KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Human Health vs. Environmental Health

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

So thank you so much, Andy, for being here with me. I'm really honored to have you. I'm quite humbled to have you on my podcast. Please, it's absolutely my pleasure. I'm really excited to be sharing this with you today. You know, it's interesting. Both of those folks, Mike Bender and Jen Stout, are past customers of mine. And so one of the things about being in this industry for 30 plus years and being, you know,

one of the older people in this industry now is that, all that experience adds up to being able to help others. You know, what I learned from my clients is really the extent of the information that's out there about chemical sensitivity and construction. My background is architecture and commercial construction and residential building, but I've learned so much from my clients over the years. And so when I've been able to work with folks like Mike and Jan and others, almost over 30,000 people now in my career. You know, it's all that information that I can combine now into creating

new recommendations for people saying that this is what's been tolerated best. This is best practice based upon real world use. Now, I'm really curious, Andy, what really led you to that? You were, you know, you could be an architect or you could work in the architectural field, but, you know, most people really don't go there or you know something must have triggered you to go in that path and what was that? That's a great question. It's it actually dates back to I started in my family business back in 1989. My family has owned a construction material supply company that dates back to the 30s and it was always my dream to work for the family business. Although I did have

have a desire to get into more into architecture and then just, you know, just specifically material sales. Although once I got into the material sales part of it, I really fell in love with it. I like being able to offer solutions to architects and builders who are in need of help on these projects. And so I found myself as that person that could come on to a job site or go into an architectural office and say, I understand what you're, what you're trying to do here. Here's a better way to do it. And it'll meet the budget and the aesthetic and so forth. Well, about three years after working in the business, I was supplying a custom water-based coating for a building in Milwaukee. It was being used as a waterproofer for a below-grade parking

structure. Now, I stress the point that it's water-based because at the time, 1992. That's really all we knew about at that time. You know, and so I got the water-based material specified and I was very excited to use this product. After the primer coat was applied, we started getting phone calls from people living in the condos above complaining about the fumes. Oh, wow. And, you know, I kind of took it with a grain of salt because I thought, well, some people just complain because they see a container and they just want to complain. Right. I said to myself, it's a water-based product. It cannot be dangerous. So, well, a few hours later,

we ended up taking three of our workers to the hospital due to the inhalation complications. Oh, my God. They literally couldn't breathe in the space. And we had to shut the project down. There was no way I was going to risk my family's 60-year history in the construction industry here in Wisconsin to sell a product that was potentially causing harm just to make a dollar. So I shut the job down. It took about a week to find a company that can make a product that would work for the

situation, but wouldn't be as dangerous. And I found that company, a small company in California called American Formulated and Manufacturing, otherwise known as AFM Safecoat. and that was the first time I ever heard of them. That's the first time I have ever experienced a situation with somebody reacting to a product. But I found out about AFM. I started researching the product.

We didn't have the internet back then. So everything I had to do is at the library and making phone calls and all that. Yes, I remember those days. Right, right. It took a long time. But what ended up happening was, I guess I had this epiphany.

like if I'm going to, if I'm going to be in this business, I wanted to be very proud of the materials that we sell and I didn't want to have any situation where customers ever would complain about toxicity issues, chemical emissions and so forth. So I learned everything I possibly could about chemical sensitivity, indoor air pollution, sick building syndrome, all of these words and phrases and literally became the very first company in the United States to start a new retail store solely around selling what we called common sense healthy building materials common sense now common sense still is not too common anymore so you know it's still a lot of convincing to do but over the years over the last 30 years

instead of having to go out and try to sell these products to people and convince them why they need it. It's completely flipped now. People are coming to us saying, I have to have this for my house. And so it's taken 30 years, but we're finally at that point. Yeah. It's been a long road for you. And I really admire your tenacity in sticking to it. Thank you. It was a labor of love. That's for sure. Yeah. But you know, like in that example of that paint that you talked about, you know, in the green home textbook, so as if you will, you know, we encourage people to use, you know, go look for non-VOC or VOC free paint. To what extent do people really need to be vigilant, you know? Well, I think that so the VOC regulations, and I can get into that if you'd like,

the VOC regulations, which started in the mid-90s, were designed completely around outdoor air pollution. Right. Oh, I see. The VOCs have absolutely nothing to do with indoor air quality from a human toxicity standpoint. VOCs are regulated by the EPA because they may evaporate from a surface, rise to the atmosphere, react with UV and nitrogen to create low-level smog. That's why we regulate VOCs. I see. They are not regulated because of human health concerns. It is true that some VOCs are harmful to humans, yes. It's also true that some VOCs are completely harmless to humans.

