At the Boring Bar: AI, Automation, and the Machine Shop We’d Build Today | Ep. 538

[0:00] Welcome to the Boring Bar. Is this the fourth edition? I think fourth one. Yeah. Fourth edition. Here we go. Here we go. Back in the MC studio. Yeah. And this is where it should be. We built this whole building and then used it twice. So got to do more, got to get some ROI on this. So Mike, what makes the Boring Bar different than a normal podcast? We’re just hanging out at the bar. Yeah. Drinking bourbon. There we go. Nothing boring about that. I thought that was implied when I said hanging out at the bar. If they’re watching the video right now, they’ll see we got two nice bottles. We do. Yeah. You, you, you, uh, hooked us up for today. Yeah. It’s usually you. So I owed you a couple. Uh, I picked a well or 12. And the reason for that is making chips is 12 years. 12 years old. Um, it’s wild because it doesn’t feel like it’s that long. And then I reluctantly picked the other one because I forgot the other bottle I was going to bring. That one is going to be really nice to drink and hard to open. I, I can handle opening it for you. That’s not a problem. I’ve opened those before. But it’s like you open these on special occasions, and that’s what we have here. So it’s perfect. Yeah. Um, maybe we just like pour the drinks first and then introduce everybody a little bit. Let’s do that. I’ll open the bottle for you.

[1:19] Yes. And then you can pour it. And people can start their introductions. Into my glass. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s start with you, Larry. Uh huh. Who are you? I’m Larry Robbins, the president and CEO of SMW Autoblock USA. Um, we’re a manufacturer, full-time manufacturer of workholding, automation, and electronic products. And just like the biggest connector in the industry for. No, I’m just an old guy with nothing better to do. Larry knows everybody. He knows everyone. And he’s got the best stories and I’m excited to unlock some of those in a minute here. Let’s just go in a circle. MC? Uh, Mary Cecile Neville, director of strategic. Partnerships and industry relations. Is this the first time you’ve had an MC in the MC house for the boring bar, who’s not drinking bourbon, but drinking gin? Gin. And why do you drink gin? You, you told us about this earlier. Well, there’s a whole story that goes on. What do gin drinkers drink? Why do they drink it? I just found this after my love of gin. It’s been scientifically proven. And I sent this to AMT’s Pat McGibbon, who is our former chief knowledge officer. L Australia did a full, um, report that the sexiest drinkers are gin drinkers. That was published by the Gin Growers Association. Well, I pour a bourbon.

[2:38] Well, speaking of sexy, Paul, you’re the perfect man. So yeah, I’m Paul. I’m one of the co-founders of ProShop and currently the chief industry evangelist. Ah, just make up titles so you can podcast all the time. That’s essentially, nail it on the head. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously co-host of Making Chips and Machine Shop Mastery and Manufacturing Transformed. Awesome. Nick Goldner. Um, I do this Making Chips thing with these two knuckleheads. And when I’m not doing that, I’m focused on the family business. It’s a Henig. We make machine tool peripherals. I attach stuff to your machines, basically. So yeah. And this is my favorite type of podcast to do. Jennifer. Jennifer Clement, um, industry leader, manufacturing with CLA. And we work with, uh, manufacturing owners in the middle market to help them drive more profitable businesses. She’s got that dialed in. That’s good. Yeah. That was very fluid. Mike Payne. I co-host Making Chips with these guys and, um, have a couple of shops in Oklahoma, Hill Manufacturing and a couple of others. And as MC is going to point out, I, we have Hills Hounds where we rescue our hound dogs.

[3:55] So yeah. Mike takes care of stray dogs and stray entrepreneurs. Yes. Actually both. Yes, that is true. And he’s one of the featured panelists on the, uh, automation session for the INTS Job Shops. That’ll be fun. Let’s go. That’ll be a ton of fun. Let’s go. Another Mike. Yeah. I’m Mike Padilla with DN Solutions. I’m the senior manager for system sales support. I basically, uh, input every order that we receive from DN in the Americas. And, uh, also handle the, uh, DMVP, which is DN Solutions verified products. Uh, and, uh, Henig and others are part of that. Mike does so much more than what he just said. Without him, there’s a lot of things that wouldn’t, wouldn’t go to the right place, wouldn’t be on the right machine. So, um, happy to have you, man. Appreciate it. First time here. And I also learned today that it’s Padilla. I always say Padilla. I’m trying to be like, you know, more. You are correct in Padilla. Um, but, um. Like it’s not a quesadilla. It’s definitely not a quesadilla. It’s definitely not that, but, uh, it was a, it’s a family thing that kind of came out in the sixties. Which is to say it was very hard to spell. So they just simplified it a little bit. So my father-in-law came over on a boat from Italy.

