Dhru Purohit Show - Is Your House Making You Sick? I Tested My Home for the Top Toxins, Here’s What I Learned, and How to Reduce Exposure in Your Home with Dom Francks Lightwork Home Health

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Momentous, Cozy Earth, and One Skin. What if some of your unexplained symptoms aren't coming from your body—but from your home? The air you breathe, the water you drink, and the products and materials surrounding you every day may be exposing you to hidden environmental toxins that quietly affect your health, energy, and even your longevity. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dom Francks, General Manager and a founding team member of Lightwork Home Health, to uncover the hidden environmental factors that could be affecting your health without you even realizing it. Dom shares the research-backed assessment process his team uses to identify the most common environmental toxins found in homes, the biggest problem areas they see, and the practical steps you can take to reduce your exposure. Dhru also shares the personal health journey that led him to have his own home assessed and what he and Dom discovered along the way.  Dom Francks is the General Manager of the San Francisco Bay Area for Lightwork Home Health. A Stanford-trained engineer, founder, and former climate-tech product leader, Dom specializes in helping homeowners identify hidden environmental factors that may impact health, performance, and longevity. Through comprehensive home health assessments—including air and water quality, mold, EMFs, lighting, and household toxins—he helps clients create healthier living environments using a data-driven, evidence-based approach.  In this episode, Dhru and Dom dive into:  (00:00) Introduction (3:18) Is Your Home Secretly Making You Sick? (5:22) The Hidden Health Risks Lurking Inside Most Homes (8:20) How Scientists Actually Assess a Healthy Home (9:35) Why Your Bedroom May Be Ruining Your Sleep (22:15) Mold Myths: What Actually Matters? (31:20) The Best (and Worst) Lighting for Your Brain (36:49) The Hidden Problem With LED Lights (46:50) Why Lightwork Home Was Created (54:39) EMFs: What You Should Worry About (and What You Shouldn't) (1:01:51) Grounding Products: Science or Hype? (1:20:26) How to Build a Healthier Nursery (1:24:47) Are Baby Monitors Actually Safe? (1:31:07) Which Air Purifiers Actually Work? (1:41:10) The Hidden Health Mistakes in Your Home Office (1:45:30) The Hidden Toxins Hiding in Your Kitchen (1:56:53) The Surprising Toxins in Your Home Gym & Garden (2:06:40) The Personal Story That Started Lightwork Home (2:09:00) The Biggest Takeaways to Protect Your Health Also mentioned in this episode: Heads up: This is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission if you purchase through it, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I use myself or truly believe are worth it. The Lightwork Blueprint: 40 Action Steps for a Healthy Home PDF Air Doctor Filter Shielding Shop EPA Study on Indoor Air  For more on Dom, follow him on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Lightwork Home Health: X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or visit their Website. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Momentous, Cozy Earth, and One Skin. Upgrade your sleep! Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU to get 15% off your entire order and a free bottle of MassZymes.  Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off their first order with promo code DHRU. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, get 20% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it true that some of us are living in homes that are secretly making us sick? We're currently running a massive countrywide, if not global experiment on ourselves. It's absolutely true that some of us are living in homes that are contributing in some negative way to our health. Most people are frightened to see their indoor air is worse than the outdoor air. Going from average indoor American air quality to exceptionally clean air shows a meaningful increase in both cognitive performance, and also sleep quality. Very easily, you can meet somebody in your local area that can so convince you that mold is the reason

that all these things are happening. It's not true that, you know, as soon as you find any amount of a mold issue, oh my God, I need to do this whole massive remediation. What are some examples of things that you've seen that people's light is messing with their health? Primary one is obviously sleep. It's like the single best thing that you could do for your health.

Let's talk about the bedroom. Number one thing, don't have your phone right next to your head at night. If you have your phone right next to your head at night, pretty much everything else we're doing is going to be There are some category of things that we're going to talk about today where the science is actually quite strong. If you make this change, it will benefit your health in this way. Airplane mode does work, but you have to make sure that your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are totally off. There's a bucket of things where we think there's just really not any evidence for them.

It's probably not going to hurt you to put a sticker on the back of your phone, but there's no evidence that we can find that that does anything beneficial for your biology. Don't emphasize like, oh, now that I've done that, everything else is fine. Joining us today is Dom Franks, manager and founding team member of Lightwork Home Health. In this episode, he reveals the hidden toxins lurking in your home, how they may be silently impacting your health, the biggest environmental red flags to watch for, and the simple research back steps you can take to protect yourself. Is my home making me sick?

That's a question that so many of you have asked yourself. And honestly, I was asking it myself, especially when mystery symptoms started showing up that I couldn't get to the bottom of over the last couple years. Here's the thing. We obsess over our diets, our sleep, our supplements, but the place that we spend 90% of our time, our home, the truth is most of us, including myself, have never fully comprehensively tested it. That's why I'm super excited about today's episode with Dom Franks, a trained Stanford engineer, who's with light work, home health. Think of them as functional medicine for your home. They ran the most comprehensive, evidence-based, science-back assessment of my home. home, including my air, my water, my lighting, and my EMF exposure. And we're not just here to talk

about my home in the results, although we'll do that. But here's what makes today's episode special and actionable. Dom isn't just sharing the issues that he found in my home. And there were a few. He's going to be talking about the issues that he and his team have seen across hundreds of homes that they've tested all over the world. And most importantly, the exact steps that you can, you can, you take because you're going to have some of these issues in your home, the exact steps that you can take today. And most of them are either free or low cost. Starting today by following these steps, you can turn your home into a place that supports your health and longevity instead of one that might be working against it. Let's jump in. Dom, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you

here today. And I want to start off with a really important and big question. Is it true that some of are living in homes that are secretly making us sick. Great to be here, Drew. And I say the answer to that question is absolutely sure that some of us are living in homes that are contributing in some negative way to our health. Essentially, at Light Work, the way that we like to think about it is we're currently running a massive countrywide, if not global, experiment on ourselves, where we have, we're spending more time indoors than we ever have before.

We're living in homes that are much tighter and much less well ventilated. We're exposing ourselves to artificial light and water that's been treated by disinfection systems, many of which are very beneficial for health, but also have byproducts, in ways that we just haven't had enough longitudinal data to be able to study. So for an individual person, it's not always true that we can say, yes, your home is making you sick, but broadly at a population level, we can say that there are a number of exposures that are contributing negatively to our health. And at Lightwork, we think it's very worth taking the time to assess those exposures, reduce them because a lot of it's pretty straightforward, to know that your home is as supportive

to your health as it possibly could be. Yeah, what I love about today's podcast and what I'm excited to have you here is that you guys did this in my home, as I mentioned in the intro, and we're going to be taking a lot of the data that you've seen from multiple homes, including mine, and give some real value on the podcast today by giving a home tour. Starting with the bedroom, which we'll get into in a second and then going into common rooms like the office, the kitchen, the nursery, and you're going to break down some of the key areas that are often silently making us sick and most importantly, things that people can do today. Starting today, there's things that you can do to start protecting yourself and your family. But before we get into that, give us a couple

of examples. Like, what have you seen over the years of some big picture examples, maybe one or two examples before we get into the tour of how homes are contributing to people who maybe not be a full-blown disease and it could be, but it's like people whose immune systems or genetics are already predisposing them to something and your home kind of tips you over in the direction. Do you have a couple of examples? Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, I think that's exactly the right way to talk about it. I think a lot of this is sort of cumulative exposure.

And so if your body is being stressed from a number of directions in terms of poor sleep in terms of potential mold exposure in terms of something in your water, something in your air that can be cumulative. So it's rather than one exposure is causing an illness, it can just be all contributing factors. There's a couple of clients where we've supported them with optimizing their sleep environment. We'll talk a little bit more about this in detail, but we've put in better particular matter filtration. And then I would say potentially most importantly, we've changed their lighting environment entirely.

I made some changes to their exposure to different types of EMFs when they're sleeping. We've had clients get back to us, you know, a week after making these changes and say, oh my God, I've slept through the night for the last five nights and I've spent thousands of dollars in sleep therapy and supplements and et cetera, et cetera, and have never seen anything move the needle this much. More broadly beyond that, we certainly see people who are spending time in home offices with poor ventilation, poor lighting, and potentially an indoor mold source that once those things are addressed, they report, wow, I feel a bunch sharper. I'm much more productive. I can focus more

effectively. So there are just a number of areas that once we find and address them can have those type of immediate impacts for folks. I've had people over the years come and test my home for all sorts of things. Mold, EMF, different toxic exposure, test the water. And to say that it's a wild, wild west is a complete understatement. There's a lot of really passionate people in this space. And one of the things that comes with passion is that you tend to think that this one thing is the solution for everything. It's because this mold species is in somebody's house, whether it has evidence as being connected to chronic disease or not, you think that that is the biggest problem and it's causing everything for them. Or you think that this little tiny sticker that

disrupts EMF that somebody doesn't have on their Wi-Fi, you know, that's the reason that they're not sleeping that well. And there's so much information in the space. It's overwhelming. And everybody tells you, so many people tell you, that it's all going to kill you. And what happens from that is that people hear that. They get really worked up. They get overwhelmed.

And then they tend to do nothing. And today, in this home tour, we're going to go through step by step. We're going to go through the bedroom, the nursery, the office, the kitchen, living room, home gym, other places like your lawn. And we're going to talk about what's really there. And the 80-20 of a few things that significantly make the difference. You know, what we try to do at light work is there are some category of things that we're going to talk about today where the science is actually quite strong. You know, particulate matter exposure for air quality, disinfection byproducts and water, the way that lighting affects our circadian rhythm, et cetera. That stuff is pretty dang rock solid.

that we can know if you make this change, it will benefit your health in this way. There's another bucket of things where we would say there's some evidence to warrant that reducing problematic exposures can be really helpful, but what the dose response curve is, how different people are susceptible. It's a little bit up in the air, but we think,

you know, if it's easy to remove that exposure, just do it because there's really no downside. And then there's a bucket of things where we think there's just really not any evidence for them. And those are where we try to, you know, mostly counsel people like, okay, yeah, It's probably not going to hurt you to put a sticker on the back of your phone. But there's no evidence that we can find that that does anything beneficial for your biology.

And, you know, don't emphasize like, oh, now that I've done that, everything else is fine. Don't get so caught up in the minors that you forget about the majors. Exactly. Exactly. And now you're not paying attention to the few things that significantly can move the needle forward. Yes. When it comes to your home, your health, the quality of your life for your family. Yeah. Okay, that's great.

I love that. All right. We're going to start off with the bedroom because, we all sleep. Hopefully you sleep and if you're not sleeping, some of these things could actually be contributed to the reason that you're not sleeping. What are the things that you see in the bedroom

that have an impact on our health, the quality of our sleep, our brain? We know now from, you know, many years ago, the discovery of the brain's glymphatic system, sleep is when our brain repairs at night and our body repairs at night. Our brain actually has its own detoxification system. but so many of the things that we are exposed to in our modern day environment are overloading that

system for a lot of us. And it's causing all sorts of havoc, including disrupting our sleep. So let's talk about the bedroom. What do you want to start off with? Obviously, there are negative health effects of not getting sufficient sleep. It also seems that there is sort of no real upper bound on the benefits of getting extremely high quality sleep. And so even if you feel you are sleeping okay, there are still best. benefits to improving your sleep environment and continuing to try to invest in really, really deep supportive rest. And I think we're seeing this with like how training is evolving for high level athletes, et cetera. And I think that's relevant for all of us. So in terms of the exposures

in the bedroom. So we look at a few different things and I'll just start with air quality. So within the bedroom, and this goes for all the rooms in the house, but specifically helpful to focus on the bedroom first. We're looking at three main things when it comes to air quality. We're looking at filtration, ventilation and humidity. So filtration is, are you effectively removing or preventing the entrance of particulates and volatile organic compounds into your sleep environment, particulates being smoke, dust, pollen, mold spores, etc.

Then, and VOCs being things that can off gas from furniture, can come from cleaning products, etc. The evidence on the sleep benefit of particular matter filtration is quite strong. And going from average indoor American air quality to exceptionally low particular counts or exceptionally clean air shows a meaningful increase in both cognitive performance and also sleep quality. At light work, we measure the difference between an outdoor baseline for particular counts and then the indoor particular count in the bedroom.

