How to Choose the Right Concrete Mix (and Make GFRC Look Like Concrete)
"When I first started doing GFRC, every architect told me the same thing: ‘I don’t like it, it looks like plastic.’ That’s when I knew something had to change." -Brandon Gore
Most makers want their work to look authentic, but too often GFRC ends up looking like plastic instead of stone. That disconnect leaves artisans frustrated and searching for answers. In this episode of The Concrete Podcast, we unpack why that happens, how to avoid it, and what it takes to get your concrete to look and feel the way it should.
We’ll also walk through the bigger question every DIYer and pro faces - how do you choose the right mix for countertops, sinks, furniture, and tile? Not all mixes are created equal, and the wrong one can cost you time, money, and the quality of your work. By the end, you’ll understand what to look for, what to stay away from, and how to make confident choices that elevate your craft.
If you’ve been struggling with “plasticky” finishes or just wondering what makes a truly great concrete mix, this conversation will give you the clarity you need. Because when your materials rise to the level of your vision, you stop fighting against concrete and start creating with it.
#ConcretePodcast #MakerMindset #concretecountertops #GFRCConcrete #CraftAndGrowth #ArtisanJourney #SelfDevelopmentForMakers #concretefurniture #KodiakPro
TRANSCRIPT:
Brandon: Hello, Jon Schuler.
Jon: Hey, Brandon Gore, good to hear from you, bud.
Brandon: Yeah, so RammCrete Workshop. Let me get this out of the way. Had a sign-up last night. October 18 and 19. Goddard, KS.
This is the rammed earth aesthetic for high performance concrete. So we’re able to do thin shell work, things like furniture cladding and tile. We had one customer make really thin tile, which is really cool. You know, when Kyle Davis made a mailbox, he did cladding for a house. He’s done all kinds of rad stuff. We had another customer, who am I thinking of, Dale, did an outdoor BBQ with RammCrete.
RammCrete is a really cool thing, but it’s a very unique aesthetic. I just want to put that out there, because if you’re like, “Oh, I want to come learn the basics of concrete,” that isn’t this class. This is a very specific look. So just know that. We had the basics class a couple of weeks ago, that was that class. This class is RammCrete, but it’s going to be a fun class. October 18 and 19, Goddard, KS, and you’re going to be here. Jon has scheduled his flight and his hotel.
So Jon is going to be here in attendance, hanging out, answering questions, high fives, kissing babies, signing autographs. So register, comps, fist bumps. concretedesignschool.com. People sometimes go to Kodiak Pro. We don’t have, I should do a link and I will do a link, but right now there’s no link on Kodiak. So concretedesignschool.com to register.
So there’s that. What else do we want to start this off with, Jon, before we dive into the topics?
Jon: Oh, you had one. It was a question on Facebook. Somebody wanted to know how to make GFRC look less like plastic.
Brandon: Yeah, that was an interesting question. There were some interesting responses, but I struggled with this. I first started doing GFRC in 2005, and Hiram Ball, who was on the team that invented it in the 70s, was the person that made and then ultimately licensed the polymer Forton VF-774.
A little bit of history that kind of explains this. When they first developed GFRC, there wasn’t AR glass fiber, alkali resistant glass fiber, because nobody had put glass fiber in concrete up until then. That was a new thing. So they were using traditional E-glass. E-glass is used in fiberglass with resin for things like boats and airplanes and helicopters. So they were putting that in the concrete, and the alkaline environment was attacking the glass, breaking it down.
Jon: Prior to the polymer you mean?
Brandon: Yeah, yeah, but I’m getting to it, Jon. Somebody on the team said, “Well, this glass is breaking down. Let’s try to put some glue in there and maybe offset it a little bit.” Polymers are glue. You can call it an acrylic, a polymer, glue. If you ever open it and smell it, it smells like Elmer’s glue because it’s glue. They put some glue in there and, lo and behold, the fiber wasn’t breaking down as badly. Then they put more in, and more in, and finally they were like, “Oh man, the fiber’s holding up.”
Time goes on and glass companies developed alkali resistant glass, which is high in zirconia content or has a zirconia coating on it. Essentially they made a glass that did not break down in concrete, but the polymer was already there and it was a huge money maker for a massive market.
I feel, I mean, I don’t have proof of this, but my instinct was they pushed polymer to the threshold of where it became detrimental. They found that point and said that’s the amount you want to put in. When I first started doing GFRC, the amount that Hiram Ball told me to put in made it look like Corian. When I demolded it, it looked just like plastic. I remember taking samples to some architects and asking, “What do you think?” Every architect said the same thing. “I don’t like it. It looks like plastic.” Verbatim.
