The Relentless Pursuit of Concrete Greatness with Justin Burd

This week on The Concrete Podcast, we’re kickin’ back with Justin Burd, a true concrete craftsman who never hits the brakes. Justin’s all about that relentless drive for excellence, and he's here to share his journey. We’ll talk acid etching cast-in-place concrete countertops, offer some solid advice for folks wanting to break into the biz, and give you a glimpse into where this ever-evolving industry is headed. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting your hands dirty, this episode's got a little something for everyone.

#ConcreteCraftsmanship

#ConcreteCountertops

#AcidEtching

#ConcreteIndustry

#ConcreteArt

#CastInPlaceConcrete

#ConcreteJourney

#CraftsmanStories

#ConcreteInnovation

#ConstructionLife

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, Jon Schuler.

Hi, Brandon Gore.

Let's see, I switched it up there?

No, you did switch it up.

Little switcheroonie.

How's it going?

Yeah, good, buddy.

How's it going?

It is good, it is good.

Technology, man.

I've been on video calls.

I hate video calls.

I hate video calls.

Oh yeah, I don't like video calls.

I've had numerous video calls with people this week, architects, some other stuff, and I just, ugh, kills me.

But anyways, that's been...

I'm too, you know, my whole thing, this is what I don't like about video calls.

I'm too handsome for video calls.

Yeah, it's tough, it's tough.

It just, yeah, it throws everybody off.

It just, it's hard.

You know what I hate about video calls?

This is what happens.

We do video calls with Solomon sometimes.

They're like, yeah, let's do a video call with Solomon.

You know, since the invite and you and I log in on video and everybody else in the meeting has their cameras off.

So it's all blank screens, but me and Jon are on video.

So they're all watching us, but we can't see them.

Why do we do it like this?

Why don't we just why don't I just do like a conference call on my phone?

You know?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I don't like video calls at all.

So then it's all awkward.

Yep.

You don't know what it'll look.

You know, you're just like, I don't do it with my hands.

My hands are by my face.

I don't do my hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyways, my nose.

Am I supposed to pick my nose?

Anybody see me pick my nose?

Yeah.

So this week, we're going to have Justin Burd.

Justin Burd on from Chattanooga.

Is he in Chattanooga?

Chattanooga, right?

I you know what?

I think he's still in Chattanooga.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know he's in Tennessee.

I just is a chattanooga.

Yeah.

Justin.

I love Justin.

You know, you can still videos of Justin on YouTube.

There's so many of him.

Yeah.

You know, with Buddy Rhodes product and I think other things, too.

Maybe even the old Z system, to be honest with you.

Blue Concrete.

Yeah.

And he's a good guy.

And I'm always, I mean, inspirational for me personally with his drive and the many times that him and I got together making things.

He may be not never felt that way.

But yeah, man, you know, just picking his brain where he's going and ideas.

I don't know.

For me, it was super cool.

Super cool.

Absolutely.

But well, before we do the call, is there anything concrete related you and I want to chat about before we call Justin?

Well, I had, I mean, I'm going to say hopefully a quick one.

I've gotten calls from various people about like how to avoid lift lines again, and they were talking about various mixes.

We talked about some mixes and some casting techniques and type of thing.

And what I wanted to do and my recommendation straight up, and I'm just going to put it out there without going as this.

We've been talking about the casting method from the bottom of the bucket.

I don't know, maybe we need to put more pictures related to that, but or let's call it the pumping method.

You know, some like Gabriel and who else?

I think Caleb, right?

They're just pumping it in through a hose, not through the old days pumping it from the bottom, but so the mix is just continually being put into the form without any breaks, you know, rather than grab a five-gallon bucket, dump it, go grab another one, dump it and creating lift lines.

So it's one of the things that people are continuing to find where Maker Mix is finding an amazing niche.

Guys are setting up multiple buckets with that, you know, the adding of the gate valve or whatever they're putting on it and the hose and creating some entirely new finishes, man, without the concern for lift lines.

So I just want to put that out for, you know, lift lines.

I've been getting a lot of calls about lift lines.

If you don't like them.

I know Karmody, Michael Karmody does a lot of pieces where he celebrates lift lines.

That's part of it.

But there's times you don't want them.

Yeah, so if you can meter the rate of the mix going into the form and you can control it and you can keep it consistent, then you won't have any of that.

Agreed.

You know, I logged in to the Kodiak Pro Concrete Product Discussion page on Facebook, and Eric Nagel had a good question about acid etching in place.

He cast in place this beautiful RammCrete wall and an integral countertop.

It's insane.

If you haven't seen it, go to Facebook and join the Kodiak Pro Concrete Product Discussion page.

But it's beautiful, but it's cast in place.

So acid etching in place, he doesn't really need to do the face of the wall because that's not going to get a lot of use and abuse as far as staining, but the top of the surface.

What would you recommend, Jon, for acid etching in place?

All my cast in place.

Basically, what I do is I mix up, I just take vinegar.

That goes in one bucket, clean water in another bucket, just five-gallon buckets.

And I hate to say a wipe and scrub technique where I use rags, multiple rags, wipe the surface as part of the processing, scrub with a Scotch-Brite pad, and wipe off with a clean towel.

You do it all in kind of a thing and replenish your buckets.

I guess what I'm saying is what I don't do is like in the shop.

I don't put in a pump-up sprayer.

I don't soak the surface down and then scrub it all because you have that potential for the material to drip down the sides.

Typical things you try to avoid in the shop, but in place when you got cabinetry, flooring, whatever other things you might be working around, the simplest solution I found is multiple buckets, rags and vinegar, either your standard four or five percent or no more than the 35% that you can get in order from Amazon that's used for like weed killers and stuff.

But acetic acid, I'll use acetic acid.

I do not use muriatic, no.

Why is that?

Why would you use acetic in place, not muriatic?

Well, so acetic is far milder and neutralizes a lot easier than your muriatic.

Gotcha.

You have to hose it with water as much to neutralize it.

Yeah.

So you're still going to scrub and clean afterwards, but it's a lot more controllable in the rea...

So as an example, I can take a slopping wet rag with acetic acid and let's say accidentally oops and drop my rag with no concern of, you know, a hard white rag mark like you would get from your muriatic acid.

You know what I mean?

Or if the vinegar drips on the floor, you're not worried about like muriatic dripping on the floor would ruin a client's floor.

Agreed, yeah.

So it's so much more milder, much, much easier to control.

And in this having things like buckets to work with.

That's the way, all my upright casts, that's what I do.

Even if I sanding with the diamond sander or something, even if I'm doing that first, everything still gets a process with an acetic wash or an acetic scrub as I call it.

And then again, rinsed off with just clean five-gallon bucket water and rags.

That's how I deal with it.

Awesome.

Another question that I saw, and this is on the concrete countertops, concrete sinks, concrete furniture and concrete tile page on Facebook, is from a gentleman named Andrew Kellison.

And his question, I think, is a good question.

Anyone in this group have any advice for up and comers in the industry?

Essentially, he's trying to find employment, working for a company that does kind of what we do for a living.

But any advice?

Here's my take on that, is unfortunately, most companies like me are very lean operations.

So, you know, there's a time I had seven employees plus me, but that was a long time ago.

And I dwindled down from seven to three to two to one.

And for years, I just had one helper.