And what we want to see is that through your state, standalone air purifier or HVAC system, though we think standalone air purifiers are better in a lot of ways because they are running all the time, whereas most people don't have their HVAC running 100% of the time. Are you effectively breathing air that is less full of particulates at night than the outdoor air? And that's especially important in a place here like LA

where there's a lot of traffic, there are a lot of particulates that can get into the air. So that's one element that we're looking at as relates to air quality. And I'll pause there before you're into ventilation. Yeah, one thing I want to mention about this, because a lot of people forget about this, is that even in a city like L.A.,

which is one of the most, if not the most dense city for the metropolitan area, even more dense than the New York, New Jersey metropolitan area. And you're like, well, how is that possible? Because L.A. sprawls, that density is kind of consistent over a large area. And I think even a couple of highways,

and I live next to, you know, one of them. When I say next, I'm probably like, Everybody in L.A. is pretty much a mile away, a major freeway. I'm about a mile and a half away from the 405, probably the second busiest highway in the world. And yeah, you're getting a lot of particulate matter that's coming from the tires and, you know, the gas and the engine sits there. And even as bad as the air is in L.A., most people are frightened to see when they finally work with a group like yours, or they get like an air monitor at home. There's a couple that are really great that are out there. They're frightened to see that if they're not taking their air quality seriously, their indoor air is worse than the outdoor air. And actually the EPA did a study back in the 80s,

and I'm sure it's even worse now. They're studying the 80s, we'll link to in the show notes. They found that indoor air can be up to three times to eight times worse than outdoor air because you have furniture, off gas, You live in these new buildings that are not breathable, as you mentioned. So as crazy as LA air is, your indoor air could be worse if you're not taking some of these steps that you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that feeds really well into the next thing I was talking about, which is ventilation.

So filtration is one of the things we look for, which is, you know, are you removing the problematic contaminants in your air? And then ventilation is, are you getting fresh air in from outside? and the best proxy to understand ventilation is CO2. I'm sure a lot of people have heard, okay, you want to make sure that CO2 doesn't get over 1,000 parts per million, 800 parts per million, whatever for cognitive performance. Interestingly, it appears that CO2 itself is probably not the thing that is causing those decreases in cognitive performance,

but it's probably the most effective proxy that we have for ventilation and probably what's causing the decrease in cognitive performance is actually like, other bio effluents, other VOCs, other things that build up alongside CO2 when you don't have sufficient ventilation. So we're looking at filtration, are you removing particulates? Ventilation, are you getting in fresh air from outside? That could be through opening a window. That could be through an active ERV, HRV system.

There's a few different ways to do that. And this is where it gets into, you know, is your indoor air better than an outdoor air? Because you sort of want to strike this balance where you want, fresh air. Generally, in the vast majority of cases, having your windows open is better than having your windows closed. There are some exceptions to that when the air is particularly polluted outside, wildfire, smoke, et cetera, or if you happen to live, yeah, like right next to a freeway. But there are ways that you can build systems in your home so that you're getting the best to both worlds where you're still getting the fresh air, but you're removing any of the problematic

elements that are present in outdoor air. Yeah, you know, CO2 is one of those that's still not on the radar of a lot of people. And the best example that I can give is that have you ever midday when typically you have, you know, a lot of energy still, it's not like that afternoon slump, you go for a long car ride and you don't open the windows, you're in your car and all of a sudden you find yourself really sleepy. You're like, what is it about being in the car that I feel really sleepy? Well, if you were able to measure the CO2 levels and maybe the proxy of other things along with it, especially if you have a new car and you have that new car smell and all the VOCs that come with it when the CO2 levels get high.

There's so much data that you can't focus. It's harder to pay attention. Even in this podcast studio, I'll measure CO2 levels. And it's one of the reasons why I constantly have the HVAC system running. And even sometimes, even if there's noise outside, we'll crack open a little bit of window just because I'll get a little bit sleepy if I don't do those things. And I just literally had a coffee. Like, why am I getting sleepy?

well, this CO2 makes it harder for you to be able to focus, pay attention, and do things. So at night, this was one area in my house that I realized, like, oh, we do a pretty good job, but my wife just does not like the window cracked open a little bit. When I got the, changed the air monitor in our house to air things, no affiliation with them, just a good air monitor and they have CO2 on there. and she saw that sometimes when she didn't sleep well, the CO2 levels were really high. And when the CO2 levels were lower,

she slept a little bit better. She now all of a sudden got on board with the idea like, okay, fine, let's leave the window cracked open a little bit to get some fresh air in throughout the night. And that was really helpful for us. I do think CO2 people are, I hear more people that are aware of it, particularly in the office or in the bedroom.

And there are some really interesting sort of new pieces of hardware out there. There's sort of like the equivalent of a window air conditioner, but specifically designed for ventilation with a little bit of heat recovery in there as well, which hopefully should make being able to get ventilation in your bedroom without needing to potentially leave the window totally open. If you've got like a loud street outside, more accessible for more people without having to do like a big renovation project and install like an interior whole home area system or something. I'm looking forward to that because you can't just leave one window open. You have to keep two windows open to create circulation. Yeah. So we end up having to crack, luckily we're on the, you know, on a higher floor. We end up having to crack one window open like in the kitchen or somewhere else or in one of our guest rooms.

And then we leave our bedroom door open a little bit. And then we crack open a window, our balcony window to create a little bit of an airflow that's there. But yeah, I'm excited for some of that new technology. Okay. So air quality, you went into particulate matter. you went into ventilation and the importance of that. What else do we want to go into when it comes to the bedroom and the things you're looking at? Did you know that shifts in your hormones can deplete your mineral stores?

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That's me, to save 35% off today. So the third thing that we look at for air quality is humidity and that the main reason for that is both sort of comfort. We want to make sure that the humidity is generally between 30 and 50% both for comfort of the residents and then also for mold growth concerns. So obviously you've talked about mold in the intro, you have had some mold exposure histories. I think there are a lot of folks out there that are rightfully concerned about mold. Our approach at Lightwork is really to strike the balance between recognizing that it's

certainly true that a lot of people appear to be having really challenging health impacts from mold and we want to be aware if there is a chronic mold exposure in someone's home. And that mold is in many places. You know, it's not everywhere, but it's in many homes. And for many healthy people, they clear mold, at least at moderate levels, reasonably well. And so it's just one of many other exposures that we try to navigate. So we try to give people helpful information about what might be present in their home without being, you know, overly alarmist about, you know, the need to create a perfectly clean home with absolutely no mold in it in order to be in order to be healthy. So what we do is we try to keep humidity below 50%,

which generally prevents the growth of chronic mold issues that have sort of systemic problems in homes. And then we do like a mold likelihood assessment, which I can get into the details of, but essentially gives us an idea of the likelihood that there might be mold present in a home. And based on that, that we work with clients to find the right balance because it's not true

that any amount of mold concern in a home or any amount of evidence of mold exposure immediately means you need to start pairing up walls and and doing a massive remediation project on your home. There are things that you can do actually investing in stronger particulate matter filtration. So more air purifiers running at higher settings will remove mold spores from the air and decrease any impact of mold present in your home on your body. Decreasing humidity, increasing ventilation.

All these things can help you navigate. any, you know, small potential mold exposure in your home without having that health impact. Yeah, I really appreciated you guys approach to mold. Certainly the state of mold testing is confusing and everyone's got an opinion. I could talk through a little bit about how we approach it and shout out to Bill Weber, who is our primary mold advisor based up in Walnut Creek, has been doing this for decades and helped both is sort of our go-to recommendation, then also has helped us design our mold protocol in our opinion. The only definitive way to really tell if you have mold in your

house and to what extent there is a mold issue is a very detailed manual inspection from someone who is experienced and certified and has been doing this for quite a while. We have, you know, recommendations bill in the bay and then the folks who we connected you with my home, my health here in LA that we like to work with for that. Sometimes mold dogs can be very helpful too, depending on how they're trained, be very effective. But we find that that's not the best place to to start for most people because it's usually reasonably expensive. It can be kind of invasive. And for most people, if you don't have any obvious symptoms

that you would immediately associate with mold or your symptoms aren't particularly strong, we think that the best place to start is a MSQPCR dust test, also known as an Ermi test, where you can do this yourself, but there are some gotchas in terms of how you collect the samples and it's easy to sort of accidentally inhibit the samples or otherwise affect the,

the data. But you gather samples of dust from around the home, send that into the lab, and then you get a window back of the species that were present in those dust samples. The reason that we choose to do this is because it has a very low false negative rate. So if the species counts indoors in comparison to our outdoor baseline come back elevated, that is an indication that further testing is warranted. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is a crime mold problem in the However, if the species counts indoors come back low or low relative to the outdoor species count, we can be pretty confident that there's not a chronic mold issue in the home. This is in contrast to most types of air sampling that people might have seen where, you know,

you put a tripod in the middle of room, you collect an air sample. Those have a very low false positive rate. So that means that if you do find something via air sampling, there's almost certainly mold in that house. but if you don't find anything, there's a bunch of reasons why you might not have found it. That is one reason why we think that air samples are often preferred by landlords. It's a really good way to do mold sampling and possibly not find anything. You know, there are some interesting new pieces of technology coming out around like improved air sampling. So we'll see where things are in the next couple of years.

There might be better ways to do it. But as far as we can tell right now, we would rather have false positives. It's been false negatives. And so that's why we do mold testing the way that we do it. Yeah, mold is such an issue, especially in the city like LA. I mean, it's increasingly an issue in a lot of places. But, you know, we've had a couple of rainy years in a row. And the homes here were never really built for rain.

And on top of that, we have the same problems that a lot of homes have. The newer construction homes, they're not really meant to breathe. And so mold can set up shop, have no, predators, so to speak, that are out there. And they can survive. One thing I learned from the mold team that you connected me with, some of these species that showed up, they can survive dormant for a long period of time. And they might be dead, but they're not dead, and they get a little bit of moisture,

and all of a sudden they're awakened, which explains how one of the species that I might be struggling with right now with my own health, that's related to some of my symptoms of eczema in my hand, which seems to be like maybe I like a... gut issue, maybe we didn't see it when we first moved in because the unit that we are in in our condo, it was dormant for quite a bit of time. So there was no water that was running. You know, there's nothing really going on. So even though we did a thorough, thorough inspection, it could have just been dead during that period of time, but it's dormant and now it gets reactivated later on. So I think the first thing that's there is, number one, do you really even need? In my case,

I had some health issues that were there where I was like, okay, this is super weird. I never really had this before. And I had a functional medicine doctor that said, okay, something is going on. We're doing a urine analysis. We're seeing some mycotoxins. You shouldn't have this there.

So I had multiple data points. Most people listening today, this is not going to be you, right? This is not going to be you. So this is not going to be you and you decide, hey, yeah, I want to get our home tested. Great. At least see, do you have to go down this rabbit hole?

Because very easily you can meet somebody in your local area, wherever you live, that can so convince you that mold is the reason that all these things are happening and they'll take you on a wild goose chase. But just screen out the basic stuff. And it's like, okay, is this a problem that needs investigating or are things generally okay based on your intake?

You guys have us do like an intake when we're first deciding to work with you and then your assessment of, hey, is mold an actual problem that needs to be investigated? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we try to sort of right size the amount of the type of mold testing to where the person is in terms of their symptoms, whether they have any, whether they are noticing that the symptoms improve when they're away from home, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, for plenty of people, you know, we've had clients where we did our mold likelihood assessment. It came back sort of somewhere in the middle where maybe there's some indication of there's some mold, but it probably isn't, you know, massively systemic or we probably would have seen higher levels.

And eventually, you know, through conversation with them, they decided, you know what, I'm going to just like, oversized my air purification within the home and put a little bit more effort into ventilation, that's going to have a bunch of other side benefits as well, and then I'll just monitor to see if I develop any symptoms. And it's been, you know, a year plus and they're cruising and feeling good. And, you know, they didn't need to go do a whole big remediation process. And so there are many different pathways. And it's not true that, you know, as soon as you find any amount of a mold issue, oh my God, I need to do this whole massive remediation. Our perspective is like the amount of information that we show people in the mold likelihood assessment

is sort of good information for anyone to have and certainly like any new home that I move into, obviously I'm biased, but any new home that I move into, I'll at least do a mold likelihood assessment to see, you know, is there any smoke? Is there any smoke? And then I can try to figure out if there is a fire

and if so, how big that fire is. But I think that's a useful amount of information for pretty much anyone to have. All right. We talked about air quality, which obviously part of that is the mold conversation related to humidity. you talked about filtration, you talked about ventilation.

Anything else with air quality before we touch on a couple of other things in the bedroom, like lighting and EMFs. Anything else you want to say about air quality? No, I think there's some air quality things elsewhere in the house, but let's go a little bit into lighting in the bedroom because I think that's another one. You know, I personally find lighting to be incredibly interesting. And I think that the way that lighting is affecting our biology, I mean, there's been plenty of people talking about this on podcast.

