NBS #128: Why Most Mold Inspections Miss the Real Problem

What if your mold inspection came back “normal,” but your home was still making you sick?

In this episode of Never Been Sicker, Michael Rubino sits down with Brian Karr, co-founder of We Inspect, to break down why traditional mold inspections often miss the real source of exposure. Brian shares his personal story of becoming sick after a water leak in his apartment, only to discover that a standard air test missed the bigger problem hiding inside the walls.

Together, Michael and Brian explain why air samples alone can create false confidence, why dust testing matters, and how exposure mapping helps identify where contamination is coming from, how it moves through the home, and how it reaches your breathing zone.

They also discuss why comprehensive inspections are especially important for chronically ill or hypersensitive individuals, how remediation plans should be prioritized, and why the right team matters when trying to create a healthier home.

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction and Background
04:51 The Importance of Experience in Mold Inspection
10:00 Understanding Air Quality Testing
14:53 The Flaws in Traditional Air Testing Methods
19:49 Mapping Exposure and Personalized Recovery Plans
26:10 Understanding Testing Methodologies
29:12 Functional Medicine and Its Application
32:02 The Importance of Comprehensive Testing
35:06 The Role of Remediation in Health
39:19 Building a Supportive Health Team
42:40 The Journey to Meaningful Work
45:01 Resources for Mold Testing and Awareness

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🔵 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moldfinders/
🔵 Get an Inspection: https://yesweinspect.com/
🔵 Take the free Mold Exposure Score: https://yesweinspect.com/moldexposurescore/

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🔵 The Dust Test: https://www.thedusttest.com
🔵 My Favorite Cleaning Products: https://www.homecleanse.com/shop/
🔵 Remediation FREE Consultation: https://www.homecleanse.com/contact/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I have been living and sleeping in a toxic box. All four walls covered in my bedroom.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

That's like you're looking at one drop of water in an entire ocean and saying, Yeah, the whole ocean's clean. My name is Michael Rubino. I'm on a personal mission to make sure you don't get sick inside your own home.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

I knew there was something wrong. I'm just so relieved there's something that you can do about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hello and welcome to another episode of Never Been Sicker. I'm your host, indoor air quality expert, Michael Rubino. And today's very special guest, Brian Carr. Brian, thanks for taking time out of your busy day to be here with us and share all of your wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hey, thanks for having me. This is this is the one thing, I'll say the one thing, but these types of talks are the things I like the most because it gets me out of like day-to-day and it lets me actually share and hopefully impact people. So this is fun. I'm excited. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Now, you and I both married into this family. So I think you're my cousin-in-law now or something like that, or is that right?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

I mean, if you go search around on the internet, you could find a whole family tree of our family that people have put together. So they probably for you all.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