And then when I moved here to Kansas, I'm solo.

I'm working solo now.

And I really enjoy working solo.

But I would say most companies, you're in this boat, Joe Bates is in this boat, Gabriel is in this boat.

Most guys are sole operators, so they might have a helper help them occasionally, but not full time.

It's just the nature of the kind of work that we do, that it's not a big production type thing, so they're not really hiring a lot of times.

So that's not to say that that's always the case.

There's some bigger companies, ConcreteWorks in California.

They have a lot of employees.

There's some companies out there that have a lot of employees, but for the most part, it's rare.

So my advice would be if you're truly, truly, truly serious, go to a training class, a professional training class, not a demonstration, not a free class, but go to a professional training class, invest in yourself, invest in knowledge, and then go back and start making things and marketing those things, and see if you can do it on your own.

And I think a lot of that's how most people get in this industry, is they go back and they start making something they're passionate about, whether it's fire tables, or planters, or concrete countertops, concrete sinks, whatever it is, and they find that there's demand for it in their demographic, in their location, and they're able to make a business out of it.

That would be my advice.

I think the chances of finding somebody that you go to work for, to learn from, are much, much lower.

And time is the greatest commodity.

So if you're waiting for that time, you might be waiting for a long time, and the time might pass, and it's better to do it today and get going.

Yeah, I 100% agree.

Anybody, that's, first of all, sit down, have an honest discussion with yourself of what you're trying to achieve, and then invest in yourself.

There's so much available anymore with abilities, you know, the days of etsies or whatever the case may be.

But first, you know, figure out what you're trying to do.

Have that honest discussion with yourself, and then invest in yourself.

That's, to me, I think, anymore, if I had done that 20, 25 years ago, I'm not saying I'd be any further than where I am, but it would have saved me a lot of the pitfalls that I found myself getting into with employees, and we've talked about it for, and what I thought I was being paid, and it turns out I was actually losing money, all this stuff coming in, like, man, I am killing it, but how come my bank account is dead?

What is going on here?

I would have avoided a lot of that kind of stuff if I would have had a much better understanding of what I thought I was trying to achieve to where I am now.

Yeah, well, I said the best money...

Truly invested in myself.

Exactly.

The best money you can spend is investing in yourself.

That's the best money you can spend.

And the biggest cost savings you can make is to learn how to do things right upfront and not through trial and error, which is the way I learned, the way you learned.

It's a lot more costly in both materials and time to just wing it, not be satisfied, wing it again, not be satisfied, wing it again, and you get a little bit better every time, but it might take you 5, 10, 15 times before you actually end up on something that you are happy with.

And that was a tremendous amount of money lost.

And the first decade of my career was spent, trial and error, really.

It was a lot of failures that led to that.

So that's really where the training classes come into place is you can pay and learn how to do it right upfront and not spend all that time and energy wasted, essentially.

Speaking of training classes, that brings my last thing I want to hit real quick, Jon, before we call Justin, is I have a furniture design workshop, August 16th through 18th, here in Goddard, Kansas.

Go to concretedesignschool.com to read about it.

You can register there.

But this is a class on designing furniture, the tenets of design.

This really kind of plays into anything design related.

So it's not just furniture, but it plays into sinks, countertops, you know, whatever it is product wise, you want to design, this will all play into it.

So if you're interested in learning more, sign up for that.

We're obviously going to cover concrete and how to mix concrete, cast concrete, cure concrete, seal concrete, all that stuff is covered in the class as well.

But it's a very design focused class, which is really at the end of the day.

This is what the message I try to get across to people is people don't necessarily buy concrete, they buy what you make with concrete.

So as craftsmen, we want to make the best concrete possible.

We want to seal it with the best sealer possible.

We do that from a business viewpoint.

We do it from a, I want to put a product out into the world that I'm not getting callbacks on, that people aren't having problems with.

That's a business viewpoint.

But a customer, they don't care if it's UHPC, GFRC, ECC, OPP, you know me, they don't care.

So they just think concrete's concrete.

Okay, whatever.

It's not in their interest or my interest to educate them on all the different types of concrete and what makes ours different.

That's not important to them.

All they're buying from you is what you're making with the concrete.

So they're like, man, I love this concrete ping pong table.

Yeah, great.

They don't care that you use Kodiak.

It doesn't matter to them.

It matters to you because you didn't put twice amount of time into it.

You didn't get a callback, it didn't crack, it didn't yellow, it didn't do all those things.

But the customer, what's important to them is what you make.

So this class is really designed for the design aspect.

And I'd say that's from my 21 years doing this, that's really where a lot of people miss the boat.

They think that concrete is enough.

They think that's enough to run a successful business and it's not.

What is needed is design.

And design is, there's more that goes into it than you think.

So that's what this class is focused on.

So concretedesignschool.com, if you want to read more and register, and it's August 16th and 18th, August 16th through 18th, I'm sorry.

So on that, Jon, do we want to give Justin Burd a call?

Hello, Justin Burd.

Hey, what's happening?

Justin, been a while, man.

How you doing?

I'm good, man.

I've been good.

How you been?

Not good.

My life is horrible.

I'm just kidding.

No, things are awesome, man.

Things are going great.

I'm glad to have you.

We're glad to have you.

Yeah, I'm excited to play.

It's so funny you said your life is horrible.

Last night, my seven-year-old, I told her I'm not gonna color with her right then.

I was doing something, and she's like, my life is the worst.

I was like, really?

This is where we've gone to?

Your life is the worst?

Okay, okay.

Because we're not gonna color at this moment?

Yes.

I'm like, I told her, I'm gonna take you to the orphanage.

I'm gonna call your mom right now.

She's asleep.

I'm gonna wake her up.

We're gonna take you to the orphanage.

And then we're gonna figure out if your life is the worst.

She's like, I'm just kidding.

I'm like, are you?

I don't know.

So anyways.

Yeah, maybe it is to her.

There's only one way to find out.

Yeah, yeah.

I think they're open right now.

Let's go.

Yeah, am I kidding?

I don't know.

Let's go see where this goes.

Justin, I know you.

Jon knows you.

A lot of people know you, but we have a lot of new people in this industry.

Tell us about you.

Well, I'm Justin of NeverRest Design, and I've been in this game almost 20 years.

Pretty close to what you guys have been doing.

And yeah, you know, it was an interesting start, you know, playing with the guys that got this game rolling, with Buddy Rhodes and Cheng.

And like, that's kind of where I started from, was the inspiration with those guys, you know?

And I always say that concrete, like, I wasn't looking for it.

It always kind of just found me.

And man, I just went down the rabbit hole, and I'm still in the hole, I guess.

For sure.

You mentioned Buddy Rhodes and all kind of good stuff, and that's when I got to know you, was back in the early Buddy Rhodes products.

Jon Schuler was helping develop the ZFRC stuff, and, you know, that was a very exciting time in the industry because we'd gone from traditional mixes, which are gravel, sand, cement, water, essentially.

We'd gone from that to these more advanced.

I'd been using ZFRC and I think you had as well, that kind of early Forton GFRC, but when Jon really started pushing the chemistry with the Z system, which I don't know who came up with that stupidity, but Z, everything was Z.

There was a lot of Zs.

There was a lot of Zs.

Yeah, everything had a Z.

Remember the retarder, they called it retards?

