 Welcome to the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, a podcast focused on helping geotechnical engineers stay up to date with technical trends in the field. I'm your host Jared Green and I've practiced as a geotechnical engineer for over 17 and a half years. In addition to practicing engineering, I also enjoy mentoring young engineers and first-generation college students. I've focused on helping to increase the number of pre-college students that are interested in STEAM majors and fields. In this episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, I'll be talking with Dr. Michael Weissaki, PE, who is the president of Thatcher Foundations Incorporated. Michael will discuss some very interesting things such as deep foundations, earth retention, marine construction, and safety considerations as a geotechnical specialty contractor. I've gotten to know Michael very well over the years, especially as we attend conferences together. But before I introduce you to our guests, I want to share with you that the very first episode of this week in civil engineering, also known as twice, will be published on September the 17th. Twice is a 10 to 15-minute weekly audio and video podcast hosted by practicing civil, structural, and geotechnical engineers, bringing listeners the latest industry news. While it's important to stay well-rounded in our profession, none of us, unfortunately, have time to read all the news like we'd like to anymore. But soon, you won't have to worry about that. Thanks to Twice. So go check it out www.twice.news, that's T-W-I-C-E dot news. And make sure to subscribe to the show so you can get your weekly updates. Now, I'd like to formally introduce you to our guest, Dr. Michael Weissaki, PE. Michael Weissaki is the president of Thatcher Foundations Incorporated. Thatcher Foundations is a specialty contractor working in design, build, earth retention, pile driving, drilled foundations, and marine construction. Thatcher has built a reputation for innovative solutions to challenging deep foundation and showing work. Michael received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the Citadel, his master's from MIT, and doctorate in geotechnical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was awarded both the Wilson and Peck Fellowships. His publications range from short russian to the effect of local soil conditions on earthquake motions to the capacity of deep foundations. He's the chairman of the Chicago Committee on High Rise Buildings, a past chairman of the Driven Pile Committee of the Deep Foundations Institute, and the ASCE, American Society of Civil Engineers, Geo Institute Illinois Section. With that, let's jump right into our conversation with Michael. Welcome to another episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast. Michael, welcome to the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast. We're honored to have you. How are you feeling, man? Jen, I'm feeling great. Thank you very much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. It's been a while since I've seen you, so it's pretty cool to kind of see you in this space. We're in the COVID pandemic, so we can't physically be at a DFI conference or something like that, but we're sitting here on Zoom and it feels like I'm sitting in front of you, which is pretty cool. Yeah, it is. It's good that we've had personal experience in the back and in the past and everything and have good relationship. It does make this kind of thing easier. Yeah, neither one of us is in broadcast journalism, right? But it might feel like it in Geotechnical Engineering. Yeah, that's tough. All right, but Michael, in your own words, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about what you do at a daily basis at Thatcher? Yeah, so there's a president company, you know, responsible, strategic thinking and such, but that's, you know, not day to day, right? That's something I'll wander off to with my brother and the leaders of the company. But, you know, day to day, it's really whatever needs to be done. I've got a pretty diverse background growing up into this business, so, you know, if we don't have enough work, it's I'm supporting my brother and the sales team. If we've got a lot of work or some really complicated things or whether they're problems that are people or unions or engineering or what not, I'll go help jobs are going. I even get dragged into accounting type issues now and again, but I do everything I can to stay out of that. Or really what I like to do is engineer, and we have Design Build Engineering in-house, and that group is fun to work with in there. They're better behaved. Soils and walls and structures do what they're told a little better. Yeah, exactly. The rest of the people in the industry. There you go. That's pretty cool. And you said you and your brother, right? Yeah, my brother, John, and I work together and have grown up in the business. Mr. Thatcher started the business in 46. My dad came in the 50s and took over in the 70s. And John and I have been running it really since the late 90s, early 2000s. That's great. So growing up, you knew that that's where you were going to be working or it was I want to avoid it and then I end up in it. I hear different stories for, you know, what's your story? It was, yeah, it's a complicated roller coaster ride. Family relationships and everything. I remember building a shed in our backyard with my dad, my brother, and my main lesson out of that was never going to work with these guys. You take the good with the bad and really, my brother and I are very different. And that ying and yang is great for Thatcher. You know, he's pretty structured detail oriented in there. And I come from a different thing. And two of me would be tough and two of him would be tough. But us together have really helped take company in a different place. So yeah, I didn't always know, but I came around to it gradually. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And I got to imagine working with family. I mean, when you're when you're at work, you're still family, but you're probably not, right? I mean, how does that like, what are the dynamics there? That is, that is challenging to separate. And people will think in either direction, like there'll be times I have no idea what's going on on a personal level versus this, or it's because we're brothers, I think we both know everything that the other person knows. Okay. One of us, that's cool. That's all I need. You know, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's a different kettle of fish, you know, mishap and dad around that. He was great to, to his perspective. And that's a completely another, you know, from, from such a different era, right? That he'd be 89 now. He's good, but he has different levels of experience and different approaches. So yeah, I really enjoyed working with him once I grew up and got old enough to appreciate how good he was. That's awesome. It's amazing what can happen when you're building a shed, right? It's like it can steer you one way or it could, you know, boomerang you back. So that's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. And I understand you attended the Citadel. So, I mean, how was the military college experience? Like, how does that impact one's career? How did it impact your, your growing up? It was great for me. It was perfect. It was great timing. You know, I, I could, I needed structure at that time and people who know me pretty well were surprised that I'll thrive in a military environment. But I loved it because I did have structure would take care of all their, you know, the day to day things you got to get done and allow you to, you know, have time for the, you know, be successful in what you have to do. And then you can go have fun or do creative things or do whatever else you're, you're interested in, you know, and just the things you learn there, you know, as opposed to as I went up into higher, you know, into graduate studies at MIT in Illinois, where I'm more focused on the academics. This is such a well rounded thing where they're pushing, you know, just life and how to live it ownership, you know, you're going to, you got to own your decisions. You got to be responsible for what you do, you know, when, when things go wrong under your watch, you've only got one answer is sir, no excuse, sir. Wow. And move on to the next, move on to the next thing and let's do it better next time. So, you know, you really, the lessons from the Citadel have tend to apply more than some of the things I learned in theoretical soil mechanics. Wow. That's fascinating. You know, you think about geotechnical engineering, we talk a lot about what goes right, but there's a lot of things that don't go right. And that concept of owning it and not making excuses. Well, you can cut out a lot of the nonsense if we have that kind of mindset. So I definitely see the wisdom in that. Yeah, thanks. I, it really is that what you, what you learn out of, I don't know, going through the, those, those life lessons, they really help you out. Or is things get really tough because they also stress you to an extreme there. And that's, so like when things start blowing up around a job site or with people with emotions, it's like, what, that's all you got? Yeah. Yeah. I can remember as a young engineer, it's like, you know, in a job site, you just, well, personally, it's like, you're just scared of everything, right? And then as you get a little more seated, it's like, so hold up, the worst you could do is scream at me because I'm not going to approve this upgrade. It's like, yeah, we're going to be okay. You're going to do it again, right? Yeah, that's good. That's cool. That's cool. But going through your bio, which is awesome, by the way, I see that you received the award for both the Wilson and the PEC fellowships. Congratulations. That's, that's awesome, man. Receiving, receiving fellowships like that, how did it benefit your career in the geotechnical space? Well, yeah, it was a while ago. I, the, you know, it primarily allowed me to stay in academics. As long as I wanted without going into debt, like so many people do these days in higher education. So I could, you know, it provides the financial side is very useful with the PEC fellowship itself is, you know, this is back in the 90s when Professor Peck was still alive and he would come to Champagne to give a lecture and I, as the PEC fellow, I would go to lunch with him and just get to share some of his experiences. He was such a wonderful guy. He, he would, I, I got him, I convinced him to come to Chicago to talk to our local ASEE geotechnical group. You know, I remember once just sitting in a lunch where I said, you know, how in the world can you stay up on all this stuff? Conference is constantly and you're such an expert in so many different levels and how in the world can you? And he said, Michael, you need to know what not to read. Wow. I love it. Such stage advice, right? Master. Oh my goodness. I remember when I was in Illinois and he was Professor Mesward still bring him to give a lecture and I remember going to Papadels with him and we're eating and I was like, man, this is like a dream. I'm here with like a geotechnical rock star, right? But just sage advice, sage advice. He was the best. And, and with your background, I mean, you have went to world class institutions, you got a PhD and you're working at a company like Thatcher. I mean, did you have any desire to be a professor at one time? I mean, how does, you know, that's a good point of, you