Why is America so obsessed with lawns and order? Max and Erin get into the weeds of how the founding fathers made cultivating grass an American pastime, why our lawn mania is a creation of corporate marketing, and how it all feeds class anxiety. Why is it so bad for our environment? Does milkweed bring all the bees to the yard? And how much do lawns and instagram face have in common? Listen to this week’s How We Got Here to find out.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Max Fisher, narrating: Hey, everyone. Max here. We recorded this episode in May, back before Erin went on maternity leave. That’s why she’s suddenly back in your feed. But get ready to hear her thoughts on a topic that has gotten very timely with the heat dome smothering the East Coast, it’s the grass lawns wilting and yellowing across America. Enjoy. 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, did you grow up with a lawn dad? 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, you mean a dad who treated his lawn like his child, meticulously feeding, trimming, and tending to it with a care that he showed nothing else in his life, even his own children? 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: No, I wouldn’t know anything about that. 

 

Erin Ryan: Even if you didn’t. Or you’re in some kind of denial that’s playing out live for our listeners. A lot of people grew up with lawn dads. 

 

Max Fisher: Drive through just about any town in America, and you’ll pass a series of houses fronted by lush green carpets of grass, the pride and joy of whoever lives there. 

 

Erin Ryan: But also cue the Debbie Downer music, an environmental catastrophe that is bad for just about everybody. 

 

Max Fisher: I can always count on you to have an un chill take about beloved traditions, Erin. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s what I’m here for. [music break]

 

Max Fisher: I’m Max Fisher. 

 

Erin Ryan: I’m Erin Ryan, and this is How We Got Here. The show that goes beyond the week’s headlines to ask one big question and then tells a story that answers that question. 

 

Max Fisher: This week, can America really kick its lawn addiction? 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, to answer that question, I want to start by telling a story of a modern day David and Goliath. 

 

Max Fisher: Who doesn’t love the triumph of an underdog? 

 

Erin Ryan: Jeff and Janet Crouch were a normal American couple who had lived in a well-loved house in a cul de sac in Columbia, Maryland. 

 

Max Fisher: I love it when the hero starts out as like a normie. That’s great. 

 

Erin Ryan: After they bought their place in the late 1990s, the Crouches stopped using pesticides and fertilizers, both of which are necessary in most places to give lawns that green carpet-y look. And in place of the grass, the Crouches grew native flowers and plants. 

 

Max Fisher: Like what? 

 

Erin Ryan: Stuff like milkweed, sunflowers, blue fescue, asters, things that local pollinators love. Do you know what that meant, Max? 

 

Max Fisher: Their milkweed brought all the bees to the yard?

 

Erin Ryan: [laugh] Yes. But it also meant that their yard didn’t look like their neighbors yards. And one particular neighbor got pretty pissed off and started writing letters to the Goliath in our story, the Homeowners Association. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, the dreaded HOA. The closest most people in this country will ever get to dealing directly with the Mafia. 

 

Erin Ryan: After years of this disgruntled neighbor filling their inbox with complaints, the HOA sent the Crouches a letter, giving them ten days to uproot all of their native plants and replace them with a lawn that looked exactly like their neighbors. 

 

Max Fisher: I guess a native pollinator garden is the kind of thing that would make a busybody neighbor worry about their own property values. 

 

Erin Ryan: That’s right. So the HOA was like grass or it’s your ass and the Crouches were like, no. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, they just refused?

 

Erin Ryan: Not only did they refuse, they fought their HOA in court and in 2017, they won. 

 

Max Fisher: Ooh, take that grass. 

 

Erin Ryan: But not only did they win. They won so hard that they inspired state officials to base a new law on their case. And as of 2021, thanks to the Crouches in Maryland, it’s illegal for homeowners associations to punish homeowners who replace their lawns with eco friendly native plants. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. Okay, well, not trying to poopoo any environmental win here, but I mean, how harmful could growing a patch of grass outside your house really be? I mean, yeah, I get that people use fertilizers and pesticides in their lawns, which isn’t ideal, but a big grass lawn is such a nice thing to have. It is American as the seventh inning stretch. Salads with Cool Whip as an ingredient. 

