19. Embrace Innovation and Push Boundaries

Andrea and Griffin Discuss the next Value in the "Level Up" Category: Embrace Innovation and Push Boundaries.

Also, Andrea is really excited to talk 1L Cement...

https://hahnrmg.com/about/values

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to Loaded, the Han Ready Mix podcast with Andrea Meyer and Griffin Hahn and producer Lex.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Fourth of July edition.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Yes. Great news, my voice is back.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Yes. We didn't talk about it last week. Like we didn't say it, but then I listened to it back. I'm like, oh, that was worse than it sounded in person.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

I was not feeling my best the last couple weeks, but I'm I'm back just in time for 4th of July. You got a fun weekend planned?

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Um I think we're gonna we're still even though uh we won't be able to have trucks there, we're still gonna go to the parade, I think. And then we're gonna go to my in-laws' cabin in central Illinois and hang out there. So how about you?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Should be fun. Looks like nice weather. Yeah. Um I'm also going to the parade. And then we have really great neighbors that always have a pool party over the weekend, and it's just the most convenient to be able to walk over there. And my kids have friends already there, and it's just that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Nice. Jeff was telling me all about his big um 4th of July celebration he does. I lost my invite though. I don't I couldn't find it. Did you find yours?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Because I didn't know I didn't even hear about it. That's how uninvited I was to Jeff's party.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah. Yeah. What do we have for announcements today?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Uh I just have one quick announcement. Three words. Don't hit stuff. How's that sound?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

That's it clear? That's pretty clear. I mean, are you are you talking to like my children as they hit each other?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

People, vehicles, whatever. No, we did have a couple incidents with mixer trucks this week. And I know that we are asking people to drive really big trucks into really tight spaces and that accidents happen. And in these cases, we did report them right away and get everybody taken care of. And nothing, no one was hurt, you know, just little little damages, but those kinds of things add up really quickly. So just taking the extra time or asking for a spotter or coming up with the safest way to get it done. Let's just keep our eyes on that.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yeah. I do want to give a uh shout out to Dustin Noble, though. I saw a video today, I think it happened yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

So it would have been happened Wednesday the second. Some kid with headphones in on a bicycle literally just right veered right in front of him as he was driving, and he did an excellent job of uh avoiding running and squishing this kid. So uh that that would have been awful. So nice work. Uh also counterpoint to what's happening this week. Last week, so the the last week of June was our first week since we installed the Sam Sarah cameras where we had zero coachable coachable events. We've had a ton of weeks where we've had like literally one event we wanted to coach on, but we had none last week, which is which is excellent. I love that. Yeah. A couple other uh just kind of work-related updates. Uh a lot of people I know have been eagerly waiting for the Stuart Road project in Muscatine to bid. So we believe we have that job that came out a couple weeks ago. So that'll be exciting. Hopefully they'll get started this fall. And that's uh about 13,000, 14,000 cubic yards there. So that's a great one. And then we're gonna get started uh later this month out at Truck Country. It's a nice size job, 6,800 yards doing there. So really excited about that one. And then getting working with Valley at uh at East Moline, downtown East Moline, and there's like 4,500 yards there. So I know we've been really slow. Some of that's weather. You know, if it's not raining, it's been 98 degrees. And if it's not 98 degrees, there's 40 mile an hour winds.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

One extreme or the next.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yes. But some of it just has been kind of you know economic malaise in the construction economy here. But I do think there's work coming and and those jobs uh we have some other nice ones too coming down the pipe. So uh I think things will pick up a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Keep that coming. I like that good news.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah. Well, what are we gonna talk about today?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

All right, we're back on values. Surprise, surprise.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

We are still in the level up section of our values and today's topic.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

We don't have this song queued up for level up, level up, level up. Yeah.

unknown 4:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

All right. Well, today we're gonna talk about embrace innovation and push boundaries.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