know, I loved what I was doing at the time. And I hadn't really committed during graduate schools when I did commit to Thatcher that I was coming in this direction. But it was, I didn't know if some, you know, maybe in my after some number of years as a contractor, I would want to go back into academics. It was certainly a consideration. You don't need a PhD to drive piles. But again, I loved what I was doing. I wasn't going into debt. I enjoyed it. And the peripheral benefits of, you know, some of the dynamic analysis I was studying towards the end has been very helpful in analyzing deep foundations in Chicago. And, you know, so I was still learning things that wound up being a great use to the company moving forward. So again, there really wasn't a downside. But so we never know. We'll have another career as a professor someday. That's pretty cool. But Thatcher, Thatcher to professor, right? Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. And, you know, looking at the publications, you have many publications, I've seen you at a number of conferences, you also have a paper on the accuracy of methods of predicting axial capacity of deep foundations. Tell us a little bit more about that. I mean, that sounds like something that's really awesome for somebody who's putting piles on the ground, you know? It's right. Well, there's a, you know, a handful of different deep foundations that have worked with towards the accuracy. I've studied a lot of load tests and measurements. And how well we can predict things or not is needs to be well understood. So I like to be a really good geotechnical engineer. You have to pay attention to significant figures. You know, you have to tell them that the undrained sheer strength of the clay is 2.7489. Yeah. That makes you a bad engineer. Exactly. Nobody's going to take you seriously. Okay. Yeah, that's a pretty good number. And to not communicate a false sense of accuracy. Yeah. And so how good are we at nailing this kind of thing? And then, and then putting it to work as we, on every job, looking at different types of deep foundations for earth retention systems of what's, what's a, what's a way to go. You know, I haven't published that much, I haven't written that much particularly lately as I've been tying up. I do give presentations and lectures more so these days, but again, as my kids are getting older and they'll have a little more time to start to show up, but I do hope to write more. And yeah, we'll see how that goes. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And I guess the reality is that every pile that goes in the ground is another data point, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. You look at the, you know, where the tips are landing versus where the borings are in the end, you say, wow, no, I know exactly where the top of rock is, right? Yeah. Sometimes that old expression that are driven piles of tested piles, very useful that piles get smarter than the engineers at some point to find in that rock. They really do. They really do. I mean, they'll tell you when they're home, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty cool, pretty cool. And, you know, when you look throughout your career, I think this is very important for the younger listeners. There are so many terms that are just very important. And one could say this is strategic terminology in the geo industry. But a lot of this, you don't learn when you're in school. You'll learn when you're kind of out there. But when you start to think about things like building codes and union agreements, I mean, how do you understand this stuff? Like, where do you learn it? Some people say the school of hard knocks, but where do you learn the importance of these things as a geotechnical professional? Yeah, you're exactly right. That is the stuff you're going to get outside of school. Not much in school because, you know, when the terminology is used to advantage, I mean, in a pejorative sense, if you're trying to, hey, I'm going to make up, I'm making up something to kind of skirt around a union issue or skirt around a building code, you know, if I call it, if I change the name of the product and now it's something that doesn't, that isn't in the building code, I can do whatever that can come on. And that's actually to the great advantage that our friends in the ground improvement community have taken. Create advantage up, you know, if it's a pile, and you attach it to a pile cap into the structure, a bunch of set of rules that have been around for a very long time that are hard to change. We call it a controlled modulus column or a, you know, something else and don't attach it. Now, I don't need a factor of safety at two. I only need a factor of one and a half. Some engineers like to do, and what that really says is our factor of safety at two, in my mind, is maybe a little conservative, right? If you actually have testing around, you know, it's hard to get past that. And, you know, when we say like we were talking about with driven piles that are so reliable, we put it all types of deep foundations. So even a, like an auger cast pile that, you know, would all, if you decide engineering-wise that you're going to have 60 footers, you're going to have a few hundred 60 footers out there, no matter what the ground's doing. Right. Whereas with a driven pile, you're going to drive them till they find the material you're looking at, at least in my area. Yeah. That's that through everywhere. But so we keep the same factor of safety, even though those two systems might not have the same level of reliability of 60 feet. Yeah. Yeah. So like those kind of things, now if you change the name entirely, I'll say I can do actually if you're two or two and a half, I'm going to go one and a half, because yeah, I feel pretty