‘The History of Concrete’ with John Wilson

[MUSIC PLAYING] IRA FLATOW: Hey, it’s Ira, and you’re listening to “Science Friday.” When I first heard that I would be interviewing John Wilson about his new documentary called “The History of Concrete,” boy, it made me really excited, because you know if you listen to this program how much I am enthralled with the world of concrete. So when I heard there was another concrete geek out there making a film about it, well, we just had to talk and compare notes.

Now, I realize that to most people, concrete seems, well, gray, drab, boring. But the film is anything but. In between facts about concrete’s reliance on dwindling sand reserves, New York City’s crumbling infrastructure, there’s the story of a struggling musician, a man who preserves tattoos, and a group of runners looping the same block for two months. It follows the idiosyncratic format of Wilson’s previous hit HBO show, “How To.”

But I may be the only person who watched this documentary who wanted more concrete facts, so here to tell us about them is John. Welcome to “Science Friday.”

JOHN WILSON: Hey, thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: What made you decide on concrete as the subject of your first feature film?

JOHN WILSON: I wanted to pick pretty big subject matter. And I really couldn’t think of anything bigger. And it felt almost like a prequel to “How To” in a way. It’s the foundation on which everything else is built on. But I don’t know, I mean, I think it started innocently enough with a crack in the foundation to my house that I was trying to figure out how that got there.

IRA FLATOW: Is it possible to talk about concrete without getting into 1,000 puns– foundation, concrete ideas, things like that?

JOHN WILSON: Yeah I mean, it was a minefield. And I was trying to avoid it for most of the film. And I think that’s part of the fun challenge of it, is to try to take something that, I don’t know, has a million associations with it and just try to avoid all of them.

IRA FLATOW: [CHUCKLES] You say it’s embarrassing to know so little about something that occupies so much of your visual environment. Tell me more about that.

JOHN WILSON: It’s one of those things where I would talk to a lot of people about this stuff and no one really had an opinion about it, aside from people within the industry or that dealt with materials that go into concrete. So, I don’t know, I did feel a bit that I didn’t know anything about it just because it’s everywhere, it’s everything.

IRA FLATOW: A big part of the film is your quest to get this documentary funded. At one point, you pitched it as, I love this word, how did you come up with a rockumentary?

JOHN WILSON: Yeah. I mean, there are certain puns that I did want to lean into, and rockumentary being one of them. And it was a kind of contractual obligation that was handed to me at one point, if I wanted to get the movie financed, that basically I would have to include a musician of elevated visibility or notoriety. And I kind of both resented that but also wanted to embrace it at the same time.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, because they couldn’t see that concrete could be sizzling enough on its own, couldn’t they?

JOHN WILSON: Yeah. I mean, I think they were right to a degree. And I think that’s why there’s this ongoing tension within the film. And I do include a lot of stuff that I think the industry values, whether it’s certain narrative plot points or incorporating certain imagery of identifiable people. But I wanted to make kind of a twisted version of that, where you only really see these celebrities for a few frames instead of being the focus. I wanted the real people in the industry or affected by the industry to be the real focus.

IRA FLATOW: I hate to say it this way, are there concrete facts that didn’t make it into the documentary that you’ve been itching to share? And now’s the perfect time to let go.

JOHN WILSON: Well, I do find it kind of shocking how we’re not really going to be able to make it, I think, for another 100 years with the intensity that we’ve been using it. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff about sand that’s really interesting.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about that.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, sure.

IRA FLATOW: How important it is to concrete, there’s an impending shortage. Tell me all about that.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah. I mean, China, like the sand expert says in the movie, uses a ton of it. I think Japan used a lot of it within the past 40 or so years. And we use a lot of it too. There’s this great book, “The World in a Grain,” that is really just a crash course in how sand is used for everything and just tells you exactly where we take it from and how it’s affecting shorelines and offshore reserves, and even stuff inland, like in Long Island, where I grew up.

I used to play in a sand pit for most of my childhood, just because it was near my house. But a lot of those reserves are depleted now. And I just think just this idea of sand wars happening all across the world is something that people don’t really think about or talk about. But it’s true. And I feel like we have this kind of addiction to the material in a way that I think we need to ease ourselves off from.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, because there are so many competing uses for sand, like glass. And people are stealing it for their beaches, all kinds of stuff.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah. And that’s the thing is that we take it from these shorelines. And these beaches, these tourist-heavy beaches are being kind of eroded. But there’s enough tourism tax money to replenish the beaches like every 5 or 10 years. But it’s not sustainable. And the new material they put there disappears within a matter of years. So it’s just kind of like you’re putting a Band-Aid on this problem that is caused by this insatiable appetite.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. You touch on this in the film, but I am always and have been fascinated by how ancient Roman concrete is different from our modern concrete. You mentioned something about self-healing, right?

JOHN WILSON: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the number one things that people talk to me about after screenings, is they claim to know the formula for Roman concrete. There’s some environmental factors, kind of volcanic ash and other things that contributed to its self-healing properties. So it doesn’t really– it’s not as compromised over time. But I don’t know.