I'm not the first person to do this. but I think it's very, very interesting how strong some of the research is. And also it's one of those where as you change your lighting in your home, not only is it sort of there's a health benefit to it, but you feel different. There's a factor in your nervous system, the effect of being in a space with lighting that is friendlier to our biology. It's just better from a subjective point of view, at least in my opinion. So within lighting, specifically in the bedroom, we're looking at three different things. We're looking for blue light timing exposure to support your circadian rhythm.

So we want blue light during the day. We don't want blue light at night. And I'll get a little bit more into that in a second. We're looking for the flicker profile of lights. Most modern LEDs, because they need to change from the AC current that our electrical system runs on into DC current, which is what LED's light-emitting diodes run on. Many of those LEDs will flicker faster than the human eye can process, but it still has cognitive effects for us. And then thirdly, we're looking at ideally getting some red and near-infraint exposure in the morning,

which is an emerging body research, sort of similar to the research around red light therapy, showing that there are some benefits to our circadian rhythm and otherwise. So in the bedroom specifically, the thing that's most important is timing your blue light exposure. And so again, most modern LEDs, this is just like a quirk of physics. LEDs are blue as a baseline. And then we put a filter or a sort of phosphor coding over the bulb that then shifts that wavelength to be something that's more friendly to our eyes.

But generally, there's still a blue light spike. And I have a light spectrometer in my kit that we use to measure every light source in people's homes. And so you can see very clearly that blue light spike for LEDs. and then you can see for incandescence, which is a completely different type of physics. Essentially, they generate light through heat generated by electrical resistance. You don't have any of that blue light spike.

So for the light that you're using right before bed, switching to incandescence preferably, but there are also some LEDs out there that don't have that blue light spike will be enormously beneficial for supporting your circadian rhythm. Two little things on that. One, all of this is completely undone if you then stare at your screen for two hours before bed. And this is one thing that I end up sort of reminding a lot of our clients is like, cool, I can totally optimize your lighting environment before bed. We can make this happen.

But you do have to also then like do your part, which is recognize that there's also blue light coming from your screen. And so if you do need to look your screen before bed, you know, blue light blockers, those glasses, they look very silly. They are very effective. I'm never in an airport without one. Those can be helpful. or use something like a daylight computer that is like a little tablet that has like an e-ink with similar to a Kindle.

And then the final thing that I find really interesting is that we have these receptors in the bottom of our retina that point upward that specifically interpret light that's coming from overhead as more likely to be sunlight or more likely to be something that's happening in the daytime. But they don't get activated in the same way when light is coming from below sort of our line of sight. So one way that we like to think about this is

our lighting during the day should be as similar to sunlight as we can get it. Broad, full spectrum, overhead, very bright. And then our lighting at night should be as similar to firelight as we can get it. So low, warm, red, and pooled, so it's not bright and overhead. For people who are listening, what are a couple things?

You know, you're not a doctor, you're not a clinician, but you work with a lot of clinicians who are often recommending your service to their patients, what are some examples of things that you've seen that people's light is messing with their health? So primary one is obviously sleep. And this is why the simplest thing that we would recommend that you do is, whatever your bedside lamp is,

just change that to an incandescent bulb. And yes, there's some regulatory concerns in California. We have always found that it's totally possible to get incandescent bulbs. There are exceptions for decorative bulbs, et cetera. You know, reach out to us. If you have any questions they are, you can't get them. So changing your bedside lights to incandescence really helpful.

But we generally find that people sleep better, which just has, it's like the single best thing that you could do for your help. Falling to sleep a little bit easier. Falling asleep a little bit easier. More consistent deep sleep. Yeah, I think it's mostly falling asleep easier and more consistent deep sleep that people report due to, Essentially, blue light suppresses melatonin onset,

which then can just affect both your time of falling asleep and then the quality of sleep once you are asleep. The other one, I would say, is Flickr, which we haven't talked about in enormous detail, can have effects on people in terms of causing migraines. Explain Flickr. You know, people don't realize it, but a lot of lighting that people are using today,

it's flickering, you know, thousands of times or hundreds of times in a second, right? Maybe I've exaggerated that a little bit. I mean, it's flickering at exactly the rate that are wiring and our walls is alternating back and forth for our alternating current. Okay.

And so one thing that you can do, this works for light bulbs that are very high flicker. It doesn't work for all light bulbs, but you can take your phone and take a slow-mo video of some LED light source in your home. and then play that back. And I'd say 40 or 50% of the time,

you can see that flicker on your phone. And so you're looking at that, like, okay, well, that, even though you don't process that consciously because essentially the frame rate of our eyes is not fast enough to process it directly, that flicker is still shown to have eye strain issues to have an effect on our biology.

So removing that flicker can be very, very helpful. and also most of our laptop screens and phones flicker as well. I know the reason to try to not spend all your time staring at your screen. And so that one is where we see, I'd say that's more maybe in home offices than bedrooms, because ideally you wouldn't be spending an enormous amount of time during the day in your bedroom. But that's one that we see to be very beneficial for lighting. And then I can speak really quickly on the red and your infrared. I'm sure people have heard about red light therapy, et cetera, et cetera.

bunch of interesting pieces of research there, but there's some studies that have come out recently showing that as little as three minutes of exposure to near-infrared light at the right time for the right people, caveat, caveat, caveat, et cetera, is shown to increase eyesight acuity in older adults that are experiencing decrease in eyesight effectiveness. And so there are, a number of you know the the working mechanistic theory is that we evolve mostly under sunlight sunlight has you know the the full spectrum of light that goes beyond just the visible spectrum into uv which has some problematic effects on our skin but also into the infrared side of the spectrum and that our bodies evolved to have some beneficial effect from that infrared both on our eyesight

and elsewhere in our body so one way you can get near infrared from particularly bright incandescence than I can get more to specifically like my light protocol and how I set up my space and stuff. But there's a potential analogy of, you know, you can do those targeted doses of red light therapy for various things. You can also sort of get a micro dose of infrared light throughout the day, either from sunlight or if you need to be inside from bright incandescence that extend into the infrared part of the spectrum.

So generally speaking, you know, when it comes to lighting in the home, in the bedroom, especially, but the rest of the home too. Getting rid of like the worst quality of lighting, especially if you're a lot of people today, your work at home, even though I have an office, I still come in, you know, I'm working at home a lot as well too. And getting rid of the lighting that is the most stressful on the body, straining on the eye,

you know, not good for sleep, you know, that can be very straightforward to do. Replacing it with a better bulb, you mentioned some of those options that are there. options that are there. And then even stepping into this category of, hey, are there parts of the day where you can optimize your lighting where not only is it not doing damage to you, but it's actually being helpful to you, right? With some targeted maybe red light exposure. And then even the reminder of how important it is to just get outside and be in the sun

for periods of time throughout the day and like taking breaks. That's the big picture approach to lighting. Is that correct? Yeah. It's funny with a lot of this stuff. My background, which we can get into more is, I was an engineer at a product manager for climate tech companies for a long time, but I was also a wilderness guide.

So I've spent enormous amount of days in the backcountry where, you know, sleeping intents outside all the time. And not all of it, but some amount of what we do at light work is just try to make inside a little bit more like outside. And, you know, turns out our body's evolved to be aligned with the rhythm of the sun. And so the best scenario here,

in many cases with, you know, the exception of UV exposure with, you know, different people have different opinions about how that affects health and longevity. But the best case scenario here would largely just be outside all day. That's not accessible for most people for a number of reasons. So what we're trying to do is create an indoor environment that is as similar to that as we can reasonably make it. And there are a few interesting levers to pull on that front in terms of different bulbs and different fixtures and where you position them.

And I personally find like the architecture of indoor life. environments to be just very, very interesting and very satisfying once you set it up. And I've also become, like, unfortunately, a huge light weenie where, like, I walk into, like, a safeway or an airport, and it's just like blinding. And I just can't even imagine how anyone could be there. And I drive the people that I spend time with crazy because I'm just, like, constantly complaining. So I would not wish that upon anyone. But it is, it is awesome when you can create a really welcoming and stimulating indoor environment.

It makes a difference. you get used to it. It's kind of like when you stop eating so much sugar. You know, many people listening here that was years ago. I enjoy sugar here, there, right? Like I'll have a piece of something or whatever, dark chocolate and other things.

But I'm not having like that, you know, you're a kid. You're having like a pack of skittles or bubble tape or whatever it is. Like when you clean that out and all of a sudden, you get exposed to even a short and small amount of that heavy dose of sugar, you're like, dude, this is way too intense. You know, let's turn it down a little bit. Are you going to an Uber?

and there's like some crazy air fresheners inside, you know, like six, seven air fresheners. You're like, oh, my gosh, how do people live this way? That's kind of how it is with the lighting. Once you really start to optimize, you're like, oh, this actually, I feel so much more calm and relaxed when the lighting in my space is in a much better place. You are a lighting geek and a lighting weenie, and we all benefit from it because you know exactly what to do. Before we get into the next category, which we have here, EMFs, I want to give a shout out because

if you're listening along and you're kind of taking notes and making things, you guys have also put together a guide that I think that people can access through the website. Can you mention the guide where people can get it? We'll put the link in the show notes as well too. And then anything else you want to say about the company and the mission, light work. I've mentioned how you guys are a one-stop shop. I wish I had access to this years ago. I've spent so many thousands of dollars on a lot of people that took me down different wild goose

chases or equipment that may have worked, may have not worked. And it's just been nice to work with like a very evidence-based team. But yeah, let's mention the guide. And then anything else you want to mention about the company before we go further on this home tour and talk about EMFs. One thing I love about summer is spending more time outside. One thing I don't love, waking up hot in the middle of the night. That's why this time of year, I appreciate products that actually.

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support the show and tell them we sent you. Our website is lightworkhome.com. If you want to check it out, we put together a guide that I believe has 40 action steps to a healthy home, prioritized by what is likely to move the needle most. In the average home, obviously it's difficult to say because every home is different, and that's part of the reason that we do the type of testing that we do, but we've tried to draw from our experience testing hundreds of homes at this point

to be able to put together that guide. So you can go to Light Work Home forward slash Drew D-H-R-U, and that's a specific link for Drew your audience. So that is a great place to get a bunch of information about how we approach things. And there is a lot of this stuff that we can give general sort of best practices on, sort of similar to how we've been doing with lighting and air quality. And then there's some subset of things, you know, mold being one and we're about to talk about EMFs that I really can't say anything about what you should or shouldn't do without testing your home because it's very, you know, specific to are there wiring errors in your walls or, you know, water leaks or etc. But yeah, light work, you know, again, going back to that founder story, the reason that we exist is because, you know, our founders couldn't find any folks who were simultaneously evidence backed wanting to

ground recommendations in what the latest science is, but then also sort of forward-looking and willing to bring into their approach and their protocols some of the emerging research and also to sort of weight things based on the precautionary principle and the probability that something, even if we don't have, you know, dose response evidence of its effect right now, if it's easy to remove your exposure to it, then, you know, maybe it's worth doing that because there are certainly countless examples throughout the last 40 or 50 years and beyond of things that we thought were safe and then learned later weren't. And I don't see any reason to believe that that won't continue for the next 20 or 30 years.

A little bit difficult to say exactly what those things are going to be and what's going to be the most important. But we definitely think the precautionary principle is a helpful and important way to navigate, at least for individuals making choices. So, yeah, the reason that we exist and really what we try to do for people is demystify and customize all of this stuff. So obviously we're on a podcast here. We're going down a bunch of rabbit holes.

Many people have done PhDs on each of the topics that we're talking about here for every individual person to process all of this and make every individual decision in their home can be very overwhelming. Like it can be done. We're not in a shortage of information environment. But what we do at Lightwork is for those that want to go this direction, we come into your home. We take thousands of daypoints.

one of our team members, either me or someone else in our team, will spend a half day in your home, measuring every room in the house, looking at every light source, et cetera, et cetera, and then give you a prioritized list of here is exactly what you should do for your home based on your family and the exposure areas that we've measured to decrease any negative health impacts that your home could be having. And then also just create an environment that's really supportive to your home's health. And this is something we work with a lot of new parents who are in a home that they hope they'll raising their kids in for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And so, yeah, putting that investment in up front to make sure that that's an environment

that's going to be supportive to them, we think is really worthwhile. And the other thing I'll say just about generally about the types of things that we recommend is a lot of them are kind of one-time fixes. You know, it's different than your diet where, okay, obviously you can build systems and make one decision ones and just eat the same thing every day, et cetera. But you sort of have to make that decision every day. You have to decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to choose the salad. I'm not going to choose the In-N-Out Burger, you know, nine times out of 10 and maybe one time

out of 10, I'll choose the bad one. But, you know, if you're adding air purifiers, you're adding water filtration, you're improving your lighting. In a lot of cases, you do that once, then you just never have to think about it again. And those benefits just compound over time. I think this is something that Alison Evans from Branch Basics was talking about in your podcast a little while ago. We love the work that they do.

