figured out is that if you don’t know root cause, you don’t know anything.

And so the core of our process is where is the problem coming from? That’s the core of the process. And that’s why I say, you know, we find 15, 20 things in a house. It doesn’t mean that you have to do every single thing in remediation, but you need to know where it all is so you can start creating your planning or philosophy or strategy on how you handle it.

Right. So the first piece of it is, is it in this wall, this ceiling, this cabinet over here. And, you know, we have a incredibly thorough way of doing that that nobody else really does. So that’s the first piece. Now, when you start thinking about how someone is exposed to something in a house, let’s say there’s a problem behind my wall. Don’t stick my face in the wall. Right. That’s not my exposure pathway. That’s the origin point, right? That’s the source. So if our goal is to reduce our exposure in the House, there’s two parts of that formula. Where’s it coming from. And then how is it migrating to my face. Those are the two things you have to do right.

So exposure paths are comprised of two things. One is your heating air conditioning ventilation system. Right. So if you have stuff floating around in your house, it’s going to get pulled into that system and distributed all over the place. That becomes an exposure distribution pathway that then allows things to get to us. The second is settled particle and dust just on surfaces in the house.

So what happens if I have a mold source behind the wall? Spores, toxins, particles will work out from behind the wall. You can’t see them because they’re microscopic and you can’t see them. And then gravity’s going to bring them down to the surfaces in the house. So like right now I’m sitting on my chair. If I, like, bounce in my chair, I just popped up all the particle that was on my chair, and now it’s in my breathing.

So this is actually a scientific concept that’s called the human cloud effect. And what it says is that as any person moves in any building or any space, they constantly re suspend settled particle and create a cloud that follows them. So your exposure path is you disturbing settled particle that follows you everywhere you go. Right. And we know that the air conditioning will also contribute to what settles on the ground.

So part of the assessment process then is not only where is the source, what’s going on in the heating or air conditioning system, is it contaminated or not. Because it’s going to continue to feed into the particle in the house. And then what has settled down on the surfaces in the house? Because that’s actually how it’s getting to your face.

So then the remediation plan needs to remove as many of the sources as you can, but then it also has to have a cleaning strategy in place for the Hvac systems and the whole house in general. Beyond the one wall that had an issue to remove the settled particle that you would then pop up in your face. That is how people have successful remediation projects in their house.

And it’s the number one reason that remediation doesn’t work is you either don’t find the sources, or you didn’t effectively clean up the mess that was already created from the sources in the first place. And so effectively, it just doesn’t work because he didn’t get it. All right. And that’s why remediation doesn’t work. So it’s really important to see it that way.

And then in terms of what we test for, source level is primarily just mold. You know, hidden mold locations, right? In the exposure path realm, we can expand the panel of testing because there’s more options. When you start sampling dust. It’s a much easier medium to get more progressive types of analysis out of. So you can sample for mold at the DNA level, which is really important because when you’re doing like source level testing, all you can test for spores.

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Okay. So a lot of us have heard of spores. Spores are big. So in your mind imagine the spores the size of a beach ball. Right. And so you can test for those. But a mold colony is more than just the spores. Spores are released from the mold colony. So imagine a tree. Your tree has leaves and branches and bark and roots and a trunk and all that stuff.

Right? That’s all the components of the tree. The leaves on the tree are your spores. Okay? The whole rest of the tree is still there, and it still has the DNA signature of that mold type. Right. But the spores are a very small portion of the entire structure of that tree. And so what happens in homes with mold colonies is when the water goes away from a mold colony, which happens all the time.

Most things we find in a house is not wet. 90% of what we find is not wet right now. What happened? There was a moisture issue. Mold grew like a plant would grow right. Water goes away. The mold doesn’t like get up and like grab his family and go look for another water source. Right? It just like a plant. What? It stays there, but it starts to dry out. It starts to bend over, wilt over. It gets dry. You touch the leaves, say like shattered your fingers. Right? That’s what happens to a plant when you take the water away. That’s what happens to a mold colony. So if you’re only testing for spores, you’re missing the roots and the branches and the bark and all that stuff.

