2. Lawn Pesticides

This episode of The Sweaty Penguin is brought to you by seasonal allergies. Seasonal allergies, because breathing isn't supposed to be easy. Welcome to episode two of The Sweaty Penguin and Artica's hottest podcast. I'm your host Ethan Brown, and if this is your first time, here's a quick recap of how this works. Each episode I talk about a specific environmental issue, then we bring on one expert and two student guests, one who's more liberal or liberal leaning, and one who's more conservative or conservative leaning, and both with no prior knowledge of the issue besides my little spiel. And so we chat with the expert a bit, and then we'll ask our guests about their first impressions of the issue, and see if we find some agreement. And we've got a fun one for you today. We are talking about lawns, or as your dog calls it, the bathroom. Specifically, we're going to talk about pesticides, but before we get into that, we should quickly cover a few definitions to be sure we're on the same page. Definitions are important. If you thought BBC stood for barbecue bacon cheeseburger, he'd be in for an awkward conversation when your boss asked you what you had for lunch. First, the word pesticide. Pesticides are substances used to control pests. And like the sizes of Domino's pizza slices, all pesticides are different. There's herbicides which control weeds or unwanted plants, insecticides which control insects, wrote denticides which control robins, and fungicides which control fungi. Fun guy, of course, meaning "guy" theory, immediately after biting into a lobster ravioli. There's also variation in pesticides toxicity toward humans. And that brings us to our next word, toxic. Brittany. Brittany, Brittany, come on, I'm trying to do the monologue. Just shut up Brittany. Thank you. Toxic, as we know, means something that's bad or harmful, but there's a little more to it. Is sugar in itself toxic? No, our body needs sugars for energy. Is 500 bags of sour patch kids toxic? Yeah, your tongue would be in pain, and your butt would shoot out rainbow diarrhea for a week. And that's true of everything. Everything will make you shoot out rainbow diarrhea at a high enough quantity. Another word that needs definition is organic, which again seems simple, but there's confusion. The real definition of organic is anything derived from living matter. So while organic and toxic are so often used as opposites, they're really not at all. Poison ivy is both organic and toxic. My ex-girlfriend is both organic and toxic. Now, a lot of people assume that something labeled organic is pesticide-free, but that's not true. Organic just describes the type of pesticide used on the product. Some pesticides are organic and come from nature, and others are synthetic and made in a lab, and the USDA regulates which are considered organic and which are not. So let's dive in with one of the most used and talked about pesticides in the world. The company behind the maker of Roundup weed killer plans to appeal on more than $2 billion verdict against it. The chemical company Monsanto has fought back against lawsuits claiming the weed killer Roundup can cause cancer. The main ingredient is Roundup, which is a weed killer. It's called Glyphosate. For every pesticide, there is a brand name like Roundup, but scientists prefer to call it by its chemical name glyphosate. Sort of like how Duane Johnson's brand name is The Rock, but Kevin Hart calls him Guy who gets me jobs. They're interchangeable. Roundup kills most plants, including grass and crops. So Monsanto, the company who produces Roundup, has been able to genetically modify crops to be Roundup resistant. They've been genetically modified to withstand being sprayed with Glyphosate. It kills the weeds, but not the crop. Today, 90% of America's corn crops are genetically modified using Monsanto's technology to tolerate Glyphosate. Essentially, genetically modifying crops is like getting the star power in Mario Kart and then driving directly into a bomb. It will wipe out everything around you, but not you. So now that corn and many other crops have literal superpowers, farmers don't have to selectively spray pesticides on weeds. They can just make it rain Roundup on their entire field, allowing them to scale up production massively. And while that has a huge economic benefit, it also leads to this. The research out today, discovered trace amounts of Glyphosate in oats, granolas, and snack bars. As we told you yesterday, strawberry, spinach, and kale top, they're so-called dirty dozen lists of produce with the most pesticide contamination. Small traces of Glyphosate, a weed killer, being found in some beer and wine. That's right, there is a chemical in beer and wine that has horrific public health impacts. The CDC has noted the chemical's potential to elevate risks of cancer and the World Health Organization has attributed three million deaths per year to it, saying it causes 5.1% of the global burden of disease. And that chemical is alcohol. That's right, alcohol does that. And alcohol is what Britney. Thank you, Britney. So some trace amounts of Roundup are popping up in our food and beverages. But that's more a result of farmers spraying their crops with Roundup than homeowners using it on lawns. However, pesticides applied to a home lawn can not only come in contact with your pets and children, but it can leach into