This is a good one for us.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

This is a good one, and this is one that like I think you could say this about our company for a long time. Some of these I feel like we we've refocused over the last five to ten years on some different things. And this one I think has been something that has been a trait of Han Reddy Mix for 25 years or more. I agree.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Generation after generation. There's different ways of innovating, but it has been consistent.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

I agree.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

So when you think about put embrace innovation and push boundaries, the first and easiest thing to talk about is kind of cutting edge technology. Using things that will give us an advantage over our competition or allow us to service our customers better by using technology. So we have a ton of examples of that. From, you know, we were one of the first to install the GPS when we got track it back in like 2006. That was pretty early.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

I think about that all the time, actually. Like, how did they ever do this without that?

SPEAKER_00 5:27

I I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

I can't even picture it.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

And what's crazy is back in those days, like the builders' trucks in particular, they like parked in like 12 different places around town. So it wasn't even like one central, I don't I don't understand how they managed it. But so that we were early adopters of that, and you know, that's evolved into we use Digital Fleet for that now, and we have tablets in the trucks. Uh obviously we put the Samsera cameras in, and we talked a lot about you know what the reasons were for that. We're using a software called Fleadio to help kind of track our truck maintenance better and be more efficient with our shops. Obviously, pay lossity was a big change when we went to that. Kind of a one-stop shop for all of our HR-related functions and um, you know, any payroll things. Uh, so that's that's a big deal. We have the mobile job site, which some of you may not be aware of. We have a customer portal for our customers to literally look at where their truck is. They can see, you know, if you're driving a load to the job site, our customers can see where you are if they have the mobile job site app. They can put orders in through the app, they can, you know, track orders, and and that app is is getting an update from Command Alcon. So it will be changing to customer portal, I think it's called. That is what it's called.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

We're testing it out right now, so we're excited to be able to roll that out.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

And then the big one that still separates us from almost everybody in the industry is we have the dispas dispatch optimization tool. And I I think someone told me that there's eight installs of this optimization engine in the whole country. So it's very rare to have it. It's a very expensive and sophisticated piece of equipment, but allows us to think 10 steps down the road in a way that a human dispatcher just can't. I mean, it's just not physically possible. We have wonderful dispatchers who do a great job, but just the computing power of the optimization engine allows us to be much more efficient and do a better job servicing our customers. So those kinds of tools, you know, we've really leaned in and invested in technological tools that, you know, yeah, other ready mix companies have some of those, or and but but there's very few that have all of that that we have there.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Yeah, we're always willing to give it a shot, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:48

I think that's sometimes we pay for that in other ways, but you want to be on the cutting edge. There's times we've been on the bleeding edge. There's a difference between the two. You know, uh, we ran into that with the the probes in the trucks when we tried that. We were probably a little too early in that process. The product wasn't mature. And we've seen that with some other things where we've gotten burned by being by being first your early adopters of technologies that are maybe not quite mature yet or not ready. But there's been other ones that have worked out.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

So yeah, I think it's worth the risk. And even when the technology doesn't work out, we learned a lot from that effort uh we still use today.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

So Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

I like it. I think it's funny when I talk to people about what I do and they think there's absolutely nothing new to do with concrete. Like this is such an ancient industry, you have to have it figured out by now. And I'm like, absolutely not. Every day, every single day, there's some some demand that requires us to try something different.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