All of that stuff can break off of the colony. And so work into the space and trigger the immune response. So what’s cool in the dust is that you can actually test to the DNA level, and then you’re getting a better understanding of overall load of exposure. Right. So that’s one really big thing you can do there. You can also test for mycotoxins. That’s where you test for toxins is in the dust. And then for certain people bacterial organism and bacterial toxins are important. If you have a more complex health issue, they’re going to trigger the same immune responses that mold exposure or what. And they grow in different scenarios. And there are times where you have one and not the other.

So we’re able to then kind of look at that if the situation makes sense. And then you could really get a comprehensive, complete remediation plan in place that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to tear your whole house down, but you have the information to make it so targeted and effective that you can really maximize the budget that you have for remediation to reduce your exposure significantly.

How expensive is the testing and does insurance pay for it?

In some cases. So for insurance, yes or no, it’s kind of a hit or miss. The big thing on insurance is that, first off, all of your all insurance policies have what’s called a mold writer. And, they have this whole separate little portion of your policy that says you could only get $5000 or $10,000 from mold issues. Right? So the big thing is like, if you are going to submit to insurance, like you don’t ever say the word mold, like you’ve literally just locked yourself in this cabinet over here where you can’t get more than that dollar amount. Right? So that’s like a really big thing. The insurance companies aren’t dumb. They know. They know what happens.

There’s mold issues. It’s spreading. They have to rip all these things out like they’re covering themselves. So like you have a mold cap and your cap is five grand or ten grand, and that’s what it is. Right? So it’s really I don’t have mold. I have water damage. That’s what you have. That’s what you have. And so like all of our reports, we always indicate like water damage that we phrase everything around water damage to help in this process.

But even with that, the other kind of things in insurance is that they have phrasing in there. It’s, it’s sudden and accidental water events. Right. So if you have something that’s like currently dry right now, right, or something that you didn’t really know about or it doesn’t feel like a bigger water issue, they’re probably not going to cover that. Whereas like if you were able to identify there’s a current moisture issue right now or something like that, that might more likely fall into a covered event or something like that.

So it sounds like if there’s, burst pipe, it sounds like the thing to do is immediately and then you’re obviously looking at water damage versus mold. If we get someone out there right away.

Yeah, but the thing is, you don’t want to bring your insurance people out there. You want to bring your own people out there, right? You want someone to come look at it with your best interest in mind, as opposed to somebody coming to look at it with the insurance best interest in mind.

So when you bring someone in. And so let’s just take my apartment, for instance, right. Like if I like, done this the right way or whatever. Right. And I had no what I known. It’s a big old water issue that happened right immediately. Like somebody needs to come out and I need to track and document the whole path. That water went what’s currently wet right now? How far did it move? And I need to get all that documented as quickly as I can, because water eventually will start to dry out. If it wasn’t like a significant thing, right? So you want to have all that documented, and then you now have proof of moisture that went and moved into certain areas.

Right? And off of that, there are guidelines outside of mold guidelines. So talk about like if you have a water loss, there’s different types of water losses, meaning the type of contamination, the water might have within it. And even if it’s a clean water leak, the longer that that water stays in like interstitial spaces and building materials like, you know, in a ceiling cavity or wall cavity or something like that, it will immediately start transforming from clean water into gray water and potentially into black water.

So the longer it stays in that environment, the more that it allows stuff to start growing and feeding and bacteria and all this stuff, and it gets more and more contaminated and so if you can show and time stamp like there was moisture here at this time, and it went to here, here and here, even if it’s dry a week later, bacteria just needs a few hours to grow. It doesn’t need weeks, right. And so you can then warrant the need because there’s a whole standard around what needs to be removed and building materials has nothing to do with mold if there’s a water loss. And so then you can kind of lump that in there and then make sure that it’s sanitized and cleaned and everything. So that’s a path that you could take

back in the day 3500 years ago. It was, written, I think, in the book of Leviticus where they would, have the priest come out and inspect the home. The priest was the mold inspector, and I think the initial plan was, if we see something that looks like mold, let’s lock up the house, leave for a week, and then come back and kind of re inspect.

