The Next, Episode #56

The biggest problem in America, and how your home is making you sick

Hi there, and welcome to The Next - my take on health, wellness, and company building.

In the last few years I’ve founded 3 health brands (Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, Surely non-alc wine), which do tens of millions in revenue. I’m now working on Truemed, which allows health and wellness brands to accept HSA/FSA funds. Previously, I worked in tech and had no experience in CPG, DTC, or any other 3-letter industries.

If you missed past episodes, I recommend checking out The Great American Poisoning, my manifesto on what’s going on with our chronic disease crisis. Otherwise, let’s dive in! 

🆕 What’s new

Today I want to bring attention to the meta-issue I think is the biggest in America. Let’s talk regulatory capture. 

Regulatory capture is the all-to-common phenomenon where regulators - FDA, CDC, DHS, etc - get captured by the very companies they’re meant to regulate. Once this happens, the pace of innovation within an industry drastically slows down, and new rules and regulations are created for the benefit of incumbent big companies: not for the industry as a whole. 

Today, I believe this is literally the biggest issue in America: the fact that many of our regulating agencies create rules that benefit a small number of companies with large lobbying budgets, rather than benefit the people or spur innovation in a given industry.

Bill Gurley gave a fantastic talk on this phenomenon that is well worth watching. I’ve gone deep on our food and agriculture systems, and regulatory capture is everywhere. 

Regulatory capture is why food stamp recipients can (and do!) spend food stamps on Coca-Cola and other sugary beverages, but can’t buy a whole hot chicken. It’s why the USDA subsidizes tobacco 4x more than they subsidize fruits and vegetables. It’s why pizza is a vegetable (according to Congress and the school lunch program), and why our food pyramid has created the sickest generation of American kids to ever exist. It’s not because government scientists are worse than normal ones: it’s because 95% of the “experts” that create our nutritional guidelines have conflicts with food or pharma companies! 

I’ve only gone deep into how regulatory capture plays out in our food and health industries, but it exists in others: the Federal Reserve, the FDA, the FCC… simply perusing Wikipedia’s page on regulatory capture will give you a sense of just how pervasive this issue is. 

Regulatory capture is a big reason why I am so pro the recent Chevron decision that pares back the power of unaccountable, unelected regulatory bodies. As farmer Joel Salatin has stated, for a small farmer like him regulations have made it such that everything he wants to do is illegal. 

While I strongly feel that over-regulation and regulatory capture drive up costs, strangle innovation, and harm many of the people impacted by regulation… I also have basically no idea what to do about it. 

Learning more about this problem (and how to solve it) is something I’m currently very interested in. Today, I’d argue that many of our federal agencies are bloated and corrupt. The challenge of the next decade will be fixing and improving these agencies, and I’d love to know how we can make that happen. 

💪 Health stuff

I’ve written a bunch about how our environment is poisoning us and leading to the sickest generation of Americans we have ever seen. Well, I suspect that one of the under-rated contributors to poor health outcomes is the buildings where one spends a lot of time: your home, or office! 

Nowhere do people spend more time than their home environment, yet so few people realize the impact that their home environment has on their health. There are environmental toxicants in air + water in most homes, microplastics, phthalates, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and PFAS in most home products, paints, and furniture. And that’s not to mention mold, EMFs, poor lighting, air quality issues… all of these can contribute to a home environment that harms your health. 

Disease arises when our current environment is far removed from our ancestral environments. Our ancestors lived outside by default, ate seasonally and locally, moved often, and had plenty of fresh air. 

Our home environments are wildly different than our ancestral environments. Let’s start with light: most homes are poorly lit, and often have lux (a measure of light intensity) levels 100-1000x lower than exposure levels you’d get outside, even in the shade. Our light environments also impact our circadian rhythms: most lightbulbs in most homes today emit a constant stream of blue light, which impacts your circadian rhythm and thus your ability to sleep, digest, your energy levels… all kinds of things. 

Not only do most lightbulbs emit blue light, but they also flicker! Because of differences in how LEDs are powered, they turn on and off again, thousands of times per minute! Try this as an experiment: film an LED light in your home using the “slo-mo” setting, and play back the recording. Likely, you’ll see lights flickering thousands of times a minute, at rates you only notice sub-perceptually. This constant flickering in your environment has real impact on mood, and can even cause seizure or long-term neurological damage (link)! To address, simply buy incandescent bulbs (or I’m trying these circadian bulbs + will report back shortly). 

It’s not just light: your water almost certainly contains all kinds of pesticides, herbicides, PFAS, and other chemicals that are not filteredt. Check your zip code in the EWG water database to see what toxins might be in your water. For most cities in the US, it’s not a pretty picture. 