What's funny about all that is um really appreciate you know kind of your expertise and everything and you sort of the entire process that you've developed over the really the past decade that's helped so many people. Um I wanted to kind of take a second to really talk about why you're so different and why you're typically one of the top recommended experts in your field. Um, you know, I I know you hundreds of doctors refer you, and there's obviously a reason for it. Can you can you explain a little bit about you know what you guys do that's so different?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Yeah, you know what's really funny when I talk about it high level, it just makes so much sense to me. And and it just becomes clear, and and I think even like before that, I think the people that are really making an impact in this field, at least a lot of them, have some sort of experience or something that was like, oh man, this was a problem. It was either them or maybe someone in their family or something like that. And it just kind of like showed them that like there's this old way that clearly does not work, and then there's this new way that I had to go figure out all by myself because it's not easy to it wasn't easy to figure out, and all of a sudden there's something that really works, right? And I think that's how like real innovation is made anywhere, anyways, is that someone has a problem, current solutions don't solve it, they have to go figure out a solution to solve it, and all of a sudden you have this new way that solves this problem that didn't exist before, right? And you know, for me, I had a situation like that, and it wasn't that I created the issue, I just happened, as you mentioned, to be dating who is now my future wife, and her dad had created the whole thing, and he taught it to me, right? And so, like that is sort of how it how it came. So the short story: I lived in an apartment, there was a pipe leak in my ceiling from a bathroom up above. The water fell down like into my bed. It was a really big leak if it went straight through the ceiling. And call the landlord, landlord comes out, they're like, Oh, we stopped the leak, we dried it all out, everything is fine. Well, fast forward two or three months, I'm having skin like psoriasis, eczema kind of breakouts all over my face, my my brain is slower, my memory is not good. Like all the things that we know now are 100% tied to exposure, right? Like we know this now, but at the time, I didn't know that. I was some some guy living in an apartment, right? That had never heard of any of this stuff before. And so uh my I'm just gonna refer to her as my wife now, but my wife, pre-wife, I don't know, my pre-wife, um, she's like, hey, you this sounds a lot like the clients that my dad works with. Like you are literally describing everything that happens. You should have him come look at this place because she's like, I, you know, it's so funny, like like Nikki, my wife. I mean, she she's she's been in the family business as much as anyone else has. She's like, You have a mold problem in your apartment. So she tells me. And uh, okay. And so I have her dad come out, his name's Mark. Um, he spends two hours in my 800 square foot apartment. The landlord sent a quote, mold inspector out, who spent about 20 minutes taking an air sample in my room and left, right? Mark spends two hours. He figures out that the water that had come through the ceiling, again, common sense now, like it makes so much sense. Everyone listening, if you took a picture of water and you poured it on your kitchen island, what direction does the water go? It goes sideways because where else is it going to go? And then when it gets to the end of the island, which way does the water go? It goes down because gravity wins, right? So I had all this water hit my ceiling, and of course it went sideways because it was so much water. And then it got to the end of my ceiling where the walls were, and what direction did it go? It went down, just like it does off of the kitchen island. It's exactly what happened in my room. So the landlord comes out, and all of them come out and they dry this, like, you know, four by four hole in my ceiling, basically, and tell me everything is fine. Meanwhile, Mark finds out that I have been living and sleeping in a toxic box, all four walls, covered in mold, in my bedroom. And that is the difference between someone who actually knows what they're doing and the old way of I'm gonna take an air sample and tell you everything is fine. And this is what people get stuck with all the time. They get stuck with the local inspector that does this because no one has ever showed them this other way. I hope it's because no one has ever showed them the other way, and not that they know of the other way and they just don't want to do it. I hope that that's not the case. I give humanity the benefit of the doubt. Um, yeah, and so yeah. So, like that was my starting point, right? And then after that, um, I actually go to Mark and I asked, I wanted to work with him. I it was just like so amazing for me. I was sick, I wasn't anymore. I was like, this is unreal. Some people, when they go through an experience, you just kind of get through your experience and you're thankful for it and you move on. Other people, it becomes like this light bulb or this like spark that they have to do something about it to help other people. And it's not saying that either way is right or wrong, right? There isn't. I've I've been on the first end of that in many other things in my life, right? But for this particular thing, this thing lit the spark. I was like, I gotta go figure, I gotta go do this. Like, this is why I'm here. And so I went and I became Mark's apprentice, and I learned everything that there was to learn from literally the best guy in the world that does this. And that's where we got to where we are, right? And so I think the high-level fundamental difference is instead of going into a house and not actually really looking for problems and relying on tests and things to tell me what's going on, I go in and use my eyes and common sense and building dynamics and actually map out where things are coming from. Because people are not sick or triggering symptoms if there isn't an exposure that's making it happen. So the whole concept then is that we need to map your exposure. And that's what Mark taught me how to do, right? It's not let me walk into a room, put an air pump in the middle of the room, and cross my fingers, right? Actually, we did an internal study on this years ago. And in multiple houses that I went through over the course of a period of time, if I thought there was mold in a wall, you know, under, you know, that was hidden behind a wall, I you know, we test in the wall, like test where you think the mold is. Again, const like why would I test 10 feet away? Like test where you think the mold is actually located if the purpose and the goal of your test is to figure out if there's mold somewhere, right? So, like, so I would do that. Yeah, I would do that. But then I took four steps away and put an air pump at the quote breathing level, about four feet up in the air, and I, you know, took a couple steps away from the wall and I took an air sample right there. And I wanted to see what the difference was. I knew what the answer was going to be, but I wanted to have data that showed me what the answer was. Sure. It was a 78% false negative rate. An air sample that was taken a couple feet away from the wall where there was a mole problem that was validated with a test. The air sample that was taken a couple feet away said there was no mold problem. So the challenge then is if you have inspectors coming in taking air samples in the middle of rooms, they have an 80% chance effectively that even if there is a problem, it's gonna be a false negative and you're not gonna know about it. And that leads you down this road of thinking that the house is okay because I got somebody in, they have a certification, they've got five stars on Yelp, and everyone loves their customer service and blah, blah, blah. I must believe this person now because they told me that, and now you end up set for years because you were told that your house is okay. Like these local inspectors and the people that go through like this, they don't know the damage that they're causing the people. Right? They just kind of come in and they're like, oh, I'm running tests, I'm doing whatever, and they don't understand how it works, why it works, they don't understand like what's going on behind the scenes, they don't understand air pathways and air pressurization and how things move around. They don't get any of that. And they are like, hey, let me take a pump and do an air test because air is what we breathe, and therefore, if I do an air test, it's gonna tell me what's going on. The problem with air tests in the middle of the room, one, I gave you the data just quickly, but like if you think of it more qualitatively and like what's happening, you're taking a sample far away from wherever anything could be. There's not mold growing in the air. Mold does not grow in the air, it doesn't, right? It the byproducts migrate into the air. It doesn't grow in the air. If I'm trying to find where it is, I can't take a test in the middle of the room. First off, told you it would fail eight out of ten times, but even if the 20% of the time that it's right, what's your next answer?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I almost I want to talk about that for a second. Like, you know, I'm sorry to cut you off. And I only get to talk to you like three or four times a year, so you know, we're gonna work. You know, uh, when when you do an air pump in the center of the room, correct me if I'm wrong. You're the expert here. You collect 75 liters of air, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Yeah, so that's basically a five-minute air pull for everyone listening. You stick air for five minutes.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