 

Erin Ryan: Or some would say as American as Manifest Destiny. Or that time that Lake Erie caught on fire. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, okay. But in order to understand our addiction to lawns, we should understand just how deeply rooted the tradition is. 

 

Erin Ryan: Unlike turfgrass, which is not deeply rooted at all. Another reason it’s a bad plant. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, using my metaphor against me, point Erin. The lawn tradition actually goes back to some of the founding fathers, the father of the American lawn or the lawn father, if you will, might arguably be Thomas Jefferson. He was a passionate horticulturalist, of course, had his estate landscaped with the gardens he’d seen in Europe. Wide expanses of grass between ornamental elements like shrubs and flowers look nice. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right. But it was also a flex, taking perfectly arable land and growing grass on it instead of, say, food was a way to show off to your neighbors that you had so many resources that you didn’t even care if some of them were devoted to pure esthetics. 

 

Max Fisher: And funny enough, those lawns in European gardens weren’t even based on anything natural. People in England and France, wanted their estates to look like pastoral Italian paintings, which often had lawns in them. 

 

Erin Ryan: So they saw a pretty picture and they thought, I can make reality look like this painter’s imagination. That’s like going to a plastic surgeon with a photo of yourself under a full glam Instagram filter. 

 

Max Fisher: Yes. Back then, lawns were Instagram face for your property, and the affluent who could afford them were very attached to them. The White House, an early disciple of big lawn, hired a bunch of sheep to keep the lawn maintained so that the maintenance crew could enlist in the military. 

 

Erin Ryan: But then their place in culture evolved from a symbol of affluence to a symbol of compliance. So to figure out how that all worked. I called up Ted Steinberg, Davee professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, to get a sense of when that transition happened. And it started, like so many trends, with an ad blitz. 

 

[clip of Ted Steinberg] What was happening in the in, in the ’20s was the emergence of what I call corporate lawn care, organized around the substantial use of chemical inputs. For example, in 1928, the Scotts company, uh released its signature product, which was called Turf Builder. And Turf Builder is an artificial fertilizer, uh synthetic, that obviated the need that homeowners had had before this to spread manure around the yard in order to fertilize their property. Manure of course, is not easy to handle. It’s doesn’t smell particularly good. The thing about Turf Builder, it’s got kind of a manliness theme going to it. As uh if to say that if you didn’t have a good lawn, you were kind of less of a man as a result. Also, the Scotts Company begins to realize that most Americans have no idea how to create a decent lawn around their homes, so they begin to give away for free to homeowners, a leaflet or newsletter, if you like. Uh. That came out several times a year that explained to them in detail how to have a good lawn, and of course, to use Scotts products in pursuit of, of that uh, goal. So what do they call this newsletter? Well, they didn’t call it grass care. They called it lawn care because a lawn was, understood as a portal to upward mobility. Kind of an image in a dream that was greater than the sum of its parts. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. The obsession with lawns as a creation of corporate marketing that exploits fragile masculinity and class anxiety. That makes a lot of sense. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right. Very American. Another thing that drove America lawn crazy was golf. 

 

Max Fisher: Golf? 

 

Erin Ryan: That’s right. According to Professor Steinberg, golf courses were basically lawn show rooms. 

 

[clip of Ted Steinberg] Golf is uh interesting, looked at again historically because while golf courses had existed since the late 19th century in the United States, the 1920s witnessed a uh really massive increase in the number of golf courses in the United States between 1923, when there were about 2000, and 1929, when there were 5600 golf courses in the United States. So the ’20s were particularly important in terms of the proliferation of, of golf courses in the United States, the depression and the war in, in intervened, and again, in in the postwar period, um golf took off, driven by things that people actually know uh about a bit. For example, President Eisenhower was an avid golfer and promoted the sport. He installed a putting green, a pretty substantial one at the White House. By the early ’60s, we start to see automatic irrigation systems being installed on golf courses and a number of golf courses in the early ’60s, probably about 7000 or so, and took up a land area about the size of, of, of Rhode Island. 

