Jacked Up: The Lumber Supply Crisis and Mass Timber
Release Date: 04/08/2021
Audit the Manufacturer: What the Largest Sub-Default Insurer Sees on Quality
Build Perspectives Podcast
Matthew Biehl is a Senior Construction Risk Engineering Consultant at AXA XL, the largest provider of subcontractor default insurance in the country. He paid for college loading plywood and laminate at a lumberyard, spent years on the general contractor side including a run as a director of QC, and now walks job sites for the insurer that reimburses GCs when a sub goes down. Which means he sits on something almost nobody else in our industry has: the claims data on why subcontractors actually fail. Carolina and Tim asked him to open it up. The headline number: when AXA XL runs a real root...
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It's Always What Happens Next: Corey Zussman on the Joints No One Owns
Build Perspectives Podcast
Corey Zussman is a forensic architect who crossed over to the contractor side in 2006, when almost nobody was doing it. Today he is QA/QC Vice President at AECOM Hunt, with 30+ years, more than 2,000 projects, 200 published Lessons Learned, and over 500 AIA presentations behind him. Carolina sat down with him solo (Tim was out) to find out what a quality professional sees that the rest of us miss. The short answer: it is never the product. It is what happens next. We get into the joint between two cladding systems that nobody was contracted to own, the multimillion-dollar surgical pavilion...
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The Levers of Low-Carbon: How Turner Builds the Supply Chain It Needs, with Imani Hamilton, Turner Construction
Build Perspectives Podcast
Turner Construction is the largest general contractor in North America, the number-one green builder 17 years running, and carries a net zero Scope 1, 2, and 3 commitment for 2040. Imani Hamilton is the person working the supply chain side of that promise. In this episode we sit down with Turner's Sustainable Supply Chain Manager for a conversation that runs from product design to procurement power — because before this seat, Imani spent a decade as a sustainable design consultant helping manufacturers build low-carbon, low-toxin, low-waste products. She has been on both sides of the table,...
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KP Reddy: Your Price Is Why the C-Suite Doesn't Know You Exist
Build Perspectives Podcast
In this episode of Build Perspectives, we sit down with KP Reddy. Investor, civil engineer, author, and one of the clearest thinkers in construction tech. We get into the real questions founders should be asking: What makes a problem venture-fundable? Why does pricing determine your visibility? And why do so many startups build for the wrong customer? KP started coding at 13 on an IBM PC his father handed him, funded his first startup on a Discover card, and pivoted a 1996 web-based project management tool into telecom - two people to 1,200 and an IPO in three years. Three decades later he's...
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It's Time to Be Bold: Sustainability as Business Strategy with Joe Rozza of Ryan Companies
Build Perspectives Podcast
Joe Rozza, Chief Sustainability Officer at Ryan Companies, doesn't run a sustainability strategy. He runs a sustainability business strategy, and the difference is the whole episode. Joe spent almost half his career at Coca-Cola managing water risk across 1,000 plants in 200 countries before bringing that methodology into commercial real estate. Now he's applying it at a $5B developer-builder-owner: sustainability in the BD pipeline, decarbonization roadmaps for 23 classes of construction materials, and buildings designed to the same secondary modifiers insurers use to price flood, hail, and...
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LEED V5, Embodied Carbon, and Why 2026 Is Prep Year with Kristin Brubaker, Green Badger
Build Perspectives Podcast
LEED V5 got pushed to June 30, 2027 — and if your team hears "delay" and relaxes, you're going to be underwater. In this episode we sit down with Kristin Brubaker, Head of Sustainable Construction Solutions at Green Badger, to walk the industry through what actually changes and what a smart GC, sustainability director, or building product manufacturer should be doing with the runway. Kristin brings her environmental science background, four years at Whiting-Turner, and a front-row seat to thousands of LEED projects into a conversation that is equal parts masterclass and gut check. We...
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How EllisDon Decarbonizes Construction: Denyse Von Opbergen on Influence, Not Control
Build Perspectives Podcast
We're joined by Denyse Von Opbergen, Director of Climate and Sustainability at EllisDon — one of Canada's largest general contractors — to work through what decarbonizing construction actually looks like inside a project, not on a slide. Denyse walks us through the influence-versus-control frame she uses to move the needle on scope 3 emissions a contractor can't dictate, the "no silver bullet" filter that weighs Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) against lead time, cost, and constructability, and why the transition to a decarbonized industry doesn't run brown-to-green — it runs...
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"We've More Than Cracked the Code": 90% Complete Facades Before Moduled Leaves the Factory
Build Perspectives Podcast
Recorded live at Advancing Prefabrication 2026 in Dallas, Tim walks the expo floor with James Haas, who leads modular and prefab efforts at Nichiha. (At the time of recording, Tim was also wearing a Nichiha hat. He's since moved on to a new adventure.) The conversation everyone's having at Advancing Prefab this year? Data centers. But not the windowless boxes of yesteryear, municipalities are now mandating warmer, more inviting exteriors, and grid entropy is forcing data centers closer to urban cores where looks actually matter. That's a facade opportunity hiding in plain sight. ...
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Prefab Isn't the Future of Construction. It's the Gold Standard! (and Gen Z Just Wants to Know "Why?")
Build Perspectives Podcast
Andrew Layman runs prefab at Enterprise Electrical, and he'll tell you prefab isn't the future of construction - it's already the gold standard. BUT, the line that stuck with us came at the end: this next generation coming into the trades isn't lazy or soft, they just want to know "why". Andrew makes the case that "respect for people" is an actual lean pillar, that the prefab shop is the best classroom we've got, and that the contractors who get both right are the ones who'll actually solve the labor problem. In this one: Why prefab stopped being "the future" and became the baseline, and...
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Smart Tag It: How Flintco Is Turning the Morning Huddle Into Safety Leadership
Build Perspectives Podcast
Safety leadership isn't about rules. It's about seeing people who've never been seen. Recorded live at Advancing Safety Leadership in Dallas, we sit down with Shane Harris and Lane Smith of Flintco to talk about how a 115-year-old GC is using recorded morning huddles, AI-powered conversation analytics, and a deep culture-change investment to close the gap between the planning table and the frontline crew. This is what happens when you stop treating the pre-task plan as paperwork and start treating it as the tip of the spear. Key Topics Covered: Planning as the tip of the spear — why the...
info_outlineLumber pricing is sky high. Is there a silver lining?
What is going on with the lumber shortage?
We start off with the basics, then get into the goods. And a review of the Global Mass Timber Conference.