Retards.

With the Z.

You can't say that today.

It's canceled now.

Yeah.

You can't do that today, but yeah, it was Z everything.

But that was an exciting time.

That was an exciting time.

It was kind of a quantum shift in the industry in what was possible and the level of quality up to that point.

It was night and day difference.

So yeah, that was a really cool period.

Well, it felt like a pioneering time.

It really did, right?

It felt like all of us, well, us that we felt like we were involved were, because Justin, that's how I met you, man.

It felt like, I hate to use the word cutting edge, but a bunch of us felt like we were on and creating a new playing field.

And it was a lot of fun in creating new boundaries, finding new challenges.

And I remember I was at a concrete countertop conference.

I think it was in Nashville.

I don't remember exactly which one, but when you were doing some of the free fabric forming, and we made that little, I don't know, I called it the Dancing Baby.

You remember that one?

Yeah, that thing was super weird.

It was fun though.

Yeah, that was definitely the inspiration from all that fabric forming and just like tying some fabric together and filling it up and seeing kind of what the hell is going to happen here.

That's how I looked at it.

It was like, well, I got this shape in my mind, but I have no idea what's about to happen.

So that was pretty cool.

And it was weird.

And yeah, it was fun.

Super fun.

All of it.

Yeah.

That was definitely an awesome time.

You know, like I felt like I was really, for me, I was really trying to stretch and push my limits.

And you know, Brandon, in my mind, you know, you bring in kind of in our industry, kind of bringing that fabric forming thing to life.

That really like sent me down a road of exploration.

And I thought I came up with a couple, you know, some really cool things, man.

And I still love fabric forming like all the time.

I just love what it produces and the thing that you do.

That was a really, that was a great time.

It was.

So you had this time when you're doing a lot of concrete.

Then you had a daughter who is now, she's pretty much grown, isn't she?

How old is she now?

She's 17.

17.

Jesus.

I met her.

I don't know if you brought her to an Epic or someplace, but I remember I met her.

Maybe it was in Chattanooga or something, but she was like...

She came to the first, like it wasn't an epic, but it was like that little, that first blue meeting before it turned into the epic.

Yeah.

And she was like four years old or five years old then?

Yeah.

I think she was probably like four.

It was early on.

The crazy thing about time and memories, you always remember people the last time you saw them.

And so I still remember her as a four year old, even though I know it's been so long, you know, but that's how I remember her.

And now she's 17 years old, but there was a, you know, you had a daughter and you had a company in Chattanooga, but you're really busy with concrete.

And then I kind of saw that you kind of went under the radar for a while.

Why did you kind of go off the grid with concrete?

I do that.

I feel like I did go under the radar.

I never stopped doing it.

Believe me, there has been a couple of times where I wanted to get away from it, but it just kept reeling me back in, which is kind of funny.

But I think one of the reasons I like stepped aside from the focus of it was I got really heavily involved in endurance racing and I'm really pushing myself.

I'm a huge advocate.

Fitness, I really love to push myself mentally and physically when it comes to strength and endurance and doing hard feats.

So I really just went full force into that.

And for me, I don't feel like there's a balance of like, if I'm going to go into something, it's going to be like 100 percent.

So there was a time where it was like, I was 100 percent in the shop, you know, 15 hours a day working, playing, keep, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And then it kind of just formed into this.

I got really into doing endurance, endurance feats and events and races.

And like just really started to go headlong into that and long things like that.

And that obviously takes a lot of time for sure.

So to do those things.

But man, I love that stuff.

And I seem to recall just from Facebook from back then that you were spending a lot of time rock climbing with your daughter, camping.

You guys were doing a lot of adventures together at that time.

Yeah, it's been man ever since she could like walk.

It was like, let's go.

And man, we've I mean, I'm fortunate enough to say that even at 17, I still get to like hang with her every day.

And I'm in the gym with her four days a week, lifting weights and like, you know, climbing.

She's a competitive climber and like, so that's awesome.

But we had this awesome, you know, relationship, which has just gotten even better.

But we, she was a whitewater kayaker when she was six, you know, we were going climbing, doing all kinds of stuff and just, just constantly moving, man.

And so that's been great.

That obviously took a lot of focus, but that was the focus that I wanted to generate every single day, so it was killing.

So you, you're in Concrete, you went off the radar, you focused on fitness and endurance racing.

And at some point you launched NeverRest, as Jon says, Nev-Rest.

We're talking yesterday, he kept saying it.

That's what most people say is Nev-Rest.

I'm like, Jon, it's NeveRest, like Mount Everest, NeveRest, he's like Nev-Rest.

We had like a 15 minute, oh my God.

We had like a 15 minute conversation about this yesterday when I was driving.

I'm like, I don't get it, man.

This is so typical Jon Schuler just butchering a name right here.

No, that's cool, man.

It's cool.

A lot of folks do that and it is what it is.

But NeveRest is like, for me, it's my lifestyle and NeveRest, like when you just get so obsessed about something and like you're doing something and you're thinking about it and like, you just can't turn it off, right?

Like that's NeveRest to me.

And another facet of it is I never rest, really.

I don't.

I'm up early.

I go hard every day and I'm just never sitting around.

I'm having trouble sitting around doing this.

Go for a run.

That'll be interesting.

I didn't think it was going to be efficient to be outside doing it.

Yeah.

But no, just that, just that like drive and that passion that you have, like that NeverRest spirit.

And it's just, that's my life, man.

That's my lifestyle.

So that's awesome.

That's where it comes from.

So I guess to bring it full circle, what brought you back to Concrete?

What was the start of that?

I never, I never, I never was gone from it, right?

I kind of look at it as this little like little remnant thing.

Like I just kind of went back in the shadows and like I was still doing it.

You know, it was my living.

Like I was making money and like, you know, my products were good.

I was, I was, I was just doing it right.

I don't feel like I got to a point where I didn't feel like I was pushing myself technically like I had in a while.

And I think one of the things I wanted was, I just got to the point where I was like, I need to, I need to change.

I need to stretch again.

And I'm kind of hungry again for this.

And cool.

So that was what led me to Kodiak.

Just what you guys are doing.

You guys are always stretching, man.

You two guys have always stretched.

Like just continually moving forward, evolving.

I feel like in the last few years, I've done a lot of evolution in myself.

So I wanted to stretch again.

And I wanted to stretch with a different material.

You know, my materials were working great.

They've always worked great, but I just wanted a complete change, right?

A completely different direction.

And I also wanted to support the momentum and the forward mobility that you guys are going.

So I think that's awesome as a company.

Yeah, thanks, man.

So that's kind of my, you know, how I got into wanting to change things.

And Kodiak was kind of like one of those doors that opened it up.

And then now, like, you know, I'm kind of like paying attention to like, you know, where the industry is and learning these new guys.

I want to say new, but they're new to me.

They're probably not new guys.

But, and seeing the stuff that's happening and then what has evolved in the last 20 years.

And it's, it's just so awesome, man, to see like where things are going.

People are pushing things and materials being pushed and like what we can do with this material.

It's just really cool.

So that's kind of lit a new fire in me and it's made me hungry again.

And so, yeah, I'm ready to eat.

Awesome.

So what I was gonna say, that's kind of the input I get every day.

Like even yesterday, I got, without naming names, somebody wanting to come on board.