But yeah, then I just thought it was interesting that after the Roman Empire collapsed, that formula was kind of lost. It was a secret sauce. And we didn’t really, as a civilization, make concrete for another couple of thousand years. And I just think it’s crazy that within the past 100 years or so, we’ve completely terraformed the Earth in this material. I mean, we’ve done a lot of stuff in the past 100 years. But I just I find this fact to be kind of interesting, that no one is really questioning that.

IRA FLATOW: Not only that, but speaking of longevity of ancient Roman concrete, that concrete that was poured in the ’50s and the ’60s lasts a lot longer than the stuff we’re tearing out now. Sounds like it’s planned obsolescence.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, yeah, the concrete father-son team that I was talking to, yeah, they said that it was often handmade in the ’50s. They used more cement, which contributed to its durability. But, yeah, there’s something about how quick and mass-produced it is these days. And you’re seeing the radiating effects of that with things crumbling faster than they should.

IRA FLATOW: After the break, more with filmmaker John Wilson. Stay with us.

You also talk about recycling concrete. I really did not know much about recycling concrete.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah it’s a really important process that– I think that we should be doing that a lot more than we do. But I think that, in the film, it’s kind of a third rail issue because the proximity to the local neighborhood is making it impossible to live there in a healthy way. So–

IRA FLATOW: Because of the dust.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, because of the dust. Yeah. And it gets everywhere. It gets through the windows. It shouldn’t be put in a place so close to residential housing.

IRA FLATOW: Right, right. And speaking about residential housing and concrete, one of the most fascinating things to see in your movie, which I had no idea, is different buildings in New York being held together with packing tape, with straps, all kinds of corrosion of the concrete making that necessary. That was just an amazing sight.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, I think I was on a depressing adventure for a couple of years where I had trained my eye to just notice all the imperfections in this material everywhere I went around the world. And it’s just this fact of life that we’re living with. But I’m maybe thinking a bit– I’m zooming out a bit too much in this film, I’m afraid, sometimes. But I do think that we should think about what goes into making 1,000-year city versus a 50-year city.

IRA FLATOW: Right. And in that vein, I’m happy you included the deteriorating Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York in the film, which is closing down for renovation, finally, after literally crumbling for decades. But this is a really big problem in a lot of cities that the concrete’s falling apart.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, it’s one of those things where thousands of people pass by that part of the BQE every day, just on foot or in cars. And I’m just looking at it and I’m just wondering why no one is talking about this or why this is the first kind of documentary to address it in a way.

IRA FLATOW: I like your philosophy of your film, that you had to use storytelling to sneak in concrete ideas, as you were saying. Maybe it’s better to put the stuff that you like in between the stuff that other people like so as to get them to be familiar with the stuff they don’t otherwise want to think about.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, I mean, this is part of the fun of making work with no rules like this, where you can just have the vegetables in there right next to the marshmallows.

IRA FLATOW: Right. So how did the film end out, either the same or differently than you thought it would?

JOHN WILSON: Well, I think when I was pitching the film initially, it was very much just a movie about concrete. And I would talk about all the kind of depressing ecological trivia during the pitch meetings. And then about a year in of just filming cracked sidewalk, I decided to just open the movie up and let a lot of the kind of meta elements of its own making flow in.

So I ended up throwing out a lot of what I did in the first year. And then just became a lot more fun to make once you’re going to the oldest concrete street or thinking through the lens of a Hallmark movie. It gives you– I realized that I kind of needed a structure of some kind, even if it was something that felt arbitrary, like a Hallmark film, just to orient myself so that I didn’t get lost in this massive subject matter.

IRA FLATOW: And where else would I see you documenting the concrete festival in Las Vegas?

[CHUCKLES]

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, I mean, the Brick Lane competition is amazing. But it’s also kind of funny. There was there’s this Polish movie from the ’60s or ’70s, I think, called “Man of Marble,” where they have the same kind of bricklaying competition. But that was like this Communist like spectacle where you were supposed to pretend you were happy laying the bricks. But the Polish people resented being made to pretend to be happy doing it.

But here in 2025 or whatever, it’s a very patriotic event here. And it’s the same action. And I just found that really– an interesting evolution over time.

IRA FLATOW: Well, it’s a great film. It’s got a lot of fun things in it. You learn a lot about concrete in it. I remember learning in engineering school that when you would break concrete, a cylinder, it would crack at a 45-degree angle. I had never seen it before. And there it was right in your movie.

JOHN WILSON: That’s true. Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: There’s something in there for everybody, John. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today.

JOHN WILSON: Yeah, thank you so much for asking.

IRA FLATOW: John Wilson, documentary filmmaker in New York City. His new film, go see it, is called “The History of Concrete.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode was produced by Shoshannah Buxbaum. Do you have any burning scientific questions you want us to help you answer, or comments about the show? Well, give us a call. Our number– 877-4SCIFRI, 877, the number 4, SCIFRI. I’m Ira Flatow. We’ll catch you next time.

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