So I started, just me personally, casting samples with less polymer and less polymer until it didn’t look like plastic, but still had the benefits Hiram said it had, which were color fastness and a 24-hour dry cure. You don’t need to cover it. Abrasion resistance, flexural strength, all the things he said were there. I said, “I don’t want to lose that, so I’ve got to get the polymer in there.”
What I found was back it down and we got to a happy medium where it didn’t look like Corian anymore. Now we know better, and we’ll talk about this later in the podcast, but polymer for what we do, sinks, countertops, furniture, tile, is unnecessary. It doesn’t add the benefit we’ve been sold. It actually increases a lot of the side effects with sealer and other things you don’t want, like air entrainment, all the things we really struggle with on this type of concrete. We’re not making cladding for skyscrapers. We’re making something that somebody looks at from six inches away. It’s their countertop, they’re going to be right down on it looking at it. We don’t want a billion little pinholes in it. The polymer was detrimental and we’ve now completely taken it out. Again, we’ll talk about concrete mix in a while.
This guy posted the question, “How do I get GFRC to look less plasticky?” One of the responses from a different materials company, which I thought was pretty telling, because experience matters. I mean people that actively do this every single day, not someone that did it at one point, went out of business, then became a salesman or trainer. People that still do it and have done it for a long time. I’ve been doing it for 21 years. People who are in it for the long game. That experience matters.
So this other materials company chimed in and the response was, “Back out the plasticizer.” What? The question was for SCC GFRC. If you’re new to concrete, SCC means self consolidating concrete. We make a concrete that’s very flowable. It’s almost like a milkshake. You pour it out and it self levels, it flows through the form. You don’t need to shake or vibrate it. We use a chemical called a plasticizer. A plasticizer allows us to get a flowable mix without adding a bunch of water, because water is detrimental if you add too much.
So this company recommended backing the plasticizer out. If you back the plasticizer out but you’re still going for a flowable mix, what does that mean? You have to increase your water content, which is the worst thing you could do. That’s a really weird answer that speaks to a lack of experience.
The other thing they recommended was throwing some cornstarch and baking soda in your form to create texture. Texture is a good way to make smooth concrete look more raw or natural, but the baking soda and cornstarch isn’t the way. You’re going to end up with a mess when you demold.
Dusty Baker, we’ve had Dusty on a few times and we’ve done tons of classes over the years with Dusty on his look, Dusty Crete. Dusty has a casting powder. I have nothing to do with it. We don’t sell it or retail it. But I can tell you the casting powder that Dusty sells is not baking soda and cornstarch. The look you get is completely different, more nuanced and subtle, and a lot less problematic.
I have personally played with baking soda over the years. If you use baking soda, it literally reacts and fizzes up with the moisture in the concrete. You end up with a travertine type surface with lots of pits and holes and fissures. If that’s the look you’re going for, cool. I did pool coping for a house and they wanted a travertine look. We took baking soda, made a paste, dipped a paintbrush in the paste and slung it into the form, let it dry, then cast over it. When we demolded, it looked like a coral travertine type stone. But if you’re going for a countertop or a sink, you’re going to fill all those. You have to slurry it. It’s going to be a big mess, and you’re going to be hating life. All the profit you would have made on that project goes out the window because you spent three or four days slurrying and polishing.
So again, texture isn’t a horrible idea, but baking soda and cornstarch I would not recommend unless you like pain. What are your thoughts, Jon?
Jon: Mine’s probably a longer story too, well not really. If you look back, those of us who’ve been around for a while, when we were introduced to this new way of thinking GFRC, I bought into it. Meaning, wow, I can get stuff from inch and a half or two inches down to like three-quarters of an inch. This is going to be amazing. It’s going to be lighter. I can pump out more. And I don’t have to cure it either. Heck yeah.
I can’t think of one person who didn’t end up making what we basically called Corian, per what you just said. We were making cultured marble in a different way because we had so much plastic in it. It just is what it is.
Anytime your mix runs somewhere around 15 percent solids, you’re going to take on the characteristic of the acrylic polymer. When you put in 15 percent, the concrete takes on that characteristic. That’s where all of us were. Then we started backing down to 10 percent, 8 percent, 7 percent, along the same lines you discussed. When AR resistant glass came along, you didn’t need as much.