good about this thing. Yeah. And there are no rules in the code. So I don't, I'm, I'm a little suspicious of some, you know, when they, when you change the name of something to get a whole big set of numbers, you really have to think through what you're doing. In a sense. I hope the industry gets better at responding to some of those challenges. Fair point, fair point. And then I guess another thing when you come, you know, when you start to think about factor safety, a lot of it is, you know, construction uncertainty and, you know, if it's brand new versus if it's been around for a hundred years, the amount of data that you have and how reliable it is, these things that come into play as well. And I'll say that is, unfortunately, exactly backwards because the whole process works. Yeah. Up that's stuck in the code, it's in the code and you can tweak it, you know, and there's a lot of work done with the Nepodroma Contract Association, Deep Foundations Institute and ASCE's Geotechnical Vision and ADSC getting together in this geo coalition to, you know, advance the IBC. Dale Beggars has led that effort for years with Lori Simpson and Dan Stevenson and some of those folks have done such a great amount of work to move things forward in a positive direction to the IBC. But yet they're gigantic inconsistencies of stuff that are hard to pull out. You know, if you take a pipe and put it in the ground, somehow you get 35% of yield. If you test it, you get up to 50% of yield. But if you chop it up in pieces and bolt it back together and wrap a helix around the end of it, you get 60%, 50% of ultimate. And it doesn't make any kind of sense. And they're in the same table with the rules. You know, do you, how do you get around that or pull that kind of thing out? I don't know. It is certainly a challenge. Yeah. No, I like the way you explain that, honestly. I think especially for some of the younger listeners, they pull out a table and they say, okay, I use this factor and I do my design, right? But trying to think about, you know, what's the history here and what does this actually mean? I think it's so important for a geotechnical engineer, so important. And it is to really know these rules aren't a uniform level of reliability, right? And an example of really what you're saying is backwards is some of the really old stuff is stuck. Some of the new stuff, when you give it a new name, it gets its own set of rules because you just made it up and the cold officials have to make something up. And I mean, for bars, reinforcing bars, an old standard piece of rebar at 60 KSI. It's tried and true. It's been around forever. We know what it does. It's very reliable. It's not going to do funny things. When Dewey Dagg started bringing these high-strength bars in and going up to 80 KSI and 150 KSI, it winds up something of a brittle structure at some point where it can break like we've had tension breaks in two places, which sounds impossible, but it kind of blows up in a little stress area or something. And you know, it's just something that behaves a little differently and isn't as newer. We get to go to 60% of ultimate on those bars as a standard. That's where you design to test them to 80% of ultimate 1.33 times that design load, 80% of ultimate, which actually equals about your yield stress. So by, you know, the rules that are standardly followed out there, we can test them all the way to yield, no worries. But when I'm telling you what we're doing that, I am very nervous about that. We're covering things up, but we try not to go all the way up there. And when we do, we're looking around if something does break, if something does go, what are you going to do? If I'm following the rules with standard rebar and things, not too worried about most of that stuff. So it's like you said, Jared, the new stuff is you got to be concerned about it for more than one reason because rules that are less restrictive frequently. Good things to think about. Good things to think about. And when we talk about construction techniques, I mean, you're so you're responsible for putting deep foundations in the ground, drill driven, auger, but you're also done a lot of supportive excavation or for tension as well, right? Yes. And that's definitely what our engineering side does the most of. Okay, a lot of the deep foundations will, you know, you're going to design one pile and that's good for, I mean, whereas our retention systems require a great deal of design work. And we've optimized a lot of techniques along those lines. What are some techniques that, you know, a young engineer should be thinking about when they're saying, you know, you know, I'm trying to think about how to design some, what are the things they should be thinking about? I would say, you know, I would, I would mostly say leave a lot, leave a lot up to the contractors or be willing, you know, the best engineers I know, have good relationship with contractors who really need a lot of the industry of, you know, innovation and, and, you know, the rules are constantly changing. Again, whether they're, you know, union rules or material rules or things that change the economics of something versus just the ground changing from this spot to that spot and some of those sort of things are just the difference between labor. So the different types of defoundations or earth retention can change drastically over time. And, you know, even through the course of months or something, so it's not like there's a right answer out there, you got to weigh a lot of factors and rely on reliable contractors, you know, that if there's a, you know, if there's a contractor that say, for example, only does agrocast files, he's going to find a solution for all the files. Exactly. The question you asked him. Just a little bit of