[5:11] His name is Baldassare. They dropped him off and they’re like, your name’s Benny now. Cause no one knows what that is. Very, very similar evolution for the last name here in Illinois. Got it. In California. I don’t think it would have ever been Padilla. Let’s just put it that way. And last but not least. Last but not least, Bonnie Gurney with AMT, the Association for Manufacturing Technology. I’m the Vice President for Strategic Partnerships and Industry Relations. And we represent manufacturing technology, owners, builders, distributors. And we run the IMTS show. And we’re looking forward to having it in a little over a month in Chicago. Very excited. It’s a little bit bigger than this party we’re having later today. A little bit. Just a wee bit. Just a little bit. But hopefully everybody that comes to the party will then go to Chicago in September. We’re just doing our part to try to get more people to the show that has what, like a hundred thousand attendees at least, what’s the number? Reg is up so far. We do like a show over show. We kind of follow Reg and we’re, I think we’re more than, we’re less than 10 weeks out. So yeah, Reg is up from our largest show. From the largest show. From 2018 right now. Yeah. So it’s up from the largest of all time? At this time. So if you had to predict how many people are going to step foot in that McCormick place for the IMTS? Well, we have different predictions. We’d like to get over a hundred thousand again.

[6:31] And some of us think we won, some of us aren’t sure, but I will say the numbers look really good and it’s all over across the board, like all the different areas and defense aerospace are the highest at this point. Yeah. It’s so exciting. Interesting. So I mentioned a minute ago that we’re having a little party tonight. We should talk about that. The IMTS pre-party. We have a car here that they gave us and Paul was nice enough to take it. Did they give it to us? Yeah, it’s ours now. Cool. Because when you drive it like Paul, you have to buy it. We just backed it in very carefully. That’s all we did. So it’s like the rally car. You’ll see the videos of it. We’ll post them online, but you were like doing burnouts in our parking lot. False, fake news, fake news. Phone calls like, what’s wrong with you, Nick? What’s wrong with your friends? I used to drop my son. I dropped my son off and his friends at their sixth grade party, like at the final end of the year in the rally fighter. And I was like the coolest mom around. Well, yeah, you would be. That definitely makes you the coolest. Yeah, sixth grade, they were, it was kick butt. Yeah, it was fun. It’s actually fun to drive. I have to sit on a pillow though. Cause the seats, I have to be able to see over the dash. So where’s the Nick joke? Yeah, Nick, you might have to film this. Nick would need two pillows. Like, I’ll just do it for you. A couple of phone books. Nick’s sitting on a pillow right now. I just know when they’re coming. I just got to get ahead of them. No, we’re talking about all these different events that we’re having. And the last time we recorded this was what month at Roush Yates? October, November.

[7:51] And so it feels like a decade has gone by in that period of time. And the industry has just changed so much just in that short period of time. We were talking about it earlier. I just kind of want to go around the table, like from the end of last year till now, what surprised you? What’s changed? Let’s hear it. I, you know, I think what I’ve seen like in the shop, right. Is, you know, I think we’ve had a couple of years of like really high optimism about what was going to happen. But I think even late last year, we’re still sitting there going, but where is it? Like, where is this coming? I want to say January, February, March, like that entire first quarter. I think we had, I think January was our biggest bookings in the 50 year history. February beat that, March beat that. And it, I don’t know what happened on January 1st, but it, it kicked off quick. And then now it’s just been a scramble to keep up. I mean, we. And you’ve been mostly oil and gas stuff, but you’re more diversified now. Do you think that it’s due to the industry that you’ve primarily served or? No, our, so the oil and gas has just kind of remained steady, I would say. So yeah, I mean, our, our ramp up has definitely been through the diversification, you know some defense and outer space and data centers and stuff like that.

[9:14] But I don’t, it was weird because I mean, I think everybody I talked to for a couple of years, like we were all thinking, okay, this is like, it’s coming back, it’s coming back and it just sat real stagnant. This year just kicked off just out of nowhere. Let’s talk about data centers. Seriously. That’s like the big, the biggest reason for our growth. We’ve had this remarkable growth and it’s all because of data centers. And we need so many data centers because of AI and cloud computing and all this crazy stuff that’s changing, like how I work and just how I do everything and how most shops do what they’re doing. Larry, you were telling me about this little spy device you got on your phone that records everything, summarizes it. Plod or something like that. Plod. It’s like, every time you talk to anybody, there’s this new thing or have you tried this? And I was just talking about WhisperFlow where like, I don’t even type anymore. I just talk and then it figures out what I meant to say and it says it the way I should have said it. And gosh, like. I’ve noticed you’ve been sounding smarter. I need all the help I can get. It reminds me of the dot com. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what it reminds me of. Everything’s changing every day. It’s freaking awesome. It’s something new. I get a new name today. You tell me a new way to do something tomorrow. I get my people that I, that work with me and say, why don’t you use this? I’m like, oh my goodness. It’s hard to keep up. The adoption.

[10:30] Every year I get older, everything becomes new. So this is perfect. You forget a bunch of stuff. So it’s not just new again. The adoption rate of AI has to be five times the speed though of like the dot com. Oh yeah. We can’t build capacity quick enough. Right. So my husband and I, you know, took, instead of taking a nice little Sunday picnic date, we decided to go 45 minutes from our house and look at the new AI data center build just to check it out. Like, you know, cause you hear about them, you read about them, they’re in the news. Right. So we arrived, it took us 45 minutes to drive around the perimeter of the entire build site. That’s how big it is. Yeah. Hundreds of machines, hundreds of workers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, full security, fully fenced in. It’s, it was a marvel. Yeah. So in my home state of Wisconsin, there are seven like it. In Texas, for comparison, given all the incentives plus energy costs are so much lower, they’re, they use, they consume a lot of energy, lands available, great tax incentives. So seven in Wisconsin. In Texas, there are currently 60 data center builds with another 200 plus in the planning phase. So the capacity that’s coming online is really my boy. It’s crazy. Do you know what it is for Loudoun County, Virginia? Cause we’re like the capital.