When I say come on board, pushing themselves a different direction and some casting styles they haven't been involved in.

And that's what's moving them towards this direction.

You know, Brandon, you jump in, man.

I remember I was one of those people like everybody else when, I'm gonna call it the evolution, right?

Like we all thought we were getting into this whole spray idea with GFRC.

And, you know, we were all these things we could do with spray techniques that were very new to a lot of us from a technique point of view.

And I know for me, it didn't take me very long to go, oh my God, this is killing me.

These are too many steps.

There's too much stuff.

Hey, I missed this.

Got this whole delaminations or whatever the case may be.

And then that quickly evolved back to like, yeah, no, casting style seems work the best for me.

And then trying to elevate the game from that direction.

And that's where I feel like we've evolved in what we're doing, is seeing a lot of people that are now seeing, creating three-dimensional objects at, we use the word quality, but I think they're just, they're taking it to levels that we didn't think was possible and truly wasn't possible with the materials we have been using at the time.

Well, you said something right there.

When we're spraying concrete, it didn't take you long to figure out that was a world of pain.

And that just further proves my point that you're the brains of the operation, because it took me a long time.

It took me about 10 years to figure out there's a world of pain.

I had to go...

I'm still in the pain.

I like it.

Some people do, you know.

That's awesome.

There's people like zippered masks and whips and chains and all kinds of fun stuff.

But for me, I spent about 10 years of my life spraying and struggling and not saying that it's wrong because it's just a technique.

But my experience with it was it was very hard to run a profitable business with the amount of recast that I had.

And that was some part due to I had employees at that point and everybody was different in the way they approached spraying.

So it was inconsistent.

But some of it was just the inherent chaos of the process of face coats drying too quickly, disturbing the face coat, pushing through the face coat.

There's just so many points of failure in the process that made it more difficult than it needed to be to run a business.

And that's why I went away from that and went to direct Cast SCC.

Another part of direct Cast SCC was like an idiot.

I, hiram Ball, when I first started doing GFRC, hiram Ball gave me the process.

He said, you know, you want to get a spray gun, you want to spray a face coat, blah, blah, blah.

Great.

I assumed that you had to do that to keep the fibers from showing.

I assumed this.

I assumed this was the way it had to be.

You know, it was only after many years of doing it that way that I poured some SCC into a form, some leftover concrete, and the next day I de-molded it, expecting to see fibers and there was no fibers.

I went all those years without ever verifying that that was the case.

And that was kind of a moment of realization for me, a moment of like, oh my God, I've been doing it this way this whole time because I thought it had to be done this way, but it really didn't have to be done this way.

So that started changing things, but it's just a difficult way, but a lot of people still do it.

And, you know, Joe Bates, for instance, he still does a lot of spray.

Great.

I mean, if it works for you, you should keep doing it.

But for me, it was very difficult to do and be profitable.

Well, I'm definitely like, you know, ever since the spraying came, like, that's that's kind of the path I took for sure.

And I still spray a lot to this day.

I mean, I've I've got a technique, a high spray finish that I really love to use.

Mix works great with it.

So but I'm transforming into like doing a lot more like pour direct to cast, SCC stuff.

And because, man, it does, it does save time.

It saves mess.

And like, you know, as far as like, if you've got workers, you know, and employees, like, yeah, they can dump it in the form instead of like everybody spraying something different and treating it different.

You take the variables down.

And I think that that makes a big difference.

Yeah, see, that's so good.

I think what's what continues to come down is the rules.

You know, we built these walls along the way and we've all been there.

You know, the days when I talked about casting, you know, again, we used pea gravels.

We use these kind of things.

They were thick.

And then I felt like so many of us were on this cutting edge of moving to like what we could do at three quarters to an inch.

And there was this big push about creating lighter, which sure, which moved us a certain direction.

But as Brandon's pointing out, I think we created our own boundaries by this rule set that we thought we needed to follow.

You know what I mean?

If that makes sense.

And then as many of us kept doing this, the experience started telling us like, wait a minute, man, I feel like we're pigeonholing ourselves.

What happened here?

And that's for me what broke out.

Meaning, I still want to do thin, I don't want it heavy.

Those days of carrying around 1500-pound slabs with getting those omni-clamps, all that jazz.

I'm like, yeah, come on, man, there's got to be a better way.

And so how do we push this now where then we start looking in our rear view mirror thinking like, no, high spray now is a technique.

You know what I mean?

And in other words, these became more tools in a toolbox than a set of rules that we had to follow specifically based on what we thought the materials could only do.

That's where I feel where we're evolving to.

Definitely.

I know that I've been like in the last couple of years, I've been really trying to push the boundaries on like thickness standards, right?

A lot of the fireplaces I've been doing lately have, man, they've only been like a half inch thick, three-dimensional pieces, and they're super strong, and like they're ridiculously light, so it's nice.

You know, we've been doing this a long time.

We don't want to be picking up 1,500 pound objects anymore, unless you're enjoying it, but fun to do that.

Zipper masks, whips and chains.

Zipper masks, eating pain.

No.

But pushing the threshold of what the material can do, I think, is really cool, and there's some good exploration in that, too.

For me, what changed was kids, which, you know, you had your daughter 17 years ago, so you were further along that journey than I was, but there was a time when I could be in my shop until midnight every day, and that was okay.

I didn't have any reason to be home early, but once I had kids, time became the most valuable thing I had.

Absolutely.

The old ways of doing things didn't serve me in the role of being a father and a business owner.

I couldn't do both the way I had done it.

And so Kodiak, I don't know if you've found this as Kodiak with your life, but for me, it opened up a lot of time, where before the materials I was using, the Buddy Rhodes products, you know, at the time, they were the best back in that period of time.

We're talking about back in the blue concrete days.

That was the best product.

I'm not saying it wasn't at that point in time, but now further down the line, those products take a lot more time to use.

I'm able to do what I need to do, mix, cast, you know, come in the next day, demold, acid-etch seal.

In my time, it has shrunk probably by 60%, 70% from what I used to spend to make pieces.

And that gives me the time to be home at five o'clock in the afternoon and have dinner with my kids and do things on the weekends, not be in the shop.

Yeah.

I mean, what it's doing is it's giving you freedom, you know?

And that's exactly what needs to be happening.

You need to be with your kids and need to be doing family things and important stuff.

Like, that's what it is.

And, but to have a material that allows you to do that, you know, that's super important.

That's just another facet of like, living a solid life like that, you know?

Not being in the shop, unless you really want to be in the shop for 15 hours a day or whatever it is.

I didn't want to miss anything with my kid.

And I'm sure most people could attest to that as well.

And having the flexibility, especially doing this kind of work, I feel like there is that flexibility to not miss anything.

And to build a business around that is, that's awesome, you know?

Heck yeah.

Where do you think, you said earlier that you've watched the industry evolve and you're excited to see where it's going.

Where do you think the industry is going?

I mean, it could be going to, I don't really know where it's going.

That's kind of the exciting part, is because I want that to other people to show me that and unfold it.

But I think it's just going to more technical pieces being made, overall better quality, and just more efficiency.

Like, I think that's a big part of it.

But I like the idea of just seeing much more technical pieces being made.

I'm not the guy, I'm not like the CNC guy, and I'm not a super techie guy.

And I know that's an art form in itself.