bias there, right? Someone who's a little, has some versatility and can come up with an answer, I'd recommend, but So I finally sell red paint. I think your shed should be red, right? Right. Red's not that bad, Jared. That's pretty cool. No, you make a really good point. I think that, you know, as a young engineer, one of the things I really started to do is to talk to contractors, to get a better understanding of what's available, because my worst nightmare is, you know, having a recommendation that doesn't align with what's available locally. You know, I'm specking a pipe that you can only get from like one small city somewhere. And it's like, oh my goodness, why did I do that? Right. So it makes a difference. Yeah. And, but I would caution or I would sort of add to that with there are engineers who are too worried about being too perfect on some stuff where they're not, you know, they are, you know, whether it's an ego thing or something of like value engineering is horribly of a contractor has a better idea. Yeah. I'm not receptive to that because it's not my or it makes me look bad or something. And it's like, hey, no, you made a good sound recommendation. That makes some sense. But hey, I've got a new angle on that. I've got some approach that I think will be that'll help to save risk or reliability or money or time or something rather. And hey, how about this? And I would encourage, I mean, that's really, in my area, it's very well accepted that, you know, our technical engineers and structural engineers aren't overly sensitive to correct engineered ideas. And they're not even putting the reports, try one of these and yeah, the market or, you know, they're pretty good about it. No, I agree. And one of the good things is that, you know, you're seeing it for the first time, right? It's like, we've been dealing with this, we have the tunnel vision, we think that this is the right set of recommendation, you go, you go, you go, you go. And then you look at it for the first time, you see, you know what, I think we should try this and like, that's a pretty good idea, you know, yeah, because in the end, we want to make sure we get the right project solution. And, you know, it takes a lot of people to figure that out. So yeah, it definitely makes a difference. Now, when we kind of talked about it before, but codes and regulations and how it addresses the design, I mean, how much do you get into that? Oh, quite a bit. I mean, it really dictates things with deep foundations. How much you can load a micro pile or a driven pile or something, you know, what stress levels are there, the structural side as well as frequently the technical side. But primarily structural side is called out in the codes. And the on the earth retention, the sport of excavation, since it's a temporary thing frequently, it can be a lot more of the wild west of your white, your more performance based, if it starts to move, you're in trouble. Yeah, exactly. What type of support systems are you guys doing? I mean, soldier pond lagging or doing secants? It's sheet piling is the majority of what we do. Okay. The soldier pond lagging were a lot more common in the past when there were, you know, two types of sheet pile. And now with all the cold form sections, as well as a lot of the hot, you know, there's such a wide variety of different sheet piles that you can, you can be really economical in that direction. And when you, when you can, you'd rather have it just the whole process of putting lagging boards in opens up another level of risk. I think they're opening for movements allowable for movements, you know, it's just not tight to the back side very much. So it's, you know, and if the economy isn't there, you just shouldn't do it, right? If the same, you're going to take sheet piles pretty much every time. No, you're absolutely right. And then you guys are doing external braces like tiebacks? Are you doing internal struts? Yeah, a lot of both, you know, a lot of the Chicago area is deep soft clay, there's nothing to anchor to without really crazy steep long anchors. Sometimes around the collar of the city or in Northwest Indiana and some of the industrial settings are great anchor material. And again, sort of the same thing is for the same price, everyone would prefer external and because it, you know, opens up the excavation. But we're still, for whether it's for property line reasons or geotechnical reasons or whatever else, we wind up internally more commonly than soil anchors. Got it. And are you using sheet piles when you got buildings next door? I mean, that could be aggressive, right? We're good at being aggressive. Okay. Well, we do actually, so I mean that the, we're good at the vibrations themselves of trying to know what are the vibrations that really matter and don't matter. And, you know, getting high frequency, are the vibrations that don't travel through ground very well and don't resonate with structures very well and get damped out and disappear. Whereas, you know, it's the low frequency resonates with the ground and really affects the structures. And so now with the modern technology, high frequency variable moment vibro will get up to speed to, for us, high frequency means 2000 RPM play. And so it'll get all the way up there and then it'll make the eccentric eccentric and then it starts vibrating already at that speed. Yeah. So it doesn't have the startup and shut down problems. Yeah. I mean, that's, I remember what, 15 years ago, every sheet pile job, you know, it's like that starting up at the lawnmower and turning off at a lawnmower. It's like, that was probably the world was falling apart, right? Yeah. That's a lot. But, you know, you still, you know, it's not for every situation. We also have a hydraulic pressing device where we have no