 

Max Fisher: That is so wild to hear lawns as just this like byproduct of this very specific cultural moment 100 years ago that we’re still living with. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. So lawns not only have a symbolic tie to morality and manliness, but also to leisure and upward mobility. And of course, corporate greed. 

 

Max Fisher: But also to good times in the summer sun Erin! After World War two, the lawn really took off, thanks in part to planned suburban communities meant to house returning soldiers and their families like Levittown on Long Island. 

 

Erin Ryan: A hive of conformity. 

 

Max Fisher: The developers who built Levittown were so attached to lawns that property owners of the communities were contractually obligated by their house deeds to mow once per week. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, I’m going to stop you there because there’s another dark side of big lawn enforcement. We mentioned the Crouches and their overzealous HOA at the top of the show, but did you know that people actually get arrested for not cutting their grass? 

 

Max Fisher: I mean, I kind of assume that the median HOA would arrest literally everyone if it could. 

 

Erin Ryan: Absolutely. That is 100% correct. Um. In 2016, a single mother in a small town outside of Saint Louis was arrested for not mowing her lawn after a warning. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: In 2015 a Texas man actually served jail time, rather than pay the $1,700 fine his municipality issued him due to his unshorn grass. Same thing happened to an Alabama senior citizen in 2016 and a Wichita landlord in 2023. 

 

Max Fisher: You know, Erin, it’s hard to escape the long arm of the lawn. 

 

Erin Ryan: Oh my God. [laugh] So now we have a few reasons why lawns are so entrenched in our culture. The conflation of consumption and morality, peer pressure, stubbornness. 

 

Max Fisher: Also known as tradition. And they’re nice to lay on. 

 

Erin Ryan: Fine. But are you ready for all the reasons, it’s time to let that go?

 

Max Fisher: Okay, take it away. 

 

Erin Ryan: While it’s true that the lawn has close ties to beloved pastimes like golf and baseball and day drinking, the lawn industry is also closely tied to war. And not just soldiers returning from the Pacific and dealing with their untreated PTSD by spending hours every weekend tending to their front yard monocultures. 

 

Max Fisher: Monocultures meaning, of course, a crop consisting of a single plant, in this case grass. 

 

Erin Ryan: Correct. Which is a problem in nature where healthy ecosystems are diverse. 

 

Max Fisher: So what’s the war tie in?

 

Erin Ryan: Have you ever heard of the Haber process? 

 

Max Fisher: The Haber process? No. What’s that? 

 

Erin Ryan: So in order for plants to grow, they need soil that’s rich in nitrogen. Unfortunately, the nitrogen in our air isn’t in a form that plants can use, and that’s why things naturally rich in nitrogen, bird feces, or bat guano were once coveted for their fertilizing properties. 

 

Max Fisher: Huh? 

 

Erin Ryan: But there weren’t enough birds and bats making feces in high enough volumes to serve large scale commercial agriculture. That is until 1909, when a German chemist named Fritz Haber invented a way to extract nitrogen from the air and convert it into a plant available form without a flying animal having to poop it out first. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, I think now I remember learning about this in chemistry, and I remember that nitrates extracted from the air, in addition to being good at fertilizing crops, are also excellent at exploding. 

 

Erin Ryan: Which means that the Haber process is an essential part of the manufacture of munitions. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: And by extension, modern warfare. When World War Two was over, all of these American munitions factories weren’t needed to make bombs anymore. And so they were repurposed to make fertilizer, which we proceeded to dump on our cornfields and lawns. 

 

Max Fisher: Wait, so you were telling me that the American lawn is an extension of the military industrial complex? 

 

Erin Ryan: In a sense, yes. 

 

Max Fisher: Well, that also means that anyone with a local Home Depot gardening department, I guess, has access to rudimentary explosive material like Timothy McVeigh used bombs made from nitrogen fertilizer to attack the federal building in Oklahoma City. And there are occasionally explosions in fertilizer factories. In large enough quantities it is a dangerous substance. 

 

Erin Ryan: But even if it doesn’t blow up, large volumes of nitrogen fertilizer are bad news for the environment. 

