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Foreign. Welcome back to the Building BuildWit Monday podcast. This is number 61 titled From Manhattan to Marble. Usually I use these episodes to give you all an update as far as what's going on at Build Whip Sales, Product Marketing, Dart World, all kinds of stuff, lessons learned. There is all sorts of stuff going on at the business as always, every week we've got a team of about 50 people spread out across America making it happen. But this episode is dedicated to my recent travels. This is the first week of a multi week journey starting in New York and going through Europe. I love to go to Europe once a year. That is on my list, probably every June from here on unless the world shuts down again, God forbid, like it did in 2020. But I've been now, this is my fourth trip to Europe. I love Europe specifically because I think it's a glimpse into the future of construction. They are far better at construction than we are, just far better. And every time I go over there, I'm more and more amazed. And it's not just because they're better. It's they're better because they've had to be better. They've had constraints, they have less, they're more dense than we are. They're twice as dense. They've been doing it a lot longer than we have. We came from there. So they've been building well before our country was even a thing. And most importantly, their labor has been constrained for much longer. If you look up the top 10 oldest populations in the world, almost all of them are Western Europe, which means that they've had to do more with less individuals, which means more technology, more equipment, more process. And I think we have a lot to learn from them, a lot to bring back to America to help us build more effectively than ever. Why is that important? Well, we're good at building. I don't doubt our ability to build. But on a Overall basis, the US construction industry has declined in productivity in the past 50 years by about 30%. So we've not gotten better. We've actually we're doing less with more right now. And we need to be going in the opposite direction. The opposite direction is what manufacturing has done, an increase in the US of about 400%. How does that benefit everybody? Well, it means we are less constrained, so everybody is less stressed. We are able to build the projects society needs in a timely manner. And everybody building is able to make more money. Wages will increase with additional profitability. I think that's a big reason why wages are depressed in the construction Industry, it is not greedy. Business owners. I know shitloads of business owners at this point. I haven't met very many that are greedy. Most of them aren't even all that wealthy in the grand scheme of things compared to the bankers, the lawyers, a lot of the, for lack of better term, the parasites of society that are not creating, they're just consuming you. You've got these business owners over here, construction business owners, creating the world around us, facilitating that creation through their risk taking, through them building a business and then them growing their teams and then them supporting the people in the front lines. But the margins are not very good. The margins in construction are far less than the overall margins for the S and P. We average about 2 to 4% while the S&P is 8 to 10%. And, and that means just less money to invest in people and equipment and process. And it's kind of a treadmill that everybody's on and that everybody's been on for 50 years. And that will not work into the future and is not working right now. So we have to get better. That is why I go to Europe. That is why I love visiting European countries, Western Europe, all over, all different countries. And, and that is what this trip here was dedicated to. But first, before I get to Europe, I went to Manhattan, the Big Apple, to see one of America's biggest flood control projects. Yes, it's one of America's biggest infrastructure and flood control projects. You've probably not heard of it. And it is right in the middle of Manhattan. Now, Manhattan has two rivers on either side. You've got the Hudson and you've got the East River. And during storms, and specifically Hurricane Sandy, the East river flooded a huge portion of Manhattan, well over 100,000 people. Subway systems, power station. It was a big, big issue. So the city planners had to go to the drawing board and say, what do we have to do to prevent the city from flooding again? We cannot have this happen. We need a protection system that enables us to protect everybody in the system for a 100 year event, meaning a flooding event that happens once on average, once every hundred years. It's an engineering term, weather term. So what they came up with was the. It has a few different names, but it's all driven by the ddc, the New York Department of Design and Construction. They are in charge of infrastructure for the city. And it is a giant flood barrier along the east river and around the tip of Manhattan. And they're doing this in a few different ways. So, so at the furthest north end they have actually a really beautiful wall alongside the river with big openings for pedestrians, for cyclists, for cars, for trucks. And those openings are open 99.9% of the time. But if there's a potential flood event, they have these enormous gates weighing up to 50 tons of that can be closed quite quickly, that seal entirely and that protect the people on the other side against storm surges up to 18ft, which is huge. And so this is, this will be such an effective system that the flood insurance will actually go away for these people on the other side of this. So that is the furthest north portion of it. Then in the middle you have the biggest part of the project. And all of these, it's the same system, but they're built in different projects. So you had one contractor up at the north side, then you had a few contractors as a tri venture on the big middle piece. And instead of building a wall, it's an existing park here. Through the park they thought why don't we build the wall with sheet pile and then why don't we raise the entire park up so that no one knows the wall is even there and that the park itself becomes the wall. And that's exactly what they did. So they exported a ton of material, I think a million, maybe a million tons of material by barge. They brought in a lot more. They drove that sheet pile wall and then they raised the whole thing 8 to 10ft. And. And it is gorgeous. I visited this project three years ago maybe when they first had it all torn