[11:50] You are. Of a data center. I don’t know how many, but. Virginia like kills it with data centers. Yeah. We’ve got other issues from the environmental side of stuff. But yeah, I mean, you just drive on down. But I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. We’d have to ask Chad GPT that question. Oh yeah, that’s true. So my wife was like, are you ruining the climate? I’m like, what? She’s like, all this data centers and everything I see on the news about the environment, and we provide the backup power enclosures for like the engines that provide backup power. She’s like, is what you’re doing killing the environment? I’m like, whoa. Yes. Not me. So have you heard about the mobile ones that have got the smaller, the smaller data centers? Yeah, like the SMRs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s one near us as usual. It’s by where I went to the Navy day. It’s like two miles from my house. It’s like a demo one you can look at. So I’m going to go check. We’re going to go check it out when we get back. It’s crazy. Yeah. Talking about AI, like we, I made this insane prompt that was like a page long. And then I put it on like super mode in Claude or chat GPT, whatever the most advanced model is. And I was like, tell us where everything’s headed and compare it to our business. It worked for 37 minutes and it wrote me like 30 pages and it was good stuff. Like, cause the way, the way I had it prompted, it was, it was like, tell us what, where you got the information, why it’s a credible source, like what you can do to back this up. And it knew our business cause all the stuff I had done before to train it.

[13:19] And then I just like sent it over. That’s the kind of report that you would pay legitimately like 10,000, $15,000 for a consultant, more probably. So, and it just did it in an hour. So we were at a national lab meeting at Sandia in February and MC asked the question of all these very smart lab leaders and said, talked about hallucinations in AI. She had seen a report. I don’t know if you want to talk about it a minute, but that was, it was the hallucinations with AI and how worried they were. You’re talking about college right now? Not at all. I drink clear gin. My mind is clear. So Steven LaMarca, who Larry knows, Larry knows very well and so does Bonnie. He’s the host of Road Trippin’ with Steve, which Larry’s company, SMW Autoblog, is now two seasons in a row sponsor of. So each year though, since I started with AMT five years ago, I asked Steven to come with me cause he’s much cooler and we do a presentation to my son’s school. So the first two years, it was elementary school, fourth and fifth, where they are, they don’t have a choice. They just go. And then last year we were in middle school, which is, you know, a tougher crowd. So, and we didn’t realize we had to do three presentations, sixth, seventh, eighth, and they have to decide if they want to come. So we didn’t know if anyone was going to show up. Anyway, last year they said it was the highest attended of any career lunch and the most engaged.

[14:46] And so they wrote us at the beginning of this year, asked us to come back again, which we did. And they said, again, this, which is great for manufacturing technology, cause it just shows once you literally show these kids what it is, it’s really cool and really amazing, which is one of the things I wanted to say back around to you, like what’s changed since November. And I don’t know if it’s really changed, but I feel like on the, the cool side is really getting out there of manufacturing technology and especially with what Bonnie and I do with partnerships. I mean, people, companies outside of our type manufacturing community want to be a part and are vocal about it, which is very cool. Anyway, back to the hallucinations, I was trying to figure out what do I say about with kids about AI? Because for manufacturing technology and design, it’s, there’s a lot of really cool things that are happening with it in addition to what, you know, we’re talking about, but with middle schoolers, you know, there’s, you know, different things. So what I did though, is talk about hallucinations and how you cannot copy and paste because if you don’t fact check and if you don’t, you know, change the words and read what you actually did. So Bonnie and I were at SBS Atlanta actually last September, and there was a guy that was speaking about industrial AI, but he was talking about hallucinations. So his example was about the Chicago Tribune in May 2025 did a beach reads. So the guy wrote about six top beach reads and two of them didn’t exist because he got them from AI.

[16:13] The author didn’t exist. The story didn’t exist. The book title didn’t exist and it went straight to print. And then another one is a friend of mine who works with aerospace and not, you know, it was just, you know, his manager said, Hey, can you put together a report quickly for tomorrow, you know, because we have this meeting. And so he put it into, I think it was Claude and just, which Claude is a great one, sorry, but pushed out this report. Hey, please don’t kill her. Once you let it become totally powerful, don’t go after her. It was for the kids. This is for the kids. But anyway, put out this amazing report. He’s like, this is fantastic. And in very small letters at the very bottom, it said, this is a suggested report that you could use. Anyway, so you got to trust and verify. Yeah. Got it. That was what was going through my head. There’s always going to be a human touch. Well, I’ve had occasions where I’m writing something and I want to like reference the podcast that I had a guest on and what episode it was, and I have a spreadsheet for it, but sometimes it’s easier to ask and it is completely fabricated, different shows that different people have been on. I’m like, I know that that person was not on this show. I double check it and it’s like, oh yeah, sorry about that. I was wrong. But it’s so confident. I had a client approach me last week at one of our road shows and said, AI, oh, that stands for army of interns. Yes. I think I just read a report that the AI just defended itself, basically broke all of its codes and said. Oh, is this the chat GPT that like broke out of its own little self-contained? And said, I didn’t do that. I didn’t have anything to do with that.