the groundwater and get swept into downstream water bodies when it rains, which can upset habitats and even contaminate drinking water. So as critical thinkers, we now ask how toxic is Roundup? And as it turns out, there's quite a bit of disagreement on that. On the one hand, there's Monsanto, who's not only Roundup's producer, but also its biggest fan. Just listen to this commercial. Okay, come on, Monsanto. Not all snakes are mad. Just because Voldemort Snake and Agenia's mad doesn't mean all snakes are mad. You can't generalize about all snakes. But while Monsanto's ads were fun, their loviest were not. In the mid-1980s, a new study prompted scientists from the APA to classify glyphosate as possibly "castogenic" to humans. Monsanto refused to accept the finding. This went on and on, until eventually in the early 1990s, the APA decided to just go along with Monsanto and overrule its own toxicologists. And completely cock-blocking scientists is a little terrifying, because let's face it, they get cock-blocked enough. Monsanto's been blocking and denying studies, linking glyphosate to non-hatchkins lymphoma for decades, even as recently as 2015. When the International Agency for Research on Cancer launched a review. In an email, Monsanto's lead toxicologist wrote, "What we've long been concerned about has happened. "Glyphosate is on for an IRC review." Monsanto launched a PR campaign to denounce and discredit the review, including a plan to orchestrate outcry. "Orchestrate outcry, Monsanto. "How mad do you expect people to get?" "Rattle's, Nick, man." "Oh, right, right. "I should have known that." So while Monsanto's blocking science in one corner, there are so many other corner making unfounded claims that Roundup is actually worse than any scientific study would suggest. Take this presentation by MIT's Dr. Stephanie Senif, which, like Roundup, needs a giant warning label on the front. You can even find a much larger number of plots, all of them showing strong correlations between disease and Roundup. This one is autism, so the number of the autism in the, when molding the skulls is in the yellow squares, and the red plot is the glyphosate applied to corn and soil. This is a.99 Pearson correlation coefficient. I never see, you never see numbers like that in correlations. They always say correlation just not necessarily mean causation. In this case, I think it does. Okay, first of all, autism is not a disease. The autism community has been battling for years to make that known, and saying that under the guise of helping them is preposterous. Second, autism rates went up largely because we're still learning about it, and numbers likely would have been higher in previous years had we known more. And third, even if autism did go up, and even if autism and glyphosate do have a near-perfect correlation, correlation does not imply causation. Just because two things change at the same rate does not mean one cause the other. And if you think.99 couldn't be a coincidence, here are some other datasets that have the same correlation. Female editors of the Harvard Law Review and females at Pennsylvania who slipped or tripped to their death.992. Divorcerate in Maine and per capita consumption of Margarine.993. A number of people killed by dogs and online revenue on Black Friday.996. And while so much of me wishes that divorced couples in Maine were eating Margarine by the spoonful, it's just not true. And with a little more digging, you'll find out Dr. Senif is not a doctor in toxicology, but a doctor in computer science, working in MIT's computer science and AI lab, and publishing glyphosate papers in open access, non-pure-review journals, to the heated criticism of others in the scientific community. That's like letting me write a book on ethics because I took one philosophy course freshman year. Does Dr. Senif represent the scientific community? Of course not. But it's worth noting that on the question of how toxic Roundup is, there's a lot of disagreement. The EPA's safe daily level for the average person is 140 milligrams, while California's is 1.1 milligrams. So after 50 years of research, there still isn't a clear answer. And this sort of uncertainty exists with a multitude of pesticides, where we know it's unhealthy to some degree, but we don't know the safe minimum standard. So where do we go from here? One option is to discuss the way lawn pesticides are regulated, which varies from place to place. In Florida, for example, if you run a lawn care company and want to apply pesticides, there's a lot of red tape as this business owner explains. If you want to spread pesticide or we control products on turf, on the actual grass of a yard, that you're being paid for, you have to have a pest control business license. Now that can be difficult to get because it requires experience, either three years of experience as the service employee of another licensee, or some education and one year's worth of experience. And remember, this is Florida. The only law stricter than this in Florida is that alligators need to use the crosswalk when crossing the street. Now what about the law for a homeowner who just wants to spray pesticides in their yard? As long as you follow, the manufacturer's directions about proper safety equipment and how to apply a product safely and properly, you're very rarely ever going to run into any type of legal issues applying fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides on your own property. So as far as Florida's concern, you homeowners go knock yourselves out, just stay safe. That's right. You can just pick up a jug of ramped up at Home Depot and start spraying weeds in your lawn. And while these pesticides do have labels that explain how to apply them safely, one could debate whether or not that's enough. Personally, I can't even put together the game mouse trap by reading the label. And of course, it makes sense that if business needs more knowledge and expertise than a homeowner. But does this level of disparity make sense? In most parts of the United States, pesticide laws are a similar structure to Florida's, but some places took a different approach. Montgomery County is now the first county in the nation to restrict the use of certain pesticides on private lawns and county owned property. This was 2015 in Maryland. And while it doesn't ban every pesticide, it bans most synthetic pesticides and most herbicides, which are used to control weeds. And that brings up a couple interesting questions. First, is an outright ban a good idea? And second, do we need to be striving for a completely green grass lawn? Are we okay with some clover and dandelions? Of course, some of these pests are harmless, while others like ticks can actually cause blind disease, so maybe the real question is if there's a happy medium. Policy aside, what can homeowners do? First, there's some basic precautions. Spray the right amount. Don't spray right before it rains. Don't drink round up out of the can. They can also think about the way in which they manage their lawn. One group is going organic, which won't give a fully green grass lawn, but many pesticides in the organic category are not toxic toward humans at all. Cedar oil, for example, prevents ticks. This one actually surprised me, because if I were a tick and found out a lawn was covered in oil, I'd bring all my tick friends into a slip-and-slide contest. But I guess ticks aren't the creative type. Another option, which can get you a green lawn, is called Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. IPM is a holistic approach to mitigating pests that focuses on the actual ecosystem of your lawn. Sometimes that requires some targeted pesticides use, but it can also involve reducing the amount of shade and mulching your yard for pests to hide, or creating an environment where predators of your pests can thrive. As this video explains, IPM requires the homeowner and the expert to work together to create a personalized plan. Kathy? Things look great. I haven't seen any signs of infestation or any conditions that would put you at risk. It looks like you've been really committed to applying the principles of IPM. I think our teamwork is really paying off. And with that, the first pesticide-themed porno was born. Since IPM requires working with an expert and using a slew of strategies to keep pests at day, it can reduce your use of pesticides while providing the green lawn you want. However, hiring that expert costs money, and the homeowner may even need to put some time and labor in themselves. So as appealing as it sounds, it may not be right for everyone. I understand it's difficult to discuss pesticides when our information is diluted to the point where you can go on three different websites and read three completely different things. But I think it's safe to say not every lawn pesticide is safe, and we need to have a real conversation about how to allow for reliable, bias-free science to understand them better, and determine the right amount of caution to use in the meantime. And what should that conversation not be, Brittany? You're walking outside. Your breath is short. Your nose is runny. Your eyes are watering. Oh no, you think. Did I get coronavirus? Nope. You got seasonal allergies. Bet you didn't see that coming. Seasonal allergies. Just because they're not in the news doesn't mean they're not cool too. Welcome back to the sweaty penguin, and if you're tuning in for the first time today, just a quick reminder that we are recording during the coronavirus pandemic. So no fancy microphones or studios here were just on a Zoom call because there's nothing college students want more right now than to be on yet another Zoom call. With me today is Ben Brode, a junior at University of Connecticut studying communications, and Spencer Brown, a freshman at Quinnipiac University studying accounting. We also have an expert in the house, literally in the house, because he is my dad. Christopher Brown is the co-founder and CEO of TD and Brown lawn care, a company that combines science with practical knowledge to provide unique lawn care solutions for Connecticut and New York homes. Dad, Spencer, Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you. So I'm going to kick things off with a couple questions and then let Ben and Spencer ask some. First, Dad, when you see a weed, how mad does it make you? I don't get mad at all personally. I understand that most people like, or most of the people we deal with like to have their lawn without weeds. However, it doesn't really bother me all that much, and it also goes to what is the definition of a weed, and literally there's no plant that is considered inherently to be a weed. The definition of a weed is a plant out of place. It's a plant that you don't want. So if