And what happens is manufacturers now, because they're being forced to reducing or eliminating VOCs in products, they are allowed to use 92 other thousand chemicals that aren't VOCs but are as toxic or more toxic than the VOCs they've taken out. And so I think that it's actually made it more difficult for consumers to actually choose healthy. It's easy to choose green. You know, from a standpoint of outdoor air pollution,

energy efficiency, global environmental concerns, the regulations have made that easy. For human health, though, the VOC content of a product has absolutely nothing to do with whether it's actually dangerous for a human. Right. And so I believe that when it comes to buying things like paints and coatings and carpeting materials and flooring and cabinetry, we have to look at other things besides whether or not it releases a VOC. Because quite honestly, if anybody had an orange for breakfast this morning. When they peel the skin off of an orange, you've now released 850 grams per liter of VOCs. Oh, really?

Yeah. So, but is it dangerous for humans? Of course not. Yeah. First of all, you know, it's a natural citrus solvent, which can be dangerous for people who have sensitivities. I understand that. It can be irritant to your eyes if it squirts in your eye. However, it's inside of your house.

Inside of your house, it's impossible. for low-level smog and ozone to be created because there's not enough UV light and there's not enough nitrogen. Right. So what I think we need to do as an industry is we need to start looking at other metrics besides VOCs. And it's starting, after all these years, we're finally starting to look at things like formaldehyde levels in products. Because formaldehyde is found in so many building materials. Right. Formaldehyde releases from so many brands of zero VOC paint.

Right. But and formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. Right. But it's not regulated. It's not regulated like VOCs are because the EPA does not care about human health concerns. They care about environmental health. Mm. Right.

So this is, this is where really what you are saying, the environmental health versus human health. So exactly right. So since we're talking about the paint then, you know, what should we be looking for? Like if we are, if I want to go paint my walls in the house. Sure. So it's not just the VOC free paint that right, right, because I can tell you that just about every major manufacturer of zero VOC paint in the last five to 10 years has either been enjoined in a class action lawsuit because the product makes people sick, fined by the FTC because they're essentially duping the public on what VOCs actually are and how they're calculated. They give out a lot of misinformation because, let's face it, I think most people don't want to spend the time to research

and they don't have access to, you know, hiring somebody like me or talking to you. And so they just say, well, you know, the store down the street, the big box store, they have zero of USAP paint. I'm just going to use that because I've heard that's the base best you can go with. So if it's up to me, again, I'm still using the AFM Safecoat brand because it's still, to this day, the only paint made in North America that's made without any toxic or hazardous ingredients. And the bigger issue for me is in 30 years of us selling the product, in almost 40 years that AFM has been around, the product has been the most widely accepted by those who have extreme chemical sensitivity. Right. And of course, every person who's painting is not chemical sensitive, I understand that.

But we all experience some type of health issue one way or another because, of that chemical soup we create in a home while we're doing our painting in our flooring and cabinetry and you may not realize that that feeling of you know feeling like you're coming down with the flu or a cold is actually derived from either chemical off gassing or mold or or something that could have been prevented right right that is you know I have to admit that I have been telling people, yeah, go get VOC, free paint or non-VOC. So this is like completely opening up a whole Pandora box for me to research and learn about. So what kind of people come to you though?

I mean, you know, like Mike Vender or Jane Stout, those are really extreme cases, right? I mean, would you say that there are extreme cases? And who are the people who come to you for your advice? So in the first 10 years that I had my business, I would say 90 to 95% of my clients were people like Mike Bender. Matter of fact, one of the early clients that I had, and I'll never forget her or her situation. she lived in a home in northern Illinois and she had been living in one room of her house for the last

two or three years because they lined all the walls, ceilings, and floors with aluminum foil because it was the only thing she could find that she wouldn't react to that would block the chemical off-gassing from the materials in that room. Oh my God. And she didn't leave that room for over two years. I helped her and her husband remodel the home, the rest of the home, using AFM Safeco products and a bunch of other things that we deal with. And she lives in that home today. And so, yes, I would say early on, that was my clientele. And again, it's because at the time, I didn't know, you know, when I first started the company, I was just learning about chemical sensitivity and what that actually meant. And we didn't know a lot about it back then.