The misinformation was that you didn’t need to cure things anymore. They said the acrylic formed a film on the back, and as long as that acrylic hardened in the concrete, it supposedly took away the necessity for cure. We all know that’s not true. It completely glosses over the need for heat in the cure, which is very important. The exotherm is such an important part of it. If you’re like, “Just leave it uncovered and walk away and it’ll be fine.” No, bro. You did all this work just to save five minutes, and your material is degraded by 50 percent strength and density. Why would you do that?
I remember in California there became this initiative for paint recycling. People thought, “We can add it to concrete.” They tried to put carpet fibers in concrete too. California was like, “Let’s put it in the concrete.” What they found very quickly was it degraded completely. As soon as they pushed any thresholds, it was garbage. That should have been a lesson, but we were still pumping polymers into other materials.
When we took the scale down, we weren’t making massive cladding projects. I’m trying to make a sink. I’m trying to make something aesthetically pleasing, that I can turn around without a ton of labor, and that sealers actually hold up on. We found polymers to be detrimental. They created air.
Anybody who wants to look at forum pages can see it. People don’t always post failures anymore, which is too bad because that’s how we learn. There’s an unwillingness to put it out there because the initial run is, “Whose materials is this?” or “What sealer is this?” There are signs to look for, aside from air. Our GFRC pieces didn’t always hold up very well to acids. They were difficult. We learned not to mix muriatic acid any stronger than 12:1 or 20:1 or it just eats it. We just heard from somebody who did a very light acid wash and completely degraded the mix, which tells you whoever made it used too much polymer or the mix was crap. That’s too bad.
So yes, we went a very different route. If I look back, when we started doing conventional GFRC, that’s when the creation of the sealer-of-the-month hamster wheel started. We blamed the sealer. In a lot of ways that still continues today. It becomes blaming the sealer instead of the concrete.
Brandon: And I want you to hit why polymer is detrimental in relation to sealer. What was the polymer doing that created issues with any sealer?
Jon: Moisture. Like a sponge, it holds moisture. It didn’t matter if it was a polyurethane, polyaspartic, epoxy, acrylic, or a penetrating sealer. We all battled which was the better sealer and they all sucked, meaning we blamed the sealer. The concrete was the problem. We told ourselves we didn’t have to cure this stuff and we just needed a better sealer. Like lemmings we followed the path of standing behind a product we called concrete countertops, but we set all our expectations on whatever film or penetrating sealer we could come up with to give us durability for this plastic reinforced material.
Brandon: You said something earlier. Of all the tech calls we get from guys switching over to Kodiak and they tell us the horror stories. “I used this company’s mix and this sealer and it all peeled off.” Why don’t you post that? Why don’t you share that?
Jon: I don’t know. The people that run it are pretty nice. I don’t want to throw them under the bus. I feel like they helped me.
Brandon: Other people are buying that product. But you might want to warn people so they don’t. They send us the photos. We know all about it. It’s not our place to share it. But, come on. Let other people know. As much as it’s good to know what to use, it’s also good to know what not to use. We do this in everything else. Restaurants, “Don’t go to this restaurant, I got food poisoning,” and you warn people. But when it comes to concrete, people are like, “I don’t want to say anything bad.” You’re not saying anything bad about a person. You’re sharing your experience with a product. That’s valuable so others don’t waste months or years and tens of thousands of dollars only to conclude the material was not right for this use.
Jon: And the phone calls, the whole nine yards. People push themselves to the point where they say, “I just can’t offer this. I can’t do these shower panels or these sinks,” because they used materials that were supposed to be amazing if they followed protocols. It wasn’t amazing. It’s an unfortunate hamster wheel that continues today.
Brandon: Back to the original question. My answer for “How do I get my self consolidating GFRC to not look like plastic?” Number one, pull out the plastic.
Jon: Take the plastic out. And once you’re done, don’t slap a layer of plastic back over it when you seal it. You could have the most beautiful, natural concrete, and then you take an epoxy or a urethane or an acrylic and slap a thick layer on. Now the only thing you see and feel is plastic. It will have the same sheen as plastic. That’s all people are going to see.
You take a beautiful wood floor, hand-scraped redwood from 150 years ago, and then pour a half-inch layer of epoxy over it to protect it. Now you’ve got a plastic floor. Think about those penny floors. The pennies are beautiful, then you pour a half-inch layer of epoxy over it that will turn yellow and scratch and feels cheap. Besides making the concrete less plasticky, don’t put a layer of plastic over it and undo all your effort.