So five minutes, 75 liters of air. Typically, people are running it for five minutes. Is that about the industry standard of what people run it for?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, some people will run for 10, some will run for five. Really?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Okay, so even so 10 minutes would be 150 liters of air? Okay, are you familiar that a 10 by 10 room with about eight foot ceilings is over 22,000 liters of air? Yeah. See, these are things, these are the types of questions. Even if I did 150 liters of air, I'm still like not even 1%, maybe 1%. I'd have to whip out a calculator. Maybe I'll just do that real quick just so it could be 100% of the five.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

While you're doing that, here's the other part. So there's the math on just how much of the air you're taking. That's one part of it. The other part is it's only getting a Polaroid picture during that five minutes. That changes all the time. If my four-year-old is jumping around in the room, it's gonna be a much different picture of what's floating around versus not.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

You want to know the percentage? It is 0.6%, like less than 1%, 0.6%, and that's 150. It would be 0.3%, which is obviously even more less than 1% if we're looking at 75 liters of air. I mean, that is like ridiculous to test less than 1% of the air of the average size room, which you know, typically 10 by 10 is considered the average size room. You get into a larger room, like a living room, which could be 20 by 10, you know. I mean, it's it's just even crazier. You're you're analyzing uh less than a tenth of a percent of the room. And then you're saying what? That the whole room is fine off of that? That's like the an the analogy I like to use on this is that you're looking at one drop of water in an entire ocean and saying, yeah, the whole ocean's clean, guys. Good news.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was just um I was just involved in a court case as an expert witness, and you've done these two. I know you've done this. And they get you up on the stand. And on my end, they're trying to invalidate our findings because I did not do air tests in a home. They do this every single time because they think that air tests are the thing that you're supposed to do. It actually blows my mind again. This just goes, this is such a good example of this. So when you're in an expert witness situation, right, when you're in a court case, I'm on the side of the affected individual, right? I'm never on the side of the landlord. Like I would never do that. Um, right. So I'm on the side of the person who's actually getting sick. The landlord goes out and they get somebody on their side. These people are called CIHs or certified industrial hygienists, right? So they have an expert. And when you're prepping for cases and stuff, like you talk to the attorney, the expert is giving the attorney what they believe are like the angles they can use for conversations and the data that they could reference and the studies that they can look at and different things to equip the attorney to then be able to go and do like a cross-examination of like me on the stand, for example. And their goal should be I feel super confident that I'm going to be able to catch Brian on the fact that you shouldn't do air samples in a room, right? Like that, why else would you ask me that question? I had an attorney in another case I was in, and they uh they had told me once after I, after I blew up a question like this on the stand for the the opposing attorney, it was my attorney afterwards. He's like, he's like, man, that guy never should have asked you that. I was like, yeah, he's like, you never, as an attorney, you never ask a question to somebody if you don't know what they're gonna answer. Right? So if you leave it open and you don't know what their answer is, you're a bad attorney, effectively, right? So what's happening, and the reason I'm framing it like this is because there are so many experts, quote experts, that are literally feeding the attorney the path to cross-examine me effectively. And they don't know the research that blows their entire case up. I I blew this entire case up when this guy asked me this question. Because he's like, Well, you didn't do air tests. I'm like, Yeah, why would I do hair tests? You're right, I didn't do them. It's like, well, how do you know what they're breathing? You so you don't know what they were breathing if you didn't. I was like, well, no, we I know exactly what they were breathing. We did dust sampling. Well, dust is on the ground. That's not let me explain the very well-documented research concept of the personal cloud and what it means. And I just go through and blow this up, blow it up. The problem is that people don't understand this and the other quote experts don't even get it, right? And so if you have people that don't understand what you just outlaid, which is like, how am I taking an air sample and getting 0.6% of what is in the space when if you are if you're truly trying to understand what you're breathing in a space, dust is where you sample from. It's well documented, it's well researched in multiple papers. And the reason you do dust is because it collects things in a singular place so you can get a real understanding of what's happening. And it is very well documented that it pops up continuously and resuspends into our breathing zone over and over and over and over again as we're walking through a house. If you want to know what you're breathing, get to the source of what you're breathing, as opposed to trying to grab it from the middle of you know, however many liters are in this room, right? It's just the wrong test for the wrong thing, right? And that's exactly what's going on. And so we backtrack to like what's the difference, right? Because you asked me earlier, and then I went off on this thing, I do this, I'm sorry. But but what's the difference? The difference is a couple things. You use the right test for the right reasons. That's difference number one. Difference number two is you need to understand what questions you're trying to answer in in an assessment, right? The question isn't, is there mold here? That doesn't help anybody. Cool, there's mold here. What do I do about it? I don't know, blow your house up. What am I supposed to do about it? Right? So if I'm trying to answer the question, is there mold here? And I come back and I say, hi, you have mold here, you as the person in the house would be like, Well, what do I do about it? And I don't have an answer for that because how do you answer that question? You answer that question by being able to backtrack how it got there, where is it coming from? How do you stop it from coming there anymore? And just like any type of issue that goes on, you have a cause and an effect. The cause is where it starts, the effect is the end result of how it got there, right? So if you're thinking in a house, mold didn't just show up in the air, it didn't just show up in the dust, it got there somehow.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

