My wife Alexa and I learned the hard way that homes can be very toxic.

We spent a couple years like frogs in boiling water, unknowingly becoming progressively sicker. And then, once we finally realized what was going on, it took us more than a year to find and fix the cause of our health issues.

We saw a revolving door of doctors and home inspectors with different theories and, bafflingly, no clear answers. Eventually, we took matters into our own hands and figured it out — aided by the realization that when we weren’t at the house, Alexa felt better, and when we were there, she felt worse.

It took us buying thousands of dollars of testing equipment for different facets of our home’s health and doing endless research, reading academic papers and consulting experts (and LLMs).

Nobody should need to go through all that.

So with our close friend Justin Mares (CEO of Truemed and founder of Kettle & Fire), we incubated Lightwork Home Health, the world’s most data-driven home health assessment. We brought on an incredible operating team who have been quietly building the business, and now are excited to talk about it publicly.

You can think of Lightwork as “functional health for your home,” with assessments that cover air and water quality, lighting, electromagnetic fields, mold, household products, and more. Most people have no idea what they and their family are exposed to — so we help them find and fix these hidden toxins and health hazards.

At the end of this post, I’ll share more about Lightwork’s services and what we’ve found in customers’ homes. But first:

Why now?

For a couple hundred thousand years, humans adapted to the environmental realities of living on Planet Earth. These realities aren’t always pleasant — it gets awfully cold in some places, and awfully hot in others; certain plants are poisonous to consume or touch; wild animals can attack us; and storms can strike.

Of course, over those many thousands of years, the conditions changed — we’ve even gone through ice ages. But, for most of that time, humanity itself didn’t introduce new “environmental exposures” or “toxins” that we then needed to contend with. We just got better — through a lot of practice — at dealing with the planet’s natural exposures.

That changed starting with the scientific and industrial revolutions, beginning in the 1500s and running through the mid 1900s, when we began to invent new things in earnest, much faster than ever before.

That invention and progress was — and is — great. Progress makes the world get better. But, as I talked about in The Toxic Progress Paradox, progress also often comes with downsides.

Here’s a chart of patents granted in the US — an admittedly-rough proxy for innovation and invention:

If we imagine that some small percentage of deployed inventions is capable of causing negative health effects, you can imagine that as the hockey stick bends upwards, so too do the toxins we are exposed to.

And since, say, the 1970s, we’ve been ramping these novel exposures faster than ever before. Just a few examples:

  • after the oil & energy crises of the 1970s, we made homes airtight — trapping particulates, VOCs, and moisture & mold indoors, unlike ever before
  • in the early/mid 2000s, we began to push LED lighting, dramatically shifting the light spectra we are exposed to, as well as changing other characteristics of our light sources
  • the energy-efficient windows spurred by the energy crises started blocking more and more sunlight from reaching us indoors
  • new sources of water contamination appeared with the advent of novel chemicals like PFAS
  • as cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, smart meters, and more were commercialized from the ’90s onward, our exposure to non-native electromagnetic fields skyrocketed

In short, since the 1970s, our air, water, lighting, and electromagnetic environments have changed dramatically. Way, way faster than ever before. All within just a couple generations.

In no way am I denying the wonderful outcomes of all of that — including the internet, one of the greatest inventions of all time. But I merely point out: after literally hundreds of thousands of years of slow-changing environmental exposures, we have thrust ourselves into a new reality — one where our exposures are changing at a dizzying pace, often in the space of years rather than centuries.

And, as Alexa and my experience shows, that world can come with downsides.

I’ve written about some of this over the last few months, and will continue to do so:

So, given all that — and our own struggles — we started Lightwork Home Health. It began with helping friends and evolved into a business that has already helped many customers across the country (and across the pond in London!) deal with this brave new world of novel exposures.

We’ve built a killer operating team led by Jay Devram (co-founder; leading operations) and Johnny Bowman and Dom Francks (running our flagship NY and SF markets, respectively), along with exceptional advisors and supporters. We’re currently offering our white-glove home health assessments in New York, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London — and the team travels to test homes across the US.

Alexa and I found it nearly impossible to get rigorous, science-backed, trustworthy, data-driven answers about our home from people who were also open-minded to these new exposures. So that’s our north star: tell people the truth, with empirical data and science.

Our assessments are best-in-class for understanding your home’s health. We:

  • collect data in a half-day on-site visit using our custom-built home-mapping inspection app, lab tests, and professional testing equipment
  • conduct the most data-driven analysis in the industry, measuring your home’s performance against our proprietary Lightwork Exposure Indexes
  • compile an in-depth 40+ page report with specific recommendations and next steps
  • deliver it to you live with all the context you need
  • and then support you through the remediation process

Every home has room for improvement, and we’ve found all sorts of serious issues across the tests our team has run. To share just a few examples:

  • combustion gas leaks
  • an incorrectly-installed $8k water filtration system that was filtering nothing and letting - through arsenic and uranium contamination
  • lighting with huge blue light peaks contributing to delayed sleep onset
  • plumbing current causing elevated magnetic fields in a nursery room at levels that have been linked to increased risk of childhood leukemia
  • hidden mycotoxin-producing mold species despite previous remediation
  • wiring issues in walls creating elevated electrical fields
  • highly-volatile compounds in shower water, creating risks from inhalation and dermal exposure
  • and so much more

If you’re interested in learning more, check out Lightwork Home Health or drop me a note.

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