EP #145: The 75-Year Concrete Design Life We’ve Stopped Talking About

Seth Tandett (00:01)
And welcome to another episode of the Concrete Logic Podcast. And today I have Dr. Jon Belkowitz with Intelligent Concrete. Surprise. Today what we're going to discuss is we design concrete structures for 75 years. There's assumptions made in codes and specs and budgets for that. But the question that was posed

Dr Jon (00:10)
But what?

Seth Tandett (00:29)
And Dr. Jon, you can correct me. Why are we so comfortable watching concrete surfaces fail in 12 to 24 months without revisiting the 75-year promise behind them?

Dr Jon (00:42)
Wow, I did not think you were gonna cover that. Great job, man. That was perfect.

Seth Tandett (00:46)
No, thanks. But

pause, because I got to do my thing. So, all right. Before we get into that teaser, let's remind everybody how you can support the Concrete Logic podcast. So there's a few ways. The first one is if you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. Jon or any of the 140 something episodes out there, please share it with a colleague or a coworker.

Dr Jon (00:51)
Go right ahead,

Seth Tandett (01:12)
Get the word out about the podcast. Don't be selfish. Second thing is good shell fish. Yeah. Selfish. Anyways, or you can go to concrete logic podcast.com the homepage and in the upper right hand corner, there is a donate button. You click on that donate button and give any amount and the amount should be whatever value got out of the podcast. So it

Dr Jon (01:16)
or shellfish.

Seth Tandett (01:37)
That's up to you. I'm not telling you how much that should be. There's no paywalls to listen to this show. You just give that value back.

Dr Jon (01:46)
Cup of coffee. Same

amount you would spend on a cup of coffee.

Seth Tandett (01:49)
if that's what you want to give or, well, there's, I, yeah. If you go, yeah, but I will share with you, if you, if you join the newsletter, so if you, if it's the first time you, you go to the website, it'll ask you if you want to join the newsletter and you obviously don't have to, but if you do, when I send the newsletter out, I'm sharing a link of all the folks that,

Dr Jon (01:51)
That's the least they should give. Sometimes the education, 50 or 60.

Seth Tandett (02:14)
that donated in 2025. So you'll see how much everyone has, range of what they donated. So you get an idea of what other folks have. like I said, it ranges from, you know, what may be a small amount to Dr. Jon, which is probably a large amount to me because he's, you know, different guy. But anyways.

Dr Jon (02:33)
stop it now.

Seth Tandett (02:35)
You can, you can check that out, but I don't want to get off task. And then just going back to how you can help the podcast. The third, the third way is still on the homepage there, www.concrelogicpodcast.com lower right hand corner. There's a little microphone symbol. You click on that and then you can record your message to me. And that goes into my email box and you can suggest topics.

or guests or just give some feedback. I appreciate that as well. And if you'd like, we can play that on the podcast as well. with.

Dr Jon (03:09)
Can I recommend somebody real quick? Mr. Nelson, Indiana DOT.

Seth Tandett (03:12)
Yeah.

I will reach out to Mr. Nelson again. It's been a while since I've reached out to him and I will do that.

Dr Jon (03:23)
I wouldn't reach out to him now, I think he's still on vacation.

Seth Tandett (03:26)
mean, Yep, got it. All right, so let's get into the topic at hand. Going back to the question posed was, why are we so comfortable watching concrete surfaces fail in 12 to 24 months without revisiting the 75-year promise behind them?

Dr Jon (03:27)
Yep, understood.

Seth Tandett (03:42)
Let's... Yeah.

Dr Jon (03:43)
It's tough.

So can I pose that a different way? And I pose this as a guessing question, like as a riddle to Seth when we first started talking about, but what have engineers stopped talking about in the last few years?

Seth Tandett (03:47)
Sure.

Dr Jon (04:00)
And it's that 75 year design life, 50 year design life, whatever you were used to. That's no longer a topic of conversation, nor do we really see that as a major set of talking points at our national or regional conferences. It's more of a discussion what's happening to our concrete and how do we rebound from that. And I have specific examples. I'd rather go into the fundamentals of this, but

Go ahead Seth, sorry.

Seth Tandett (04:29)
No, you're going.

Dr Jon (04:31)
Okay. You know, Seth and I were talking about this fricking book that I absolutely love. And it's somebody else that I would like to join or not join, but to be a guest on the podcast. And it's Peeler Taylor's Cure and Concrete book. And I believe that was published by Taylor and Francis or the CPT tech center.