vibration install sheet piles. Nice. That doesn't work any, you know, just anywhere. If it were that easy, people would have done it a long time ago. But the, you know, the, so you can get sheet piles in anyway, you know, and sometimes if that, that one doesn't work, we've done maybe a secant pile or an excavation where you're we don't do slurry walls ourselves, but those can be the, if you aren't a super, if you're in a spot, you can't press sheet piles in or it's a, or it's a big, you need a big, very stiff wall, then you're going to be drilling or digging it. Got it. And then your secant wall, I guess you would also have that double over as the foundation wall or you have it truly temporarily. At times, most of ours have been just, have been just temporary. Okay. Well, we've done some internal ones. But yeah, that's, that's what it really, what it should be. I think it is more common for the big deep ones with the monster equipment these days that you can, you know, try and reuse it. Maybe there's just a facade over the front covered up. Yeah. There's, there's one spot, there's an excavation in Chicago where they put the parking garage right in. There's, I mean, there's stuff coming full concrete and dirt peeling off the walls and they think it's kind of cool and industrial. I wouldn't put a nice card on there. Yeah, right. That's awesome. That's awesome. In Chicago, and I understand you've done several marine construction projects, kind of, I guess an upper Midwest, right? What have you learned from those projects? I do ask a lot of questions. Like, why did I get mixed up in that? It does. It introduced a whole new set of challenges. In particular up here with the weather and whatnot, as things start freezing and ice comes around, getting into barges. We don't have tides, but lake levels still move. People think of them as being perfectly stable. They wander around from hour to hour versus season to season in the neighborhood of a few feet. But like on the river, we do a lot of work on the river, you know, a general contract said, Hey, this doesn't look too hard and rented. Put this beautiful new $400,000 backhoe on it. And over the weekend, there are big storms and all of a sudden the river can pop up from five feet. They were parked under a bridge. Oh man. They destroyed the backhoe. I don't know how much damage they did to the bridge, but it was. Yeah. No names will be mentioned. No names will be mentioned. No names, no names, no names. Wow. So you know, you're doing your subsurface investigation and you see the water level is you have to remember it doesn't stay at that level, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Things change. Yeah. And knowing where that zero zero is and knowing what datum you're using. Again, this is, you know, commonplace for us, but for, you know, the younger listeners, these are the things you have to think about. It's a lot. It is, you know, it moves the whole industry in another way that's, it's kind of interesting. Like the level of Lake Michigan, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are one Lake hydrogeologically. Like they're, they're attached enough that there's only four lakes from an engineering perspective, right? Like, right now we've been, we've set six straight records for the highest level that Lake Michigan has ever been at in the last hundred something years since we've had recordings. Wow. You know, and this happened back in 1986, 85, 86, 87. These are the records we're breaking primarily and which inspired a lot of legislation, a lot of work because the bluffs are going in. There are some multimillionaires hanging over the bluffs who would like to change the rules and reinforce things. You know, or you let nature wander back and forth as they want, as the higher lake levels will chew into the bluffs and take away extremely valuable property. Wow. And so, you know, that kind of thing went, then the lake levels drop. We just, a few years ago, we were setting records for historical low levels. So that makes all the beaches great. But then up on the rivers, you know, that same amount of water is holding the dock wall up. Now the, the free length is much different than what you thought of or planned for. Now the dock walls are falling over. Nice. The low levels. Anyway, Zoe wanders around and can change things. So right now, I mean, we don't do a lot of residential work. We've been doing some residential work lately to help protect some of these bluffs. Yeah. Boy, that's a tough one from a lot of other reasons that are non-technical. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's interesting. I remember some years back, you know, in the Northeast, we were talking about, you know, sea level rise and how do we deal with, you know, water infiltration and flood barriers. But then on the West Coast, we were talking about, you know, droughts, right? And it's like totally different type of challenges on the two extremes. And from a geotech, there, you know, there are opportunities for us, obviously, but there's solutions that are out there, which have to figure them out, you know. Yeah, that's cool. Wow. So Michael, before we go to our, our intimate segment, one more question for you. What excites you about geotechnical engineering today and in the future? Well, you know, I would say today is what we're talking about, that it is such a dynamic field, right? There's different problems all the time. There's so many different solution techniques and so many reasons that these different things are useful or valuable in different spots. You know, and right now, the level of instrumentation and the data we can get to learn from, whether it's measuring for testing results of individual piles or during construction techniques or measuring flow rates to bring up