And if it’s still there or it seems to have increase, you know, let’s scrape the stones and anything that has that they get it out and move it far from the city. And then if it’s still there, when they come back and they see that it’s spreading, you know, it’s literally take the building down, get rid of it all. obviously our technology has increased a little bit, but the concept is still the same. Get rid of the bad. Cut it out. Get it out. I’m guessing you can’t just clean, water soaked, mold infested drywall.

Yeah, correct. I mean, it’s source removal, right? It’s, you said it earlier. The majority of the issues happen behind the walls, above the ceilings. Right. And so even if you surface clean something like that, it really is a lot of times, like the tip of an iceberg where behind it it’s much larger and a much more significant issue. The pictures that you see online of like, the black stuff on the front of walls is much more common on the backside of the walls, not the front of the walls.

How do you test the backside of the wall?

So what we do is like if we think that there’s a mold issue and a wall. So what we’re looking for is not just moisture right now. Like we will do that, but like the like I said, the majority of things aren’t wet right now. So our I say this a lot. The secret to this whole thing is to not go into a house looking for mold, because if you’re looking for mold, you’re not going to find it. It’s all hidden. So what you need to do is understand, like what creates mold, which we know water is the thing that that you need to address. Right. So okay. And so then we learn what two signs of water intrusion look like.

Right. And these are things that a lot of people just kind of write off or they don’t look at. It can be super, super subtle and minor. And if you’re not looking for it you would never see it. Right? But it could be like a little bubbling on some paint at the bottom of a baseboard. Looks like nothing, right? But that’s a sign of that would happen if moisture kind of soaked in the baseboard a little bit, that becomes a clue that our eyes can see. We can’t see the mold, but we can see the precursor to mold, which is water damage. Right. And so our whole process and the reason we take the reason Mark took two hours of my 800 square foot apartment and the reason that we spend 4 to 7 to eight hours in a house and we go through a normal sized house, is because we’re looking at all of the surfaces for those things, right?

It takes time. You got to look for that stuff. And so it’s bubbling paint, you know, peeling, cracking, warping floors, separating a building materials. These are all things that happen when moisture gets in there. And so if we see that on a base wood or a wall. So the way that we test behind the wall is we actually put like a really small hole in the wall, like the size of like a pencil or a pen. And then we pull air from behind the wall. So you take the air test. That is not effective when it’s in the middle of nowhere, because it’s not near anything. And you take the air test right to where you think the problem is, which, okay, makes sense. And you pull air right from back there. Right.

The strength of an air test is to be able to get you access to these areas that you can’t get access to, because the building is built. Right. So ideally, if I was on a surface, I would do a surface test of it. Like that would be ideal, right? If I could see it, I would want to do that. But most times you don’t have that. So then the next thing you do is how can I get closest to it? And then how can I get information from the area? Right. So if it’s behind the wall you put a little hole. It’s called a cavity test or a core test. People call it different things. And then you pull air right from the area where the water damage is the most. And that’s going to show you if there’s an elevation floating around back there. And that’s how you know if stuff is hiding behind walls.

Yeah, I am curious, like you disturb the wall a little bit, kind of just like, when a person walking through the room disturbs the ground and creates a little dust.

Yeah. So it naturally happens when you create the hole. So you’ll get a natural little disruption there. So you don’t really have to do more to it. Right. But there are other areas, like if I’m testing inside of a cabinet for example, because I think there’s a problem like in below the cabinet floor or something where, yeah, you just tap on it a little bit to disturb it a little, and then you close like the cabinet door. So you keep it all interior and sourced in there, and then you’re doing an air test in an enclosed, targeted space. You did a little disruption to try to aerosolized a little bit. And then you pull the sample and you see if you’re getting an elevation.

Yeah. And I guess, also the history is probably a big part of that, like, you know, okay. Did the dishwasher leak here? Or whatever. The cases are

100, 100%. So, like we talked about earlier, mold, when the water goes away, it doesn’t go anywhere. It just dries out and actually impacts the space more because the particle breaks off of the whole colony a lot easier. So knowing the historical things is why the first step in our process is we actually do. Again, we’ve mirrored the functional medicine process in so many places because it works. When you go to your doctor, there’s an onboarding process here. Tell me your family history. Tell me what you’re allergic to. Tell me this. Tell me that whatever the doctor feels like they need, we do the same thing. Tell me about you.