That's why it's fun.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

That's why we like it. Yeah, I mean, ReadyMix in general is never boring because it is wildly different every day. So yeah. But I think, you know, when you talk about innovation, sometimes it's beyond even technologies, right? So um one of the innovations that you brought that really changed the game for us was our 3 p.m. operations management meeting that we do every single day. So every single day, you know, uh we have dispatch and maintenance and sales and area managers and Darren and me and you, and you know, we we all sit in a room and Sheldon and we and look at the next day, right? So, and days beyond that. But how are we going to get through the next day? It's such a simple thing, but it allows us to catch mistakes, to make sure we're on the same page, to have any materials or things that need to be moved in time. Um, and that's been transformational for us to have that. That's a huge innovation. And I know of multiple companies that are kind of either came to that idea themselves or copycatted from us and are implementing that. So that's a big deal. But we're also doing things, you know, we're droning our stockpiles once a month. I bet a lot of people don't know that to get our inventory accurate. So we have a drone going up and taking pictures of our rock and sand piles to make sure we have accurate inventory so we can report financials. We have been doing a lot with Lex has been changing a lot of our procedures with our quality control department so we can get more hands-on, more data, more reportable data that we can, you know, see trends and what's happening with our mixes and materials. And then on the product side, we're constantly kind of trying out others' innovation, right? So new ad mixes, you know, different aggregates, things like that. We're we're constantly trying to make sure that we're using the best materials that we can to make the best mixes with what's available for us.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah, I think sometimes it's the availability of materials or the demands that require us to be innovative, you know, whether it's making hot concrete colder.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

That's not fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

No, no. And there's different tools that we can use to do that, but just like the effort that it takes to do it, we sometimes have to be innovative with what equipment we're using or what time we're doing it. You know, there's just always ways to work around whatever challenge we're facing. So it whether it's too hot or too cold, or too much of this or not enough of that, we're always working around something, it seems.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Yeah. Material shortages, we have to be very innovative, innovative in those situations where we can't get the materials. You know, a lot of times it's been fly ash over the last, you know, five, ten years that that's been off and on been had shortages with that. Luckily this year, knock on wood, it's okay so far. But yeah, that that it requires us to be nimble and innovative in those moments.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Yeah. So then even if we have uh the materials figured out and the equipment figured out, sometimes it's actually an innovation that's required of what we're producing, right? Like we've been through different things, whether it's RCC or SEC or one of those other initials that you get excited about. Sometimes all the customers. Don't ask me. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Do you know what RCC and SCC stand for?

SPEAKER_01 12:13

I know the uh roller compacted concrete and self-consolidating concrete. Look at you. I know.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

It's like you don't want to learn, but it's just osmosis. It happens.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Over time it sinks in. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

I'm proud of you. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

What uh what else?

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Well, I was gonna ask you uh what boundary did you push recently, but I feel like you just pushed one, but maybe it was.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Uh yeah, that is boundary there.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Angela and I are doing some work right now on uh block sales and delivery. So just kind of been something that, you know, we don't put it through command the way we do with ReadyMix tickets. And so some random customer calls some random person at Han ReadyMix and wants to order blocks, and from there it just kind of was up in the air. And we've made it happen, but not as efficient as we should be, and definitely not as efficient as we should be on the invoicing side and making sure that we're charging what we should for those blocks. So, due to some recent increased demand, Angela and I have put a lot of time into how can we get these orders organized and handled so that the salespeople and the people making the blocks and the people loading the blocks and the customers are all on the same page all the time. So that's required a little bit of technology that's beyond me. But Angela's helping me out, and then we're trying to teach everyone else. So I think that's yeah. That's a recent thing. Another thing I thought of um I I think I said in the last podcast that I recently visited Alito and I spent some time with Kurt. And, you know, inventory is for some reason something that's close to my heart right now. But he showed me an innovation that is so basic, but it makes so much sense. You know, we have for admixtures, we have sometimes 500 gallon tanks or bigger, and we ask them to estimate, you know, how much is in the tank each month for inventory. And he showed me that he keeps a tape measure right there by the tank. And instead of just estimating where it is on the tank, he actually measures it with a tape measure and has a calculation that shows, you know, 27 inches equals 300 gallons or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