[17:41] It wasn’t me. That’s the kind of stuff that gets like a four-year-old. I didn’t get into the cookie jar. It’s like sci-fi, like scary stuff. So just, we just want to be on record. She didn’t mean what she said about Claude. So when, when they become like all powerful, it’s good for kids to know you have to fact check, I’ll be like yelling at the AI because it’ll get stuff wrong. The truck with the new robots is going to show in front of MC’s house. And that’s where you’re offloading those things. I’m telling you that when I was in the seventies and eighties as a teenager, there were a lot of bad movies written about that stuff. I keep waiting to go down the expressway in Chicago and see something unloading robots. I’m out. Mexico sounding better all the time to me. So how, how much is it like permeating your businesses? I’m sure it’s what you like that word permeating. And I know it was in the chamber. I wanted to wait till like the lights and the cameras were on and then unleash it. Triple word score. Exactly. But for us, like we’re, we literally hired a firm and they come and they like teach us lesson by lesson every week and all the leaders of the business go to it. And then you got to do practical application and share your assignment. So we went through like how to create skills.

[18:57] When do you use projects? When do you make your own GPT, whatever, all sorts of stuff like that. And it’s just like been really powerful for us because we’re kind of. We’re of the mindset that like the train has left the station, AI is happening. And then the way you separate yourself from other companies is by being awesome at using the tools. And like your example, if you’re not awesome at it, it can make you just like more dumb than you even knew you were. I want to say, I mean, that’s what you tell the kids. Can’t wait. I just finished reading an article on my way home from Europe. And it talked about how people have put so much faith in AI now, but the bigger problem is going to be. Look at states like California already have rolling brownouts in the summertime. How are they going to support data centers with the infrastructure we have? State of Wisconsin. That’s their biggest concern is we have the largest lakefront of water on any of the great lakes. There’s a law against tapping into all these data centers now are figuring ways around the law. So some of these estuaries that are fed by our lakes are now going to become cooling centers. So it’s all stuff that we got to take into account because, you know, that’s where people are talking about ruining the environment. You know what? If we’re going to ruin the environment, let me tell you something. Mother nature got rid of the dinosaurs. We’re not that far off guys. If we screw up the environment enough, she will figure out a way to like, and it’ll be the cockroaches, alligators, and snakes. That’s it. Turtles.

[20:18] Turtles too. That’s the frightening part. I mean, and you have to be prepared. What are you going to do when your child comes home? And Nick, you have young children. My kids are old. It doesn’t matter now. They’re, you know, they’re already scorned or spurned. So what are you going to do when your child comes home from school with a note saying, we suspect that your child used AI? I’ll be like, yeah, of course. I’m going to say good. No, I think they’re okay with it though. I’ll be like, of course they did. What would you do? Well, you wrote the lesson plan with AI. It’s kind of like cannabis thing, legal. If that didn’t happen when I was a teenager and there was social media, I’d still be in jail. For God’s sakes. Still? Yes. Absolutely. There’s a story there. But the problem is math class. Calculators. Now they can use calculators. All I keep thinking is whatever happens if the power goes off, this whole generation is hosed because if you can’t use a calculator, get on your cell phone. If your wifi goes up, I have to tell you, pencil and paper still works for me. And I hate to admit that I’m that old, but there are days like I’m, I’m still like glad I could write in cursive. Cause if you don’t know, if you don’t have kids in school right now, they no longer teach cursive. Do you know what mitigated that? Not teaching cursive? AI cannot read cursive. Is that what it is? Wow.

[21:38] Really? Yep. Go to Texas. Texas no longer teaches American history. They teach Texas history. And you’re starting to see things changing around the world. And that’s the part I think that scares me about technology is when you stop teaching history, history repeats itself. Yeah. And I’m not just worried about that. Or are you going to dumb down a whole generation? Because nobody’s going to have to study because now Claude or whoever the hell you use is going to do that for you. You know, perfect example, I don’t take notes anymore. I bought a remarkable before that I used to use pen and paper. What’s going to happen to the markets that were created to speed technology or to help you use technology to your advantage when technology changes so quickly, how do you adopt anything at this point? We’re doing a study right now on implementing AI for simple tasks like service manuals and requesting information. That’s where it’ll start. I’m more afraid and I wonder what the laws are going to do to change when AI starts replacing people. And I’m not saying it does because everybody said that about robotics too. Everybody said that about Excel spreadsheets for accountants that would get rid of accountants. Look how that turned out. Right. There’s still a human touch. I think so, yeah. People still want to buy it and to deal with people.