the quality of some of the drilled and grounded piles, that there's so many opportunities out there. It's now it's harvesting that data and using it effectively and not just getting buried in miles of paper data and clogging up your hard drive. So that's a challenge, but the solution techniques and the analytics are pretty cool for right now. You know, for the future, they'll all continue to develop and, but I think we have some great techniques. A lot of that is happening pretty well. I would say for the future, what excites me is the people, you know, the people who are attracted to geotechnical engineering, geotechnical construction are a pretty cool set of people, you know, dealing with them. I'm going to test this one, you know, a few hockey pucks worth of material and characterize this entire deposit and make recommendations on how to hold up your structure. That's pretty bold, right? And it's not, you know, this isn't precision cookbook stuff, right? There's some level of creativity or some level of something and the kind of people that are attracted to geotechnical engineering, the kind of people I want to hang out with and I look forward to working with in the future and spending time. So it's the people of the future. Awesome. I love it. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much. We're going to come back in just a moment and close this and out of Michael on our career factors, safety and segment. Stick around. Welcome back everybody. It's time for our career factor of safety in segment. In geotechnical engineering, like many disciplines of engineering, it's important to incorporate a factor of safety into your design. And actually, we were talking about factor of safety just earlier today. And today, of course, we're speaking with none other than Dr. Michael Weissacki. Michael, the work that you do and that you've done in the past, it can be dangerous. I mean, geotechnical engineering contracting is not simple and it's very challenging. And when we think about, you know, the usual safety protocols that engineers have to follow, I imagine that you've built in a factor of safety in your career in managing and giving yourself a way to make sure that you're safe on your construction sites and also for your employees. Is there anything you can share in that regard for, you know, folks that are getting ready to go out into the field of things they need to think about from factor safety standpoint and safety? Sure. Jed, you know, I'm very fortunate to have grown up in a business like this. And with a, I learned a great deal from my father and it came from Mr. Thatcher before him of the safety culture here in my company was, has always been very high. Dad was one of the founding members of Chicago Construction Safety Council. So from a very young age, I was aware of what's there. We have, we've taken things beyond what's there, but it helps when you came from one of my dad's favorite expressions was, you know, we cared about safety back when OSHA was just a town in Wisconsin. And it comes from work with people, man. There's families, there's, you know, I know that there's a, you know, I was looking through some old pictures for our website recently, and I just couldn't believe how many people in the photographs retired from Thatcher. We've got fourth generation people here, currently working, who are, you know, there's a, we have a McCann, really a drill operator now who's our first fourth generation guy in the company. And, you know, it's because of that, it's like, yeah, safety, really, we don't want to see people losing appendages or, you know, it's a danger of business if people die, if you're not paying attention to this. We have, we're 28 months now without a recordable incident here at that. It's awesome. So we, it is completely ingrained within our, within our, within our team, our forces here that everybody gets it. And they're not afraid to speak up and straighten people out when, when there's, they're including for a third generation type, I've had a few of my kids work in here the summer, they've come back and said, wow, Mr. Cooper really got mad at me today, dad. But it was safety related, right? Yeah, right. Get off that cell phone, you know. Exactly. Oh, that's awesome. Michael, thank you so much for coming on and thank you for sharing the great insights that you have with us. And thank you for your service to the engineer engineering community. You've shared some great information and advice to the listeners, especially the younger listeners. And my question for you is how can the listeners find you the best way for them to get in contact with you? If they heard something, I want to ask more about this attention. Well, yeah, I would say, you know, you can, you can find me probably easily through the deep foundations Institute and will become the, maybe I'll become the virtual president of that. I don't know, personally hand the gavel over here at our annual meeting this year. No email it to you, but through Thatcher foundations or company Thatcher foundations, you know, it's Thatcher foundations.com is our complicated website. And true. There's a, there's a way to get, there's a way to, way to reach me through all that. So yeah, I look forward to helping out and love to talk back, talk with the geotechnical community. Excellent. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed the episode today. We would love to hear your feedback, comments and or questions. Please feel free to go to geotechnical engineering podcast.com where you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode, that being episode six, as well as links to any of the resources, websites or books mentioned in this episode. Until next time, we wish you the very best in all your geotechnical engineering endeavors. Peace.