That's great.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

And so his inventory is spot on perfect with those ad mixtures just because of a simple tool that is so obvious and we should be doing it everywhere. So I love people coming up with simple ideas like that.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Well, and then we have the tank monitors, so he should be able to compare that and maybe calibrate that tank monitor if it's not showing the same thing. So that's great. That's great. You know, and and the other part of this you kind of spoke to a little bit there with the first part of your question, your response was you know, pushing boundaries is the second half of this value. And that's about expanding our capabilities or our experiences and um, you know, getting outside our comfort zone, right? We want to do that because that's how we level up, right? We get better, we learn and grow, like last week, by doing something that we're not comfortable doing. And and so pushing our boundaries personally um or individually at work pushes the boundaries of the whole company. Because if you think about it, both from an innovation and boundaries standpoint, if if we stand still, we don't change, definitely we are falling behind, right? Think about where we were 15 years ago. And if we didn't innovate, if we didn't change our processes, if we didn't grow individually and grow as a company, as far as how we how sophisticated we are, we would be so far behind. We'd be so far behind our competitors, the industry, everything. So we cannot stand still. We cannot be content with how good we might be today because it's not good enough going forward. So we have to continue to improve. We have to continue to challenge ourselves to think about our problems differently and and different solutions to them.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I agree. That I had a couple sort of fun questions for you on this topic.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

All right.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

The first one is if there's no budget, no rules, no limitations, what is the most innovative, craziest thing you'd like to try here?

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Hmm no budget. Well, I'd like to have a central mix plant at every uh location. But uh I don't think that's uh even feasibly realistic. Well, we've talked a little bit about EV mixers, would be something I want to try. There's some software pieces out there. There's one called um a C60 that is a basically it's what command performance that we have, if anybody's familiar with that, is supposed to be. And it's basically a really powerful calculator to just track kind of financial metrics of our operation. And it would give us a ton of transparency into what we have going on. We could look at like customer to customer, how profitable we are. We don't have that capability right now. And we could look back on projects with real accuracy to say, hey, did we price this right or not? Because right now all we can do is look back on a month or uh a year and figure out whether we made the right decisions in aggregate. We can't look at, you know, we can't look at the I-74 bridge and go, did we make money or not on that project? We just do not have the capability the way our industry is set up. It's really hard to do. Yeah. So that would be uh something I would love to have if we could get that, because I think it would inform kind of smarter decisions on where we can get more aggressive with pricing or where we maybe are not making the right decisions with pricing. So that would be a big one.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

All right. What companies or people do you think of as highly innovative?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Highly innovative. Well, some of the people, especially in our industry, I talked about way back, I think it was the first episode when Sam asked, you know, if there are bigger concrete nerds out there. So people like Tyler Lay are constantly challenging the status quo on what we think we know in this industry, right? So his one of his big things, for example, is does air content rebound in concrete after it's been pumped? So the conventional knowledge is that if you have 6% air and you put it through a pump, you know, maybe you lose a percent, you're gonna have 5% on the other end. He is trying to prove and has a lot of evidence to show that actually, yeah, it might be 5% right when it comes out of the pump, but that if you are able to keep it plastic an hour later, it's a 6% air again. So that air is rebounding. So basically, his thesis is that the air has been compressed and will kind of rebound in size. If that's true, that's gonna change everything about where we test concrete, right? Right now, if we're doing a bridge deck or something, you gotta check the air after the pump. If we could check it before the pump, oh my gosh. That would be so much better for us.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Right. So how do we help him with that?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Uh DOTs, are you listening? Um, there's a lot of people at a lot of DOT, there's some state DOTs that have already adopted their convinced, and others that have not. You know, I I definitely we're getting on a tangent here, but I definitely think it's unfair that our industry is held responsible for what happens at point of placement and not point of discharge. And we have no control what happens once it leaves the truck. So that we're held responsible for the angle of the pump boom or a conveyor, or you know, if somebody puts it in a buggy and drives it a mile on a buggy. I mean, what you're doing. Timing. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. So um, so yeah, so that's a guy in the industry that I I'm really excited to see what other things he can come up with or what changes in that nature he pushes through. And then other companies, you know, there's there's a lot of radiomix producers out there that uh I respect a lot and will, you know, will trade kind of information. And are you seeing this or what are we seeing that? There's one up in Dubuque, barb materials, very sophisticated company. Rasmussen Group over in Des Moines, same. So really respect to those guys. And and there's a bunch, there's a bunch of others, but those those two definitely stand out.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