What’s your health stuff going on? Why are you here? What’s going on? All right, now let’s talk about the house. Right? And the house is like your family history. Except for us. It’s the house history. And it’s like. Have you had any leaks? Was anything done about it? What’s gone on? Like, what do you know about. Some people know a lot. Some people don’t know as much. you know, whatever’s there is helpful. It’s not required. But whatever’s there is helpful.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is definitely an enlightening conversation. I’ve learned more. Is there anything at this point that we left out that people should be thinking about? And, besides the website, what’s your website? Where can they go to schedule the service as well?

Yeah. So our company is called we inspect. Our site is yesweinspect.com And there you could set up a free call with one of my coaches. And we can kind of talk through your situation and see if it even makes sense. And if that’s something you know, that you’d explore how it would work. Maybe two things.

One thing I feel like a lot of times I start talking. It’s it feels scary and it feels like, oh, I have to rip all this stuff apart and have to do all these things. If you’re somebody who is having health issues and you have connected the dots, or maybe this lit up a flag for you, that it is, I will tell you this people get better from this. All the time. You just need the right support to do it. People stay sick here because they’re not getting the right support, right? And so they’re either continuously being exposed to something or their doctor doesn’t really know how to handle it. So if you if you get the people in place to help people recover from this all the time.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, if you’re like, not sure and you’re like, do I want to dive into like a whole inspection process? This sounds like a lot. I don’t even really know if I have a mole problem that’s contributing, like if that’s where you’re at, which makes sense. Like, but after this conversation, you’re like, I don’t know, maybe, like, it’d be nice to know generally if there’s a mole problem, we have a separate test that you can do.

it’s an at home test kit. It’s called the dust test. We’ve talked about dust. The dust test. It’s literally like a Swiffer cloth that you can just wipe dust off the surfaces. Right? I talked about how that’s your exposure path, right. And you can analyze the dust to figure out if you can have a mold problem or if it’s significant. And that can then be kind of your screening test to say, oh, you know, we did talk about like these weird symptom clues that Brian talked about earlier. It’s like, oh, maybe. And now I see in my dust testing in the house that there’s like a high load of mold in here. That becomes your understanding of it. Okay, maybe I do need to dig into this a little bit. So there’s an easier path to step in if you feel like you want to go that way through, like an initial screening test, which we have called the dust test.

Yeah. If I bring it back to the health challenges that people are having, I will say, and I’ve always said this, getting rid of the cause is so much more important than treating the condition.

Yes,

for most people, when you get rid of the cause, that condition leaves. the body, recovers. It does what it’s supposed to. Some people might still need medical care, detoxification, maybe some gut repair, but for the most part, if you remove the cause, things get better. And by golly, if it’s mold, you better get rid of the cause

It’s a it’s a big contributor. So it can I, I think that it’s you know, there’s a lot of things, but I feel like it’s an epidemic. I feel like it’s something a lot of people don’t know about. And it’s a silent thing that is just impacting millions and millions of people, and they don’t even know about it. Like if you just look at genetic predisposition to not be able to detox, that’s 24% of population.

And then if you just look at like autoimmune pans, pandas in kids, which is neurological and Lyme disease, you just look at those four things. There’s way more than that. You just look at those four things. That’s 130 million people in the US who falls into one of those four categories. That’s 40% of the entire population. And that’s not even the bulk of all the health things.

It’s just a few of them, right? There are so many people that are impacted by this. And by fixing this, you can fix so many things downstream. Like this truly is like a root of a lot of things that go on. So it’s a very big issue. So I appreciate you allow me to have the platform here to chat about it a little bit.

Awesome. And for those that are consuming this on YouTube, look in the description. There will be links to Brian’s website and podcast platform. I you can’t click on them, but it will be there. You can copy and paste into your browser and visit the site, or everyone can type. Yes we inspect. Is that correct?

That’s it. yesweinspect.com. That’s it.

Awesome. Hey Brian, thanks so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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