I'll be honest with you. Right. You know, back then, it was actually thought that chemical sensitivity or MCS, multiple chemical sensitivity, was just literally days away from being added to the American Medical Association's classification of being a disease. It never got added. And it kind of bothered a lot of people because they thought maybe once it gets added, you would get more funding for research.

and so forth. What happened was the medical community actually came out with more information about other diseases like Lyme's disease, like mass cell activation syndrome, chronic inflammation, dysotidomia. That actually chemical sensitivity is one of the side effects or one of the, you know, one of the symptoms of an underlying disease. And so there's been, a ton of research going into that now. And so the reason why our customer base has expanded dramatically, I would say nowadays, 95% of my customers are people who don't have sensitivities, but they know about it and they know somebody who is, or they have young children living at home or elderly parents who have depressed immune systems. They just don't ever want to get to the point where they're

building their home is causing them sickness. And so we're learning more and more about that. We're finding that between chemical off-gassing and mold, that it's essentially triggering the immune response in the body. And the reason why the body is being triggered so easily is because of that underlying condition of either Lyme disease or, you know, all these other things. Right, right. I mean, do you think that there are more people who are becoming increasingly sensitive to those chemical issues or is it is it because the knowledge has become more available and more people are finding I don't know which is which is the case yeah I honestly think that more people are willing to self-diagnose more people are willing to accept the fact that they

have a sensitivity and more people are willing to protect against ever getting one. So I don't think that the numbers are increasing per se of people who actually have sensitivities. I think that we're just more likely to be able to talk about it now. Yeah. Again, back in the mid-90s, I remember doing a presentation about chemical sensitivity to a large group of architects. And I had to talk about how, you know, if you think about sick building syndrome, which is what really we started thinking about back in the 70s, right? Right. And that started with the oil embargo of 1972, 73.

Buildings were now tightened up to meet energy code. And we're all stuck in these commercial buildings that have less fresh air intake. And then we go home and the homes, the walls were inefficient and they breathed and so forth. But over the late 70s into the 80s and the 90s, homes started becoming more energy efficient. More materials were being used that were manmade. So a lot more glues and adhesives and chemicals and plastics. And so we essentially started tightening up and reducing the fresh air. So I can see why more people are complaining about it now.

But, you know, back in the day, it was, you know, you had to refer to things like, you know, Legionella from, you know, Legioneer's disease. That's a big exposure of, of an indoor air quality or indoor air pollutant, of course. I remember in the late 80s, the EPA, their own headquarters. They built a new headquarters. And within the first couple of weeks, they had something like 1,400 employees calling sick. Oh, wow. And to this day, there are still several hundred people on permanent disability. Oh, wow. And that's because of the carpet they installed.

Wow. And so, you know, we, again, we didn't know enough back then, and we're learning more, which allows people to say, you know what? I think that's what my problem is. And so if we have the ability to buy materials that are healthier, if they meet the same budget, if they meet the same aesthetic, right, then why not use them? It just makes sense. Right, right, right, right.

Now, shifting a little bit, what about EMF, the electric magnetic field? I know that there are quite a few people who are sensitive. And as you know, when we call green homes, you know, I'm doing an air quote right here. A lot of people associate that with smart technology. And I am very much aware of all the signals that we are surrounded by. And as Mike Bender talked about in his interview, it's something that's accumulating in our body that we're exposing. And the longer we are around these modems and, you know,

Wi-Fi signals or Bluetooth signals, I mean, what is your take of EMF and how how we can deal with with that issue. Yeah. So the first thing I'll say is that EMF issues a lot of times mimics either a chemical sensitivity or more so a mold mycotoxin sensitivity. And one can make the other worse. The other thing is you are right. So many people, builders especially and developers, Smart technology equals green. Well, this is why back in the late 90s,

I actually created my own rating system. I call a degree of green. So, and I'll explain that, I think it'll help you understand the whole EMF issue. So we found that there were three separate and distinct type of customers that would come into one of our showrooms. The first one would come in and say, we are building a new home.

We have a seven-year-old with autism that lives in the home. Autistic children can't be around chemical off-gassing because it exacerbates their issues. And so we need to build using completely toxin-free, off-gassing-free materials. Can you help us? That's our first customer. Second customer walks in and says, I've been on this earth for 55 years. I've been a burden to the earth for 55 years. I want to buy an existing home and completely remodel it using nothing but repurposed, renewed, recycled materials.