So we have to figure out where it came from, and we have to map the exposure path of how it got there, and that is the big, big difference. It's exposure mapping. So, what we do when we go through a house, we don't do mold testing to figure out if there's a mold issue in your house. Of course, we do sampling and stuff, right? But the bigger question is how are we identifying where it's coming from, how it's moving through the house, and then ultimately how it's getting to your face. And that is the real question. And if you can answer those three questions instead of one question, which is do I have mold in my house? If we could say, where is the mold at? How is it moving and circulating, so I could address that piece of the equation, and then how is it getting to my face so then I can address the exposed the re-exposure portion of the equation? This is how people get better. This is the difference. This is why Mark was in my apartment, an 800 square foot apartment for two hours, or another guy was in there for 20 minutes. This is why an inspection that we inspect does takes six to eight to ten hours going through someone's house, and it doesn't take 30 to 45 minutes. Because when you're being exposed to the point that you're having health issues, it's not one issue in your house. It's not two issues in your house. It's not, it's several, and it's all adding up and moving into the breathable space of the house. So if I have an issue in one wall in this room and under the sink in this room, and I have an issue in the HVAC system over here, and I have an issue in this room over here, all of those are isolated issues. Some of them might be worse than others in a vacuum, right? Like the area behind this wall has a whole lot of mold in it, the area in this wall in this room has less mold in it, the area in the kitchen has a medium amount of mold in it, whatever it is, right? All of those impact and migrate into the occupied interior living spaces of the house, and they get into your personal cloud resuspension, like we talked about, and that is your exposure. So your exposure is the sum of multiple sources. That is what exposure is. So the only way to reduce exposure is to reduce as many sources as you can that are feeding into that formula. Now, the really cool thing is that you can start recovering by not reducing every single source, by not removing every source. It's if I have 10 sources in the house and I cut five of them down, but not only do I cut five of them down, I pick the five that are the biggest contributors to what's going on in the house, and I remove those. I'm not removing 50% of my exposure at that point, right? Because five is half of 10. I'm actually probably removing like 75% of the exposure because I'm removing the ones that are the biggest amount contributors to the load. This is the magic formula of exposure mapping and return on exposure priority plans. And that's it, that's exactly how we do it. So you go through the house, you map it out, you figure out where every single source is that you could find, you figure out how it's traveling through the house, you figure out how it's impacting your breathing zone, and then we put together a recovery blueprint plan, which is what we hand to you, right? The remediation recovery blueprint. And that breaks out here's where the problems are, here's where the worst problems are, here's the order of events in which you should address all of the problems. And we even prioritize it by individual. So, like if you came to us and you said, My child is the reason I'm here, okay, um, I have I'm a little symptomatic, but my child is like really struggling, right? So the goal of this whole process then is really focused on your child, and you want to have also some benefit because you're you're also you know impacted. That means that the areas that we identify in the priority plan, we personalize to the way the child moves through the home and how their exposure looks, as opposed to a blanket flat, the whole house, this is what's worse. So, for example, if your child, the way that we break it down, we we actually do priority um personalized priorities. And so what we'll ask the client up front is like who's the person that you're you know most, you know, that you're wanting to focus this on? Be like, oh my child, okay, cool. So what what I want to know for each area in your home, we need to understand is this an area, is it a uh we have like three tiers is it a primary area where they spend time, a secondary area, or like a tertiary area? Third area. And so what we do is we define that as if you spend four or more hours in a space, that's a tier one priority area. So you're there every day for more than four hours. This is your bedroom, your bathroom that's attached to it. For me, in my house, it's my office. I'm in here every day, right? So that'd be a priority room for me. Your second tier is anywhere that you're in daily in your house, but less than four hours. So a lot of times it's like kitchen, um, maybe primary living space, maybe a playroom for your kids, maybe something like that, right? Maybe for my wife, the laundry room, she's in there every day because we've got two kids and all kinds of stuff. For me, I'm not in the laundry room every day. It's a different priority. For me, if I was dialing the plan of how to make the healthier house for me, that wouldn't be as high as it would be if I was dialing it for her. Right. Right. And then we go to the third, and then what we do is we overlay the raw lab results, just look at the numbers, which areas are the worst. Then we overlay where people, where the target individual, how they spend the most time in the house, and we have a back-end algorithm that we created off all the data that we've used that then pops out and helps to reprioritize everything that's going to focus it all on the individual that you're most looking at.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Yeah. Now I don't want to sugarcoat this. That sounds like a lot of work. Like, yeah, that that's not something that just like happened. That's not just something you spit out in 30 minutes, right? That there's a lot of work and detail that goes into this. You know, almost like you go to the doctor's office, you're doing a whole discovery. I actually just went to a doctor's appointment. They asked all these, it was like 200 questions, all these different questions, really trying to get to understand my whole medical history, things of that nature. And then, you know, it's a very personalized plan from that point. So you you guys are really spending the time and care to go through this discovery process to really best understand the person or persons and what they're going through. And then you do this deep dive diagnostics throughout the house, right? You probably do a lot more testing than the average company. Let's face it. I know this for a fact because I've seen your reports, where a typical company will charge$1,500 and take three samples. You guys, you know, are charging more money, but you're you're taking way more samples, you're putting way more thought and care into the process. You know, you're you're really going through this house in a very detailed way. And I think one of the things that you said is really important that I wanted to hit harp on because I want people to understand, you know, why I recommend you