 

Max Fisher: Bad news? How so?

 

Erin Ryan: Runoff from nitrogen fertilizer promotes toxic algae blooms in wild bodies of water. Can throw the entire wetland system out of whack. And in people, excessive nitrogen in the water supply has been directly linked with elevated rates of cancer, reproductive issues, thyroid problems, and other health issues. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. Remind me to discontinue taking my daily nitrogen supplement. 

 

Erin Ryan: Where are you even getting that? They shouldn’t even be making it. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s in the valley. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, the funny thing is that if we weren’t so wedded to lawns that consisted of uniform grass, we might not even need nitrogen fertilizer. 

 

Max Fisher: What? Is there some kind of magical plant that can add nitrogen to the soil? 

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, and it’s called clover. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, Clover as in four leaf clover. Those are everywhere. 

 

Erin Ryan: And it naturally adds nitrogen to the ground. In fact, if it’s grown alongside turf grass, it eliminates much of the need for nitrogen fertilizer. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, so why don’t we grow clover alongside turf grass? 

 

Erin Ryan: Because of herbicides. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, you mean like Roundup and WeedEx? 

 

Erin Ryan: Correct. Another problem with lawns in addition to how much fertilizer and water they guzzle, is that in order to achieve that perfect uniform look, homeowners need to use herbicides, pesticides or fungicides to keep all of the biodiversity out. 

 

Max Fisher: Hence, all the weed killers I see in every single hardware store I’ve ever been to. 

 

Erin Ryan: Mm hm. Yeah, and turf grasses aren’t native to the continental U.S. and as anyone who has tried to grow a cool weather plant in a place that’s too hot and dry can tell you, non-native plants can be pretty demanding. Just ask all the lettuce I’ve killed by trying to grow it in a USDA zone ten A. Traditional turf grasses need a lot of water. A lawn of 1000ft² uses about 35,000 gallons of water per year. 

 

Max Fisher: Whoa! 

 

Erin Ryan: And even more in the hottest, driest parts of the country. Here’s more on that from Professor Steinberg. 

 

[clip of Ted Steinberg] And these kinds of grasses, especially cool season grasses, are difficult to grow in North America unless you happen to live in Newfoundland, where there’s a little town called Lawn. [laugh] Uh but in the United States. It’s it’s hard to achieve perfection in in lawn care because of this ecological reality. It’s like pushing a boulder up a hill and most people fail at it, which is, of course not good for the homeowner. But it was a very ingenious business model on the parts of the companies that were in the chemical lawn care business. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. When Americans like Thomas Jefferson or those postwar suburbanites imported this European Renaissance landscape idea of a grass lawn, they were transplanting something that doesn’t really do well here unless you absolutely douse it with water, which is really bad when you’re talking about millions of lawns, all of them guzzling up water that we need for, you know, people. 

 

Erin Ryan: Lawn irrigation represents a full one third of residential water use. 

 

Max Fisher: Whoa! 

 

Erin Ryan: Which means that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in America. We are dumping unfathomable amounts of potable drinking water into our yards. 

 

Max Fisher: And there are large swaths of America that are dealing with drought during any given year. Like a few years ago, things were so bad in California that the state had to impose tight outdoor water use restrictions. 

 

Erin Ryan: But to your point about our lawn addiction being hard to shake, those restrictions didn’t really seem to impact golf courses and the ultra rich. At least they didn’t during the summer of 2022. We’ll get to how some of America’s hottest, driest areas are combating lawn waste in a bit, but we’ve still got to talk about another way that lawns are an environmental disaster. [music break]

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Max Fisher:  Okay, so we’ve got massive numbers of people cultivating fragile, non-native plants that require tons of water and fertilizer. But if you want a nice, pretty monoculture, you’ve got to kill off all the weeds that all that water and fertilizer are going to invite. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, and that is how the lawn industry created a self-perpetuating market in products that are dangerous. One example is the popular herbicide glyphosate, which some studies have linked to an increased risk of cancers, most specifically non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in a ton of herbicides like Ortho, Ground Clear, Rodeo, and Roundup. 