Can you help? Okay. Third customer walks in and says, I want to build a home with the lowest carbon footprint. Which one's right? They're all right. Yeah. So they're all right. All of them will be considered, I want to build a green home.

Right. So when that customer, one of those three customers talks to a builder, talks to a home improvement center, and they say, I want to build a greenhouse. I'm going to look, I want green materials. They don't know how to describe to them what they mean by green. They just say that the word green. Right. And in the construction industry, green means energy efficiency. Right. Green means sustainability. Right. Green has nothing to do with human health. And so I can tell you that many years ago, I was on the board of directors of the Wisconsin affiliate of the U.S. Green Building Council. I actually helped write the Wisconsin Green Built Home Code many, many years ago. And part of that code was used to help to write the lead program. Anyway, I resigned from the USGBC in protest because they kept on bringing out all these new iterations of their lead program that had nothing.

to do with human health, had to do with outdoor air pollution, global environmental concerns, energy efficiency, recycled content. But I would have clients of mine going into a lead platinum building and walking out within minutes because of the toxicity of the offgas. So I realized right away that we were not ever going to be able to legislate us into health, be able to mandate builders into using the right stuff. It's got to be up to the homeowners themselves, the people writing the bills, you know, writing the checks for the bills. They need to insist on it, but they need to know how to talk about it. And so I created a degree of green as a way to allow customers to learn about how do they

talk about what they mean by green. There's 27 different reasons why you can call a product green, but it boils down into one of those three main categories, human health, environmental health, or sustainability. And so, you know, long story short, You know, with EMFs, that falls along the line of two things, environmental health and human health, or I should say sustainability because of energy efficiency. And so this is starting to get into mainstream verbiage, but still to this day, when you talk about, I want to build a green home, they're going, okay, well, how about we have this control system that? turns on the lights when they need to be turned on and turns them off when you leave and it automatically sets the temperature in the home to whatever, you know, temperature you want to be at. You never have to

touch a thing. It's all done through Wi-Fi. They don't understand that, okay, it's all done through a method that actually causes damage at the cellular level in your body. Yeah. And so getting them to change from that has been very difficult. It's like, I have to tell customers, tell their builder, you want a dumb home. You want a home that you actually have to turn a knob or push a button because that means that there's nothing that is considered smart in the house. Right. That is eventually going to lead to additional problems down the road. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, so do you see any way that we can reconciled that? Like, I, you know, as a green realtor, as I started, I started as a green realtor and that was all about, you know, the sustainable building,

sustainable green building practice and including smart technology. But as I have learned more and more, it's it's become so clear to me that it's not just about energy efficiency. And if we really want to be healthy and comfortable, you know, do I tell people not to to have Wi-Fi in your home or not to have those smart technology installed in your home. And I don't know how to navigate that. You know, it's kind of getting to a point where I'm really confused. Well, here's a thing about something like Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is problematic for everybody, whether they know it or not.

It's just because you don't have any symptoms, because you feel like you don't feel it. doesn't mean it's, you know, I'm not a problem, right? And so it comes down to having the client themselves decide what's most important. So if somebody hires me to help them build a new home, for instance, the very first conversation I have is, what degree of green are you? Yeah. Human health, environmental health, sustainability. And usually they'll say, we want all three. Well, sorry, you can't have all three. You can't be perfect at all three. You have to choose one that is your goal. We'll try to get to the others as best as we can. But, you know, if I have you installed one of the healthiest flooring materials you can for you and your family, it's not going to be sustainable because it's made

halfway around the world. So, but that's the tradeoff. And my customers would eventually say, you know what, I don't care where it's made. I don't care what it's made from as long as it doesn't poison my kids. So you have to get to that conversation and find out what's most important. You can't necessarily make a blanket statement about avoid Wi-Fi completely because most people will be turned off with that. You know, even if you want to say, I don't want any blue, or I don't want any Wi-Fi-enabled appliances in the home, or I don't want smart technology.

Okay, but do you want access to your cell phone? I mean, do you not, if you don't have a landline and you're relying on, your cell phone for all communications. Yeah. You either need Wi-Fi or you have to hardwire everything. Right. And that's usually where we start to look at trade-offs. Yeah.