All right. Anything else you want to say about embracing innovation and pushing boundaries?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

No, just that like I said in the last value of continuously learn and grow. Anytime any one of us innovates or any one of us pushes our boundaries, it pushes the whole company, the whole organization forward. So this is a an aggregate group effort. We are all uh innovating together and pushing forward together and getting outside of our comfort zone. So yeah, we're a team in this. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

All right. Let's move on to our loaded question. You know, I am pleasantly surprised that we are getting some loaded questions, and I'm shocked and distraught that the questions are actually like technical, concrete questions. So maybe I'm wrong in my impression of how boring these answers are, but people want to know more. It's really, really wild to me. But here we go. All right. This um question actually came in from a friend of ours over at uh Galesburg Builder Supply. AJ wants to know your take on the one L cement mix design, one for one replacement, finishing issues, and durability problems, any other issues or concerns that you see.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

So this is a big topic.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Did you put him up to this? Because this is like one of your favorite topics.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

I did not put him up to this. But I did see that question come through. So it's not a surprise.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

And I Oh, you're prepared.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

I prepared. And yeah, it's going to make this episode a little longer than the rest. So but okay, so let's start with one L cement, in case anyone doesn't know what it is. What is it? So the traditional type 1-2 cement that we have used, you know, for a few decades anyway, had 4.5% inner ground raw limestone that was added to the end of the process. So basically we cook limestone, clay, some other materials to make clinker. That's the reactive cement. And then they were adding more raw limestone into it at the end. And at 4.5%, it really didn't seem like a big deal. Nobody ever noticed the difference when they went to from zero to four and a half percent. And that's just the way it's been, definitely my whole career. There is a big push, particularly in the cement side of the industry, to find a way to be more carbon neutral, decrease the carbon footprint of concrete and cementitious materials worldwide. And that led the Portland Cement Association, now called the American Cement Association, to kind of pledge to, I think to achieve, don't quote me on this, but I think they said they were going to be carbon neutral by 2050. I don't think that's a realistic goal, but that is what they said. And the first step was we can make low-hanging fruit right now by putting more raw limestone in the cement because it's not being cooked at a high temperature, it's not being burnt. So the energy cost of that is negli there's basically zero. It's just the mining of the limestone. That was the idea was let's let's add more. So they did some mortar bars in a temperature controlled laboratory and figured out if they grind the clinker, the raw part of the cement or the finished, I guess, uh legacy cement, if they grind that finer, they can replicate the strength and set characteristics of the cement before, even if they're adding kind of, even if they're diluting the cement. And so they foisted it upon the entire uh industry in if for for us it was April 2022 that uh our our sources all changed to the 1L cement. And a lot has happened since then. What I think is the takeaway from everything I've read and seen is that the the 1L performance is very locally dependent. There are places in the country where they all said, you know, it's one-to-one replacement. You take out, if you had 550 pounds of cement, you put one 550 pounds of 1L in there, and it's no difference. And there are some places in the country where that has proven to be the case, and there really hasn't been any issues. There are a lot of places where that has been wildly inaccurate that you could not do that. So in in parts of the country, they've had major issues with uh declining strengths where they've lost strength, which is a huge problem. Safety issue, obviously, though I'm sure there's lawsuits and things going on as they're trying to figure out who's to blame for low low strengths. Well, major issue in the southeast, I know, is floor delaminations because the one L cement was bleeding later than the contractors were expecting. So basically they were waiting for the bleed water, didn't come, didn't come. They've densified the surface, bleed water comes up underneath it, can't get out. You have a weak layer, the whole top of that concrete comes off. So that's been a major issue kind of nationally. There's been a lot of talks about lower abrasion resistance. So Amazon does not allow 1L in their uh distribution centers where the robots are going to be