and why like why I think it's so important for me to continue to recommend you is because the level of detail that you go through a house is insane. I mean, how you train your people to go through places is really, I mean, bar none. Like have my hats off to you. I respect that of you, you know, whether you're my cousin-in-law or not. Like what you've done, you know, you and Corey have done in this industry, I think, is really bar none. You've taken what Steve and Mark have built and really have taken it to a whole new level. I mean, they they were obviously really ahead of their time, really good at what they did, but they were very localized. You've been able to do this all across the country, which is not easy to do at the level you're doing it at the quality, you're doing it at it. And, you know, it's I just I wanted to take a minute to really harp on that for a second because I think people need to understand like what you're actually giving them and what they're receiving in the in the return of exchanging whatever dollar figure it is. And so obviously, you probably your cost parameters probably look a little different than you know, the guy down the street who's gonna do three air samples and charge 1500 bucks. But the benefit is you're gonna get this really detailed report. You're gonna know all your problems, whether you wanted to or not. You're getting all of it. And you're gonna get it in a way where you understand like that's not as big of a problem. We're not worried about that right now. This is the five, six things we're worried about. And of course, like it then it comes down to people's means, right? If they want to do everything, they do everything. If they have the funds and means to do everything, they do everything. If they, you know, really want to take a bite-sized approach and make the impact, they need your data to do so. So, like you, you know, people have criticized you in the past saying you take a lot of samples, right? And that that benefits you financially to go and take a lot of samples. So I think it sounds to me like you've heard that you've changed your business model to really reflect that you care more about getting to the data than you do about, you know, the cost per sample. Can you explain a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Yeah, a couple things. So um, first, on just the quantity of testing that's needed, right? It's not that I want to take all that I want us to take a million tests in a house. When someone comes to us and they say, my kid is sick, or I'm like really struggling, I have to find where the issues are. And the only way that you find them, because most of it is hidden, is to test the areas where you have a very high um likelihood of that problem being based off the visual assessment, based off the history that was shared during the onboarding, based on all that stuff, right? If we're not going through and testing in that manner, we're not achieving the goal the person wants, right? And I think the challenge is because most companies don't do it that way, it's a very normal human just kind of reaction or or just um like that's the word I'm looking for. It's just it's just like a normal way that we look at things where you compare to others. And the normal thing when someone thinks about it is like, well, if it's way different than everyone else, then it must be wrong, right? But the biggest advancements that have come in human history have come from the thing that was way different from what everybody else did, and eventually that becomes the new norm and then it happens again, right? That becomes the new norm, then it happens again. And the thing about being part of the family unit who is redefined what this industry really is over the last 20 years is that we are different from others, right? And it's very easy to explain when you actually show someone the photos of their house and why you're testing the things. All of a sudden it becomes really clear to them, right? It's difficult when they don't see it contextually and they just hear, oh, they test way more than everyone else, right? It's almost the way that we go about it, it's it's how functional medicine tests the body to figure out what's going on. Like we've actually modeled our entire process after the functional medicine process because that's what works, right? So functional medicine is understanding what's your symptom profile, what's going on, really, really in-depth onboarding, right? And then their job in functional medicine is to figure out the root cause of the problem that is downstreaming all the symptoms, fix the root cause, have all the symptoms go away, and you never have to go to that functional doctor again. That is the goal of functional medicine. Functional medicine is to heal the body so it doesn't need you anymore, right? Regular medicine, which is the norm right now, right? Functional medicine is the new thing that's weird, so it must not be right because the regular hospitals and doctors are the norm. Regular hospitals and doctors are treating the symptoms which never actually solve the problem, which means you will constantly suffer through this for the rest of your life because there's no fix, there's patchwork, right? We have to fix the problem in order for you to heal. And the same thing happens in the house. Now, you know, what we do now is we our whole model is just different than any other inspection business, right? Like we're we're more of like a health engineering firm. Like that's what we are. And so when we go through it, like you don't pay per test. You pay for your result. That's what you pay for, right? And the nice thing about that is like if I go into a house and I feel like I have to take 80 tests to get what I need to be able to get you the result, which is your recovery blueprint that's gonna tell you what to do to make the house better. We just take the 80 tests, we don't charge you for them. If it's 40, then it's 40. If it's 20, it's 20. Like whatever it is, we do it. And we don't like that doesn't change the cost. And I think that's really important because nobody could do this job effectively if you're limited by how many tests you can take. You can't because you're gonna miss stuff. And the other thing that you brought up, which I'll just put a data piece behind this, so yes, we test more than probably anyone, right? We have a 68% positive contamination rate on our tests. 68% of our tests show that there's a mold issue somewhere. And so that means that 32 doesn't. Great. That's fine. But if I'm taking 40 tests in a house and I have a 68% hit rate on positive contamination sources that we're finding in the house, then that means I'm finding 27 problems in your house. Yeah. Now, if I only came in and took five tests because I can't test that much, if I have the same hit rate, that means I'm finding three and a half problems in your house. Where's the other 24 that are contributing to your exposure? See, nobody knows how effective our testing is. Everyone just says it's a lot. No one knows that roughly 70% of all of our tests that we do are actually validating a hidden mole problem somewhere. Nobody knows that. All they do is they go and talk about, oh, well, they test way more than anybody else. It's a very good thing we are. Or we would have missed 24 problems in that house.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