But, yeah, these are things that it can feel overwhelming, but you do them. so that you don't have to think about them all the time. And that's true for 90% of the things that we talk about. Yeah, absolutely. I can 100% attest that. Okay, great. We have the link in the show notes where people can sign up for that guide and also find out more details about light work and all the great things you guys do.

You've worked with a lot of my friends, entrepreneurs, new parents, some celebrities you guys have worked with as well too. There are big fans of everything that you've done and help them. It's amazing because one of the things that's there is, it amazes me how many people who have so much money actually have no clue and don't even have people in their own network about things in their own home

that is causing them to be sick or not feel well. I was a co-founder of this company called Clean many years ago as a reason I moved to Los Angeles and we had a lot of different celebrities that were fans, they were cleaning out their diet, they were feeling so much better and we connected them with the early, you know, hodgepodge team

of like, hey, here's our water filtration guy, or here's this, or here's the best kind of okay mold person we know in this space. And many of those individuals were like, dude, I have the best architects in the world. I have the best builders. I have the best this. And they had no clue that the way that they designed my home was contributing to my sickness or created mold in this area. That was so obvious. They had no clue at all. So this is a little. This is a little bit of. So this is an emerging area where even people who have a lot of resources, there's not somebody in their own network that actually told them that there's simple things that they could do to help create an environment at home that doesn't constantly poison them. So that's always been

interesting and amazing. And it really highlights the fact that this great toxification of America, the West, increasing the rest of the world, it's something that's impacting all of us. And it really does need, you know, more companies, maybe government to be involved, more solutions so that we can actually do something about it. We've seen minimal to potentially zero correlation between like the property value of a house and the number of exposures that we find. So definitely there is an emerging sort of smallish industry or awareness of, I think particularly a lot of people that are rebuilding here in the Palisades post five. are doing so with wellness and health in mind.

So it is, you know, I think in comparison to two, three years ago, something that's more present within a lot of builders. And it's been interesting, we've worked with a lot of folks. We do like renovation consulting as well, where, you know, people who are in the process of making some changes to their home or building energy home will bring us in and we'll sort of work with the general contractor or subcontractors to help make those choices. It's been really interesting to get a bunch of positive feedback from a lot of

those contractors saying, wow, I never thought about this stuff. I would love to incorporate this more fully into what I do. And you know, you folks are presenting things in a way that, like, makes sense to us. I feel like general contractors are a tough audience. And so it's always good to feel like we're presenting things in a way that's helpful to them. But I do think it's changing. But right now, I do think we're still in a world where, yeah, you sort of have to go that extra step. It's not going to, you can't take it for granted that even if you're getting a new home

or working with an architect that they're going to be taking this stuff. into consideration. They're just uninformed, you know? Which is like, you know, not their fault. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Okay, EMFs. This is, can be a big can of worms, but take us through the light work approach. The 80-20, the things that you know that can significantly move the needle forward

and protect our brain and body especially in our bedroom, especially when we're sleeping. What should we pay attention to? And then I'm going to ask you, what are some of the things that might be either bogus or at least there's not,

evidence that's there right now to support, you know, some of the solutions or energy that people are putting into trying to solve or mitigate EMS. Our founder, Annie Bromberg, wrote a blog post called A Rational Skeptical Person's Guide to EMFs, which I think is a great description of how we approach EMFs, how we weight the evidence and how we approach supporting clients with taking the appropriate steps to decrease their exposure without, you know, becoming paranoid that everywhere they walk they're being targeted by Bill Gates and 5G stuff so yeah as it relates to EMFs in the bedroom so we measure three different types of EMFs EMS are just electromagnetic fields these run the gamut from x-rays to extremely low frequency fields visible light is a

type of EMF microwave is a type of EMF gamma rays etc the main difference is just intensity and wavelength. Without getting too, too deep into the physics, there are three different types that we measure. One is radio frequency. So that's essentially any two devices communicating to each other. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell signal. That's one type that we measure. And then we measure two different types of EMFs that come from our electricity infrastructure. We measure extremely low-frequency magnetic fields, which if anyone caught any wind of this thing that happened with the 49ers like five months ago, that was about magnetic fields, and I'll get a little bit more into sort of what that means and the evidence there. So magnetic fields and then AC electrical fields, both of which come from

wall wiring, external power infrastructure, magnetic fields come from current, AC electrical fields come from voltage potential. AC electric fields are what causes increased body voltage, and that is the type of EMF that grounding sheets, etc., are attempting to mitigate. We'll get a to a little bit later about our skepticism about grounding sheets and grounding mats. So that's the three different types. Radio frequency will start there because I think that is what most people are talking about when they just say EMFs. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell signal. There's another huge long blog post that Andy wrote essentially on is radio frequency causing cancer.

The answer that he landed on is maybe. There's some evidence that says that it might be. There's some evidence that says that it doesn't. There's also some evidence that would show that it disrupts sleep. It's unclear what the dose response is. In our view, looking at all the literature, we think it's worth doing some simple things to decrease your exposure. But we can't say specifically, this causes this issue. In terms of in the bedroom, number one thing, don't have your phone right next to your head at night.

I'll get into a bunch of other stuff that we generally tell people to support reducing EMF exposure. but this is another one where I say, and if you have your phone right next to your head at night, pretty much everything else we're doing is going to be minimal. That's immediately something that people can do today. One little thing, airplane mode does work. If you turn your phone on airplane mode, it will brick it. But you have to make sure that your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are totally off.

And there's this funny little pattern on iPhones where maybe we can show like a screen capture of this. but you might think that your Bluetooth is off. It's so annoying. But it's just not connected. Now, ranked in terms of the intensity of the radio signal from a cell phone, cell signal is the strongest, Wi-Fi is the second strongest,

Bluetooth is the least strong. So even if your Bluetooth is still on, it's probably still pretty minimal in comparison to the other ones. However, it's helpful if you turn your Bluetooth totally off rather than just having it not connected. That being said, phone on airplane mode,

way better than phone novel. on airplane mode, far better for a number of reasons, mental health-wise, would be to have your phone either out of the room or far away from you, totally recognize that some parents, et cetera, people who have people that they want to make sure if they call them in the middle night, they will get the phone call. We would recommend just putting your phone on loud, far away from you, because distance is your best friend when it comes to EMFs. So one interesting thing about all types of EMFs is as opposed to a line source, but if it's a point source, EMF exposure, follows the inverse square law, which means that going from one inch away from a source to 10 inches

away will be 100x decrease. So distance is really your best friend. And this is part of why we're in most cases not nearly as concerned with cell towers as we are with like Wi-Fi routers, phones, or other exposures that are inside the house. So you got to get back to how we would set up a bedroom for reduced RF exposure. First thing, decrease exposure from your phone. That also goes for your Kindle, your iPad, anything else that is a connected device near the bed. Secondly, we'd just be being conscious about where your Wi-Fi router is in the house.

Ideal would be just turn your Wi-Fi off at night. That works for a lot of people. Some people have like security systems or baby monitors and we'll get into baby monitors, but if you can't turn your Wi-Fi off at night for whatever reason, either unplugging the Wi-Fi access point, like the ERO that's closest to your bedroom or just making sure that you don't have,

that essentially you move any source of Wi-Fi or Sonos, other connected device as far away from your bed as possible, that will get you a lot of the way there. Yeah, those are super important and easy, low-hanging fruits that people can do. And we'll talk about baby stuff and nursery because I'm in the thick of it. And actually, one of the most problematic areas that you found in our household, you know, stay tuned, any parents, grandparents that are listening was our nursery.

and there were some very specific things that we had to do to protect our child, our baby boy, and make sure that he was okay. Weirdly, our bedroom, probably because of the way that our building was built and also some of the things that my wife and I were doing tested pretty well.

But often one of the things that you find is that the bedroom because of all these things, the speakers, a plug that even if you don't keep your phone right next to your head, people often have a long cord that's on a nightstand and their phone is right nearby them and they're getting exposure through that.

So you often find that people's homes, separate even from air quality, which can often be bad and lighting and mold and humidity, there's all sorts of little things before you get down the rabbit hole of crazy and EMF, right, which maybe there's something that's there. There's a lot of evidence-based things that people's bedrooms test really poor, poorly in and making some of these changes can make a huge difference. Absolutely. And that's, you know,

brings me into the other two types of EMF that we measure as well. So I'll start actually with AC electrical fields because that's related to the phone charger that you were talking about. Yeah. So these are fields that are created by voltage potential in wall wiring and in devices that are plugged into the wall. So, you know, right now you've got your laptop plugged in there. That is creating a voltage potential because almost certainly this plug,

is not grounded. So, you know, if I had my little like electrical fluke that shows the intensity of electrical fields, I would move it close to your laptop. It would get really loud. You know, if we were holding hands over here and I was holding the fluke

and then you touched your laptop, it would go crazy. That's just physics. We have these wonderful machines that are very helpful for us. We need electricity to run them, et cetera, et cetera. We would recommend trying to decrease your exposure to those electrical fields.

I will say this type of EMF we think has the least strong evidence of the three for the health impacts. So this one falls much more into the category of both anecdotally and sort of small sample size with our clients, we certainly find that when people decrease this exposure, especially when sleeping, they report sleeping better. There are other things that I would suggest people prioritize changing first rather than going way down the rabbit hole on AC electrical fields and ignoring all the rest of the things. The simplest thing to do to decrease your AC electrical field exposure when sleeping is to just unplug or cut power to any devices that are plugged in around the bed. And one simple way that we suggest people to do that is there are these little remote control kill switches that you can buy on Amazon where it's you plug something into an outlet and

then you plug whatever device, phone charger, lamp, whatever it is into that switch. And you have a little remote that's like a TV remote. So it's not Bluetooth. It's not Wi-Fi. It's not continuously emitting something, it's just a radio. And so you're going to bed, instead of turning off the lamp or whatever, turning off the clock, whatever it is, you just cut power to it. And that means that the cord and the device itself will not be energized and therefore not creating an electrical field. And we've seen decreases of up to 80% for people in their electrical field exposure in their bed, just from doing that. No hardware change is needed in their bedroom, no even behavior changes really needed other than just, you know, instead of turning a lamp off, hit the switch and cut power

to the little kill switch. Exactly. That's great. And that goes for anything that, you know, you might have an alarm clock. You might have light, like a, you know, a nightstand with like, you know, an evening light that's on it. And I will say from my end, anecdotally, I sleep so much better when nothing is plugged in around me. could be, you know, placebo, could be this, could be that, but I find that it makes a huge difference,

not having anything plugged in. It's definitely been a little bit tricky. My wife and I navigating it as we have a baby and the baby monitor that we have and making sure it doesn't die and sometimes we end up having to plug it in. But even then, you guys have given me some incredible tools of, you know, a lot of plugs. even if you have a home that has plugs in the wall outlets that have a grounding wire and you test it and you make sure it is actually properly grounded. That's that third hole that's at the bottom of like the two prongs on top and you have the third hole. Very typical of like, you know, U.S. outlets.

So even if that outlet is set up correctly and it does ground, a lot of people's plugs for their iPhone, for their laptop, even the laptop I'm using right now, the one that I have in the office, they're two pronged. so they don't have that grounding wire inside of them. And you guys gave me some good resources of some plugs that I could put on top of that to make sure that my two prong still can stay kind of grounded if we have to. You know, it's like one of those situations that if we have to plug in the baby monitor,

which doesn't have a three prong, can you mitigate the risk a little bit by putting something on top of the outlet? If I got that correctly. Yeah, I would definitely recommend doing exactly that. I believe the company that sells those is the shielding shop, which is Brian Hoyer's company. I'm sure there are a couple others out there,

but that's the one that we recommend. But yeah, there's some things you can do to ground your, ground your devices, which we would broadly always recommend doing. Grounding your devices, good idea. This brings me to grounding sheets and grounding mats, though, which I think is very interesting and something that,

you know, kind of about a year ago, we were recommending to clients to use grounding mats and grounding sheets because part of the reason that part of the way that we measure AC electrical fields is body voltage so we're measuring the actual voltage potential in my body between my body and the ground created by an electrical field that is the sum of electric field coming from the wall wiring electric field coming from devices etc etc when you touch a grounding mat and a grounding sheet that will bring your body voltage to roughly zero because it's creating a path to ground for those electrons to go to the ground.

So we would say, okay, well, we're measuring body voltage. We want body voltage to be low. If you touch a grounding mat, then that makes the body voltage low. Therefore, probably a good idea to recommend that. We've since had, you know, sort of gone through a process of refining our protocols and doing another review of what we actually know and where the literature really is on this topic. and speaking with our EMF advisors, and we've kind of come out the other side

and realize that all that's happening when you are touching a grounding device when you're still exposed to an electrical field is you're trading a voltage potential in your body for a current flowing through your body. Because the field is still there. It just means that the electrons that want to go to ground, voltage potential now can.