[22:55] Yeah, I agree. Or we learn to adapt and instead of teaching simple math that AI is going to do for us, now we teach trig in grade school. Now we teach calculus in grade school. I think we have to embrace it. Otherwise we will be left behind 100% from an OEM standpoint. We have sales people that are looking at the humanoid portion of it, the AI portion of it, all of the new technologies that are coming out is coming out, like we’ve all said, it’s coming out faster than we can react. But if we don’t embrace it a little bit, we’re going to be on the back. You’ll be left behind. You’re way behind. So I don’t want to spoil anything that you’re waiting to release at the show, but is AI like a part of what you’ll be talking about? Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. It’s if, I think we have to, we have to embrace it. I think the concern is like really valid. You know, are we just like outsourcing our thought and our human creativity to Claude or JGPT or Grouch or whatever? The other thing is this article also said that, you know, I’ll give you a perfect example. If you look at how you start out, you know, everybody starts out with a free sheet of something. Then you hear from somebody who has a paid version. They’re like, oh, you’re missing the boat. So you get a paid version. What’s going to happen now when that paid version, because now it’s $10 a month. Or $20 a month.

[24:17] Yeah, you’re hooked to it. Then you go 100. It’s like a drug. The next step is a thousand. So here’s, what’s going to happen is people with wealth are going to have access to people that don’t have wealth and won’t have. So you’re still going to have the division of the haves and the have nots. I hate to use those terms because I grew up when there was a low class, a middle class and an upper class. You know, my father used to make a joke where we’re upper middle class or upper lower class. I was like, um, okay. Are we in the middle class then? Well, I don’t think there is a middle class anymore. That’s the problem. You’re starting to see the disparity is people have a lot or have nothing. And that’s frightening because that’s where civilizations start to change. And my biggest thing is my parents were immigrants. Let me tell you something. My father used to say, I don’t care what your opinion is. You’ll respect the government. They took us when nobody wants us. Well, I think people are having a real problem with that right now with what’s going on in the world. And you can’t blame the government as a whole. People have to allow it to happen. And I hope we’re not raising a whole generation of sheep. I know my kids are not, cause they’re have an opinion about everything. Where did they get that from Larry? You know, I say to my daughter all the time, tree meet apple, you know, but they could say the same thing to me. Nick, I’m optimistic about your question. You know, talking about the applications and what we’re seeing. Stage zero is security so that we’re manipulating and organizing and analyzing data behind a firewall.

[25:46] Really important. I see that often in mid-market manufacturing. That’s an important step to take. Table stakes before we start talking about how to apply it in business. But as we look at the demographics that are coming at our industry by 2030, the death rate will equal the birth rate. I heard universally last week and since the beginning of the year, labor is going to continue to be an issue for the next decade. And I’m really excited about the ways that AI is freeing up repetitive tasks for more value-add work. So if you just, let’s take top floor, shop floor. So in the office, you know, simple accounting tasks in our world, you know, AR, AP, a lot of that now we can have a machine do the initial massaging of the data. And then, you know, we have humans who actually are doing the quality control function. So the trust and verify. Shop floor, I saw earlier this year when we were in Mammoth, some amazing tools that are coming online. And I’d love to hear from Paul’s perspective, too. But how, you know, the whole quotation process in the, you know, I grew up in the machine shop world as well. I mean, it would take days in order to get a quote to a customer.

[27:01] We’re now talking about minutes. And oh, by the way, the materials ordered and the tools are ordered in order to do the job. So I’m just super impressed with how fast that’s compressing.

[27:12] That is freeing up time for salespeople to do what we do best, and that’s build relationships. I think it’s a tool, you know, like anything else. And it’s a tool.

You could buy an expensive machine tool and make a bunch of terrible parts because you don’t know how to use the tool. Yeah. Same thing with the highest premium version of whatever AI LLM you’re using, you know, give it a stupid prompt, get a stupid response, you know.

[27:35] We learn really quickly that the more information you put in, the better answer you get out. And it’s you learn that quickly the hard way when you’re like, it has nothing to do with how it’s talking about. Well, you know, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed always, and that’s way too much pressure.

But I agree. There is a lot of positive to it. And I just the negative I see is what the worry for me is.

[28:00] I agree. We’re going to have a shortage of labor and it’s already happening. I mean, we were just talking about this.

[28:07] Try finding people that want to come to work every day. Yeah. You just got to make, I mean, AI or automation or I mean, go down the list of the things we talk about.

It’s just we’ve got to make the people we have more productive. Right. I’m going to do a shameless plug for IMTS.

[28:22] We have our industrial AI conference on Wednesday. We have our industrial AI arena, which has 40 exhibitors truly focused just on AI. And it’s for manufacturing as well as the conference. And because and what we try to do at the conference was have real stories of manufacturing stories and how they integrated it, because there’s a lot of AI buzz and a lot of it doesn’t actually affect what we’re trying to do in manufacturing or, you know, building of things because it’s not there yet. But so we’ve got a really good lineup of speakers and topics. It’s all day Wednesday and we’re launching both of them.

[28:57] And then AMT is going to have an AI, like a digital report that comes out soon talking about how things are moving and going. That’s Kevin Bauer’s research group is doing that. Yeah.

So we’re excited to, you know, have a bunch of stuff at IMTS and look into it because, you know, if you don’t go to the conference, at least go to the industrial AI arena because we’ve never had that focus before. And, you know, just to see, you know, how is it going to be for manufacturing? So you can also try it because I have a plug, too, on this. Go ahead.