Right? I can't remember who the publisher is of that book. It is not an inexpensive book, but it is one of the best books ever written about this very topic. And the book was written, I think it's the second edition in the early 2000s, but the, the, the, the, I'm trying to sound smarter than I actually am, the juxtaposition of the book. I don't even know that's the right word. The thesis of the book is while the concrete surface will not

dictate the strength of the concrete slab, it will have a direct impact on the service life of the entire slabber pavement. And I'm paraphrasing, and Peter, if I'm destroying the thesis, please come on the show and correct me. I don't mind. The assumption was, and if you look at different DOTs, the assumption was that sacrificial surface with good curing, as per Peter's book,

would be somewhere around 20 to 30 years that we would have a maintenance cycle that would lead up to it, which wouldn't be a huge footprint. And then once we got to whether it's the 10 or 20 year, there would be some type of preventative maintenance, grinding, milling the surface, putting a polyurea or a silane or not milling it and putting a polyurea or an MMA or, or a silane on there. But there would be some type of remediation to extend it another 20 years or 10 years. And then you would do something else.

Now that 10 to 20 years cycle that allows us to get to 50 to 75 years is happening in 12 to 24 months with an average of 18 months. So with that inadvertently, and this is my pitch, this is my schtick and spiel, this is my spiel, this is me reading the tea leaves, folks aren't talking about 75 effing year design life anymore. They are.

knee-jerk reaction trying to figure out what the hell is going on with their concrete and how to make it last past the close of their contract into the maintenance site.

Seth Tandett (06:53)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (06:54)
And with all new design, screw 75 years, what the hell do we have to do to our specifications to make sure they last past 24 months or two years?

Seth Tandett (07:05)
So what we're saying is the specs of old are not keeping up with our concrete, right?

Dr Jon (07:15)
They never did. We just had, I don't know if it was the meeting of good raw materials, mixing and batching practices, and then finally, the placing, the laborers, the finishers who...

cared about their job. I don't know if it was the meeting of that. You know, normally when concrete fails this quickly, it's not one thing, it's a coupling event. But yeah, I do think that whatever we're doing now with the concrete we have now doesn't work. Something has got to change and nobody has the research budget for it and everybody's got to figure out two things. I guess it's three things. Why it happened.

what caused it and how do we change it?

Seth Tandett (08:02)
So we're saying that.

Dr Jon (08:03)
Well, wait a second, I'm sorry, I didn't answer your question. No, I don't think the specifications we used to have really did anything for our concrete, just we had more forgiving concrete. What were some of those specifications? Compressive strength, flexural strength, slump, unit weight, air. I mean, those really don't go back into durability mechanisms. They're more indicators if the concrete is of a certain quality, but whether or not and

By the way, compressive strength, is one of the most forgiving effing tests in our arsenal. Right? Any schmuck can do curing, but abrasion, de-icing, or scaling attack, like permeability, that stuff, which is performance-based. It's when we're really concerned about concrete, it's not the compressive strength of the concrete for pavement. Couldn't give a shit about that to a certain degree.

abrasive wear I've got a certain amount of traffic and then I deicing salts at the same time either separately or combined how are those two going to affect the life of my concrete and if your concrete doesn't meet the certain boundary condition I'm up Schitt's Creek and we don't have that compressive strength doesn't tell you anything

Seth Tandett (08:59)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (09:13)
And then most DOTs, and I hate to say DOTs, but that's what most people go to when they need research done because they don't have, ready mix providers, engineers, they don't have their own research budgets and don't need to be disrespectful. It's just.

Production or ready mix production doesn't have a line item for research normally, right? It's about producing concrete and there's no lag time.

You know, this is such a, it gives me such, you you know what adjada means? It's like heartburn.

Seth Tandett (09:40)
Alright.

Dr Jon (09:42)
No, this could have been avoided. It's the dumbest thing in the world. Like if we had just been honest with each other and Rich gets so pissed at me when I bring up this one-to-one thing, but you know, it's very hard to convince the industry, the production industry of something. And furthermore, because they don't have that lag time, that research time, it's really hard to convince them that that lesson that we convinced them is now wrong. So when we said water was the enemy,

I remember working with people who had dropped their water cementitious ratios down to a 0.28 for DOT concrete. Like, what the are you doing, dude? Well, water causes shrinkage. What do you think a 0.28 water cementitious ratio does, So it's very, and that took years for us to unlearn. Like, yeah, water is the enemy, but you still need water to hydrate the mix.