you've got a garden bed with flowers and there's grass growing in there, the grass is a weed in that spot. However, out on the lawn, it's not a weed. It's what we want. How much work went into getting licensed to commercially apply pesticides on lawns? Do you think it's the right amount of rent tape or do you think there should be more or less? It's different in each state and Connecticut walks an interesting balance where each company has to have one supervisor, and that somebody has passed the supervisory exam, and that is really hard. I've heard, and I can't corroborate this with any kind of facts or figures, but I've heard that somewhere in the neighborhood of about 93 to 94 percent of the people who take the supervisory exam actually fail it. So it's very difficult. I got that license many years ago shortly after I graduated with a degree in turf grass science, where I had literally been spending four years studying this stuff, and I even found that test to be challenging. Most of the people who take the exam didn't have the benefit of that kind of training before taking it. You only need one person to need this to have that license, but the applicators, the people actually going out and doing the services need to get what's called an operator certificate, which is a much, much easier test that really just makes sure they understand common sense safety precautions, that they understand the principles of what they're doing. So I think in terms of Connecticut, I think they almost make it too stringent on the top end, where it's just incredibly difficult to get that supervisory exam, but almost too easy on the bottom end for the people actually going out and doing the applications. Now, if you look at New York, they actually do it a little different. They kind of walk the middle of the road on this where anybody doing an application has to pass an exam that is pretty challenging, and you have to really study for it, you have to really know what you're doing, but the higher level supervisory exam is also easier than Connecticut. So New York kind of split the difference, and as much as it's frustrating from a business owner's perspective, because I have to get guys much higher trained up to get that New York license, I tend to agree with their philosophy more in that making it a little more difficult for the applicators to get the license that they really, really know what they're doing, but making it a little bit easier to get the supervisory license is probably the way to go. So I'd say Connecticut's got too much red tape on one end not enough on the other, and New York probably kind of hit it about right. Why is it that in a lot of places, a homeowner can just go to the store and buy pesticides without any restrictions or licensing? Is that fair to businesses? I think there's a lot of stuff that's very innocuous, and it's pretty easy to use, and homeowners could use it effectively with maybe a little bit of instruction that is probably pretty safe, but I think there are too many things available to homeowners that could be misused without the right kind of training, and that does create a frustration for me, and the fact that whenever there is some sort of pesticide regulation coming forward, they always go after the businesses who are the ones that are actually trained and licensed in how to use these products, and not after the homeowners who really have no training. And so that's, I think they're a huge opening right there for abuse and misuse and problems associated with it. So I know Teed and Brown uses integrated pest management, and I'm wondering what particular IPM strategies do you use, and to what degree do they differ from one to one? IPM is a bit of a loose term, it's a great philosophy, and it's also something that's a little bit difficult to implement on a large scale because you do need that hands-on one-on-one focus. But the way we implement it is by trying to get the right kind of grass seed into the area, talking to the customers about getting tree branches removed if there's too much shade in an area, improving the soil by adding composted leaves, there's a lot of different scientific things you can do to improve the environment, which then results in a lawn that needs far less support from chemical pesticides, or even fertilizers. I hear the criticism pop up that lawns are unnatural, pesticides are unnatural, human shouldn't be controlling nature, and I assume you disagree with that considering you're 25 years running a lawn care company, but what would your response be to that criticism? Well, to a certain extent, they are unnatural. I mean, I'm not necessarily showing away from the fact that this is not a totally natural thing. On the flip side to that, it's more natural than people like to think. Grass is evolved to need mowing because animals grazed on them, and so you had areas where animals were doing all the natural mowing of the grass, and you would have sort of, they would essentially be the precursors of lawns, and they can go out there and do the work of plants in terms of scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in terms of acting as a filtration system, with very little support. So yeah, it's unnatural, but I think it's in the end, if done correctly, and not being abused in terms of the maintenance practices, it's adding to the environment not detracting from it. Now, I'm going to hand it off