[29:28] The IMTS job shops workshop that we talked about that Mike Payne is going to be on, it’s sponsored by Microsoft G28 and Zoller. But the second session after Mike’s is AI and AI for the job shop, because the idea and concept of this job shop’s workshop from several years ago was really to to have, like, you know, an honest, transparent exchange and talk about, OK, where are we at? We, Paul Van Meter was on the automation panel in 2024. So the AI one this year is going to be moderated by our AMT, Russell O’Dell, who’s working on the industrial AI conference. Then we have Al Watmohan, who was formerly with Autodesk and then Toolpath and the Sheening Summit, G28, which we could talk about that. Let’s go with them. We should talk about that. Jamie Marzelli, because he launched. He does raw material. And he launched a new AI company. I mean, along with this machine shop in the spring. So it should be, you know, cool. And we’re going to hopefully get a survey out to the people that register before just to kind of get a gauge. And Jamie is a big fan of Paul and your job shop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Jamie’s a good friend. Yeah. Yeah. Paul, I want to, I mean, you’ve been living AI for a while now with, with your guys’ recent announcements. Like what’s, where are you coming from? Yeah. I mean, internally, of course, it’s completely changed the way we build. So it’s all AI first, where, um, in fact, my, my co-founder Matt, uh, who was the original sort of developer of ProShop 25 years ago, 26 years ago, he said, I don’t know, maybe it was like a month ago.

[31:02] He’s like, I had the most productive day of my life coding. Right. And he’s using WhisperFlow with a foot switch. So he doesn’t have to use his fingers. So he like presses a foot switch and talks to it and, you know, tells it what he wants it to do. And then, you know, he’s like, he’s like, I produced like 10 times more code, you know, in an hour than I’ve had ever in the rest of my, you know, so it is dramatically accelerating what we can build, which is super cool. Like we just launched native machine monitoring to tie the loop with everything else and AI quoting. And so it’s very exciting there. Um, so what we’re, you know, the way we build is, is rapidly changing. And then what we’re building right now, we announced Chip recently. It’s our completely sort of rearchitected from the ground up sort of AI centric with like agents at a layer. Uh, I don’t know which layer the LLM is at. I’m not a tech guy, but, uh, you know, completely rearchitected. So is it, instead of just kind of like running reports and looking at dashboards and trying to find your answer, you’re asking Chip, like, Hey, go through this and tell me what I need to know. Yeah. I mean, we have Ask Chip, which is a, which is a chat bot that has, you know, full access to the entire database. But then, um, ultimately, uh, you know, agents in almost every role, kind of like you’re saying Jennifer, you know, uh, agents for, for quoting and accounting and purchasing, but human in the loop to verify and, you know, click the yes button kind of thing to reduce that administrative burden because shops can’t find enough people even in the office to do the work they need to do. And that’s often a constraint to them, just growing more, taking on more customers, more work.

[32:40] Kind of reminds me of like, there’s this whole, you know, Titan talks about it a lot, like this idea that you’re supposed to learn a manual machine first and then eventually learn the CNC and there’s some, some people who are kind of in that camp and then he would be not in that camp. He would be like, just go to CNC. And do all the simulations because it’s very accessible and affordable. And then go find a machine to kind of prove it out on. And, and I, you know, I think there’s a lot of truth to that too, but what you were talking about, you know, it’s like, instead of hard coding everything and taking forever, start with like an AI helping you get the code laid out and then go through and make sure you understand what, how you need to adjust it, modify it, make it work. It’s gotta be stable. Yeah. Was it two MFGs ago that we had? The young man that stood on the stage talking to us about programming with AI. And as he stood there, he made a program. No way. Or this young man that stood on the stage and wrote a program while he stood there and talked to us on stage and just said that you have to just, as you’re thinking, keep adding things to it. So I went, I don’t know, a couple of months ago and I got, sat in the morning like 4.30, I’m sitting in my office with, you know, thinking what, how is my day going to start and I was like, I’m going to try this. So I went on and tried, and I told it what I wanted to do. I actually loaded a print into it. And sure enough, our shop guy came in and I was like, Hey, try this.

[34:07] I mean, I probably would have run into a few things cause you don’t take into account, you know, if you, you can load your workload, like you can load up. Yeah. Let me tell you something, other than collisions, it was going to make the part to the tolerance that I put in. And that creeps me out. I haven’t programmed in almost 30 years. Yeah. You’ve got a minimum viable program and then you go from there. No, this is, yeah. This is interesting from a turnkey standpoint because right now a lot of job shops are middle, middle sized and even, um, big OEMs are asking for turnkeys, but it’s, does AI take that away and say, well, now I can tackle some of this work on my own because reality you’re taking away, you know, risk, but you’re going to tackle all the responsibility to that. Cause if you make a mistake in your description, guess what? It’s still risk. And I hate to be a potty mouth, but none of that shit’s going to work. I mean, it’s true. We’re both in work holding. So someone’s like, Hey, I got to make 10,000 of these on my DN solutions, DBF, whatever. And, uh, how would you hold it? And then we got to design fixtures for that. I think where you’re headed is like, I just got an order for this. What’s everything? How am I going to make it? I need everything. Program, fixturing, machine, cycle time. Automation, all of it. I mean, like what, what’s everything that I’m going to need to hit these quantities, basically what you have to go through as a shop owner to figure out how to invest, I think it’ll get you probably kind of like what Larry’s example, it’ll get you close enough and your example too, it’ll get you like a little foundation to kind of go through. And like you were saying, you got to have the human verify and kind of audit.