Seth Tandett (10:36)
Yeah. Well, you need the data from those things, right? To respond to it? Are we, is it, we have, right, well...

Dr Jon (10:43)
Yeah, we have the data. Nobody reads the effing data. And then when they

read the data, they're whoa, that's not with my concrete, or who did you have do that? You sure that's the right person? You know, there's enough anecdotal evidence that we don't need to dive into academic research projects.

Seth Tandett (10:51)
you

Right.

Dr Jon (11:05)
you know, that takes six months to a year and then they're going to write a paper about it, then we're all going to sit in a conference and talk about it. If the same engineers who were designing these specifications would step out of their office and go to job sites to see what has happened, it's very easy to see when you lose your entire surface and then you just start asking questions and normally just start with your contractor. Hey, why does this look different from my 1986 con?

Seth Tandett (11:30)
Yeah. So maybe the issue is that what you're saying is we're not getting out in the field and seeing what's actually going on. And then we're, then we're slow to react as well, right?

Dr Jon (11:43)
I think it's the opposite. We were slow to react. Nobody did the homework to include the DOT engineers. That's why I want you to invite a couple more DOT engineers because just like the ReadyMix providers, the DOT engineers trusted the one-to-one shtick from the associations and the cement producers. But we all followed blindly with that.

Seth Tandett (11:45)
Okay.

Dr Jon (12:07)
You can, you don't have, nobody has to believe me on this. I, encourage people to put me through the bullshit flag. And if you go to most DOT specifications, when you look up ASTMC 595, you know, they allow everything and anything under the sub. And also you don't have to send the old letters that you used to professing that you have no chemical changes to the cement. It's actually clauses.

Let's say, Hey, hey, don't worry about sending those letters anymore. I'm paraphrasing by the way, but giving that carte blanche. And yes, I know there's been a lot of universities have put time into paid by certain people to do. There was a lag when it came to the real creed and street creed evaluation. And even at this point, you, and I don't mean to piss on your Cheerios, even you were like, well, do you have the data?

I have plenty of job sites that you are more than welcome to come to. And that does not mean I have data. That means I have practical intelligence. And for some reason, there is, just like you did inadvertently, I don't know if you meant it, but there is a disregard in our industry for practical intelligence. And I cannot stand it when people say, where are the papers? Show me the papers.

Most of the people who asked for these papers have never read a effing paper. And, and, Hey, I love reading papers. I have papers galore that I tear into. even have a freaking podcast that goes into how to read technical papers. And I can tell you most people in our industry, there's 80 % of the people who should be reading papers who couldn't give a shit because, I don't got the time, Jon.

Seth Tandett (13:48)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (13:57)
You find time to get onto TikTok Wendy or Jerry, bring a paper into the bathroom. I can't understand the language. Buy a dictionary.

Seth Tandett (14:05)
Yeah.

Well, I wasn't talking necessarily papers, but the data from submittals. So it sounds like the specifications need to change, right? So what needs to change? Because I think what you're getting at is the, I think we're kind of on the same page. I think what you're suggesting is specifications need to change to kind of

Dr Jon (14:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Tandett (14:34)
get ahead of these issues, right? And then from that, from those, from the specs, you're going to be requiring these, these different submittals. And those submittals are going to give the engineered data, should be giving them up to date data on those new requirements in the specifications. So then you have the data and then you can decide if

if you're going to get the product that you want, right? So what needs to change in the specs so you get back to the 75 year design life?

Dr Jon (15:02)
which is the 75 year design life.

Dr. Rich says she says it best. Emeritus says it best. Don't tell me what's in the cookie. Tell me how you want it to taste.

Seth Tandett (15:21)
Alright.