 

Max Fisher: Roundup? But I saw it in the hardware store the other day. 

 

Erin Ryan: Oh, yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: How bad could it be for you if they sell it in the store? 

 

Erin Ryan: Oh, yeah. It’s got to be fine. It’s still on the market despite the link to health problems. In a recent $2.25 billion judgment against its manufacturer, Monsanto, and its parent company, Bayer, a Pennsylvania man alleged in that lawsuit that his cancer had been caused by decades of use of the herbicide, and a jury agreed. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. If America loves its lawns so much that it’s willing to give itself cancer to keep them, that’s a significant mark in the this country will never kick its lawn addiction column. 

 

Erin Ryan: If water pollution and ecological collapse weren’t enough, is there anything more lowkey annoying than the quiet of a summer afternoon shattered by the drone of a leaf blower? 

 

Max Fisher: Oh my God. Lawns as noise pollution. You’re right. 

 

Erin Ryan: Lawn equipment, from blowers to mowers to edge trimmers, makes a lot of noise. 

 

Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: And uses a lot of gas. In one hour of operation, a gas powered leaf blower burns as much fuel as a car burns driving 1100 miles. 

 

Max Fisher: Whoa. So every time you get your lawn cleared, the leaf blowing alone is the climate impact equivalent of driving from DC to New York and back. Okay. Pollution, ecological collapse, nitrogen runoff. Fine. Those things are bad. But aren’t commercial farms the bigger violators here? Not individual lawn owners who just want a pretty front yard?

 

Erin Ryan: You’re right to imply that commercial farm runoff is responsible for the majority of nitrogen in the water supply. But did you know that a full 2% of the United States is covered with turf grass? An area the size of Iowa is just lawn. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: We grow more acres of turf grass in this country than we do acres of wheat. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, so while it might seem like a little lawn isn’t hurting anybody, any environmentally unsound practice at that scale is going to be a big problem. 

 

Erin Ryan: And you’re right that it’s not just individual homeowners who are responsible for the lawn problem. 

 

Max Fisher: And golf courses. 

 

Erin Ryan: Of course, we should never miss a chance to remind people that golf is bad. But in golf’s defense at least, that grass is being used for something. Public and private entities spend tons of money and resources on upkeep of useless strips of grass that serve no purpose beyond a decorative one. Now, I’m not talking about things like flowers or trees, which actually help the local ecosystem or provide shade. I’m talking grass. Just grass. 

 

Max Fisher: It does seem pretty wasteful when you put it that way. 

 

Erin Ryan: That’s why in a few states and municipalities, governments are now offering to offset the cost of converting their turf grass lawns to native plants. 

 

Max Fisher: Huh? 

 

Erin Ryan: In Pennsylvania, for example, the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources offers free advice for what to plant instead, and even in some cases, will hook homeowners up with landscapers who specialize in cultivating native plants. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s funny you mention this. I actually just learned about something called the grass replacement program in some parts of Los Angeles County, where homeowners can get rebates of thousands of dollars for replacing the grass with something more arid coast appropriate. 

 

Erin Ryan: You’re talking about a practice called xeriscaping, and places all over the west and southwest are getting into it. In 2021, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak signed a law mandating all nonfunctional turf grasses in the state be removed and replaced with more drought tolerant and climate appropriate varieties by 2026. 

 

Max Fisher: Does this mean that everybody in Nevada needs to get rid of their whole lawn? What about baseball, Erin? 

 

Erin Ryan: Hashtag not all lawns. Nevada has only outlawed the decorative kind that serves no functional purpose. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh okay. 

 

Erin Ryan: I’m talking about boulevard medians of little grassy areas outside of businesses that nobody uses to work or play on. The state law passed back when Nevada’s drought situation was fairly catastrophic. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh, right. That was the summer they kept finding dead bodies in Lake Mead as the drought caused the water levels to fall. 

 

Erin Ryan: That was the only cool thing about the drought. [laughter] Still, some Vegas homeowners associations were pissed about having to eat the cost of replacing their water guzzling, herbicide huffing, biodiversity smothering patches of Kentucky bluegrass with something more sensible. 