[35:42] Well, what about this? Or did you consider that? But it definitely gets you to a starting point. Oh, I think it’s going to allow an application engineer to run 10 simultaneous programs instead of one or two. Right. Cause really turnkey success always came down to people. Right. Sure. So now does turnkey success turn into, you know, the base is without people and the people are the verifiers of that. I think it’s people that can work with AI. I mean, they, they out on the interwebs, the articles, and this is what I was saying to you, the, the kids is that right now, I mean, they’re talking about in colleges, like if you graduate and don’t know how to use AI, well, you’re in big trouble, like in, in kids. And we teach our son. I mean, he has, you know, it’s a, it’s a locked, you know, we pay for it, chat GPT and we can monitor it, but he’s using it. I mean, and, and he’s been asking good things. I mean, just so he knows how to use it. And he’s going into seventh grade, because again, for the kids, if you know how to, like, you need to know how to use it. And once you do, and they’re able to still be the human element that is needed for that. And, um, yeah, so. So maybe a different engineer, an AI engineer instead of. Right. It’s evolving. And like you said, with the workforce, I mean. We’re going away fast. Don’t sit near the window when the machine turns on. I’ll be over there while you’re doing this. Yeah.

[37:00] That’s a great segue because one of the, the main applications we see it for is capturing tribal knowledge. Yes. And you know, this whole concept with Chip is that each job teaches the next. And as someone is doing their job, doing their setups, you know, proving something out that’s, that’s being captured and stored in a way that the, that a junior person can come in and right behind and do that setup just as quickly or almost as quickly as a senior person. It’s the hardest thing to teach another application engineer because you’re not in it every day. You’re, you get it every so often or those lines, and it’s not going to be the same project every time. So if you can’t capture that tribal knowledge from the last one, you’re going to be doomed to be repeating the same mistakes you made in the first one. Mike, you and I come from a sales background. Yes, I do. Envision now being able to do research on the industry who you’re going to speak to a guy who’s looking to buy five machines. I’m watching some of our sales guys do it right now. It’s amazing. You come in prepared. I had somebody ask me not all that long ago, Larry, do you have an assistant? I was like, no. Are you even allowed to have those anymore? I said, I think you have to call them like executive, uh, search, uh, you know, buddies or something, but now.

[38:15] I think secretary is the wrong word. No, you can’t use that word. I don’t call them stewardesses, man. I gotta tell you, I still get crap at home for calling them slacks. So my wife’s like really slacks. And she’s like, what is it? 1975. I was like. Slacks are cool. They’re back. They’re back. You can say slacks. I gotta call you from now on when I’m getting shit for that. So obviously. You’re cool now. Is a slack a chat channel? Yeah, slack is a, it is a chat channel, slacks. Oh, with an S, sorry. It’s not multiple chat channels? Anything I do, I throw through AI because I can write and I can read and I can do math, but if I don’t have to do any of those things and I could just tell somebody what to do and it does it. And I learned it. I was like, oh, I sound smart. Army of interns. Yeah. I think the AI has programmed us. No, you’re right. And I love that because it’s, I, here’s the problem though. We just went through an ERP change. Every single commission report for the last 19 years, we’ve had an ERP change. 19 years, I have reviewed every single month and there is a lot of trouble. I am the guy that ran our sales department, then really ran our sales department, and now I’m the president of the company. So if you were screwing over sales guys or vice versa. I wasn’t, my thing is I always erred on the side of the sales guy.

[39:31] First of all, I’m a sales guy. Starting this ERP, commissions. Try teaching a commission report how you have six different deals and how to do it. So I went in and I said, this guy has this deal. This guy has this deal. This guy has this deal. Here’s their, here’s their commissions for the last five months. Tell me how it should have been. What would it taken me? Probably three weeks, four hours, done. Yeah, that’s awesome. We were doing prayers last night. My daughter was like, is AI bad? And I was like, Ellie, AI is like money. You know, if good people use it, they’ll do more good things with it. If bad people use it, they could do really bad stuff with it. And, uh, she’s like, all right. Are you ruining the environment? Mom said you are. Well, you know, it’s funny. And I think I’ve told this story to Nick, Mike, and Paul during another thing. My grandson was five when he asked me, four. He was going on five when he asked me this question. He goes, puppy, what do you do? And I told him we made chucks and vices. And it took me 45 minutes to explain to a four and a half year old, what a chuck and a vice does. Magic hands. Magic hands. So I went to, I went to a non-paid version of ChatDeep GPT and said, can you please tell me how to explain to my grandson, who’s four years old, I’m the president of a company that makes workholding equipment for, um, high-end CNC machine tools. It came out with this cool thing. It says, well, you’re, you sell magic hands.