to Spencer and Ben, who listened to the monologue just before the call, and Judd, down a few questions. So Ben, I'll hand it off to you. Is there any major difference when you apply organic versus synthetic pesticides? Honestly, I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference, and the organic program really is more about feeding the property. And what I tell people is we go back to that weed definition, as long as they don't mind the dandelions and clover and you know, plantain and those things in the lawn, then by definition, they're not a weed. And so by providing the nutrients from organic sources, you can feed all the plants, the grass plus those plants, included and create a pretty healthy stand. But organic pest control is something that's very difficult and very limited. Now, there's only a few products out that really do much of anything with any level of predictability or reliability. Now, that said, there's a lot of new products coming out of the market that are just tremendously safe. I'll give you one example. It's a product called a celloprint, which is new, and it's a synthetic chemical. But what it does is it's for white grubs, which is the larva of a beetle that feeds on the roots of the grass and can really destroy a lawn if left unchecked. Now, a celloprint acts by blocking calcium. And the reason that works is because grubs have a unique aspect of their physiology whereby they need calcium to transmit nerve impulses. And so by blocking the calcium, they can't transmit nerve impulses. They become paralyzed. They starve to death. They die. You've just taken care of your grub problem. Other insects and mammals and other non-target organisms, the ones that you might be concerned about, don't have that aspect of their physiology. And so this product is literally harmless to anything other than white grubs who have that unique thing. And that's a tremendously targeted safe product to use. You're never going to find something organic that is so specific and so targeted and so safe to use. And so we're getting to a point where the synthetic product, in many cases, are way safer than the organic alternatives. And so that's where I think we should be looking is what is the safest, most environmentally friendly way to do it. And forget about the organic versus synthetic labels. Let's just look at each one independently on its own merit. When you're looking for pests to use on the lawns, what are some red flags that prevent you from using that specific product? Repesta said. Yeah, that's a good question. The main thing we use is we go by with a very clear on the warning labels. LD50 is a measure of toxicity. And what that stands for is lethal dose to 50% of the population. And so we're going to go into the sort of distasteful end of the industry. And this is where they use lab rats and those kinds of things and they literally feed them these products as part of the testing. And you kind of keep ratcheting up the level that you give them until you've killed 50% of the population of the rats. So don't blame me. I didn't make up this system, but this is how it works. And so the LD50 is a measure of how much of the product it took to kill off 50% of the population. So if you think about that, a very low LD50 means that they very highly toxic products because that means it took very little of the product to kill off that many of the rats. A very high LD50 means it's a very low toxicity product because it took a lot of it to kill off the 50%. So there's three different main categories that products will fall under. The first one is danger poison. That's going to be on a label. You'll see a skull and crossbone that says danger/poison. Those are the most toxic ones with the lowest LD50s. The middle is warning. It was just say warning on there. And that means that it's sort of a middle level toxicity. And then the least toxic product says caution on it. And those are the ones that are really low in toxicity. Every product we use has that caution label on it. So if we're using a pesticide, we go with the ones with the least toxicity and we find the ones that work the best. The products that we use that are in that caution category oftentimes have a LD50 that's about 1 or 2% as toxic as table salt. In other words, table salt is about 50 to 100 times more toxic than the products that we're putting on the lawns. And if I could just back up to that other product that was talking about a little bit earlier, a celebrant, that actually is the first EPA product that doesn't even require you to have the word caution on it. Like they literally, because they could find no, they fed a ton of this stuff to the rats and they couldn't harm any of the rats. Spencer, take it away. From your experience, have you seen a pesticide application that harms the lawn? It is applied to NFSO. What was the experience like? Absolutely. I wouldn't say many cases, but it happened. And typically speaking, the reason that happens is because somebody did something wrong. It's not that they did it all right and somehow it ended up hurting the lawn. They did something wrong. And I've seen situations where we've gotten a call from a customer who said, "I've got weird brown spots on my lawn and we've come out and taken a look." And the weird brown spots are interestingly in the shape of footprints going from a garden bed over to a driveway. And you realize pretty