Dr Jon (15:22)
And that is where we are currently with our specifications, where most of our specifications are so much cement, you can't do this beyond a certain point with your water cementitious ratio. I don't like using this admixture. They tell you what's in the cookie despite not knowing. This is the engineers of DOTs. They tell you how to make the concrete mix design.

despite not knowing what the F to do when it comes to concrete mix design. Most of these engineers don't know how to do the absolute volume method or have never made a cubic foot, cubic yard or a truck of concrete. So it's really, I think three things that need to happen. One is the specifications need to go from prescription to performance and it is a full swing. They can't go halfway and Rich is a wonderful flipping person to talk to. I've heard him

I can't convince engineers to do that. Rich gets on the phone call with them for 10 minutes and they're like, yeah, this makes sense, Rich. So it's really annoying how good he is at convincing people to make that change. The second thing is, I mean, there needs to be a state of the practice change. We're not dealing with the same old concrete. We're dealing with a much more, and if you've had other people talk about it on your show,

every freaking sector there is, whether it's flooring, pavements, vertical construction. So there's already a lot of information contained within the podcast on how to deal with that. And the third thing is the most important thing, which is getting back to the basics of concrete mix design. This problem all started with, we made the assumption that cement is just gray and it doesn't matter what's in it.

And if you go back to Peter Taylor's book that I absolutely flipping love and Peter, if you're listening to this, I would love for you to sign this. There's page 19 that goes over cement chemistry and how if different compounds change within the cement chemistry, how that will affect your end concrete product. Well, there, I believe it goes into both fresh and hardened properties, but I know it goes into not only the color, the setting time.

And we're talking about individual compounds. We don't do that anymore. We, as the producer, don't have the ability to go into concrete mix design. Somewhere along the way, somebody convinced the entire ready mix industry that we can make performance-based concrete with performance-based raw materials.

And we cannot do that. Just like a baker, we need to know if we're working with wheat flour. And if it's in rich flour, if it's maybe if it's buckwheat flour, if it's tapioca, almond, the sugar that we're working with, is it an artificial or is it natural? Is it raw? We have to know these things to get the end product that we promised our end user, our customer. And for some reason we told the ready mix industry

don't worry about that shit anymore. It's gonna all work out. But you're gonna have to pretend that the chemistry of the cement doesn't matter anymore. Same thing with the you know, we pick on the cement and I'll shut up here in a second. But it's the same thing with the fly ash. Just like traditional Portland cement is dead. Even the Portland cement Association changed their name. Traditional class of fly ash traditional class, natural ash or coal combustion ash is

dead too. They've been putting limestone fines and chemical additives in that crap forever. Last 10 years. And now they have an ASTM that allows for this.

Okay, I'm gonna shut up, I'm so s-

Seth Tandett (19:12)
So I just want to get back to the point of the specification change to help this out. typically, we specify compressive strength, slump, and air content. So what should we be specifying to help protect the service?

Dr Jon (19:20)
Right. Right.

Performance

What type of performance do you deal with like Colorado? They're still for some silly reason specifying compressive strength abrasion resistance 779 944 1803 there's three different types that you can use for pavement and You can combine it with a scaling test that was taken out for some stupid reason and it's really ego that took it out But you can still use the 672 that's available

Pre-treat the concrete and then do a brazen test or doom separately and compare the results but specifying that as well as the compressive strength now gives you ability to do not only quality control and Does this concrete meet a boundary condition? for the durability to the Aggressive environment that I have and if you're in Florida It's not you know deicing salts

It's the magnesium and sulfates that you get from the ocean water in the soils. Which is just as nasty. Or, it's the wetting and drying cycles that you get on marine-based structures. Which is just as nasty as freezing a thong.

Seth Tandett (20:33)
Are you hitting your microphone or something? there you go. No, OK, so abrasion resistance needs to be specified.

Dr Jon (20:35)
No.

shrinkage

we used to expect the shit at a ASTMC 157 modified that 35 day test and it was something like you know can't be less than 0.0 negative 0.04 percent you know in a 35 day period

Seth Tandett (21:00)
I see, I see that in specs.

Dr Jon (21:03)
yeah, but it was everywhere. And now I'm just saying, I'm not saying we don't see it. It's just, that's a performance. Like if you combine those four things, strength, abrasion, scaling, and let's say for here in the Western U.S. where we have Midwest U.S. where we have freezing thawing, scaling, de-icing salts. If you do strength, shrinkage, abrasion and scaling.

Seth Tandett (21:05)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (21:28)
I mean, I mean those four things, not just strength, but those four things. Okay. If your concrete can meet these limitations or these boundary conditions, we know it has the probability of survival of 85, 90 % right now. And for your DOT engineers, when you specify that, now you have a way to hold your contractor, I guess, just your contractor accountable.

So if you create this performance based specification, now you can say, Hey, your submittal needs to have this. And at any point within the one year timeframe of your warranty, I'm to go out there and I have the right to test that concrete. And if it's not 85 % or greater, then either I'm going to backcharge you, or if it's not at least 50%, then we've got to do a further analysis considering tearing it out and you got to fucking pay for it. Excuse my language.