It's not clear whether going from a voltage potential to current is better, is worse. There are reasons to think that it might be worse. So from our perspective, we would not recommend grounding sheets and grounding mats. We would recommend doing whatever you can to decrease the strength of the field. And that is sort of removing sources from wall wiring. There's a few ways we can do that, which we can talk about. And also those devices that we, devices plugged in that we talked about.

This relates to sort of grounding shoes and the idea of spending time with your bare feet on the ground. There's a number of studies of the benefits of that. I think it's a little bit difficult to pull apart exactly. There are a lot of confounding variables there. We would definitely recommend, like, spending time outside with your feet on the ground, great idea. Great idea. Getting shoes that have like one of those grounding plugs may be a good idea. I would not think that that's a bad idea.

It's specifically using grounding devices when you are exposed to an indoor electrical field that we would not recommend because that's just trading voltage potential for current. Yeah, that was super helpful to hear because shout out to one of my podcast listeners, Erica, who lives here in Southern California. You know, she is a mom, a grandmother who really thinks about a lot of these things and had heard me talking about how I use grounding sheets in my home and in my newsletter and how we had somebody come into the home and they tested it and, you know, this is before I connected with you guys and they're like, wow, your room is so great and these grounding sheets are awesome. They must be the reason why it's, you know, your room is in such a good position when it

comes to all the areas under EMFs. And it turns out when you guys came, you were like, hey, your room is in a really great position for EMFs, probably one of the cleanest rooms you'd seen when it comes to those categories of EMF. But the grounding sheets are probably not contributing a lot to that. It's because you have, and the way that the building was built or maybe the room was built, you've naturally reduced that sort of voltage exposure and whether you're using the sheets or not that's the most important thing and you know it's up in the air about whether or not you want to trade

and my listener podcast listener Erica was like hey I don't know if you should be recommending this because sometimes I've heard on other podcasts that she definitely was ahead of her times of this may not actually be good because now it's just rerouting the voltage through you so you've definitely taken me from being somebody who would recommend it across the board to, okay,

there could be reasons. This is not helpful. But what about like, okay, so there's grounding sheets that people use at night. There's grounding mats. Let's say my wife works at home. She doesn't like using a separate keyboard.

She types directly on the laptop. Her laptop is plugged into the wall. It is an outlet that's grounded. and then she also uses the three-prong chord that I got hers that Apple used to sell but now switched over to like the two-prong. So at least we know that the voltage coming in is grounded into the laptop.

I'd want to test it, but probably. Probably, yes. Yeah. In that instance, should she use a grounding mat? Should she not? Does it not matter? If she's in your bedroom, which is absolutely,

normally low in wall wiring, which we measure, which is not the case for most bedrooms. I would say, like, yeah, maybe the grounding mat would be helpful, but it's probably so marginal that I just wouldn't worry about it. You know, I would, I would say, based on what we can see right now, it doesn't appear to be likely to something's going to move the needle a lot, even if you're not exposed to a big electric field and therefore trading like a strong voltage potential for a strong current. Yeah.

Makes sense. She'll be happy to hear because I'm always like, sweetie, where's your grounding that? And she's probably so annoyed with me. So she'll definitely be happy. She might even paid you some money to say that. So I got to double check that. No, that's good.

You know, this all goes back to the idea of like how much shit can you actually focus on and if you can remove a few things that, you know, may not be the biggest things. that are moving the needle, not contributing that much, it's just another thing you don't have to worry about. And then you can focus on the stuff that actually matters,

like getting your ass out of the house and being in nature and getting exercise and other stuff. Okay, so that is the verdict on grounding, at least based on the best advice, science, and a group of people that are kind of- We'll see if people that are there. Maybe something will come out in the next few years that'll change our minds.

That's entirely possible. but based on what we can see right now, that's what we would say. Okay, amazing. So that was the conversation of AC and voltage and voltage exposure in the room. Anything else on EMFs that we didn't get a chance to touch on? Yeah, let's touch quickly on magnetic fields. So this, in contrast to the AC electrical fields, magnetic field exposure is the type of EMF that we would say is the strongest health evidence.

And that's mostly, you know, what's been studied so far is increased incidence of childhood leukemia at levels that we find in probably 20. 25, 30% of homes. Now, it's going from, you know, a very small likelihood to a larger but still very small likelihood of childhood leukemia. So I don't want to be overly alarmist here saying something like, no, it's not true that like all leukemia is being caused by my name. But there's a tiny enough signal.

But there's enough of a signal that seems consistent and there's, seems to be a viable, plausible mechanism for a biological effect that we would say, yeah, it's probably worth understanding your exposure to these things and trying to decrease it, you know, to the degree appropriate to your exposure. So magnetic fields come from current in wall wiring and also from external power infrastructure. So magnetic fields are really one where I can't really say anything specific about what your exposure is without coming to your home and testing because they come from certain types of external power infrastructure. Sometimes like coax cables from the cable company can cause. But it's not true that like if you see power lines outside your window, oh my God,

I'm being like sometimes it's fine. Sometimes they're elevated magnetic fields. As it relates to issues in your home, the way that houses are wired, the current should be balanced between a hot and neutral wire. If those get separated, then there's a net current and that creates a magnetic field. So it's a wiring error. So if you have a wiring error in like the wrong spot in your room. We found this actually, I'm in a very high profile client recently. We found a extremely elevated magnetic field right behind their headboard of the master bedroom. They'd be sleeping there for like a decade, not knowing that that was there. And that turned out to be sort of a series of wiring errors in that home. Did they have symptoms or other stuff? They didn't know. This magnetic field

issue was part of the issue that Andy and Alexa, our founders, found in their home. And that was certainly, they would say that it was contributing to some element of their health impacts. You know, did this client have cancer? No. Were they potentially having sleep disturbances over the last decade or some other, you know, chronic symptom that it's very difficult to pin down? Possibly. We're certainly not at the point where for an individual person, we can say, this exposure caused this and we're just not there. and we don't want to pretend to be.

But again, I think it's worth reducing the exposure. And then the other thing that you can have with magnetic fields is you can get current on your plumbing, in which case the current will not be balanced and you'll create a magnetic field. And we just, I tested a house up in Beverly Hills recently that had a really systemic plumbing current issue throughout the whole home. And yeah, again, you know, these things are worth understanding, worth addressing. Once you know about them, you can fix them. then it's fixed, don't need to worry about it anymore. But yeah, that's the third type of VMath that would measure.

That's probably one of the most impactful when it's wrong, right? Like if it's like a wiring thing in the home and like, I mean, there can be small instances, but especially if it's in the bedroom, would you say that that's like one of those that is like, you know, even though you can't pin it down exactly, has the highest chance. of, you know, you don't want to be living with that for like, you know, 20-30 years. Yeah. Yes. Broadly with the things that we measure, I would say that the evidence is still stronger on

air, light water, to some degree mold. However, you know, again, all these things can work together. And so, you know, one thing, again, this is anecdotal, but one thing that we have seen quite frequently is folks that have a mold exposure or some other type of health issue then becoming sensitive to EMS and they can walk into a room and tell you whether or not the outlets are grounded in that room or, you know, et cetera. And so there are some interesting ways that these things appear to affect each other. And so, yeah, if we can reduce that magnetic field exposure, perfect. You know, I have every room that I walk into, like I'll walk into a hotel room and I'll

quickly measure like, okay, what's the magnetic field on this side of the bed? What's the magnet on the other side of the bed? Oh, great. If I can just sleep on the other side of the bed and my exposure is a little bit lower grade, I'll just do that. It doesn't cost me anything. Obviously, I would not recommend that everyone walk around with a gauce meter. I happen to be like, this is my job and I'm carrying around my Ghostbusters kid all the time. But, you know, I do not want to say like the number one thing you need to think about is magnetic fields, but it's sort of a one-time thing, find it, fix it, don't think about it. Yeah, I think the important thing that you said is like the cumulative effect of all of these things not being addressed. And now you have multiple sources of things that are

impacting your health or your family's health or your child's health. And now you understand how, you know, your environment can just make some people just super, super sick. In fact, one of the people that you introduced me to, a young man, a part of the mold team that was there, you know, he, you know, had shared that he was diagnosed with the chronic disease at a very young age and that their own doctor who was kind of like a mainstream doctor was chatting with the mom and saying that, hey, it seems that there's some evidence that if your son already has some of the genetics that predispose him to this particular chronic disease, that mold could tip him over and be a contributing factor. Is it 100%? No, is it 80%? Probably

not. Is it 50%? Maybe there's something that's there that people who are more susceptible to certain things, this can tip them over the edge, one of these exposures. So we just want to find identify what's an actual issue, what's the 80-20 of it, and then move on with our life so we can give love and attention to everything else that we care about. Exactly. Yeah. Find it, fix it. Ideally, in the vast majority cases, don't need to think about it that much anymore. Go be outside. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah. Okay, great. You know, the good thing that we did was we took a lot of time to talk about the individual points for the bedroom. We all sleep, hopefully you sleep well. and when your environment at home is not designed in a way that supports you,

one of the first things that can go is your sleep quality. So addressing some of these areas, even with some of these practical fixes that we've shared with you, that Dom is shared, and then checking out their PDF guide, which has even more areas that you can expand on, those are great because you make those fixes in your bedroom. a lot of those same things

could apply to the rest of the house as well too. But there are some unique things that are there. So I think it is worthwhile to go into some of the other rooms inside a typical home and talk about some of the exposures that are there and maybe even some of the exposures that we saw in my own home when we were testing. Let's talk about the nursery.

You know, little kids, you bring a child in this world, you're trying to feed them the best food, you're mindful of organic, and you're thinking about their clothes and not exposing them to harsh chemicals, but sometimes people aren't always aware of what's going on in their room

that could be contributing. And one area, if we could just piggyback off of it, into our own son's room, our bedroom was such a clean environment with so many areas, air quality, lighting, et cetera, EMFs, pretty good with EMFs, and the voltage was excellent. But you went into my son's room and you measured it,

And we saw that unknowingly we were exposing him to a lot of extra EMF. High level, this came from the Wi-Fi router and the way our home is designed kind of pointing a little bit more into his room. That was one of them. Voltage exposure from the Nanit that we used that was plugged in, the baby monitor. I think those were the two biggest things. There might have been some other ones. Do you want to just chat about those in particular from what you can remember?

The two things we found were relatively minor radio frequency exposure, but still something worth addressing. Yeah, due to a Wi-Fi source in your home. And much more elevated than our bedroom. Much more elevated in your bedroom. Absolutely. Much more elevated in your bedroom. Your bedroom was abnormally low. So I would say there are plenty of homes that we've tested where the measurement that we

measured in your son's crib would have been like the lowest measurement in the house. So on the RF front, interesting thing that we found there was, I believe you had had a previous sort of EMF assessor come and recommend putting like a reflective Argymesh. It's like a reflective shield. Yeah. So one thing to be aware of

with those radio frequency reflective materials is they will do exactly what they say they'll do, which is reflect radio frequency. That's pretty good if you're sure that the source is on the wrong side of the reflective material. If there is a source that is on the same side of the reflective material as you,

that can be problematic because it can just bounce the radio frequency back towards you. You're creating like a little loop. Yeah. Well, especially if you completely enclose yourself, this is part of the reason that we're really careful with people around sort of canopies and anything like that. We want to make really sure that it's grounded properly for AC electrical fields. And for ACE electrical fields,

we want to make sure it's really grounded properly. If you're trying to mitigate RF, we want to make very sure that there's no source inside, the canopy or any source that could be coming from like an apartment below you that's coming up through like the unshielded floor of the canopy, etc. So it's like related to like people get like these Faraday cages and sometimes sleep in them. Yeah, something resembling a Faraday cage. It can be, I mean, we can if you want, we can get more into like, you know, EMF mitigation 201 where people are wanting to like cut the electricity to their walls and et cetera, which for what it's worth,

you know, all the folks in the light work team do. And we all personally would swear by increased sleep and just generally feeling better by like, you know, what we'll do is, is have that same kill switch idea that I talked about for the lamp. We'll just have that at the breaker level. So we'll turn off the electricity to all the circuits in our bedroom. And most electricians can like punch one extra outlet from an adjacent circuit into your bedroom. So you have like one functioning outlet on the far side of the room where you can run an air purifier, charge your phone, whatever.

And all the folks in our team say, I feel like I'm sleeping better. Small sample size, placebo, et cetera, et cetera, caveat, this is not the first thing that we recommend to people. But there is like an EMF mitigation 201 that we can get into. As it relates to the Faraday KG, the main thing I would say is like it's kind of similar to grounding sheets where it can go wrong and it can have the opposite effect that you're hoping for.