I still like pencil drawings, I still like that kind of stuff.

But it's really cool to see the precision and the detail that we can get when you're using, I guess, a computer and things like that.

But it's really cool to see that.

I respect the hand more, but that's probably because I don't know how to use the computer stuff.

Me and you both.

I built a chair that, it's a chair I haven't released yet.

I've posted some photos a couple of times of it.

It's a very kind of fluid shaped chair, but I did it all analog.

And sometimes in workshops, I'll show photos of the process, but it's an unbelievable amount of work that went into it.

It was all because I don't know how to use CAD software.

I couldn't model it.

I had to literally make it by hand because I don't know any other way to do it.

But there is something nice about that as well.

The whole process of making it by hand, even though it takes 100 times longer to make a master pattern by hand, anything that's made by computer is so precise and it's so perfect and it's so crisp and clean.

And there's nothing wrong with that per se.

It just doesn't have the mark of the hand.

It just doesn't have that character that your hand gives things, you know?

A craftsman said to...

Slight imperfection.

It's like a hand thrown, like Buddy Rhodes, for instance, making hand thrown pottery versus machine made pottery.

You can get these machine made...

I followed this guy on Instagram.

He makes ceramics.

He CNC's the molds and he makes a rubber mold.

Then he like slip cast them and they're very geometric and they're very cool, but they're very precise.

There's not any imperfection in them.

They're perfect.

And there's a difference, not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's certainly not in something that's handmade.

The Japanese guys I follow on Instagram that do ceramics, they're slightly imperfect and they put a lot of energy into it and a lot of effort into it, but they're not quite perfect and that's the beautiful aspect of it, versus the CNC one that's absolutely spot on, every little angle and line is crisp and symmetrical.

It's just missing the soul of the piece when you do it that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

What do you think, Jon?

That's why you do the upright cast, really, is the character you get from tooling the piece versus upside down casting like I do.

True, no, yeah, because in my opinion, I can control it.

I mean, to the best of my ability.

And, you know, I just had some, so anybody knows I took this, I've taken this summer off because my kids were off, my son was getting ready to compete for nationals and et cetera.

And so, yeah, I shut the shop down, but I had some clients come over here just for some projects I got coming up in August.

And these are the things, I just walked through my own house and seeing the various textures and what I've done to things.

That's what I enjoy about what we're doing.

And what I was going with this is you guys were like, where do you see this industry going?

And for me, not that I was asked, but I'm gonna put my two cents in there.

I think a lot of what, where I'm seeing it go, at least my view, is once again, it's that same thing.

You surround yourself with those people.

We talk that a lot.

You wanna be a millionaire, surround yourself for a millionaire.

You know what they're doing.

Are they buying real estate?

I mean, what are these things that they're doing?

And what I'm seeing going on in this industry, and I've been in there for quite a long, with some of the evolutionary paths that have been created, is paying attention and being part of where people are elevating the game.

Yes.

And then, you know, and then, I'm not saying this is bad, but I see the daily stories of some people.

And you know, again, some of the other personalities out there with, you know, various experience levels that they claim they have.

And it's just interesting to see where it's evolving with those people that are pushing for it to evolve, creating new things, you know, pushing new things.

And again, I'm even going to put guys out there like Gabriel.

I mean, do you see some of the recent, I think it was a waterfall that he created in that whole three-dimensional cast and a texture.

And I mean, these are things that are really pushing places that I'm excited to be moving that way and walking away for some of the pieces you'll see come up.

You're like, yeah, yeah, there you go.

That's a rectangle.

Oh, nice.

It's important for the bar to be set, so the bar can then move up.

And I think that's where the industry has a good chance to go, especially fostering the community.

I mean, we've talked about that before, too.

Like how many industries are as open, and I feel like as open as ours is, like everybody kind of is free to talk and like share.

And like, I think that helps raise the bar as it builds a community and builds a brotherhood and a sisterhood.

And then we all kind of rise to that.

And then the bar just keeps going and going.

And then you got to think too, like, you know, young kids got to be bringing this thing up too, because they're kind of the future of this industry, if you want to call it that.

So like, you have to build them too.

It's almost like you have a responsibility or duty to pass that on, so this thing can still continue to grow.

Absolutely.

Yeah, Jon's been talking about getting his kids involved and maybe doing a little side business to, you know, generate some side income for them.

You know, a lot of kids get summer jobs, but if they were able to craft really cool items and go to a farmer's market and sell wine coolers and concrete bowls and vases and, you know, all those kind of things, it could be a way to generate income, but also a way to teach the craft to the kids, to pass it on to them so they learn, whether they want to continue down that path, at least it's something they learn and they have in the toolbox for down the road.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Has your daughter helped you in your shop at all, Justin?

Yeah.

I mean, when she was younger, man, she was all about it.

She was into it.

We were always making stuff and then she's gotten a little bit busier.

But in the last year, she's helped me do some projects.

And so that's super fun, man.

I'm so grateful that I get to have a 17-year-old that still wants to be around me consistently.

Yeah.

So, man, I take every ounce of time that I get.

And so, yeah, she'll still come in the shop.

She doesn't like sweating her butt off all day in the shop, but, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, my 7-year-old, she's got the worst life ever.

Ever!

So hard.

Maybe she's missing the black crayon or something.

Dude, with her Bluetooth headphones and her iPad.

I'm like, are you serious?

I didn't have an iPad till I was like 30 years old.

You're 7!

I didn't have a phone till I was like 30 years old.

Golly, these kids these days.

Anyways.

Well, Justin, what do you want to talk about?

What are topics of interest that you want to discuss?

Well, I mean, one of the ones that I was excited to discuss was kind of like, you know, where this is going and like, you know, what the future looks like, whether maybe it's training or or how that's moving.

But, you know, talking about the NeveRest lifestyle is just always exciting to me.

And getting people kind of excited about that same situation, I feel like what we do can represent some freedom, right?

It's not your typical nine to five.

It's a creative place, a creative place to go to every day.

And it gives you an opportunity to build something tangible and real.

That's what I really like about what we do.

And it's given me, like I said, it's given me tons of freedom and flexibility to be with my kid and raise my kid, which has always been very important to me, obviously.

Absolutely.

So training, I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

I've been teaching classes.

I taught one of the very first classes for Buddy Rhodes, the man back in the day.

I went to his very first class.

It was me and one other attendee.

And at the time I was a hotel trainer in hotel industry.

And at the end of the class, Buddy said, what do you do?

And I'm like, I teach hotels.

I travel and I train hotel staff.

He's like, hey, I'm launching this product.

I bought his first pal to mix.

That's why he started doing classes, was he wanted to teach people so they could buy his mix.

He said, I'm launching this product and it's gonna be in distributors.

I need somebody to go teach classes.

Would you be open to teaching classes?

I said, yeah, for sure.

So that was before I started my company.

So I've been doing this 21 years.

That was probably 22, 23 years ago that that happened.

So I've been teaching for a long time and we do professional classes.

We're planning to do with Kodiak some demo days where we demonstrate the product.

But from my perspective, I always feel that you'll see out there, you know, free classes, this kind of stuff.

And I always feel like there's no such thing as free.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of likened it last week.

If you go to a TimeShare presentation, you kind of know you're going to be held hostage.

It's not a vacation.