Seth Tandett (22:25)
So these things are easy to do test in place.

Dr Jon (22:29)
In place or just like you do with your compressive strength, there's a concrete submittal process and you could...

Seth Tandett (22:33)
Yeah, I understand that.

I'm saying in your warranty example.

Dr Jon (22:38)
yeah. And then

remember these concepts are just bad. These are just reference points. If you're like, Hey Jon, we can't core shit and go do compressive strength. Okay. You could do a Windsor probe. And if you want to do that within a three day period, you can use a Windsor pen. You know, there are other methods to use that still fall under the realm of qualifying and quantifying, you know, an indicator.

that tells you whether or not the concrete is gonna last so much time. Like right now, again, go ahead, sorry.

Seth Tandett (23:10)
Is there are specs

out there that have that frame as far as if say you specified abrasion resistance, permeability, ⁓ those things. They have that and so during that warranty period they go out there and they have a system that they test these things and yes? Okay.

Dr Jon (23:21)
Yeah, Indiana DOT.

Yes,

and what I could do is, I don't know if you know this, but Company 33 has started working with this company called Concrete Logic Academy? Anyway, Company 33 has got some engineering specifications already written out in Word document form, and I think they're like three to five dollars a piece. So if there's an engineer out there who needs a starting point,

Seth Tandett (23:47)
Something new.

Dr Jon (24:03)
We have different types of Word doc or editable. I just can't say that. Editable engineering performance specifications like we're talking about for different types of structure.

Seth Tandett (24:13)
Okay, yeah, I'll link that in the show notes for this episode. people, yeah, I think that'd be interesting to see because I would think there'd be some pushback there as far as.

Dr Jon (24:21)
What would be the pushback? I love that.

Seth Tandett (24:24)
Well, going and verifying that something is still meeting the performance requirements as far as abrasion resistance and

Dr Jon (24:34)
Talk to Daniel, he's dealing with that right now. Those specifications have already passed in the state and they have like a certain like window where they don't have to do it. Like I think they have to start doing it September 20, 26. You know, it's like a grace period for them to plan for it. And all those tests per mix are gonna be somewhere between 12K and like, you 20K. And you have to hire a third party lab.

Seth Tandett (24:37)
Yeah.

huh.

Dr Jon (25:03)
You have them run your tests and you put that cost back on your freaking end user. And by the way, most of those projects are in the hundreds and thousands or multi-millions. So 20,000, 30,000 and verifying a concrete mix design, that's gonna disappear within the contract. So people can do the tests.

Seth Tandett (25:22)
Yeah, don't. Yeah,

warranty is always part of the price. I was just more curious about...

verifying performance during a warranty period.

Dr Jon (25:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, you've got to talk to Daniel about that because he's dealing with that now.

Seth Tandett (25:36)
Okay.

Dr Jon (25:38)
And by the way, that's not just the verification, that's the state doing the verification.

Right, okay, but still Daniel, if the verification shows that the concrete is shit, or something went wrong, that's where you gotta talk to Daniel. I think he has more insight on that. I can only tell you what the specification says, and it's basically, we're all in this together.

Seth Tandett (26:02)
Yeah, Well, you would definitely want to, as a contractor, want to clarify what that performance of warranty period is so you're prepared for that.

Dr Jon (26:13)
Well, right now it's a one year period. I can't remember what the spec says, the new spec says, but even that, DOTs have sent letters out to all their contractors that stipulates, hey, any concrete that was placed, you know, before or after 2004, the contract will not close until the contractor fixes all the maintenance issues and the DOT is not responsible for the cost of the maintenance issues.

Seth Tandett (26:16)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (26:38)
And I tell you what I've learned from this whole process in the last five years, because maintenance has been going to shit. It's not the repair that costs money. It's not even the materials. What's the most expensive thing about repairing an in-service or even new structure that hasn't been put in service is, what's it called? Traffic management. Holy moly guac.

Seth Tandett (27:00)
Right.

Dr Jon (27:03)
Gamole, just saving money on that is worth it. And then you have to tear out the structure of things really go to shit. even if you look at some of the old DOT specifications like Colorado, you know, if you're, what is it? 800 PSI below the required strength, you, you rip it out. And okay, if I'm wrong on the PSI, there's a certain amount that if you're below on compressive strengths, there's no get out of jail free card, you know,

We could do cores, but if you don't meet that, you're out. It's a thousand PSI, so if it was intended to be 5,000, it's only 4,000, you're ripping it out.