running because they have determined that the 1L has less abrasion resistance than the 1.2 used to have. So that those are some of the national things that we haven't seen much of, but some of the things we have seen is for one, a way higher water demand. So if it used to take, let's say it used to take 30 gallons in Mix X to reach a five-inch lump, now it might take 32 or 33 gallons. So we're having to use a lot more water, which impacts our strength, our freeze-thaw resistance, our abrasion resistance, every kind of durability metric that that you would want to be better has gotten worse because we have more water in the mix. And then we have seen basically in elimination of bleed, so there's no bleed. That's why we haven't seen the delaminations, but we've caused other issues, particularly outside, where if there's no bleed water coming up and the concrete is outside and exposed to evaporation, you can get premature drying of the surface, which causes plastic shrinkage cracks and can mean you don't have cement hydration on the surface. And I think that's what we've seen. We've had a lot, not luckily not this year, but we've had a ton of scaling from concrete we poured two years ago in the last winter we saw it. And a lot of the analysis we did on it was that the cement wasn't hydrated on the surface. So that means curing operations is so important. But you know, on if you're doing a parking lot with a 500-foot wide parking lot, how do you cure it? I mean, you just can't. It's just not, I guess you could use a drone as a new way to do it, but that's really the only way you can cure it. So all these laser-screened parking lots that nobody's ever cured, now we have a product that you know isn't sometimes performing in the way that we expect because of that. So yeah, so that that's a problem that if we don't have bleed water, that we can get this premature drying. Didn't see it so much in the last year and a half, but before that, we were also seeing a huge increase in just our general drying shrinkage. So we were getting more cracks, you know, in between joints. And I think there was a lot of talk at ACI about do we need to change the joint spacing standards that are in the industry. So there's a lot of problems there nationally, locally. I haven't talked to a single ReadyMix producer ever that's been like, ah, this stuff's great. I'm glad we did this. You know, it's definitely not something the ReadyMix industry wants or can afford to handle the issues because that's a big question is okay, then there's these problems. Now who's paying for it? The cement companies, you know, uh a lot of them are like, we're willing to help, we're willing to figure out what's going on, but they're not coming with an open checkbook and saying, hey, this is probably our fault. We're gonna, we're gonna pony up, right? So, you know, in an industry like ours, it's a low margin industry, it's it's a really tough pill to swallow. So, so what's next, I guess, with 1L would be the next question I would ask. You know, I think you're gonna see admixture changes to try to adapt to the 1L cement. I the 1L cement's not going anywhere, right? This is a politically driven decision and not a it's not for constructability. It's not a construction innovation, it's a political innovation. Um, and so it's not gonna go anywhere no matter what happens with it from a quality standpoint. So I think there needs to be a discussion on what constitutes a benefit and who pays for it. I think that's gonna be the the the maybe the biggest change in the industry is if you have a scaled parking lot, that parking lot can still hold cars. It can still function as a parking lot. It looks ugly. I wouldn't want a parking lot to scale, but that is gonna be where the industry is gonna have to go is is what constitutes a defect when we're using carbon-friendly and you know lower quality materials.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Right. How much are we willing to tolerate for this benefit?

SPEAKER_00 30:08

Right. Yeah. So I think that's where we're going. I mean, I I make no bones about it that I'm not a fan of 1L. And uh, AJ, hopefully you aren't seeing as many of the issues as we've seen. But you know, they come and go, they're not consistent. And so there's times where certain things are are better. Like, you know, we haven't seen as much of the shrinkage this year. We didn't have a scaling uh from last winter. I think a large part because of how mild the winter is. But our water demand just keeps climbing, right? So we we've gotten better on some things and others are are not. So the long form answer was by far our longest episode now, but uh it wasn't terrible justice.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

You didn't you didn't lose me completely. Okay. So I think I agree. I hope there's still some people with us here at the end.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

All right. Well, thank you, AJ, for the question. Thanks to everyone for listening. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening, and we will talk to you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Thanks so much.