There’s a story from years ago. A friend in Modesto. We were sitting at his kitchen bar. I said, “Close your eyes and put your hand on your bar. Tell me what it is by feel.” He goes, “I know where you’re going with this.” At that time he was using an epoxy. You couldn’t tell if that was a laminate, a piece of melamine, a surfboard. You couldn’t tell any of it until you opened your eyes and saw it was a concrete countertop. Concrete covered in a film of plastic. You’re relying on all the love of this material based on the plastic longevity. That was a turning point for a lot of us. We started blaming GFRC instead of pulling it into parts and pieces. We forgot what concrete felt like.
So, number one, do not take the plasticizer out. You’ll end up pumping up the water, which is not a good answer. It’s not about putting stuff in the form to create texture just to overlook the plasticky look. The number one, in my opinion, is to take whatever mix design you’re working with. If it’s a pre-blended material and that’s what you’re locked into, maybe look to another pre-blended material that doesn’t have polymer content. If you’re making your own and you’re adding the polymer, bring it to a minimum. Don’t follow the manufacturer’s high percentages. If you must, take it down to 1 to 3 percent. Everyone will find a balance. Reality is, you don’t need it. If you feel you must use it because you bought 10 drums of it, then use a small amount. Otherwise, take it out and you’ll have something beautiful that looks and feels like you hoped.
Brandon: That’s the sunk cost fallacy. You spent money on it and keep throwing good money after bad. You bought all this polymer. That was a mistake. Don’t make a bad situation worse by adding it to your concrete, putting air in the concrete, creating sealer issues, and adding time to fix those issues.
Jon: It’s amazing how that cascade continues because a lot of material suppliers don’t have enough experience doing this for a living. They don’t make the products and stand behind them in the field. They’re selling you material based on limited experienced information. When you fail in the field, when the sealer doesn’t work right, the constants I see are people using a horseshoe-shaped sealer and a year down the road they’re getting white cup rings. I know exactly why that’s happening. I’m not trying to knock the sealer technology, it just is what it is. It’s the nature of the materials. Same thing with the plastic look of traditional GFRC with a certain percentage of polymer. You’re getting the characteristic of that material. If that’s not the characteristic you want, pull it out.
Another misinformation that continues is the idea that GFRC glass fiber needs polymer for bond. That’s not true. You want alkali resistant fiber. You can still make glass fiber reinforced concrete without needing to put polymers onboard.
Brandon: When I was living in Phoenix, there was an adobe block manufacturer in Tucson. A bunch of family companies for 100 years had been making adobe blocks. They all had their own handmade molds, their own size. One company got their block size specified as code. They were the only company manufacturing that size block. They got their block specified and immediately put their competition out of business because the others couldn’t afford to retool. That’s shady.
With GFRC, a similar thing happened. A polymer seller got a spec that said if you want to have a certified material, it has to have this level of acrylic polymer. Nobody asked if we needed it. The company that sold the polymer also sold glass fiber. There isn’t much money to be made on glass fiber, but there is a tremendous amount of money in polymer. Salesmen were doing very well. Because it got specified, everybody just bought into it. “I’ve got to use it. That’s the way.” It was like the Tucson adobe block thing. Shady, but that’s capitalism.
Anyways, you don’t need it. You don’t want it. Get away from it. Don’t use it. Whether you use our mix or some other mix, get it out and you’re going to love life a lot more. Then get away from plastic coatings because those are detrimental too.
Let’s move on to the topic we wanted to talk about, which was choosing the right mix for concrete sinks, countertops, furniture, and tile. The right mix is super important and it’s a question that pops up. People want to know more about mix and what makes ours unique.
I want to be very specific about this use. If you’re making cladding, then yeah, use polymer. Who cares? It’s 300 feet up in the air. You don’t care about sealer performance or pinholes. In that situation there can be a benefit to it. But if you’re doing things where clients will interact directly and look at it up close, like a countertop or a table or wall tile, the surface quality is important.
As a business owner, we all know the cost of running a business and how important profitability is. We don’t have the additional three or four days per project to slurry pinholes and air holes and polish and color match. You can’t run a business that way. You have to think about workflow, close-up look, and day-to-day performance. You were talking about acids before. Vinegar will murder polymer-heavy GFRC. I tell people do not use vinegar in your kitchen. That was always a problem. Those are the three points I’d be focused on. This is your wheelhouse, Jon.