Seth Tandett (27:40)
So you said something there that caught my ear was you said a one year warranty. So there should be a warranty for the surface, right? And then a warranty for the entire structure. So and.

Dr Jon (27:49)
Hmm, it's...

Well,

see, that's the problem. There is no accountability in these warranties. So if... okay, okay, I apologize.

Seth Tandett (27:58)
Well, I'm saying going, I'm not asking you

to, I'm asking the way forward, path forward. So what, there's two, we need to start looking at concrete as the surface, which is how much are we talking about? Depth.

Dr Jon (28:07)
Sure, sure,

the top

six millimeters, 12 millimeters. So what is that? You know, up to a half an inch. Peter Taylor book here in concrete.

Seth Tandett (28:24)
Okay, and that design should last, yeah,

so how long should that last? 10 to 20 years, and that's the DOT's maintenance program is built on that. Okay, and then there's a separate warranty period for the entire depth of the concrete. No?

Dr Jon (28:29)
10 to 20 years.

Yeah.

No,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no. think I should have said it differently. And this is where that Colorado thing comes in. But first it's the warranty right now is not based on an accountability program. What it's based on that we talked about those four different strengths. So when you say something, somebody has to provide a warranty because the concrete didn't do X, Y, or Z, right?

Seth Tandett (29:08)
Yes.

Dr Jon (29:09)
Right now that X and Y is either slump, air or flexural strength or compressive strength, right? Which has nothing to do with durability. And right now, most of these concretes are meeting their strengths or coming pretty damn close to their strengths. And the contractor says, Hey, this is what you asked me to design. There's no warranty clause. Like, this is how we measure how good the concrete is going to be.

Seth Tandett (29:31)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (29:36)
Like if this is a maintenance thing, I can fix your concrete, but that's going to cost you different. And they're not wrong. Right? So the warranty for the sake of the DOT and the taxpayers, sorry to take this away from the contractors or make it tougher on them, needs to be a little bit more encompassing of what's going to happen to the concrete. And compressive strength is a quality thing that the ready mix providers use to make sure that, what they ordered is what they received.

Seth Tandett (29:42)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (30:04)
is what was designed. Right? But when it comes to how do we ensure through indicators that the concrete is going to last due to the aggressive ambient environment, compressive strength don't tell you squat. Doesn't tell you permeability, doesn't tell you the ability to resist abrasion. It can hint towards it, but if you want to do abrasion resistance or you want to know the abrasion resistance, you effing test.

Seth Tandett (30:17)
All right.

Dr Jon (30:32)
the abrasion resistance. So moving forward, we need to change to that.

Seth Tandett (30:37)
designing the surface.

Dr Jon (30:37)
You know, if you...

It's not, it's the surface, yes, but let's say if, we have ASR, like there are certain states that all of a sudden they're finding ASR. That's not surface. That's just another performance test that they have never had to use. They're just learning about it, but not surface though. That's performance.

Seth Tandett (31:01)
Okay. All right.

Dr Jon (31:03)
But a lot of it does deal with the surface. Remember that surface, Peter Taylor says it so much more poetically than I do, but it is the first line of defense. Right, once we lose that cementitious cap, now we expose the weakest part of the concrete, which is the interface between the aggregate and the cementitious paste. And Seth, you've gotta read that book.

Seth Tandett (31:24)
Yeah,

it's on my list. All right.

Dr Jon (31:30)
The industry did not lose the ability to build durable concrete structures and infrastructure.

we lost the habit of protecting the concrete surface. And I think that was the point you were trying to make. That a lot of this stuff, especially when we hold accountability to the warranty in the field, is surface related. And unfortunately, because we're dealing with concrete on Earth, and we have gravity, the choices we make with

Mixed design, raw materials, transportation, and placement all have an impact on how that concrete responds to gravity and how that impacts the top half inch.

So those are the dots connected.

Seth Tandett (32:14)
Yep. All right. I think we'll pause for today. We definitely will have to circle back and cover this, but I'll put the links to Company 33 in there so we can give folks that.

framework for the specifications.

thank you for coming back on the show today. Appreciate it, Dr. Jon. And like I said, check out the show notes. We'll have those links in there for you all. And until next time, let's keep it concrete.