It can work also. But we would recommend if folks are trying to do something like that to have a device where you're actually measuring the radio frequency exposure and you're not just saying, oh, probably there are these exposures coming from away from my bed and therefore I'm going to shield myself

because you might end up... It might be counterproductive. Okay, if you could, just talk about baby monitors for a second. Are these like secretly poisoning our babies? Are they the worst? You know, if you watch social media, people will convince you that you're killing your baby if you're going to use a baby monitor with Wi-Fi.

What's true and what's not true? It is certainly not true that you are killing your baby with Wi-Fi. It is true that's probably worth taking some steps to decrease your baby's exposure, but it does depend on the baby monitor. Interestingly, even between the same brand, I've measured dozens if not hundreds of different units from this same very popular brand of baby monitor. And there's extreme variation between the different units. And I don't know whether it's like there was a different batch that they had a stronger radio,

in there or whether there's like some setting or some like distance between the actual unit and the Wi-Fi rather like I'm not exactly sure what's going on but it's something that's worth measuring because I've you know measured some um uh nurseries where the baby monitor is like reasonably close to the infant and it's actually like not causing any sort of concerning exposure uh and I've measured others where the baby monitor is like a similar distance and we would say oh you should probably move that further away um so that's radio frequency But then there's also AC electrical fields, which is just the main concern that we found in your son's nursery, which again is coming from the actual device being plugged into the wall. And it's just the same type of thing that would happen if it was a lamp or anything else.

It doesn't actually have anything specifically to do with it being a baby monitor. I think this is important because when it comes to baby monitors, so many people are worried about the Wi-Fi. And they overlook a more basic fact, which is just the voltage could be an issue as well. It's not that the Wi-Fi isn't an issue, could be an issue. You know, you might need to measure it and see. But the voltage is something that is probably an issue for anything that's plugged in too close to your child's crib. The research is not definitive on this. Far from it.

Precautionary. This is very much precautionary principle. This is, we think that there's reason to believe that it would be worth taking straightforward steps to decrease your baby's exposure here, provided that it doesn't, you know, disrupt your ability to care for them. and obviously we would still want you to have a fully functional baby monitor. The simplest thing that we would recommend is just move the baby monitor and whatever stand and whatever wiring

you're using to set it up as far away from the crib as you can get it where you can still see your baby effectively through the camera, which is usually further away than people currently have it. You actually measure this in real time in our son's room

and even though we have our Nanit, which shout out to Nanit, I think it's a great monitor. So you are monitoring the voltage in real time. We have our nana on a stand about a foot away from the crib. You showed us the voltage. And just by moving it like four feet back, the voltage exposure that our son would have had if he was in the crib.

He wasn't in the crib at the time, but he normally is in the crib. It went down massively just from moving it from a foot away to four feet back. And we could still see the crib really well. Yeah, exactly. And that's that exact thing I was talking about with the inverse square law. A little bit different in this circumstance because it's a line source and not a point source, but the general idea is distance is really helpful.

And so, you know, the other thing, which is like another little tweak that you can do is pay attention to where the cord runs. The difference between having, so like, Nanit here and crib here and the cord running under the crib versus Nanit here, crib here, and the cord running away from the crib is actually quite significant because a lot of that electric field is coming from the cord. And again, you know, this is not to create enormous concern or panic in parents, but these are things where it's like doesn't cost you anything to plug the, it doesn't cost you anything to move the baby monitor slightly further away from the crib, doesn't cost you anything to plug it into

an outlet that's slightly further away from the crib, provided that you can still see your baby, still have all the same effectiveness of the monitor. And we think it's worth doing those little things. Yeah. And it's like, especially if you're a parent who's like, okay, I don't want any Wi-Fi around my baby. I'm going to get like a baby monitor that has not Wi-Fi. Okay, great. I have a few friends. I think even my sister got one. And pay attention to the voltage because if you still have it plugged in next to your baby's crib, there's some potential other exposure that's there. So just move everything away as far as you can and still be able to see the baby. That's going to be the best situation for everyone. Absolutely.

And we're also, we're cooking some stuff up on the light work front to see if we can find a better holistic baby monitor solution because, yeah, the ones that are out there are effective and good and we're not like anti any of the brands that are out there. But we do think there's an opportunity for those that, you know, do want to go the extra step, maybe until like EMF mitigation 201 for your baby. We do think there's an opportunity to build a product that's a little bit better for them. So, yeah, we're cooking on that right now.

Yeah, and why you guys work on that, you did give me some recommendations. There was a couple covers that I can also put. Yeah, you can put a shield on your baby monitor. Yeah, you put a little shield. It's, it's, it's, you got to like cut out the middle of the shield so that the camera, but it's pretty straightforward to add a shield to the baby monitor. That'll decrease the baby's exposure.

by 75, 80% sort of depending. But yeah, it's just, you know, reduced duration, our general guidelines for EMF exposure, the simplest things. Reduced duration, increased distance, then potentially add shielding. Reduced duration, hard to do, baby needs to be in the crib a lot.

That's not really possible here. Increased distance, move the baby monitor as far away from the crib as you can, where the baby monitor is still effective. And then shielding add, yeah, you can, And we can put a link or anything, but there's effective radio frequency shields that you can put over the unit.

And even in our case, you also recommended a shield of, because the way our Wi-Fi is set up and our home and the condo unit, that there could be some, you know, I've probably got to put it in and measure it. Putting a shield for the Wi-Fi so that some of it that's being kind of more

in the direction of the nursery is kind of blocked a little bit, shielded a little bit. So we're going to be implement. that soon. We'll test it. I'll report back to my audience if it worked. So those were great recommendations. You know, that was our place. Luckily, when it came to air quality, we have a really great air filter in our home. Shout out to Air Doctor. But there's a big mistake that a lot of people make with their air filters, which is they forget to change the air filter on a frequent basis. And that is actually how you can turn an air filter.

which is something that's good for you, where now it's, if you don't change your air filters, some people don't change them when the lights come on, it could be just recirculating a lot of that stuff that it ends up getting clogged up with in the filters, and that's not good for you either. Right? So do you want to say anything else about air quality, especially in like the nursery?

Yeah, this isn't specific to the nursery, but it's a great point about air purifiers. I would say that even for rooms that have an air purifier in them, I would say the, like, percentage of, those air purifiers being effective is below 50% for three reasons. One is the filter replacement that you mentioned. It's very important to replace your air purifiers. I would say ideally slightly more frequently than the manufacturer recommends.

You know, if that's not prohibitive financially, there's absolutely no downside to replacing them more frequently. But at least on the schedule that the manufacturer recommends. Two, we see so many air purifiers that are either completely turned off or on such a low setting that they're just not creating the sufficient air changes per hour needed to actually filter the room because people don't like the noise.

And so interestingly, you can go to purifiers.lightworkhome.com. We built a free tool for people to be able to, from a purely data-driven, no affiliate marketing, et cetera, way understand which air purifiers are going to be the most effective for their rooms based on this measurement that we put together called Quiet CADR, which is a measure of the airflow that any particular air purifier can produce while staying under 41 decibels, which is our assessment of like the noise level that most

people aren't bothered by. Because it turns out if you're bothered by the noise of your air purifier and you don't turn it on, then that air purifier is not helping you. And we would say that the vast majority of people undersized the air purifier for the room. This is a great one right now. But the other thing about air purifiers is that in the vast majority of cases and we can talk about like VOCs and there's some, there are some nuances. Most air purifiers are just a filter and a fan.

They're not that complicated. The filter is extremely effective. Like any HEPA filter will remove 99.97% of the particles that are most difficult to remove. So there's not a huge amount of secret sauce for particulates. There's some other categories of air contaminants we could talk about, but in terms of particulates, there's not a huge amount of secret sauce in the filter. So it's really just a matter of, is the unit large enough to run a fan that is quiet enough to get sufficient air changes per hour for the room?

And so that's the recommendation that we try to provide both in our reports and also for free on purifiers. Style lightworkhome.com. So yeah, we just want to make sure that, you know, even if you have an air purifier, yeah, make sure it's actually working for you. Yeah, after doing a lot of testing, having air monitors, you know, because we spend a lot of time at home. my wife works from home primarily. I work from a whole lot, especially with the new baby or babies home. We have air monitors.

We've switched from, we used to use this one that I recommended before. No affiliation with them. No affiliate link, no nothing. It's actually the one we have in the office over here. I forgot the name of it. But then I end up switching from that to air things because I find it to be a lot better at the breakdown

and the dashboard's a lot easier to see. Again, I have no affiliation with them either. So we have those in all the different rooms. We've had you guys test. I've done some previous testing that's there. I have like an at-home sort of meter that I use. And just because I've dug down on the science a lot, and I feel like I really want to pay attention to it.

So what I found that really works for us is that during the day, we're lucky, L.A., generally really good weather. And unfortunately, there are periods of, you know, we have this massive fire that's going on. I don't know if you know about it. It's this warehouse. It's like 500,000 square feet. It's kind of closer to like downtown in the Boyle Heights area.

It got so bad right now that the local people in that area had to evacuate. People have cough, asthma flaring up, all this stuff. And because the winds, you know, the winds have been coming in this direction, largely yesterday and today was a better day. So outside of those days, wildfire days or some sort of crazy, you know, warehouse fire in L.A., we like to get fresh air from out of the home to come in, to keep the CO2 levels, to kind of bring in, you know, some new air. So I love to run the air purifiers that we have in all the major rooms.

I run them 24-7, right? To me, it's like a great investment. I don't care that it costs a little bit extra money for electricity or that you have to change the air filters because I've found that it's one of the things that just like significantly. And it's probably why I haven't been even more affected by some of this mold stuff that we've been finding. So that combination of opening the windows and keeping the air filters on has generally kept my home to be a very much more pure source of indoor air quality, low VOCs, low particulate matter 2.5. And I understand that's not doable for everybody.

But if you can get some fresh air and have an air filter, at least in the primary room that you're spending time in, significantly sized air filter, that's a great recipe for great air. quality in the home. Yeah, would 100% agree with that entire protocol. One interesting thing, there's a essay that went around, I think a few years ago that was essentially making the argument that one potentially defensible strategy for like all these effective altruism people is like, okay, what's the greatest like quality adjusted life years that you can help people achieve per dollar? And someone was like, we should just buy everybody on earth and air purifier and went through and laid out the data of, okay, here's what we know about the health impacts of poor air quality. And a lot of this is heavily weighted by like cities in India, cities in Bangladesh, cities and other

places that have just unbelievable pollution that is unthinkable for us in any city in the U.S. barring really gnarly wildfire smoke or other fire smoke. But I thought it was a very well laid out essay and just interesting point of how beneficial. like I would argue that having a standalone air purifier should just be like that should come with any furnished apartment that you would rent. That should be installed in every college dorm room, et cetera. That should be like just a standard piece of furniture similar to a fridge that it would be like unthinkable to not have in a home, especially in the bedroom. But that's just me. Yeah, that's a great insight.

Anybody who's a landlord, that's a great marketing tool that's there. I own some real estate with some partners. You know, I should I should bring it up to them. I'm like, hey, dude, we should throw it in. Like, sign your lease, get a free air filter, but they just have to remind people to change their air filters. That's the biggest thing. There's a minimum amount of maintenance required.

There's a minimum amount. Any other things that are things you want to mention when it comes to the nursery. I mean, there's a lot of tool, you know, tips, resources online about the importance of trying to mitigate to the best degree you can. You know, more treated, toxic things. Air mattresses, all these things off gas, right? And your baby spends so much time sleeping. It's such a tough area because that world can get so deep and expensive very quickly.

We're not going to spend time on it. I will say that I do think a good quality mattress that doesn't have all these crazy fire retardants and other things with the amount that your baby is sleeping on there. and there's some cost-effective, organic, you know, low-tox mattresses that are out there, and then trying your best to just not buy so much furniture for your nursery, any parent will tell you you don't use half that stuff anyway because everything you buy comes with regulations

that it has to be treated with certain, you know, things to make it not flammable or is just treated in the normal manufacturing process. So the less stuff you have and the less new stuff you have, the better off the air quality is going to be in your kids' bedroom. Totally would agree with that. I agree there's plenty of great resources out there for finding non-toxic products, non-toxic baby products.

I want to say, you know, the way that we approach this to light work is within our assessments, we take photos of essentially every product in your home, household product, laundry, detergent, cleaning products, shampoo. And we'll also look at sort of cookware and, um, And specifically for babies, we're starting to look more closely at things like mattresses, et cetera. And then we essentially just do an audit and make recommendations of things that we would recommend that you change based on our assessment of the evidence. Plenty of people have talked about this. Plenty, some on your podcast.