apart. Now it is beautiful. Tennis courts, amphitheater. I sometimes probably am more than a critic than I should be of infrastructure projects because sometimes they just don't really end up benefiting people. Like here in Nashville, we've got terrible roads, yet we're building a multi, multi billion dollar stadium. And it's a multi multibillion dollar stadium because of the debt service that we have to pay off. And why? To stimulate the economy. I don't understand it. I don't think it benefits the community whatsoever. There's a lot of academic research that say stadiums are a complete sham for people like me living in these cities, whatever. But this was an infrastructure project that was really incredible to see. I touring it with DDC was great because we had the engineering and construction team with us. You could sense their passion in the project. And it was a beautiful project. It came out to be, to look extraordinary. And there were tons of people already using it because a lot of the project is complete at this time. While they're doing work in other sections. So that was the middle part, that 90 acre park. And then we move further south to an area that could not accommodate a wall because it would block the view for residents. It would block access. It just. It wouldn't work all that well. And so instead of a wall, they have these interlocking floodgates, so they lay flat almost always. And then if there is a storm event coming, they hydraulically lock, raise these gates. They all lock together and they form a flood barrier up to that 18ft of protection that the entire system needs. So really cool. We'll have a YouTube video and all of this coming soon. A huge shout out to the New York Department of Design and Construction for having us. It was a really amazing project to see. Now at this point, Ben and Wyatt were with me, and the initial plan was for them to come join me in Europe. But I started to think more and more about it and we have so much work we need to do. We still had videos from South Korea, from India, from Africa, and to pile on more with Europe just, just was not including, you know, New York and Komatsu video and all kinds of stuff. It just wasn't in our interest. And sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. So rather than them coming with me, I said, hey, you guys, just stay home for a month, which is quite rare for us. Let's get caught up. Let's get ourselves to a really good place going into July, and then let's get running again for the back half of the year. So they flew home. And I also selfishly wanted to just travel by myself and take photos. Video. It's a lot of fun, but it's consuming, it's taxing. You don't get to enjoy and experience where you're at as much because you're trying to think about how to tell the story and how to piece it together and how it's gonna. Did we get this and did we get that and oh, we got that. But I was incorrect there. And I just wanted to enjoy some projects, to meet some people and then to take pictures. That's what I started with. I still take pictures to this day. Every picture you've seen on my social media, I have taken. It's a library I'm very proud of, and it's something I hope to do the rest of my life. It's very special to me, and it's something that I can do with no thought whatsoever. It is, I think, the easiest thing about my job and maybe the most enjoyable thing about my job. When I can just photograph a really cool operation, really cool machine. It's the only time that I truly get into a flow state. I don't think hours go by hours without me even recognizing what's going on. I mean, I'll start at, you know, six and I'll look at my watch and it's 1pm and I'm just like, what just happened? And then I get to go dig through the thousands of photos I just took and kind of discover each one. And I like this one. I love that one. I get to edit them and share them. It's such a fun process. And so I wanted this trip to be about thinking, just digesting life, the business, me as an individual, and then just taking photos without having to worry about video whatsoever, which I think was the right decision. So it was a kind of a twofold decision there. But all of that to say. I then, from New York by myself, flew overnight from JFK to Rome, and then I drove up to Carrera. And this is somewhere I've always wanted to go see the world famous Italian Carrera white marble mines. So they have mined marble here for thousands of years. Michelangelo. The sculptures came from this marble. A lot of the most famous things in Italy came from this marble. This marble is known all over the world for its absolute beauty. It's pure white color, lack thereof that everybody wants for architecture, for countertops, tile. It's everywhere. You've for sure seen and used Italian marble. And there are over a hundred Italian marble mines owned by Italian families up in the hills of the. I think it's the Apuin Alps outside of Carrera Italy, just on the coast up into. Just almost up into Tuscany. A friend of mine. Italy is tricky because it is a different world. And it's hard to go there as an American who does not speak Italian and navigate everything. So I knew for this I had to be with somebody Italian and somebody that already knew the landscape. It was not something that I could do on my own, maybe, but very unlikely. And so I reached out to a friend on social media. I'd never met him before, but he set me up with not just him, but four of his friends. They're all operators from around Italy. They meet once or twice a year to look at equipment. And I was essentially like the kid tagging along the fifth wheel here on their adventure. And we spent two days, they spent a third after I left. But I spent two days with them touring five different Carrera marble mines and learning all about the marble process. It is an experience I could have never had on my own and that I'm very appreciative of. And, and, and, and, and I got a lot of pictures that I am really excited to share. So even without the pictures, it was just such a brilliant experience seeing the, the craftsmanship and the skill it takes to extract these big blocks of marble from way up in the mountains and then get the blocks of marble all the way down. Just incredible, incredible few days. So that was week one. That was mostly to tee up the second week, the bulk of the Europe trip, where I then went off to Norway, to Switzerland, to the Netherlands, Belgium, and then ended the trip the following week in France. So stay tuned. That'll be next week's episode. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.