You're going to be held hostage for the sales pitch.

And if you go to a free workshop from people that actually don't do it, then you're going to be getting kind of what you paid for in a way, and you're going to be in a sales pitch.

Ultimately, you're going to be getting outdated, irrelevant information for today's processes.

I just don't think there's value is there as much when it's free.

Exactly.

In my opinion, if you want to do anything at a high level, there's a price for professional whatever it is.

If you want to be a professional doctor, you know you don't do free online workshops on how to be a neurosurgeon.

You try to go to the best school you can go to to learn how to do that.

Same with this.

I think there's a price and there's a value to the knowledge.

If you want to learn the highest quality knowledge you can, there's a price tag associated with that for that trade of knowledge.

But I'm not opposed to free.

Like Jon and I have said, we're going to do demo days, but I just want to make a very clear distinction of the demo days aren't a furniture design workshop or a fabric forming workshop or anything like that.

It's just showing the material.

Exactly.

Here's how we do it.

Introduction to the material and material alone.

That's always, I don't know how many podcasts you've ever had a chance to listen to, Justin, and I know Brandon and I have been chastised by some individuals because of where we're at.

But there's a reality, and not just in this industry and anybody, when it comes to training, I guess ultimately a person looking for training really has to ask themselves per what we've been talking about, like, what is it that you want to do?

Meaning, do you want to excel at this, or, you know, hey, I just want to make a vanity for myself, or, you know, what am I trying to do with this thing that we're calling concrete?

And it's hard out there because, you know, there's some people with no hands-on experience, well, they claim to have hands-on experience, but have no hands-on experience, and people come to get that knowledge, but there's no base for the knowledge.

And that's difficult.

But, and I'm not saying it's bad because I'm sure, you know, whoever that can put a nice little, you know, thing together and talk about cement chemistries and at least, you know, blow enough smoke to make it seem like they know what they're doing.

Or do you want to look for a training with somebody who, you know, has done it, does do it, has some, you know, client projects and deals with this stuff almost on a daily basis?

And that's always going to be tough.

You know, it's just, it's just tough.

I don't, I think I've said even in one of the podcasts, I think the only way of getting over some of the information and misinformation is this industry or individuals, you know, you got to track it with your dollar, right?

Almost like protest.

You know, I don't know.

Well, you support, you support the people you want to further.

It's like eating at a restaurant.

You can support the big chains or you can support the mom and pop.

Who do you want to support?

You know, I would rather support the local owned mom and pop restaurant versus Applebee's or Chili's or Outback Steakhouse or any of those.

I'd rather go to the local place and put my dollars there and support them.

So same thing with this.

Do you want to support the companies that aren't pushing innovation, that aren't doing this for a living, that don't know what you actually need in a product?

Or do you want to support the guys like us that actually do this for a living, that are listening to the to our customers and making adjustments and striving to make the best products that exist in the world and continue to push the bar of what is possible?

And you can support either one, but you do it with with, you know, who you purchase from.

That's how you're going to further each one of those missions.

Absolutely.

What are your thoughts, Justin?

100 percent, 100 percent.

You know, training for me was a was a super important part of my of this thing.

You know, I trained with and for Buddy for about five years.

And I absolutely loved it.

Like, I loved to teach.

I love training.

I loved the relationships I forged from it, the places it took me.

And one of the things I thought was just so cool was like seeing seeing somebody light up like almost like the light bulb goes off.

And at the end of the class, you know, everybody's, you know, you do for four day class, whatever.

Everybody's pretty wrecked at that point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Four days is tough.

It's tough, man.

But like, it's a big show.

But at the end of that, man, you see the guys who are like.

They're fired up to get back to their shop and start playing, you know, hopefully sell some product at the end of that thing too.

But putting on a really good show and, and then like you said, you know, supporting, supporting the people that are like doing it every day in their shop and they're also successful and continuing to stretch and just pushing, pushing what's possible.

Cause those are the guys that go to those classes, the light bulb goes off and then they take it back to their house and they give their own twist and they develop their own thing.

And then there again, there's the bar going up and the new things are born, right?

Absolutely.

Also the high spray, you, you developed the high spray technique and as you know, you took something that was being done and then you innovated and, and pushed it beyond what had been done.

I almost want to say that like that was like a little like me and Jeremy French.

I saw something that Jeremy was doing and then I was like, wow, that looks really cool.

And then, yeah, I just kind of like took a little nugget and then made it my own.

And, and yeah, and I had a lot of good years with it, man.

That's not something that I've like, you know, continue to do all the time, but it's, it's definitely one of those things in my, in my toolbox that I like to use a lot.

So, you know, you're talking about a four day class and four day classes are tough.

I've really tried to re-design my workshops to be no more than two and a half days when possible, because I've kind of found that's the limit.

After day two, on day three, people are kind of getting mentally fatigued.

Yeah, so that half day, you know, it's easy.

We come in in the morning, we can do Q and A, we can demold the peas.

Yeah, you know, it's high fives and everybody leaves on a high note and you're not like mentally gone.

But we do a five day class called the Pinnacle Concrete Workshop where it's, I'm sorry, no, six day class, not five days, six days.

Two days with me, two days with Dusty, two days with Jon.

And Jon's always at the end.

And that is for a reason because Jon, Jon...

Closer.

Oh, well, no.

I mean, if we put him up front, Jon goes, he doesn't stop.

He's Billy Mays.

He's Billy Mays on Cocaine.

Hey guys, I'm Jon Schuler.

He's got his spreadsheets, you know, his Excel spreadsheets up and he's just going and everybody's just, his eyes are glazed over, right?

Happy fires.

We can't put them in the very beginning because he would mentally wreck people on day one.

And so it's a calculated decision to put Jon at the end.

By then they're already done.

They're already fried.

But it's tough, man.

It's tough.

It's hard for anybody to stay mentally engaged for six days just on it because it's a lot to take in.

It's like, we tell people it's a fire hose of information.

The Pinnacles are awesome.

And it's by far our most popular workshop that we teach, but it's a fire hose of information.

Man, those ones that endure are the ones that change the game.

Because if you fire it up, you're going to stick in.

If you look through the list of the individuals who have come to Pinnacles and so forth, yeah, they, I don't know, man, it's so cool.

And I've said this before, but I'll say it again.

It's so cool to see that people who come to Pinnacles and then take that and what they're doing with what they came to the training for.

And again, I think I said it before, I'd name off probably 10 names right now.

It's so cool to see what they're doing, what they're creating and what they've done with it and how they're still excelling.

And then there's times when you sit down, you feel like you were this, I don't know, I hate to use the word teacher.

I never look at that.

I just look at it as introducing a style or a technique.

And then you take that and engage it and take it a whole new direction.

That's what I think training is all about.

And then it's just very, very cool.

And every day I'm getting texts from people like, man, what do you think of this?

And hey, I just did that and you just go, damn, dude, that is amazing.

It's great to be a part of people's success like that.

You hit on something there that I think is an important point of, again, what sets us apart.

And I think, Justin, you kind of had the same mindset when you were training, is we don't want to put ourselves on a pedestal and we're your teacher and you're our student.

That's such a like a...

We're working right next to you.

Yeah.

That's like such a power dynamic of like that we're not interested in.

We're transferring knowledge to you.

That's what we're doing.