Trade-offs are where is it most important, right? Bedrooms. Bedrooms have to be the healthiest rooms of the home. Right. That is the sanctuary within the sanctuary. Mm-hmm. You know, you need six to eight hours of sleep every night, restorative sleep. to essentially combat what you are facing all day long.

Right. And if that restorative sleep is now interrupted by cellular signals, Wi-Fi, chemical off-gassing, indoor air pollutants and so forth, and you're not getting that restorative sleep, you know, what good is it? And so I would always say, you know, focus on those first, focus on the bedrooms. You can easily make a bedroom a safe space. And you can do it either during construction or after the fact, too, just when you move in. It's very easy to do.

And then decide, do we really need Wi-Fi access in every room in the house? Right. Maybe, and we're seeing this more and more, maybe you just put in Ethernet throughout the entire house. And if you want to go online, you plug your phone into Ethernet. There are adapters you can buy. And now we have access to everything we need. including phone calls, but everything's hardwired. Right.

So, you know, you'll still have signals from outside of the house coming in, which you can block during construction. But we're reducing as much of it as we can. I know you're not going to eliminate it completely. It's impossible. The same way that most people don't want to give up on all of those creature conference that we've had now. Yeah, right.

But you have to decide really what's most important. And if you do have somebody that lives in the home that does have some health issues. You have to look at all of the avenues and any good parent is going to look at all the avenues that could be causing the problem or could help and you got to at least go down those roads and see if it's viable. Well, it sounds like you have more people who are at least conscious or aware of some of the issues that we may encounter in our homes. But what do you think about the construction industry itself? Do you see that there's... are becoming more aware or do you see that there are at least some willingness to address some of

these issues in the construction industry, especially in the home building industry? So to answer those questions, no and yes. I don't think if a contractor isn't being asked to or forced to change, they won't. They do what they do, not necessarily. because, you know, it's the best way to go. It's because that's what they've been doing. Now, early in my career, that really bothered me. Yeah. When a painter would come to me and say, listen, I've been painting for 30 years,

I've never had to change the materials that I've used. You know, we've done this way. We know what we're doing. My response has been, and it still is, I've been golfing for 30 years, I'm still horrible. So just because you do something doesn't mean you're the best at it. There's always room for improvement. There's always a room to learn.

Yeah. And the good contractors are starting to learn. Or at least they'll say to the clients, you know, I've heard about that. I've been waiting for a customer to ask me because I'm really interested in finding out how to do this. Yeah. And so right now I think I have 25 homes around the country under construction with my clients in all various stages, from planning. all the way to almost finishing up. There's a way to make the entire process healthier, piece by piece, little by little.

How much you have to improve is based upon the client themselves. Right. But I will say that compared to 10 years ago, contractors these days, for the most part, actually seem willing to learn. Whereas 10 years ago, no, no. This is the way we do it. Move on. Then you've got to find some contractor who only builds like straw homes and, you know, dirt floors and, you know, real eco, you know, real environmentally friendly homes to get them to build a healthy home.

And now I have high quality, high-end custom home builders coming to us saying, I've got a client that wants to build a healthy home or not sure where to start. Can you help us? So I think it is improving dramatically. That's a great news, actually. That's very hopeful. So you work with clients all over the country or outside of country as well. How do you work with your clients?

Most of my clients are in North America, but I do have pockets of clients in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. And so it's the beauty of podcasting and the Internet. and people are finding out about this. It's interesting. Actually, down in Australia and New Zealand, there is a big push for healthy homes, far greater than what we see here. And, you know, they're kind of isolated from the rest of the world. And so, you know, they don't have access to a lot of the same materials that we have here

are what you can find in Europe. So they're a little more proactive in learning what they can do to make their homes healthier. So people come to you. builders and homeowners? I would say the majority of my clients are the homeowners themselves because, you know, they want to learn themselves so that after they move in the home, they can also maintain the home healthy. Also, I would say that, again, builders are generally looking more at the cost of things and their

familiarity and homeowners are willing to take some more chances with ADEM as chances. But quite honestly, the best projects work with all three parties, myself, the client and the builder and maybe the architect or the designer. We're all getting together on Zoom calls or in person and we're all sharing information and creating that conversation that needs to be had to make sure that ultimately that family is living in the healthiest home that they can possibly have. That's amazing. I mean, it's, you know, it's the advanced technology really allow us to do that kind of work, you know, remotely from so you have clients all over the country, all over the world. And thanks to our technology, we can do things like this. And it would be,

it would be a challenge for us for us who are in this industry whether you know being a realtor or you know like yourself consultant or builder um to shepherd this evolution like human evolution how we live right it's very difficult yeah what is your um what is your tip if you have any for homeowners who are considering of either building or renovating a home for themselves to be, you know, like they want to have all three healthy, you know, sustainable and environmentally healthy. What would be your tip, their first thing that they can do other than obviously calling you? Well, right. Let's say they called me or they they're working with somebody else. But I, you know, the first thing I would say is have a plan. And what I mean by that,