If we didn't. And if we do that, we're doing a disservice to people for the reason that they're coming, right? And that's why like we went away with this whole like you nobody pays for tests with us. You you pay for working with us, right? Working with us is what you outline, right? It's how we're prioritizing, how we're onboarding, how we're organizing around certain individuals in the house, how we're looking at all the data when it comes in. It's a lot more data to look at when there's 40 tests than when there's five. It's a lot more analysis and a lot more prioritizing, it's a lot more mapping in the house of what we have to get to one, two, three in order, right? There's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of time and there's a big team behind it. But what you get out of it is the thing that works. You get the thing that solves the problem, right? And so, I mean, that's the idea. And so I understand it, I get it, right? There's a lot of people that talk about mold and have you know ratings on Yelp and have their platform to talk about how you don't need to do this, that, or the other. That's fine. I have an inbox of emails telling me that I've saved people's lives. And people keep sending me those emails, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, right? And I mean, I just got literally just got one like three days ago. A three-paragraph narrative about how we quote, saved my life if it wasn't for you. It's what keeps me going, and it's what I know, it's what validates that the way that we're doing it is really truly helping people.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

No, I'm glad I we got to bring that up because truthfully, I think it's it's one of those things where it's just confusing in the marketplace. You know, I I've been doing this myself for I think it's about 14 years now, and there's a lot more people out there today talking about how they could find mold, how they can remove mold, etc., but still don't understand the lengths of which they should go when people are dealing with chronic health issues or when they're hypersensitive to mold, which obviously can come come along with some of these chronic health issues. And I think that does money the waters, right? Because just because they happen to be in a specific area and they might know somebody that, you know, uh they've remediated before or whatever, you know, or inspected before or whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that they got the result, right? And you know, people need to understand that there are differences in all these different companies and their offerings, they don't need to understand why they might want to choose you and your method versus somebody else and theirs. And so I think it's been really helpful to just get a better understanding of what your method is. I mean, obviously, I know because I uh have seen, I don't know, thousands of your reports over the years, so like I get it. But you know, for if you haven't, and if you're not me sitting at a computer reviewing these reports, you may not really understand what it is that you're buying. And I think it's really important that people understand like there is so much value to what you guys do, and I really appreciate what you guys do, obviously. And uh, you know, it's why I always recommend you.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Listen, I appreciate that. And on the flip side, I've seen I I literally just went, I had a friend who lives 15 minutes down the road. They had a leak in their ceiling that came down into their office down below. Leak came from their son's uh under the shower pan in their in their sun's shower, came down into the office down below. And the builder is responsible because it's under you know warranty time or whatever, right? So the builder sent their like remediation team out, no inspection, just the remediators just coming in and just blowing stuff up. They're not wearing protective equipment in the containments and like uh just blowing my there's mold everywhere, right? There's mold everywhere. And I walk in, and so I'm talking to my friend, and he's like, hey, um, would you mind just coming and checking it out? I I don't feel like they're doing enough, right? Like, yeah, I'll I'll come check it out. And so I go there and I go into the containments and I look, and there's there's water damage on materials that haven't been removed yet. There's water damage and seepage like through the subfloor into adjacent rooms that they just weren't gonna touch because that's not where the leak started, right? Well, the leak came from this bathroom up here, so they like handled that. Well, there's another room like six inches away from that bathroom, and from down below, you can see all the water went into there on the subfloor. They weren't gonna touch that. No, I wouldn't. And this is this is the difference on the remediation side of people that get it too, right? And you know, not to make this sound like a whole like like family love fest for whatever it is, but like there's a reason that that you are who you are, and that we send everyone to you too, right? It's because the quality of the and I'll say this, and this is true, it doesn't matter how good I am or how good We Inspect is, if the remediator doesn't know how to execute what came in, you could have the best plan in the world. If your executor sucks, then it doesn't matter, right? Yeah, true. And and so the execution of the plan is very important, right? So, what you need when you create a team around you that's gonna go through this process, you need like three key players on your team. You need your health, your health team, your health advisor, right? So your functional medicine doctor, your health coach, whatever it is, right? You need that person who can really help figure out how to optimize your body, what the exposures look like and what the big triggers are, and like what your plan is for fixing, for remediating the inside of your body, right? Then you need the uh inspection, assessment, investigation arm to diagnose where the problems are in the house, to then allow the remediation arm that's also effective, who's effectively the surgeon at that point. Like, if you think of it in that way, like our role, if you ever watch Gray's Anatomy, we're like Meredith Gray. We come in and we find the things nobody else finds, right? But we are not the surgeon, we're not Derek Shepard doing brain surgery, right? We're telling Derek Shepard that, hey, there's the brain needs surgery, like you need to go in and surgery the brain, right? And you're the Derek Shepherd that goes in and does the surgery, right? So you need all three pieces on your team to address the two areas that are affecting your health. The one is the consistent exposure that's happening. You have to remove that, and that's where inspection remediation comes in. And then you have to have the person on the team that's looking at the inside of your body and kind of cleaning up the mess and remediating that and helping recover from the inside. And if you fix those two things, that's how people get better. And I mean, there's research and studies out there that even show if you fix the house issue, you only have to do that much work on your body. Like just the fact that the exposure is significantly reduced, your body all of a sudden is like, oh my God, I can breathe. Now that I can breathe, I could focus on fixing these things inside of me that I need to fix because our bodies are freaking crazy. It is crazy what they can do if we just give them space to do it. Right. Now there's other people that need support, obviously, in their body, right? Like you don't just take the exposure away and all of a sudden you get better. But there's a lot of people where that is a significant enough thing where you don't even need significant treatment. And then there's other people, obviously, who are a little more severe, their exposures have been more long-term, like, or their you know, genetic makeup and make, you know, makes them more susceptible, their MTHFR is off, their, you know, whatever's going on. And so for those people, they might need more support, and that's you know, where the health person can help support the body to then become more resilient. But at the end of the day, addressing both sides of this equation increases your body's resilience to the point where you can go into a space that has a mold issue and not crash, right? And I went to go visit my. I mean, I've had clients who are like, I can't go visit my my uh my my kid's grandma, right? My mom. We can't go to my mom's house for my kids to see their grandparents because they have a mold problem and I can't be there. Yeah. So, like the goal is to say, hey, listen, get your house so your everyday is fine, but also get into a place where you could go to grandma's for an hour and your kids can see their grandparents. Like, you know, and and that's like the overall goal. And I think when you have the right team around you, I mean, obviously, we know it, we've seen it so many times. It happens, it happens all the time.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