It's transfer knowledge, but it's also a collaboration because I can't tell you how much I've picked up from attendees in the classes of things that they say, dude, this is cool.

Let me tell you what I do.

And I'm like, yeah.

And they tell me like, oh my God, I never even thought of that.

That's genius.

So there's so much back and forth as well.

And I see us all in the same even playing field.

We just have a certain skill set that we've refined over time.

We're transferring those skills to a person that wants to learn.

Yeah, and hopefully take us some new directions that we hadn't even thought of.

That's what I think is cool.

Yeah.

Well, where do you guys see this in five years?

Well, let Jon answer first.

Where do you think it's going, Jon?

Well, from a materials in?

Listen, so things that I'm working on right now, where I see the materials going is continuing to push a direction that I've been trying to take concrete.

And that is people who are along this line.

I want to take the...

I'm literally so invested personally, emotionally, materials-wise to driving this material to a point where the most minimal amount of sealer, because to me, sealer has always been the potential for a flaw in this technology.

Unless you accept it as its ability to stain and so forth, then it's not a flaw, right?

But I want to keep pushing this so that any boundaries that we think this material has set based on, as we're saying, thickness...

I mean, I'm watching people make things an eighth of an inch thick that's just, we all thought would crumble, and now you're like, oh man, it's an eggshell, and it's hard, and it's awesome.

And it works.

So for me, yeah, I'm pushing this directions.

I'm not gonna use words because then, you know, we know other people are listening like, oh, did he just say so-and-so?

So, I mean, I am working on some developments that are gonna carry into a whole new generation of this material.

And I'm super excited about that.

And sealer as well.

Keep pushing to the point that it continues to absorb, turns the surfaces into a dynamically living surface that continues for years and years of use and abuse that outperforms, so that's that.

And so to me, that goes hand in hand with the concrete.

So I'm trying to push the materials a direction that enables the concrete to be pushed directions that we just haven't thought of before, if that makes sense.

You know, I always see Jon in my mind as like Doc Brown from Back to the Future.

1.21 gigawatts, you know, he's just like, he's the mad scientist, but he's a genius at the same time.

And I'm not uncertain that Jon hasn't invented a time machine.

I'm sure he probably has a concept of time travel.

But where I see it going is directly in relation to what Jon has done.

I'm not a concrete chemist.

I'm not a materials scientist.

I don't have a mind like Jon's, but what I am is a designer.

That's where I really kind of view myself in the industry.

So what Jon and I have done, and it's really Jon, I want to give the credit to Jon because it's Jon's genius that's done it, is taking a material to a place where now as a designer, I can do things that weren't possible before.

And for instance, the chair I've been working on, which I referenced earlier, the reason I put that on hold largely was I wasn't satisfied with the result of the end product I was getting.

And that had to do with air entrainment.

So I was using the Buddy Rhodes products.

This was like six years ago, seven years ago, when I first did the first few castings of this chair.

I was using the Buddy Rhodes products.

And the surface was not desirable.

It was not fitting the aesthetic of the chair.

And I put it all on hold.

I was going to redo the mold.

I was going to redo the mold to injection cast from different areas.

I was going to almost like rotocast the form, or I was going to move the form in different directions, let air out of air sprues that I didn't be able to close off, and then rotate the form this way and inject it from this direction.

And have air sprues, all in an effort to get a very clean, precise casting.

And so six years ago, when I was developing this, that was the roadblock.

And the problem with anything is momentum.

When momentum is lost, it's hard to get it back.

And so that chair, I was all about it.

That summer, I was in it.

I was going hard.

I put all this time and energy into it.

And then when I hit that roadblock of the surface quality not being what I wanted, I literally put it on a shelf.

It's on a shelf in the back of my shop right now.

And that's where it has set ever since.

And I keep saying to myself, one of these days, I'm going to get back to it.

And I am going to get back to it.

And I have a project I'm working on now, which I'll talk about here, the upcoming podcast.

I kind of announce what I'm working on.

But a big part of that's going to be the furniture for this project.

And one of the pieces is this chair.

And I'm really excited now that Kodiak exists, that I can do what I wanted to do six years ago, but wasn't able to with the products.

I can now do that with Kodiak without having to do injection cast, have air sprues, rotocast, all these different things I was going to have to do to use that product.

I'm not going to do that anymore.

So for me, I think the exciting thing for this industry is, we're able to do products that were unattainable before.

So I think that's where the direction is going, is kind of what you're talking about.

The thin shell pieces, the very sculptural pieces, things that are very technically difficult to cast at a high level, are now much more within reach of what is possible.

And that's 100% due to the material advancements that have been made.

That's all directly related to that.

It has nothing to do with my ability as a craftsman, with my knowledge, with the casting technique.

You know, funny enough, I bought an Eimer pump just to pump concrete into the bottom of the form and then pull the hose up as I was filling it up, just to help mitigate this.

And I'm getting far better casts now, just dumping Maker Mix in, really with no technique whatsoever, even though I know how to cast it to minimize that, if I don't even try, I still get a 10-time better result than I was getting with the pump.

So it's really incredible where the materials have gone.

And for people that listen and say, oh, these guys are just salesmen, they're just talking it up.

Okay, try it.

I mean, I'm telling you.

Of course, you're selling, yeah.

You're selling, but you're not.

It's so tough, it's so tough to be in this position that we're in, in the sense of people listen to it with skepticism.

They think, there's nothing new under the sun.

There's no innovation.

There's no original thought.

But there really is, and there really is innovation in this world.

The problem is when the innovators are also the people that are selling the product, then people cast doubt on what they're saying.

The funny thing, and this is kind of a thing that I don't think we ever really talked about, but when we first launched Kodiak, when Jon came on the company, we weren't really interested in retailing the product.

So we had approached a distributor.

Yeah, we had approached a distributor to be the sole distributor.

We weren't interested in selling, fulfilling, any of that stuff.

We were just going to manufacture the product and another distributor could handle selling it and marketing it and doing all the stuff.

And we were just going to focus on running concrete companies, doing the things that we continue to do.

And that distributor turned us down.

They said, whatever, they had too many irons in a fire, a snowstorm collapsed their warehouse, I don't know.

They had all these reasons why, but they didn't do it.

And so Jon and I then went into selling a product, even though that wasn't really the goal we wanted to do.

And since then, that distributor has turned and tried to sling mud at us, which is a funny thing, since we offered them to be our sole distributor.

But the point is, this wasn't our goal.

This wasn't our intent.

We never intended to sell a product.

Our intent was just to make a product that was actually usable because the products we'd been using had changed and the quality had gone down dramatically.

And it was very difficult to continue running a company with inferior products.

And that was really the whole impetus to all of this.

But luckily, those things happen in life that at the time they seem like a catastrophe and the sky's falling and I'm just having these horrible results and very inconsistent and all these different things.

But that was what led to where we are today.

That's when the door is open, right?

Dude, that's the good stuff.

That's when the great things happen.

So, yeah, so that's what led us here.

Well, if you want them to, you know, if you want, you know, like you're saying, when you get into the, you know, the training and the endurance races.

Never rest.

Right, when you never rest.

Never rest, never rest.

Yeah, never rest.

What's the, somewhere?

When, in the darkest, the darkest times, you know, when it, when it comes to, you know, endurance or whatever you're doing, the darkest times are the ones you remember, right?