 

Max Fisher: Freedom means that I can have green grass in 100 degree summers if I say I want it. 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, you mentioned earlier that one of the big factors keeping people on team lawn was the need to have one in order to fit into their neighborhood. 

 

Max Fisher: Changing your lawn into a meadow and pissing off the entire neighborhood in the process seems like kind of a petty hill or grassy knoll to die on. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure. 

 

Erin Ryan: But that pressure is also dissipating. With the growing popularity of the no lawns movement, both in real spaces and online. Like there’s a thriving Reddit community where people who have chosen to replace their grass with something more sustainable show off their new meadows to each other. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh. I’ve seen this. People are growing these little meadows all over the place. And some organizations that promote a return to more natural plants even issue these little signs that homeowners can put on their front lawns now, letting curious onlookers know they’re actually helping nature by letting their lawn grow out. 

 

Erin Ryan: There’s also no mow May, which is exactly what it sounds like. 

 

Max Fisher: So maybe this is just because I’m in my late ’30s, but I’ve noticed more people growing food in their yards too. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, which, funny enough, is a throwback to a time before lawns when people used most of the property around their houses for growing food and raising animals. 

 

Max Fisher: Hey, I’m all for people making eco friendly choices, but if my neighbors who live 20ft away from me start raising chickens. We are going to have a problem. 

 

Erin Ryan: I don’t know if it’s zoned for livestock where you live, Max, but on the off chance that it is, might I suggest sheep. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh nature’s lawnmower? Okay, so Erin, one thing I love about this idea of converting a lawn to native plants is that it’s so easy to feel helpless about the environment these days. Like, what can I possibly do that will make a difference? And actually, if you have a lawn or if you know someone who has a lawn and might listen to you, this is something you can do that makes a real difference. Like sure, it’s a bit of work. Maybe you have to get a gardener to help you out, but the benefits to the planet will keep accruing forever. That’s something you can feel really good about. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know, one thing that I was thinking as we were putting this episode together was as we learn more and more about how lawns are bad environmentally and kind of irresponsible ecologically, will they become eventual cultural division symbols. 

 

Max Fisher: Oooh. 

 

Erin Ryan: Like Democrat Republic. No lawn, lawn. You know?

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: Is it is it going to be something that people who are on the more conservative side insist on, and people who are maybe more forward thinking, don’t?

 

Max Fisher: A grass lawn is going to be the new Blue Lives Matter flag. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right. 

 

Max Fisher: Flapping over the house. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right, exactly. But I got to say, also, just on a personal note, a couple years ago um, I seeded my lawn. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh!

 

Erin Ryan: With some wildflower seeds, and it bloomed and it looked really beautiful. And we have butterflies and all kinds of natural pollinators in the lawn now. And it seems like people in the neighborhood actually really like it. When I see people walking their dogs past the house, they stop and they look at the flowers, and it most importantly allows me to be incredibly lazy. Like I barely have to do anything to keep it up. I every once in a while I’ll dump some like gray water on it. Um. And it and it kind of maintains itself. So I highly recommend going meadow if you can, especially if you like flowers and are lazy like me. [laughing]

 

Max Fisher: And as a side benefit, you get to save the planet. 

 

Erin Ryan: Exactly. All right. That’s all the time we have for this week’s show. To play you out, please enjoy this sound from an authentic lawn dad. 

 

[clip of unnamed lawn dad] What a day already, what a day already. I would rather change out urinal cakes then cut the grass. That’s not true. Might be true. Starting to come back. I’m proud we had [?] the ground in June. Never happened before. Home stretch baby. The back quadrant. Look it up. I guess it’s not a quadrant, but one, will you actually look it up? I was just attacked by a dragonfly. Where’s the bear shit? There it is. Avoid the shit. ATS, avoid the shit. More bear shit, damn. [music break]

 

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s produced by Austin Fisher, Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. 

 

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. 

 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Max Fisher: Production support from Adriene Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf.

 

Erin Ryan: And a special thank you to What a Day’s talented hosts Tre’vell Anderson, Priyanka Aribindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. [music break]

 

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