I don't think we need to go usually deep into it. But I would agree that all that stuff is worthwhile to pay attention to. And the last thing I'll say on the nursery, just as a quick plug on the lighting front again, is what we've seen be very effective for our clients is creating. a very circadian optimized, low, dim light sort of feeding and changing station for the nighttime wakeups to support both you and your baby being able to get back to sleep. That is something that I think gets overlooked in some folks' homes because obviously you want to be able to see clearly to do whatever you're doing in the middle of night, but that can be really beneficial for supporting, you know, mom, dad, and babies circadian rhythm.

Amazing. All right, we got a few other rooms. not a ton to cover in each, but some important points for them. So I do feel it's worthwhile to touch on them. So we'll go through and let's first talk about the office. So everything you've talked about so far applies to every room in the house, including the office. Any unique things about the office that deserve an honorable mention? Lighting in the office.

This is where you really want that actually blue light is great, broad, bright, over headlight is great. Low flicker light is great. What I do, there's an interesting company out there called Rhythm that we've seen that's called a sunlight generator. They have like a massive 60,000-lumin giant brick that sits on your desk and projects upward onto your ceiling to create extremely bright environment, which we think is one great option. The thing that I do is all put two lights sort of over above my desk. One that's a very bright full-spectrum LED and then one that's a very bright incandescent bulb that gets into the infrared near infrared and infrared spectrum. And so I'm getting essentially full spectrum all the way from blue light to near infrared,

which is as close to sort of the spectrum profile of sunlight as we can get. But yeah, the lighting profile can make a big difference in your office. And then the only other thing I'd say is, you know, a lot of people have standing desks. Standing desks are great. One thing that we often find is that standing desks, because they're energized, will be a very strong source of AC electrical fields. Oftentimes it'll be like over half of the AC electrical field at the desk is just the standing desk.

And that's a great candidate for one of those kill switches because it turns out got to be like, I don't know how this is a made up stat, but like 99.9% of the time that you're using a standing desk, it doesn't need to have the power on because you're not actively moving it up and down. So what I'll do is just have my little remote at my desk. If I want to move my stand and us up and down, I'll turn the power on, move it up, turn the power off. And that is, again, this is the one that has, you know,

the least strong health impacts, but I would say that probably it's just like some moderate decrease on the amount of stress that I'm experiencing while I'm standing at that desk. Great. Simple tips, simple things that people can do. And, you know, we wrote a whole newsletter a few years ago about the data around air quality and decision-making, air quality and lack of performance in the work

place. There's so many times where you think, oh man, I'm tired. I can't focus. I can't do other stuff. And just some ventilation and some better air quality can make a huge difference to that. Not always the case. Sometimes you actually need movement and activity and you need to stop sitting and just go for a walk around the neighborhood. But there's some really strong data. Actually, one study that was done. And I heard about this. Shout out to the podcast, Freakonomics, is where I originally heard about it. We wrote about it in our newsletter. We'll link to in the show notes. There was a study that was done a natural study where they looked at decision-making at Major League Baseball games in cities, and they connected it to air quality. And so they were looking at umpires.

And when the air quality was worse, the judgment calls from the air empires calling balls and strikes accurately. When air quality is worse, their ability to call strikes accurately or balls accurately went down. So you're worse off at making decision making, and then enough data points and everything, you can check out the study yourself. And on days where air quality was better, you're sharper, you're more focused, you're able to do this.

You can make those decisions correctly. And a bunch of different stats about the economic impact. So if you're an employer, you know, getting an air monitor for your employees, getting, you know, an air filter, that's a nice little added bonus and benefit that can make a huge difference and improve the other.

improve performance as well. Yeah, one of the most unique light work assessments I did was for a robotics company in San Francisco. I went in and did their whole office and they had like all these, you know, big areas where people were sort of piloting robotic arms and stuff, but they had this whole bank of 3D printers and those 3D printers were off gassing all this VOC stuff. And so we, you know, did a whole assessment in their entire office and made these detailed recommendations for how they could improve their air quality.

So yeah, this is something, you know, we were primarily focused on homes, but we also have some experience doing workplaces as well. And yeah, air quality can be really helpful on that front. Let's pop over to the kitchen. Yes. And if I could just share a little anecdote about air quality, right? People don't often realize it, but if you have an air filter that's nearby your kitchen, because most people don't have it in their kitchen, one of the things you'll

see, especially if it's a responsive air filter, like the air doctor and a bunch of other ones that are out there, is when you cook and you're cooking certain things, especially if you don't have your ventilator on in the kitchen, that's one of the air doctor. that's one of the first things that increases poor air quality. And again, we don't know why there's so much that's unknown, but when it comes to lung cancer, women are, this is a fact, women have higher degrees. There's this whole category of non-smoking lung cancers

that there is a lack of an understanding of why does this happen and why does this impact women. Of course, it's multifactorial, probably hormones play a role, so many other things play a role. But one of the theories, again, this is a theory, is that if women traditionally are the ones that are doing the cooking on are exposed on a regular basis to this poor air quality, could that be, in a way, these extra particulates, a version of, you know, smoking that they're getting exposed to because of all the particulates that are there. So keep the kitchen window open, right? And turning your ventilation on when you do cook, two very important things for men, women, anybody that's cooking or in the kitchen. So I just wanted to share that anecdote.

What else do you want to talk about that's unique to the kitchen and creating a healthy environment inside the home? Yeah, quickly just on the air quality in the kitchen, most important thing that we look at is the ventilate. hood and whether it's effective. This is another one where a lot of them are really loud and so people don't want to use them, but we would really recommend using that ventilation hood on as loud a setting as you can tolerate.

And if you really can't tolerate the loudness of the setting, maybe get a new one because it does make a huge difference in terms of being able to clear the particulates and also any other VFCs or other issues that could be coming from your gas stove. We're definitely not on like, oh my God, everyone should remove a gas stove. If I was designing a home specifically, the only thing I cared about was health impacts. I would probably put an electric stove in there, but people love gas stoves. We're not anti those so long as you have good ventilation. And a lot of the particulate concern is actually coming from the food itself.

That's not coming from the stove. And so it doesn't matter whether you're cooking on gas or electric. You're still going to get that particular spike, which, yeah, talking about, you know, everyone that I've talked to that has either an air monitor or an air purifier with a sensor, anywhere near their kitchen, we'll see that enormous spike when you're cooking. So that's one thing. Another thing worth talking about in the kitchen, but also throughout the home is water. We haven't talked a lot about water so far. And that's one of the areas in terms of the inputs into your home and into your body that you really do have a lot of control over. So at Lightwork, we test two different

sources of water in your home. We test your drinking water and then we test your shower water as well. And the reason that we do that is for two different reasons. One is that the set of contaminants that we're concerned about for drinking water is actually different than the set of contaminants that we're concerned about for shower water. Drinking water, we're much more concerned about heavy metals. We are concerned to some degree with trihalomethanes, which are also known as disinfection byproducts,

and these are chemicals that can emerge in water due to the interaction of organic material and the disinfection process at the municipal level. and so those show up both in drinking water but also often in shower water and there is some evidence of health impacts for both ingestion and also inhalation through hot water vaporizing in the shower and then you breathing it in and then also dermal exposure. So what we're looking at is for drinking water, heavy metals and trihalomethanes. We'll also look at fluoride remineralization but those things are a little bit secondary. and then in shower water we're looking for primarily trihalomethanes which are a particular type of volatile organic compound.

What this all means for people is that I think 94% of the homes that we've tested have elevated levels of trihalomethanes in their shower water. This is pretty much a universal issue because almost everyone has water that is treated somewhere upstream municipally flowing into their flowing into their home. Now, there's varying levels, people have varying sensitivity. There is,

you know, this doesn't mean that this is the number one problem in everyone's home, but it is something that's present for most people. Our recommendation there is there are two different options. The best option is a whole home filter with a large amount of activated carbon, and that will, in most cases, severely reduce,

remove those trihalomethanes. That has the added benefit of also removing or reducing those trihalomethanes for your drinking water because I'll get into this, but our recommendation for drinking water is reverse osmosis, but reverse osmosis does not remove trihalomethanes. Reverse osmosis will remove heavy metals, et cetera, et cetera. There is a whole interesting body of research right now on the number of unregulated and often untested for disinfection byproducts that are emerging in our water supply. There's a special test that we do called a total tax test that goes beyond sort of standard

water testing that's regulated by the EPA and into a bunch of unregulated trihalomethanes. And those are elevated in almost every home that we've ever done that test in. And again, can only be removed through activated carbon, either through a whole home filter or through a shower filter. So bottom line, there's a lot to test for in water. Fortunately, the recommendations are fairly straightforward, which is best case scenario, we know this isn't accessible for everyone.

Best case scenario would be a whole home filter with a large amount of activated carbon that will remove many things entering the home, but specifically focused on removing chlorine and trilomethanes. Then you want to pair that with an undersink or reverse osmosis filter ideally with a remineralization cartridge that will add back in calcium and magnesium to try to get you as close to

essentially what we're trying to do here is mimic spring water and there is a slightly more expensive but in many ways simpler shortcut which is just to drink spring water there are delivery services find a spring.org cool place to go on a road trip you can fill up

like a glass jug from a spring which I think is just a cool human experience to drink water that's coming straight out of the ground and know that you don't need to purify it or do anything to it. But, you know, in terms of something that you can just install in your home and never have to think about it again, reverse osmosis underneath the sink, whole home filter. If you don't have access to putting in a whole home filter, you can put in shower filters. We particularly recommend the Sante shower filter that has carbon KDF.

That one is going to be more effective in removing more trihalomethanes. But, you know, this is one of the things that we work with clients to understand, okay, the details of their home and how their home uses water. One of the things that we're frustrated by that doesn't exist is there's not an effective bath filter standalone for a number of reasons because of like water flow concerns and it's very difficult. So you need more water for a bath than you do for a shower and it's physically challenging. We know some people that are working on it.

But yeah, right now there is not a good equivalent sort of bath filter as there is for a shower filter. So if you have a child that is at the age of taking bass primarily. or if you as an adult very reasonably want to take baths, then a whole home filter is going to be better for you. Yeah, one hack because we can't put in a home filter where we're at right now. So one hack that we do for a child's nursery where we have a bath, we have these custom shower, not custom to us,

but there's this local company here in LA, no affiliation with them, just known them for a long time, recommended them. It's called O2 Oxygen, run by a William Wedling. and they make these large kind of custom filters based on a design that he has. You guys, no, no, they make it for shower. And then we run a like kind of a long shower head that has like a long hose.

So when we fill up our baby's bath water, he's still young enough that he's got the smaller bath that you do it in. But even still, when he gets older, there is a bath that's in that room. And we would just turn on the shower filter. the challenge is you just got to turn it on a little bit early, but you've seen the flow.

Like the flow is pretty strong. Yeah, totally. From that one. That's our hack around that, but there hasn't been a good bath filter that we've come across. Yeah. To me, the concern is the filter looks so small on there. Is it actually doing anything besides chlorine?

Like, what have you found for a lot of these companies that are like marketing these shower heads and other stuff? Like, I look at mine. My shower head filter is massive. And it's kind of an eyesore. Most people are not going to want to use it. Right. It's probably almost like a foot long.

And then, you know, I get my wife is like, why don't we move to this? Like it looks so much more beautiful. I'm like, I don't know if that's filtering out as many things because it's just such a tiny filter inside. Filter baby, you know, this one, that one. There's so many Instagram ads for different ones that are out there. We did a deep dive on this four or five months ago. So my recollection is at that time, maybe something has changed. But my recollection is you're exactly right.

Those things are great for chlorine, but they're not effective enough to remove these types of disinfection byproduct, trihalomethanes, which removed chlorine is great. You should do that. It would be better to use filter baby or something similar rather than have bath water that's not filtered at all. but our recommendation would be to try to get to a place where you've got, yeah, a filter with more KDF carbon or a whole home filter. The kitchen? Anything else you want to mention about the kitchen?

No, I think just another plug, we already mentioned this earlier in the podcast, but all the stuff that, you know, Alcenaed Branch Basics, other folks are talking about. We also recommend Branch Basics,

no affiliation. We just also think they're great. But, yeah, reducing, not putting food in plastic, not cooking on non-stick pans. you know, clean laundry detergent, clean dishwasher detergent, et cetera. All that stuff is very important. The research on that is reasonably strong, et cetera.