The winds, you can, you know, you can, you can think about those, ah, that, that good feeling lasted for a minute or, but the where, the times that you can like explicitly remember are those, are those dark times right before the doors open, right before whatever it is, you can always remember that.

And that's always what carries you through.

And like, this was supposed to happen this way.

And if I didn't do that, I probably wouldn't be here.

Those are the ones that makes the difference.

If you push through it.

So yeah, Jon is saying a lot of people probably quit, whether it's an endurance race or whether it's concrete.

If you, if you've been running a business, yeah, if you've been running the business for a long time and all of a sudden the materials change and your quality goes downhill and you're having very inconsistent results and you're not satisfied with the pieces and your clients aren't satisfied with the pieces.

And you're just like, you know what?

I don't need this.

I'm done.

You know, I'm going to do something else.

And you shift gears and I can see why somebody would do that.

I don't, I don't fault anybody for that.

But for Jon and I, we're kind of like the neverest of, of concrete where we just can't stop.

More like cockroaches.

You can't kill us, we can't be killed.

But we're just like, no, no, there's a better way.

Well, I think, and continue with this evolution, anybody listening, you know, anybody part of this journey, I think the other part of this journey that's, has continues to elude a lot of people is, how do you make something?

And to me, like you were just saying, you know, with the whole quitting thing, maybe you were making things, but it only catered to a certain clientele, right?

A certain clientele that would only pay X amount, and it just happened to be where you were at, and a lot of it had to be, you know, what you were making.

And it's an analogy that we've used a lot, and I still continue to use the, you know, are you making a Timex, and do you want to make 10,000 Timexes, or are you trying to make a Rolex, and you make one Rolex?

You know, and which end of that spectrum?

And so back to the material saying for me, is I kept asking myself that, based on Jon Schuler, Murphy's California, I know there's money here, I know what they're doing, and how do I achieve the quality that's going to get that end of the market?

And then to do that, I just stepped back and I'm like, well, here's number one, I can't tap on the concrete and it can't sound hollow.

You know what I mean?

Okay, so what am I looking to achieve?

Oh, higher density.

All right, well, I get higher density.

Okay, well, that's all fine and dandy, but it still looks kind of plain.

It looks kind of dried out.

Oh, what do we do with that?

How do you make it look vibrant?

How do you increase the value, you know, the price point value in this that makes somebody pick up and go, oh, hell yeah, I'll pay 500 bucks for this, but I'm only gonna pay 50 for that one.

And how do we achieve that?

And so for me, that's where the focus on materials and getting into that end of a market.

And I think that's where we all want to be.

Well, and for you, Jon, what I'd say is Sealer has always been, I remember way back in the day, this is like 2005, 2006, when ICT was in its very early stages, Jon reached out to me and was, I was using E3 2K back then, I want to say, at that point.

Maybe, what was that, EcoTuff, which was like a soy based epoxy.

Yeah, I remember EcoTuff.

Yeah, so EcoTuff or E3 2K, 2005, 2006, that's what I was using back then.

But Jon reached out to me and he said, listen, close your eyes and touch it.

What does it feel like?

Does it feel like plastic?

I'm like, yeah, he's like, cause it is plastic.

You know, he's like, you want to make something that feels like concrete.

You want to touch the concrete.

You don't want to touch plastic.

I was like, yeah, yeah.

But back then, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you know, I need stain resistance.

I need this, I need that, which you do.

You do need those things.

And ICT at that point did not work for me.

But Jon was on the right path cause he was focused on the quality of the material.

Even way back then, he was thinking about the quality of material.

We don't want to make plastic.

And that was really, again, back to GFRC, when the first, you know, iterations of GFRC came to the market with Fortan, was it felt very Corian-like.

With all the heavy polymer loads, it felt like Corian.

And that was the feedback I got from architects.

In the very early days, we did a much heavier polymer load.

I think Kyron Ball kind of figured out the max load of polymer before it just fell apart in your hand.

Like, what's the most amount of polymer we can put in this mix before it just crumbles, you know?

Let's tell people that's what you need.

So the initial mix I was making, I can't remember how much, it was a ton of polymer in it, and it looked like corian.

I mean, it literally just looked like plastic, like a chunk of plastic.

It felt like, it looked like, yeah.

Yeah, and I remember I showed it to some architects and they said, I mean, it looks like corian.

And I'm like, yeah, it does, doesn't it?

I mean, it just, when you put that much glue and plastic into it, you kill the material.

And so, you know, again, back to quality and what Jon is focused on with this, is there is no polymer in this.

You know, there is no plastic in this.

We're not coating it in a plastic coating.

This is concrete.

And when it's sealed to the reactive sealer, you're touching the concrete.

And so, it's all about quality.

It's all about quality.

It's being honest to the material.

Honest to the material.

Kind of letting the material speak.

Dude, I mean, I'm sure you appreciate this, Justin.

When you're mixing it, it smells like concrete.

For people who don't know, there was a time when GFRC, or High Performance Concrete, or Fiber Reinforced, whatever you can say, either smelled like cat piss, like total cat piss, or it smelled like glue, like it smelled like Elmer's glue.

It was one of those two things, depending on the polymer you put in it.

It smelled like Elmer's glue or it smelled like cat piss.

And now when I put my nose in the mixer, it smells like concrete.

And I love that.

And it's such a ridiculous thing, but it's so amazing that we're making concrete that's concrete.

It's a very high performance concrete, but it's concrete.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, guys, we've gone to the end of this podcast, I want to say.

We've gone quite a long time.

Anything you want to wrap this up with, Justin?

I mean, not necessarily.

I feel like we kind of touched on everything.

I just love to see the growth and I'm going to continue to keep pushing myself because that's what I do.

And striving for new things in this industry and outside of this industry.

And I'm really excited to see where Kodiak goes and you know, where the people are, what the people are doing.

And where can you find, do you have your Instagram and all that stuff running?

I'm terrible with that stuff, but are you stay on top of that?

People can find you?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's at NeverRest and is my Instagram and I don't really play much on Facebook anymore these days.

And then neverrest.com is my website.

So, yeah, I'm out there.

Awesome.

Community is another thing is, you know, you've always been a big advocate for and that's something we're trying to kind of rekindle in the industry is community and working together as a collective and kind of growing and pushing and advancing as a community.

And we're excited to have you, Justin, you know, in the Kodiak Pro family, helping with growing the community and fostering community.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I'm super excited to be part of a newer endeavor, newer in my world endeavor.

So, and to see the community and like, it's just a badass thing.

It's cool.

It's just, everything's got to grow.

It's always got to grow, man.

If you're never staying the same, you're either getting worse or you're getting better.

And so it's our responsibility to get better.

Absolutely.

Jon, what do you got?

I agree, man.

Well, and Justin, yeah, same.

I mean, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but dude, just the times that I've worked together definitely inspired me.

The things you've been doing over the years have inspired me.

And that's the whole thing for, I guess, I'm not saying I'm different per se, but I love seeing what people do.

And it's those inspiration that keeps me driving the material to see how do we take whatever you're trying to achieve and make it possible.

That's what's just so cool to me.

Definitely.

Absolutely.

All right, guys, on that note, let's wrap it up.

Justin, adios, amigo.

Good talking to you guys.

Adios, my friend.