And it’s not just water! Homes today are filled with stagnant air that contains lots of dust, allergens, and mold. HVAC and air filtration systems in most homes were built to satisfy minimum filtration requirements, not to promote optimal health. Many air environments have huge amounts of CO2, and plenty of dust and other allergens. 

There’s also mold! More and more homes today (and the people within them) experience mold issues. This is largely due to the advent of air conditioning (one of the great wonders of civilization). AC is great, but it does create temperature differentials, increasing the chance that water leaks and condenses, thus promoting mold growth. 

The way we build homes today also increases likelihood of mold. With the current wooden frame + drywall structure, there are plenty of corners where mold can proliferate, and do so on a medium (wood) that mold enjoys. Contrast this to brick houses (naturally anti-microbial and anti-mold), and our homes today are ripe for mold problems.

In addition to all the above, there are concerns around EMFs (which I’ll write about in a future episode), toxic chemicals found in paint, primers, furniture… the list goes on. 

I believe that fixing your home environment is one of the highest-leverage things you can do to improve your health. As I’ve said before, environmental toxicant exposure is one of the biggest health issues of our time. And cleaning up your home and work environments - places where you spend 70%+ of your time - will make a huge difference. 

🤑 Biz stuff

I also suspect that helping people detox their homes is a huge business opportunity. 

https://x.com/IntegratedAlex/status/1791985595650105435 

The home services space is HUGE, with multiple $40B+ public companies in the space, and none of these public companies think about their industries through the lens of health. I suspect you could sell an annual checkup that gives people peace of mind that their home isn't making them sick. 

I'd pay for this in a heartbeat (in fact, I have). And because health-oriented people make many decisions through a health lens, you could sell a TON of other services to customers. Think pest control (with non-toxic sprays), lawn care (with non-toxic stuff), pool maintenance (with non-toxic chemicals), and so on. 

We are very early in this cycle, but I believe people will start to invest more money and energy in detoxing their homes in the very near future. And I think there’s a huge opportunity to build a business that helps people improve the health of their home environments. 

I actually had a friend (who recently started the home health company Lightwork) do a full review of my house. If you’re interested in learning more about them, check out their site or reply to this email and I can introduce you. Or, if you want to view my full results (including some fuzzy photos of my house haha), see here!

😌 Dope stuff on the internet

Some of my favorite things since the last newsletter (note: I don’t get paid to recommend anything here):

• 📰  Article - This whole article does a great job debunking Big Skincare’s decades-long argument that the sun is bad for you and causes cancer. I’ve written about this before, but I firmly believe the evidence at this point is firmly on the side of “sunlight is good for you”. If anything, the lack of sunlight is linked to the types of skin cancers that are actually deadly! For more on this topic, I’d also recommend giving this a read.
  

• 📚 Book rec - I recently finished The Prize, a marathon history of oil and the role it’s played in geopolitics, economics, industrialization… pretty much everything. The book is exceptionally well-written, and gave me a major appreciation for just how important energy costs are to developed economies. I’ve long believed that we should be investing far, far more into nuclear energy (for reasons) than we are today. And something that stood out in the book - especially given the current conflict in the Middle East - is just how many times in past decades the US was on the verge of investing in cheaper, CO2-free nuclear energy, and just… didn’t. Instead, we chose to remain dependent on oil-exporting countries, and have continued this policy mistake for more than 50 years now.
  

• ⌚ Cool product - One of the biggest consumer trends of our time of our time is the alcohol moderation movement. More and more I’m seeing people drinking less and looking for alternatives to drinking regularly. It’s for this reason I helped incubate Surely non-alc wines several years ago. And now, the Surely team is launching Arlow: the first low-alcohol wine of its kind.
  I’m happy to write more about how the team went through the process of launching Surely on a shoestring budget, and how they turned customer learnings around moderation intothe Arlow opportunity. If y’all want to hear me write about that (or any of my company founding stories), just reply and let me know!
  

• 🎵 Music - This set from Simon Doty is great, and is easily the most fun set I’ve seen played in a kitchen 😂. Enjoy, and if that’s not your vibe give Anjunadeep 15 another listen.
  

• 🏀 Random - This finding is just weird. Studies found that - somehow - previous sexual partners among flies seemed to impact future offspring. I have no idea if this generalizes to mammals, no idea if this is a real finding period… but it’s one of those very strange things about the world that suggests that our models of reality may not be what we think.
  

• 🔥Hot take - IVF will continue to grow in popularity. I suspect that is it gets more popular, we’ll see more somewhat strange effects like that fact that IVF results in more boys.
  

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - Give Arlow a try this summer. If you don’t like it, I’ll venmo back what you paid for it 😉

***

Enjoy the last month of summer and be sure to get outside. I’ll be in SF and LA the next few weeks, so if you’re around please say hi! Otherwise, see you next month 👋

• Justin