And I think the uh, you know, first off, appreciate everything you said. I think it's really important to understand like the psychology behind all this. And, you know, I I do obviously appreciate the fact of you know honoring our work together and helping the people that we've been able to help over the years. It's not easy, though, right? Like, you know, it's if it was, there's a good saying, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right? And I think the reason it's not easy is because it takes a lot of training, there's a lot of philosophy that has to be taught. It's a it's a subject subject on microbiology, um, typically in a blue-collar industry. You know, it's a very heavy, complex topic to train people in blue-collar industry. Um, you know, so I think that's it's really important to understand like what we're achieving is uh is or what we're really striving for to achieve on every single project for every single outcome is you know, a level of perfection to try to find everything, a level of perfection to try to remove everything, you know, with obviously within a reasonable frame of reference and obviously budget constraints and all things considered, you know, but it's that's what we're trying to achieve. And the outcome is all we're all outcome focused and outcome driven. We want every single person to be able to have a healthier environment so they could heal, just like you just said. And so, you know, it's not easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. And I think that's you know, there's there's not there's not nearly enough of us doing what we're doing. And I just wanted to kind of just you know harp on that for a second, because I think it's important, you know, and um, yeah, it it's I know it's what drives me, and it sounds like it's what drives you as well.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Yeah, I mean it does. It's when you think about like what you do with your life, you know, there are people who have jobs, and I was one of these people, had a job, went in every day, got my paycheck, didn't really like it that much. And there's so many people who have that job or have that situation, and I'm just very grateful that I have a situation that I really enjoy doing, and that I feel like I'm I'm really doing, like I know I'm doing, I'm telling these emails I'm getting. Like we're doing things for people that are meaningful for them, that are changing their lives, right? And you know, it's not saying that like everyone has to find something like that, right? Like everybody do what do what makes you happy, right? But like for me, I'm just very grateful that I sort of fell in. I mean, literally think of like this. Like, I'm one of these like universe guys, like things happen for a reason, kind of guys. I happen to start dating my wife years after I first met her, right? There's just like whole timeline of I met her, there's years that went by. Finally, we start dating, and then like a month or two after we start dating, this happens. And then she connects me to Mark, and then Mark sets me on this whole new path, and then all of a sudden, here we are sitting here. What if I never dated her? What if, you know, what if I dated her earlier and then we broke up? And then when this happened, I couldn't really talk to her. Like, I would be sick. That place was a bad situation. Like, like I would be sick. And none of this would have happened. It's just when you think of stuff like that, and you think of it in that way, like these little things that could have happened, and then you see where you are, and you're like, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And that's that's why whenever there's like criticism and stuff, I kind of I just don't care about it. I just don't care. Because I see what we do, and I know how we got here. And that's all that matters, you know.

SPEAKER_01 44:47

So couldn't have said it better myself. Um, you know, I wanted to thank you for your time today. I know you're a busy guy, and you've got you know houses to go inspect and lives to save and people to train, and you know, the the show must go on. So really thank you for taking some time out of your busy day to be here with us and share your wisdom. I know it's always great having you on and getting to talk more about like the clinical side of the inspection side. And um love, love, love what you're doing, obviously. Where can people find you? How do they work with you if they want to get their house inspected? Give us all the deets.