Jon: If someone asks me, the first thing I’d ask is, what are you trying to achieve? Most of the concretes we make, even 1500 PSI concrete is going to hold a cup. The question becomes, what are you trying to achieve? Are you doing something an inch thick, six feet long? A drop face? Does it have a sink? Are you troweling it? Placing it? For this conversation it’s strictly precast, flat.
Are you going to put primary reinforcement? Cement, sand, and water are your three basics. We all know the higher the water-to-cement ratio, the weaker the concrete, which changes how much reinforcement you need. Once you start getting beyond that and into 9000, 10,000, 12,000 PSI, start looking to a mix that achieves what you want with the least amount of air. How do you do that? Keep your ingredients to those that produce the least air, which gets back to water, cement, and sand. But those three alone aren’t going to achieve what we want. So we bring in things that enhance the cement and the sand and allow us to keep water at a minimum. As we keep water at a minimum and enhance the cement, you get a mix that doesn’t pump air.
Most of us are using hand mixers or barrel mixers or vertical shaft mixers. The shear alone pumps air into your mix. Anyone who’s made meringue for a pie, that’s what it’s doing. It’s not just polymers. Certain plasticizers do the same thing. Some defoamers and pigments are built with surfactant technology. When you use a hand mixer, you’re effectively creating meringue. Strip those things out. That’s not easy. You have to look around at the materials the various manufacturers are putting in.
If you’re making your own mix, again, that’s the difficulty. At Kodiak we have TBP plasticizer with the absolute minimum amount of surfactant technology. That makes it more expensive, but it means it pumps less air into the mix compared to others. When you call a manufacturer, ask these questions. It might steer you toward which materials and manufacturers you want to work with. If they don’t know, that tells you they don’t have the experience.
If you’re buying a pre-blended mix, do the same thing. Talk to these people. Doesn’t make their mix bad, but at least know why you’re achieving what you achieve with it. They may not give you exact names, but know that four or five percent of their mix is a certain powdered polymer, assuming a pre-blended material. When you know that, you know why you’re getting the results you get.
Once you start dissecting and talking to the providers standing behind the products, that’s when you start narrowing down what you’re trying to achieve. If you want something hole-y, there are materials that will easily achieve that. If you want your piece to look like plastic, like Corian, that exists too. Cement and sand and water will get hard. Then you take it to the next level with fiber technologies and so forth. Call the manufacturers, start asking questions, and have real conversations about what you’re trying to achieve. Ask their experience. If at the end of the day this person says, “25 years ago I ran a little business for about six months,” maybe not the most experienced person. That’s OK.
Brandon: When I do the basics class, people ask, “What’s special about Kodiak? What sets it apart?” Here’s how I explain it. Particle compaction is the secret of Kodiak Pro. We don’t use polymers or a bunch of defoamer. Back in the day, we used that stuff, but we know the issues it creates.
If we looked in a microscope and the room you’re sitting in is filled with beach balls, that’s Portland cement. Fill it with beach balls. The sand you’re using might be basketballs. Put basketballs in there, that fits between beach balls, but there are still spaces. So you add a pozzolan. A pozzolan is a reactive material that can replace a portion of your cement. Pozzolans are good. They come in different sizes and shapes. You can use them to your benefit. Maybe that pozzolan is the size of a volleyball. Now you have volleyballs between basketballs and beach balls. That’s the average mix most people used forever. Portland, sand, metakaolin, polymer, plasticizer.
What Jon has done with Maker Mix is we’ve got our Portland, three different sands that get progressively smaller. The sands are chosen based on color and shape, which are important to flow and how the particles go together. Color matters too. Then Jon mathematically formulated each progressively small pozzolan. He chooses them based on color and shape, and they are reactive. He gradated down each particle smaller and smaller and smaller, so the next pozzolan is the size of a baseball, then tennis balls, then ping-pong balls, all the way down to microscopic. You get a super dense mix. There’s no place for air. You do that through particle compaction.
It’s not easy. These suppliers mine pozzolans out of the ground. You have to have relationships, get samples, do testing. Jon’s been doing this for 20 years, leading to Maker Mix and Rad Mix. That’s how it works. I’m comfortable telling people because nobody can recreate it without that breadth of experience and relationships.
Jon: The unique opportunity is our materials can evolve and keep getting better. As suppliers bring on new equipment and more advanced processes, we can take materials we never thought could be modified and say, “Oh, we can turn that into a micron?” That reinforces everything we’re doing. Gabe just did a workshop in Spain and was surprised how many people saw the flow of Maker Mix with a 25–26 percent water-to-cement ratio and said, “No way.” But materials engineering is further along than the days of 50 percent cement, 50 percent #30 sand, nine pounds of water, and a little plasticizer.