It's not a plan for the project, you know, drawing or something like that. But what are you really trying to achieve? If you go to a builder and say, I'm trying to do, let's say, I'm trying to do a greenhouse, we want to make it eco-friendly and reuse recycled content and energy efficient and healthy. Builder and the architect are going to step back. Whoa, wait a second. Focus. What are you trying to achieve?

So come up with the reason why. You know, come up with the end goal first. Mm-hmm. Now we work towards that end goal. So proper project planning, whether it is a new home, whether it's a remodel in addition, even if you're painting a bedroom, always have a plan in place. You know, understand that in today's building climate because of, you know, we're still dealing with pandemic related issues with material shortages, labor shortages, price increases,

so on and so forth. we need to be even more diligent with the planning phase. Interesting, you know, on that, I find that the pandemic, the silver line in that black cloud was the fact that people have now learned to navigate Zoom phone calls. People are used to buying materials online instead of going to a store. People are used to asking more questions. And now because we spent all that time inside of our homes with the kids doing homework over here and you're, you and your spouse are doing work over on the kitchen table.

And you're like, well, this room could probably use a good paint job. But, you know, we're all here. Do we really want to use products that are going to be stinky and full of chemical? People actually have, have taken this as a kind of a call to action in their own homes. Like, this has got to be the safest place we're in day in and day out. Let's make it safer. And so I think that's been the big upside of the pandemic is that as a as a people we have decided that we need to have our dwellings to be healthier. And we now have the technology and the access to do that. I agree. I think that the pandemic really shifted a focus on the health and especially in the whole.

environment and it's a good news for us and I guess it can really help us to achieve or at least move forward you know towards better building healthier building and you know hopefully equals or leads to some more environmental health as well yeah I'm a big believer that if a product or a space is human friendly, by definition, it's environmentally friendly. Yeah. And I don't think the same is true in the opposite direction. There are plenty of examples of products that are eco-friendly, but still very, very dangerous for humans. Yeah.

There's also plenty of examples of things that are 100% natural that are dangerous for humans. Right. You know, asbestos and lead, right? Tobacco. We can go on and on, arsenic. So all these things that are dangerous. So you have to look at things a little bit differently. Right.

And I think that there are many ingredients now that are found in products that manufacturers are using solely because they are not told that they can't. So I know that there has been a push over the last 20 years. for, you know, pushing what's called the red list of chemicals. And, you know, the Safer Chemicals Act. All these chemicals were not allowed to use in building materials. I understand that. I know why would we do it because you have to put it in writing.

Right. But out of the 289 chemicals on the, you know, that they want to eliminate, you have to remember that there's actually 92,000 chemicals that have been approved for use in the United States for home goods and building materials. Yes. So we're going to take away less than 300 and allow manufacturer to use the other 90s, 1,700. Okay.

So how about instead of having a list of things you can't use, you make manufacturers list every ingredient? That solves the problem. The customers usually say, yeah, but I don't know how to interpret this. Yeah. I don't know what all these chemicals mean. You're right. But eventually then there will be third-party independent companies that will look at that

ingredients list and give you a listing of what everything does and why it's dangerous. So I think we need more transparency, not less. I think all of the regulations that are out there, I think people rely on material safety data sheets, which is not anything to do with human health. Again, it has to do with spills on a job site or spills on the highway. You know, how do you clean it up? That's what an MSDS is for. we are we are not using the right information to make our decisions so until then it's a matter of reaching out to people like myself and others that have knowledge and eventually I think the industry will change completely but it's still going to be another 20 years or so yeah well hopefully a little bit shorter that's so great thank you so much Andy I I so appreciate

your time and your knowledge and experience your full of, full of experience and wisdom. So I really appreciate it. Thank you and thank you for bringing this to your listeners. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. This was Izumi Tanaka with Home Going Homes podcast until the next episode.