Every industry has the conversations that happen after the meeting ends. The ones in the truck on the way back to the yard, at the bar after a long pour, or over lunch with the other city manager who actually gets it. For construction, wastewater, and infrastructure, those conversations rarely make it past the people in the room. The public never hears them. Sometimes the industry itself doesn't even hear them, because everyone's too heads-down running their own jobs to compare notes.
That's the gap Poo Pit built Talkin' S#!T to close.
This is where the people behind construction, wastewater, and infrastructure come to talk about what's really going on. From the job site to the office, we're having the conversations you don't always hear at the conference table, with contractors, operators, manufacturers, leaders, and industry characters, about the work, the people, the challenges, and the wins.
It's not polished. It's not corporate. It's real stories, real numbers, and a few opinions that probably should've stayed off the record. If you work in this industry, work with it, or just want to understand the people who keep the water running and the sewers flowing, you're in the right place.
Here's a look at three conversations already in the can, and why you'll want to hit play.
John Naron: The Oil Field Guy Who Ended Up Running a City
John Naron didn't plan on becoming a city manager. He was on location in the oil field, scrolling Facebook, watching his hometown fall apart in the comments section, when he called his wife and told her he was coming home for good. He walked into a council meeting with no staff left (the city attorney, city manager, city secretary, and CFO had all quit), stood up in front of fifty angry residents, and asked the council to let him steer the ship until they found somebody better.
They said yes. Three years later, he's running Hondo, Texas, and he's got the stories to prove it.
In this episode, John talks through:
- The 60 water leaks a month that pushed him to map every pipe in the city, only to pull up the GIS map and find the whole thing covered in red
- Why he's constantly at odds with engineers who default to the tried and true instead of trying something new
- How listening to a local plumber instead of sticking with the original engineering plan saved the city $800,000
- The maintenance program that took the politics out of a million-dollar tank repair
If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to prioritize infrastructure against a budget that isn't keeping pace, this one's for you.
Rob Mayville: Twenty Years From the Bottom of the Trench Up
Rob Mayville is our very first guest, and he set the tone for everything Talkin' S#!T is about. He started as an apprentice operator, learned from mentors who threw him into hydro wires and sheet piling because his brain needed to stay busy, and worked his way up doing everybody's job along the way, from deep sewers to wind turbine footings to sheet piling inside an active Chrysler plant.
In this episode, Rob covers:
- What it actually takes to become employable in this industry, and why versatility beats specialization early on
- The story of driving a 14-foot-wide high-speed dozer down the highway between jobs (with a Tim Hortons drive-through stop along the way)
- Why he calls the industry recession-proof, and what his mentor taught him about always building, fixing, or tearing something down
- The hardest lesson he learned the hard way about getting people twice his age to listen to him
This is the conversation that started it all, twenty years of crazy stories and hard-won lessons about where the industry is headed next.
Keegan Jonkers: The Guy Who Digs Tunnels With Spades and Wood
Most people hear "tunneling" and picture a giant boring machine. Keegan Jonkers, of Circle C Construction out of Fort Worth, does it with 12-inch timbers, muck buggies his crew welded together themselves, and guys crawling on their hands and knees for hundreds of feet at a time.
In this episode, Keegan breaks down:
- How wood box tunneling actually works, and why it's still the answer when open-cut isn't an option
- Running three tunnel crews at once, boring under highways, lakes, and backyards nobody else wants to touch
- The realities of live sewer rehab work, and how you can tell on day one if a new hire is going to make it
- Why patience and appreciation, not confrontation, get the job done when a resident is furious about their yard
If you want to understand rehab sewers and the specialty work most people don't even know exists, this is your episode.
Come Talk Some S#!T With Us
These are the first three conversations, and there are a lot more coming. If you work in this industry, work with it, or just want to know what's really happening underground, subscribe and catch the full episodes. The people keeping the world's infrastructure running deserve to have their stories told, and we're just getting started.
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