SPEAKER_00 45:21

Yeah, you know, actually a couple things. So, I mean, one, our we're called We Inspect. That's our company, our website, yesweinspect.com. Um, free consults um to talk through what an inspection might look like if you're concerned about it. So, so just the button click on it. One thing that I think can be really helpful for people, depending on where they are in this kind of their understanding of what their health is, are they being exposed, are they not, is getting information that's kind of validating that for someone before they dive into a big project, right? Which I think is fair if you don't know for sure, right? So there's a lot of people who are like not working with a doctor, but they have, you know, a multitude of symptoms that are lining up and they're doing the research and they're seeing the connections and stuff. So I think it's worth mentioning two other things for people too. One is the dust test, right? So just for everybody, the dust test is something that Mike and myself, and added another family member, Michael's brother-in-law slash my cousin-in-law, um, Corey. Corey married Mike's sister. So the three of us started the dust test together, right? The dust test is an at-home test kit that you can do, collect us. We talked about why dust is so important to understand what you're being exposed to. It's an easy access point. It's the same way that you would do like an at-home test for like your gut or something like that. It gives you a diagnostic to let you understand are there problems? How significant is it, how is it connecting to my health issues? It maps all of that stuff for you. And it gives you then a way to give you a little more data to then determine what makes the most sense for me, right? So if you're someone listening to this, you're like, oh, I heard Mike imply that they're more expensive than the local guy down the street. We are. Slash, if you're not ready for that yet, which is fair, start here and figure out if you even need it, right? So if you're at that point, you don't know if you need it, you can start there. And that's one's place to start. If you're even earlier and like, I don't even know if I want to do that. I created one other thing that's a free tool for people. I just launched it this week. It's called uh the mold exposure score. And it's moldexposurescore.com. And what I did is I went back through a bunch of our clients and I effectively uh created different profiles out of those clients. And what you can do at mold exposure score is you can come in, it's 90 seconds, it's a six-question survey, and off of that survey, I can align you with multiple different profiles of clients that we've actually worked with directly. So if your profile matches one of these profiles, it's then gonna show you what was happening in the houses of people with that profile, right? And it's gonna give you a really quick understanding of what's the exposure potential in your house, right? And it's a scoring system that's based on there's a call, a free um the free exposure assessment call that comes on the back to talk through what it means and how it works. But if you're even before the point where you're like, I don't know if I want to spend a dollar on anything for this because I'm not even sure, go here. This is gonna connect you to real inspections that we have done, and it's gonna take the data from those inspections based on how you specifically answer these questions and apply all of that to you. It's a personalized exposure score for you. That's gonna give you an idea of do you have, based on the people that we've worked with and the profile who you are, a consistent and ongoing exposure that's likely happening in your house? If you do, that's a free data point for you now. That's tying into data that does not exist anywhere else. This is we inspect data that doesn't exist anywhere off of real stuff. You can use that and then decide where you want to go, right? Maybe the dust test is next for you. If you want, you're like, oh, well, this says I this says I have a high potential for exposure based on how my profile maps. Maybe now I do the dust test and let me just validate if that's true, right?

SPEAKER_01 49:24

I didn't know you guys made that. I'm gonna definitely check that out myself and happy to pass that along. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

Yeah, I'm just trying to like, you know, as we go through this, it's like it people need to have the ability to get real data that doesn't exist anywhere else that they can connect to themselves to just help them understand where they're at.

unknown 49:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

Because I think a lot of the reason that people don't progress down this is because they have they don't believe that their house could be it. Right. Right? Or maybe it's not even them, maybe it's their spouse. A lot of times it's the spouse, right? It's one person that's sick and the spouse is like, oh no, it can't be our house because I'm not sick the way you are, so it can't be the house everybody in the same air as you, right? Happens a lot, yeah. So we have to we have to figure out how to use data to provide validation to people. Like, hey, this isn't like my opinion, this is numbers, this is real stuff. And honestly, the cool thing about the dust test, I mean, we're IRB certified. It's we're the only data that I'm aware of in our in our industry that has an internal review board certification from the federal government that allows our data to then be used for clinical trials down the road. That is the that is the level of importance that we believe that data has, to the point that we've gone through an entire process to certify our data that can then be used in human trials for all kinds of things. And we're the only ones, to my understanding, in our field for molten homes, that has gotten through that process that has it, which is just really speaks to the way that we look at things, the process that we have in place, and the fact that it's recognized as data that is quality to the point that they're willing to put human trials on top of it. I think it's really, really important, right? And I think we should be sharing that because if people can tap into that to understand what's happening, they're getting clinical level human trial data at their fingertips that they can use to make decisions for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

Which allows research to exist and happen in the future as well. So I think it's really important. Yeah, people are participating in that so we can continue to progress things forward.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

Well, thank you so much, Brian, for taking time to be here with us. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to having you on again in the near future because I know we haven't covered everything, but really appreciate what we did cover here today, and we'll definitely be in touch again and having you back.

SPEAKER_00 51:52

Awesome. Thanks, thanks for having me. Good seeing us.