We support our clients with that. I don't think we need to go massively deep into it on this podcast. We didn't touch on the living room. Is there anything unique about the living room that isn't there for any other rooms? I think we could just hop through like a couple things I want to touch on in the home gym and then some like sort of miscellaneous around the house. So one thing that we see in home gyms a lot, a lot of times, folks will just sort of use like the random extra room as the home gym that like weirdly doesn't

have any windows or has like I walked into a number of gyms where I'm like wait why why would we want to spend time in here that's supposed to be like relaxing and supportive um anyways the one thing I would say about the home gym is oftentimes people put a lot of equipment in there or like flooring that gives off this like rubber VOC kind of smell it's not clear to us when exactly those VOS are problematic versus when they're not because like natural rubber is going to off gas and produce some type of smell and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's problematic for health. That being said, just on the precautionary principle side, we would recommend if you have the ability to do so, putting an air purifier in your home gym that specifically has a boatload

of activated carbon. You want like a lot. Essentially, more carbon is better and Aller Air and Austin Air are great for that. Putting that in your home gym will help reduce that smell and also remove any VOCs that could potentially be problematic, off gasing off of your gym equipment. And obviously you're going to be in that room. You're going to be breathing more heavily. You're going to be taking more breaths.

So probably worth emphasizing that more strongly than, you know, some other random rooms in your house that you're not spending a lot of time in. So that's one thing on the home gym. Some of these rubber mats that people use, they're made out of recycle tires, right? and just, you know, just be mindful. If you look this up, especially in California, there are Prop 65 warnings, and unfortunately they use a lot of these recycled tires in sort of kids gymnasiums or kids playgrounds in the area.

And these tires are, besides, you know, when it's an enclosed area, you're worried about air quality. But, you know, just look up the manufacturer, see what it is, do a little bit of Googling. they often will have lead exposure, but they're just sold with a Prop 65 label, right? And again, if you're sweating, if you're breathing, if it's an enclosed room,

you're just trying to pay attention to it. Not all of them are made with recycled tires, but that is a problematic thing just to be paying attention to. And that is actually a great segue into another thing that I wanted to talk about, which is sort of lawns and in this case, sort of fake lawns astroturf. There are some healthier options on this from,

but there are a lot of sort of like fake grass products out there that are made from recycle tires or otherwise problematic materials. And then those things get hot. You have pets or you have kids out there playing on those things. Can get on your hands, can then get into your body. Again, you know, the dose response of how big a deal this is compared to everything else I think is a little unclear.

It's probably very dependent on the person and the climate and how much time you're spending. But I, you know, I would recommend trying to have real grass in your lawn if you can or not, or if you're going to do some sort of grass replacement or fake grass having it be something that's as non-toxic as you can find. And I'm sure there's some good options out there. The other thing to say is just trying to be mindful of your pesticide or bicide use on your lawns and gardens because any pesticide herbicides otherwise that you're going to be spraying right

near your home is going to get into your air, could get into produce, anything that you grow in your garden and then could be a piece of the exposure for you. So that's an area that you have enormous amount of control over. So, you know, obviously we, you know, want our lawns and gardens to look nice, but just being mindful with the choices that you're making. That's another thing that we sometimes will work with clients like gardening staff or or landscaping staff to support with seeing if they can meet their goals for what they're aiming to create in terms of the environment or growing food.

without needing to spray as much. And hopefully this is an area where I hope technology gets better and better and we just don't have to rely on these chemical options. I saw not for the home, but in our newsletter last week, we wrote about a robotics company at a San Francisco, I forgot the name,

but we'll link to in the show notes, who's now using autonomous sort of tractors that are using UV light to go in and where they would normally have to use a ton of pesticides for strawberries. They're using UV light to get rid of pest and weeds and other stuff. And they work 24 hours a day. They're operating even at night.

You know, I can't wait for like things like this to scale because then it's like a lot of these, you know, things that we've just had to use to create more yield and to make farmers lives easier. And that our, you know, our economy is kind of dependent on because people all want cheap food. You know, we were kind of stuck using that. And then you got, you got all sorts of like industry trying to keep it alive. So the more that we can get interesting technology, robotics involved, I'm very hopeful that the future could be a future that just has a lot less pesticide dependency than we do right now. Yeah, I think that's a very, I used to work for a company that did. We made adjuvants to support making organic pesticides closer to as effective as synthetic pesticides. Yeah, very much in support of that.

And I also, in a past life, was on the Stanford golf team. And I spent, like, easily got my 10,000 hours in on golf courses. And so I'm suspecting that at some point later in my life, that pesticide exposure will come back to bite me. Because certainly there was some moments where I'd pick up the golf ball and it'd be sort of, like, suspiciously blue. And I would just kind of shrug and be like, oh, okay, well, I'll just kind of rub it on my pants, no big deal. So, yeah, golf courses also, I would say, you know, if you're out there playing golf, just being really intentional about, like not touching your hand to your mouth and et cetera, et cetera, and trying to, you know, wash your hands frequently and stuff.

But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of exposures in our world that are problematic. One of the things that we appreciate the opportunity that we get to do at Lightwork is to help people, at least in the environment that we have a lot of control over, create an environment that's as conducive to health as possible. And then just, you know, make intelligent choices throughout your day without being paralyzed because, you know, we also got to get out there and live our lives and, you know, doing things like playing golf and enjoying, you know, fresh fruit and stuff is part of the joys of life. Do you think that there's a story, whether it's the founder's story or just one like human story that you could say like,

even if it was multifactorial, but is there like a human story that you think that is, is something you feel comfortable mentioning? I can walk through how Laywork was founded. Our founders, Andy and Alexa Bromberg had a number of really challenging health problems in their home. And so essentially they were living in Austin at the time, had been living in his home for a couple of years. all of a sudden starting to have sleep problems, a bunch of cognitive issues, immune issues, just general mysterious health problems that I'm sure, you know, I've certainly seen in many family members, many friends, and I'm sure folks in your audience might be familiar with as well.

And they sort of went down the rabbit hole, I've tried to figure out what it was because they noticed that they tended to feel better when they were away from home and worse when they were home. Which, by the way, that's like a big signal for anybody who's listening today. If you feel better when you go away and you come back and then some of your symptoms come, that's a red flag right there. Yeah, absolutely. If you see that, it's worth investigating.

You know, you're seeing, you know, when you're changing one variable, you're seeing something change, and that's certainly an indication to go deeper. Yes, that's what Andy and Alexa were seeing. And they sort of went on this mission to see if there were people out there that could help them. They're working during Austin. So obviously, a lot of resources in terms of health support. They worked with a number of mold inspectors. They did find a mold problem that was pretty mild, actually, in their home,

but was probably contributing to some degree to their issues. But through both investigating on their own and then finding some other people to come and support them, it actually turned out that they had a severe magnetic field issue due to a buried power line right behind their bedroom. And it was interesting, you know, Andy, his background is as a tech founder and he came into the whole process thinking, no way EMFs are not affecting health.

There's no evidence of that. Sort of went down the rabbit hole, came out the other side, thinking, oh, no, there's actually a there there. And there are our reasons to decrease our exposure to these things. And through the process of trying to figure out this, again, like multifactorial equation of what are all the ways that my home could be impacting my health? And how do those things potentially complement each other and contribute to a holistic stress load when I'm spending time in the house?

He, you know, by the time they had figured out their own problem and remedied the house and generally started to feel a lot better. They realize, you know, this is actually a big hole in the market, that there's no one-stop shop for people to just have someone who is extremely science-backed come in and look at all the exposures and give them a comprehensive view of, here's what's going on in your home, here are the priorities, here's how to fix it. And so I think Annie in Alexa stories is particularly illustrative because they're having these specific symptoms that are really disrupting their life. It turned out to be a combination of a number of different sources, and they were able to fix it. Add in a little bit, you know, you talked about light work, you talked about the founder, how the company got started. You know, you yourself, what makes you so passionate about this? You know, you have a background of spending a lot of time outdoors.

You're a nature guy. You were involved in some, you know, how do we take care of our climate and general initiatives? I'm sure you had a lot of opportunities, especially being engineering background, Stanford. Why does this problem feel like a problem that resonates with you? My background is building technology to support solutions to the climate crisis. And then also for the last seven, eight years, have been a wilderness guide for outward bound and ran my own organization,

et cetera, creating extended experiences in the backcountry for people. And, you know, my through line throughout my, career has been trying to help us live more in alignment with the natural world, both on a macro level in terms of how humans as a species can be in better alignment and share this planet with the rest of the living world. And then also how we individually can understand our biology more fully and live in a way that the human organism was designed to live. And to that end, along with my wilderness guiding work, personally, I've done like two weeks

trying to live as close to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle as I could with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School and have really just been very curious about the ancestral context and the human organism. And I think Lightwork is just an amazing opportunity to bring those two things together to be very close to the data and emerging science and being able to build solutions that support people's lives. And then for the time that people do need to spend inside, because we've created lives in which we're going to spend a lot of time inside. and it appears to be trending that direction

for the foreseeable future. So it's a privilege and an honor to be able to support people in creating environments that are really supportive to their thriving. I think particularly for me, I get excited about doing that for kids because I think the trajectory that we get set on early in our lives has really ongoing health,

both benefits and also challenges that can be laid out for us. So trying to create environments for the early years of kids' lives and also to support their parents as something that I drive a lot of joy from. Well, it's just a super important topic, and it's even more important because as more awareness grows, more people get involved in this space.

And because of the nature of social media, clips on Instagram, on, you know, TikTok, everything else like that, it's hard to tell what you should pay attention to. It's hard to tell what's actually, you know, a problem. And it's hard to step out of the paralysis that comes from the fact that everything's going to kill you according to all the, you know, influencers that are out there.

And it's nice to have a team to be able to guide you and take you down the path of here's what matters. Here's what we actually tested. There's so many things in my home, just like we're talking about on today's podcast, that I was able to do. Like air quality, there are a bunch of things that you can do, right? Big picture. And then what's nice about a team like yours is that there's even further things, whether

it's mold, identifying the exact source of what's contributing to poor air quality in the home. There's a lot that we can do on our own. And then if you want to actually seriously take the step and make your home a place that's not only not poisoning you, but actually is contributing to your health, that's why I think that it's fantastic that a company like, you know, your guys exist because the only other solution that you have is working with a hodgepodge group of people or looking at social media, and it just gets so confusing, even if you're somebody that's in this space like me, I actually had a building biologist who seemed pretty well trained

from Los Angeles, come to my home and look at a lot of these things. And, you know, now that I've looked back at what he said, half of the recommendations that he told me were not fully correct. They were missing the mark. And I don't think he was trying to misinform me. I just don't think that he had put the pieces of the puzzle together. He was a little bit of like a mad scientist type, which a lot of these guys are, where they're very focused on one particular thing.

And if I only followed his recommendations, I would have missed the boat a little bit when it came to protecting my family at home. So I love that in this landscape, a company like your guys exist. And if you are listening and you're thinking about taking a little bit further beyond these recommendations that are here today, definitely check out lightwork and the world. that they do, I could not recommend them more. And Dom, it's been fantastic a chance to get to know you and for you to come in my own home and help me figure out the simple things that I could do to protect

my family better. The other thing that I'll say is I spend about a quarter of my time, actually reassuring people that their home is healthier than they think because there are a number of people out there who, through no fault of their own have had really gnarly, mysterious health problems that maybe they're concerned or their home is causing it. And, you know, a number of our clients come to us because they're really concerned. And then we're able to sort of exonerate their home and help them feel safer in the environment that they spend most of their time in. And that is also something that I think is really valuable about what we can offer is like

ruling out big concerns so that people can settle more fully into a feeling of safety. Dude, this happened with us. We have a school nearby us. And in that school, I don't know why, there's a massive cell tower. And it's probably, you know, 500, 500,000. yards from our home. And our wife was always worried, like, should we be living here? Is this an issue? Is this not an issue? And you guys came in and you tested and you said, listen, that doesn't really seem to be a thing that's there. And that definitely made us feel like, okay, cool, we don't need to worry

about that. There might be other things that we need to focus on, but we don't need to worry about that anymore and let our imagination run wild and think that we're like, you know, poisoning our child by living in this location. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we work with folks who are having some particular health issue. We also work with a ton of folks who just really care about their health and are aiming to be around for, you know, 50, 70, 100 plus more healthy years and just want to make sure that they're taking the actions now that are going to compound for years and years for them and also for their family.

So it's a joy to do this work and really awesome to speak with you today. We have the link to your guys' website, the landing page that we created together. Lightworkhome.com slash true. The link is in the show notes that people can check it out. Are you active on social media too? Can people follow you as well? I should be better about social media. Okay, so just find the light work team.

Yeah, the light work team is on there. You can certainly find me at Dom Franks and maybe I'll be a little bit better about doing light work stuff. You'll see a lot of me in the wilderness on there. Amazing, amazing. Brother, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Yeah, really appreciate it, Drew.

Thanks so much for having me on. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening.

Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an evening. easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization,

click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to drewproet.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.