Brandon: Another focus when choosing a concrete mix is health. Equally important to performance. Many sealers contain isocyanates and toxic solvents. For the mix itself, we removed crystalline silica from our mixes, to the best of our ability within spec. We’re the only company I know of that’s done this. That greatly increases the healthiness of the product. Dust is inevitable. You’re going to mix it, grind it, cut it, sweep the shop. To the maximum we can, we’ve reduced crystalline silica dust so you’re not breathing it. I breathed it for a lot of years using silica sand and making my own mix. I wish this mix had been there when I started. Same with sealer. I used very toxic sealers for a lot of years. You can’t go back in time. All we can do is develop the healthiest products we can.
Second, I get this question almost daily. What is the difference between Maker Mix and Rad Mix? We haven’t done a great job differentiating on the website. Maker Mix is our fully blended mix. It has cement, sands, and all those pozzolans that create the particle compaction. You add water, TBP plasticizer, and your fiber. That’s all you do. You can batch a project in minutes. That’s what I use in my shop.
We also have Rad Mix. Rad Mix is an admix, but it’s a rad admix. It contains all the pozzolan technology, but no cement and no sands. That was developed for the U.S. consumer doing terrazzo who wants to add a lot of glass sand or decorative aggregate. You can do that with Rad Mix because there are no sands in it. The second consumer is overseas customers in Europe, Australia, South America. They don’t want to pay to ship cement and sand across the ocean. They add their own when it gets there. In the U.S., the math doesn’t pencil that way. It’s cheaper to get Maker Mix than to source cement and sand and batch it out. Time is the killer for companies. Anything you can do to reduce time increases profitability. Rad Mix is the admixture without cement and sand. Maker Mix is fully blended.
Jon: Lots of companies do that now. They have their pros and cons. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada, it’s a pretty good advantage to have it pre-blended. There’s a magic that happens when you get all the materials into a big sheer blender. The wetting out is different. It doesn’t mean Rad Mix won’t make something amazing too, but remember it’s not the same. Even though we have other companies sourcing sands and cements, it’s still not quite the same.
Gabe thought it was funny that here we focus on clear sands so that when we acid etch, we don’t see salt and pepper. In other places they’re like, “What are you talking about? That’s all we have.” Concrete has a different aesthetic elsewhere. If you’re in the UK or anywhere in Europe, talk to Gabe and bring some Maker Mix in when they do orders so you’d have the sands from here. Realize that comes at a cost.
Brandon: While you were talking, I checked the master platform to see how many hours total the Concrete Podcast has been listened to. Do you know how many hours?
Jon: No.
Brandon: 92,036 hours. That’s 3,833 days of continuous listening. If you listened 24 hours a day, that’s 10.5 years of listening non-stop. That’s insane. We’ve been doing this for a while now, almost three years.
Jon: Once again, the cockroaches. The concrete cockroaches.
Brandon: People don’t know what that means. In the very beginning, there was a lot of pushback when we came out. Anytime there’s anything new, there’s pushback. When we first came out with Kodiak, Kodiak then and Kodiak today are different things. It wasn’t crystalline silica free at first. It wasn’t the Maker Mix and Rad Mix of today. It has taken time to sharpen that blade. Same with ICT. ICT has progressed and gotten better. But three years ago it was still a revolutionary idea compared to everything else. Everything else out there is pretty much the same. Kodiak is the outlier.
We referred to ourselves as the concrete cockroaches. We’ll still be here no matter what. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll survive the nuclear apocalypse. We will be here for the long haul. Here we are years later. Looking at analytics, 2022 is when we really kicked off the podcast, but I started in 2019 on my own. 2021 started picking up. We probably started recording toward the end of 2021, and 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 have been consistent. 92,000 hours listened. And we’re still here.
Jon: And we’re still here.
Brandon: I’m sure Taylor Swift does one podcast and there’s 92,000 hours consumed in half a day, but for us over the course of the last four years, that seems really good.
All right, Jon, it’s Friday. I still have a lot of work to do today. I’ve got to get this done, get it posted, and get to work.
Jon: All right man, enjoy your day.
Brandon: All right, buddy, till next time.
Jon: Till next time.
Brandon and Jon: Adios.
Brandon: Hey, I say it first and then you say it.
Jon: I’m sorry. Adios, Brandon.
Brandon: Adios, Jon.