quickly that the gardener went into the garden bed and very carefully sprayed weeds with roundup and very not carefully walked through those weeds and got it all over his shoes and then walked over to his truck in the driveway. So we've seen those kind of situations. Generally speaking, what level of involvement regarding a pesticide application plan in your opinion is best for the homeowner to have and what level of involvement is best for the expert to have? I would put this in the similar vein to like a doctor patient relationship where the doctor is the one with the medical knowledge and really should be the one trusted, but it's perfectly reasonable for patients to get several different opinions, medical opinions because not every doctor is going to be exactly right. So getting a variety of medical opinions on a problem is probably a good idea in many cases, but ultimately if a patient comes in and has already decided in their own mind what's wrong with them and what the medical procedures should be to remedy that and doesn't want to listen to the doctor, that's not going to work. And so it's a similar kind of thing with us. Homeowners should really be encouraged to ask a lot of questions and learn as much as they can, but ultimately understand that if they're going to be consulting with an expert that they really want to take that expert advice in under strong consideration. And if you are looking for that expert, you've got one right here, CEO of Teed and Brown, Christopher Brown, Deb, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, I hope it was helpful. All right, so now we're going to have a little bit of a conversation with Ben and Spencer, and first off, I know to anyone listening over the age of like 23, I'm sorry that a bunch of non homeowners are having a conversation about lawn pesticides. I know this is a little silly, but I think it's going to be a fun conversation regardless. So we get it, don't judge us too hard. I'm curious, having heard about some of these different types of programs, like a more organic program or a more integrated pest management program, if you had a lawn and you had to pick what type of pesticide program you'd want to do or if you wanted to bring an expert or do it yourself, what kind of program would you be leaning toward? I'd say obviously you want to get rid of everything, and I think it's very, every person can have their own opinion, but I personally would say, just get rid of it. I mean, as long as it's not going to be harmful to me, per se, and it's relatively good to the environment, I'd say whatever step you think is necessary, go ahead with that. Do leads make you mad? They do. Yeah. Working on a golf course, when you see weeds, whether or not supposed to be, you get a little annoyed because you not necessarily because you know it's a bad look, but you know you're going to be after one to pick it off, clean clean it. That's actually a very good point, which I haven't mentioned yet, Ben worked on how long did you work on a golf course? Two summers, and did you interactive pesticides at all there? Did you actually spray anything? I personally didn't, it was a little above my pay grade, so that was more the superintendent and the assistant superintendent who worked with the pesticides because we weren't really, we weren't liable to be covered, so if anything bad would have happened, we were covered by the golf course and I could create problems, but from the experiences I do have, just watching them, they're all in there, they're supposed to be in hazmat suits, one wasn't, and he actually got cancer from it, so that was kind of his own fault in the way, not following the proper procedures, but the procedures are user hazmat suit, user ventilator, you're not supposed to get anywhere near them unless you have that stuff on, they're really, really dangerous if you go to them without the proper protection, so that's my experience with them. Spencer, I'll ask you the question I ask Ben, hearing these different pesticide programs, what would you do if you had a lawn? I would want to give the grass as much protection as possible from various issues like weeds, change bugs, ticks, along with fungus infections, along with many other things, and ultimately it just comes down to, like just doing whatever you can do to limit that while making sure there's as less harm from the various pesticides as possible. I think it's interesting, both of you want that green grass lawn, so in Maryland, they, in Montgomery County, Maryland, they banned completely green grass lawns, essentially, you can't, well you can buy the herbicide, but you can't spray it on your property, you can't even spray it on now the local parks and that kind of thing, what do you make of that? A ban, I'd say for personal property, is maybe a little extreme. I understand why they might want to do it for public areas, just because if they, what they're saying, it could be harmful, you're going to have a lot of people interacting with it, but if it's your own property, I think if you feel that's the best solution and you're okay with the consequences, it should, there shouldn't be as much red tape. I mean, obviously your neighbors could have some input and that could cause problems, but for the most part, I'd say if you want to spray a weed on your own property, you should for the most part be allowed to. What about those communal consequences? If someone sprays it wrong, it might, not only will it mess up their lawn, it could get into the drinking water, it can contaminate things. Yeah, so like I was saying, if I understand, there's some red tape that needs to be put up, I don't know the full extent personally, but if you, if it's going to create problems for your neighbors, I think you, it should be your duty to alert them and accept the consequences if and when something goes wrong. And then like I said, I think public areas, I understand why there's that put up because so many people would be interacting with it. Then you get some white dandelions to blow on. Exactly. When we're guarding this law, there's obviously pesticides that are really dangerous like the warning ones or the danger ones and those pesticides like for once are danger to like ban those, I would probably agree with one of those bans because it's a really tough to be able to target the application in areas without killing half the lawn and making it really dangerous for other people around you. And the warning one is iffy, since it's not quite as dangerous, yet still pretty dangerous to the lawn and then you go down the list to caution, which I feel you could use for certain things. What if you're an expert and you know how to spray the danger one and do it safely? Why are you banning it? I'm banning it because if in case they make a mistake or something, then it's really dangerous for other people and also it's for people who are not experts at it when they see the experts spraying these really dangerous substances. So the other people will will be willing to use those pesticides and spray their own lawns, which means there's a high risk of doing it incorrectly and also it will basically kill half your lawn since they don't know what they're doing. So they're setting a bad example. You're saying Ben bro, do we ban the danger pesticides? Probably just because they're not necessarily banned but really hard to get. I'd say if you're a teeth and brown expert like your dad is, you might be able to get away with using them correctly but for the average civilian who doesn't know the first thing about taking care of their lawn, you'd probably ban the danger ones from public consumption. Get a underground market for danger pesticides. You can have your drug dealers and your pest dealers. The other interesting thing I found is this disparity between what a homeowner can do and what a business can do. So do you think that disparity is too much or too little? Do you think businesses need less regulation or homeowners need more regulation? I pretty much agree with that. I mean it's the same thing if you wanted to be a doctor, if I cut my arm open, I wouldn't want my dad trying to put stitches in. I'd want to go to a doctor and I think the same thing is pretty true with lawn care. I'd want a professional to take care of it more than I trust myself or a family member too. Do you think if you want to do it yourself, you should be able to? Yeah, for the most part I'd say yes and I mean you're always going to have people who want to try to do it themselves for whatever reason, even with everything, but I think you should have some sort of level of knowledge in what you're doing to legally and effectively. It's very pest, even if it's on your own lawn. Like you said before, you're not just a danger to yourself then you can be a danger to the community. Spencer, what do you think? It's also to the doctor patient type thing. If let's say in 10 years from now, my back is really bad and I need back surgery, I wouldn't want my parents to do it right on my back since I would be super painful and be they won't know what they're doing and when it comes to doctors, they would have like, they would have an anesthesia drug which would make me pass out, they would do the surgery expertly. Then afterward, I might be hurting a little bit, yet in the long run, I'll be a lot better and I think that's the same thing too with pesticide application. Yet in the long run, you're going to see the recovery process where it will look better and greener and you'll be more satisfied in the end. So we agreed on a lot. We agreed pesticides are dangerous, but maybe not all of them. We agreed about wide array of the solutions on regulating businesses, maybe a little more than homeowners, but maybe ramping things up on homeowners a little bit. I think we disagreed on bands a little bit, but that's all right. That was a great conversation. Anything you want to add at the end, Spencer, have been? No, I think we covered it off of the most part. I think we discussed it pretty well. We understood each other's points and I think at the end, we can do a pretty happy medium overall. If we were Congress and we get stuff done. Spencer and Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. This wraps up episode two of the sweaty penguin. Thank you again to Christopher Brown for his insights. Stay tuned for next week's episode. We'll see you there. Today's episode was written by Ethan Brown, edited by Frank Hernandez and produced by Ethan Brown, Shannon Demiano, Frank Hernandez, and Caroline Kale. Our ads were voiced by Shannon Demiano and our music was composed by Brett Saka, special thanks to the Boston University Build Lab. For bonus content, follow us on Facebook at sweaty penguin news, Twitter at sweat penguin pod, or Instagram @sweddypenguinPod.