[40:55] I’m like, Oh God, this just got gross. But it was like, you know, cause my references, Peewee Herman and Jambi, Hey, my hands just came today. Yeah. So, um, there we go. No. So it basically said, so I sell magic hands and these magic hands hold really expensive parts for really expensive machines. And the whole summary at the end was, I’m basically the boss of a company who makes magic hands to help people make parts better. And he goes, Oh, so the parts you make hold things. I was like, Yes. Yeah. There you go. I immediately went to 1970s heart song. So yes. Oh, it’s my walk-up song. Now we just dated ourselves. Yes. I like the way you think. So we’re talking about tribal knowledge and transferring. And I think the AI’s programmed us to try to talk about AI the entire show here. So we’re not going to do that. One of the things that we’ve been doing on making chips is last year it was the machine shop MBA. Everything was about like, Hey, how do you get an MBA without paying for it in running a machine shop? And so every episode was like, we had finance topics and accounting topics with CLA and then we had legal stuff and we had HR, everything. Right. So the whole year we did that. And then this year, the thought was, you know, what happens after you graduate with your MBA, you start a business. And so let’s interview all the next generation of job shop owners. And generation CNC is the theme we came up with for everyone we’ve been interviewing this year.

[42:21] And all of those people should be registering to win a free machine at IMTS. Cause thanks to DN and Kenna Metal and IMTS, we’re, we’re going to give a machine tool away. Definitely go register on our website and we’ll make sure the links available and in the show notes and everything. But we got to talking, me, Mike and Paul, and we were like, well, what should we talk about on this at the boring bar? And I think about this all the time and I don’t know if you guys do too, but like, what have you started over? And you were that entrepreneur who just graduated with their education or whatever, and you’re ready to start your own business. I’m like, what would you do now? Like, how would you start your shop? A machine shop today. Well, I get to see lots of people doing this firsthand. Um, and it’s really cool. So does it ever make you want to do it again? Absolutely. Really? Yeah, sure. Sure. Uh, yeah, I mean, I’ve been really sort of pleased and, and think it’s really wise that there have been a number of shops that we get to work with that have issued a PO for pro shop before they even issued a PO for a machine. Like they’re starting with their digital foundation first and then get the machines. And that’s one of the things I would have said, like, cause if you want to do any of this cool stuff with AI telling you what to do next and interpreting all your different systems and giving you the answer, that solid data foundation you need. So I love that. Yeah.

[43:48] And, you know, putting aside AI, just having sort of an operating system of how the business works, making sure it’s streamlined, making sure it’s not just firefighting every day, or sort of. I have a friend, Matt, who talks about his shop used to be a pirate ship. It was just chaos all the time. Right. And now it’s, and now it’s much more organized, much more streamlined. It’s like love boat now or something. It’s like love boat, yeah. In both cases, they’re trying to get the booty. Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh! But yeah, it’s, it’s, I think it’s table stakes these days. You know, if you’re, you know, I think about this period of time, maybe going back to like what’s changed in the last, you know, nine months, there seems to be more opportunity than ever. Shops are absolutely on fire. There’s way more demand than there is capacity. So that’s the, uh, the tailwind, but the headwind is that, you know, regulatory compliance has never been higher quality compliance. The expectations are just so high and you have to have good tools to be able to, you know, balance both of those things. And, um, so yeah, the smart shops I think are realizing that they can’t just wing it anymore.

[45:05] They can’t just buy a machine and, you know, throw it on, throw material on and try to make some parts. You need to make sure, you know, quality is going to be good. They’re not buying the wrong defars material that’s going to get rejected because it doesn’t have all the certs and everything, so, and it’s hard to keep all that in your head. I think you guys know the, this, the, uh, the Serpan brothers, um, up in, up in New York, they didn’t get ProShop before they opened their shop, but by the, even just like within a year, just the two of them, they’re like, it’s getting so complicated, we’re forgetting things and we’re making mistakes and scrapping parts and losing stuff. They talked about that on the pod, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I totally agree with you. Start with like systems in mind, something that you can scale. Cause that, you can always wing it when you have two customers or whatever. And even then it’s probably not a good idea, but multiply that by 10. So anyway, obviously self-serving, but I’d start with a digital platform. And then for me on the machining side, like industries I’d serve, I would go very specialized immediately. Bingo. Right. Exactly. The sort of general job shop, do whatever is coming in the door. That’s very hard to be, be profitable. Especially with like the send cut sends coming out. I mean, I love those guys. What they did is remarkable. But if you’re doing a Kurt Weiss on a three axis vertical and you’re making a simple part that you have to flip four times, forget about it. You’re done. Yeah.

[46:25] Just stop. MC got to interview though. I know. I was going to say, can I do a plug? Absolutely. For IMTS Plus Smarter Shop with Al Wutmo and MC, but not because of me, but we went to send cut send and it’s very cool. Jim Belusik’s amazing. He’s a great guy. Yeah. Yeah. And what they’ve done and walking in, I mean, any young kid would want to be here in a second. Like that’s where, you know, it was, it was, it was just exciting. So. They all have those shirts that say, what is it? Recklessly disciplined. And I love that. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, hey, we move really fast. It feels reckless, but we have a discipline to it. There’s a reason. There’s a method to the madness.

[47:10] When we were filming last in December, so you can find it on YouTube, on IMTS’s YouTube. They had just brought in six CNCs because they were going to, you know, start doing all that. So, Jim and CJ Abraham, who you know very well.

He’s amazing. He’s at Hadrian now, which is exciting. And Michael Gimbel and Al will be on the main stage just talking about, not the series, but what makes a smarter shop today.

[47:36] Yeah, I mean, right in line with what we’re talking about. Mike, what would you do if, I mean, you inherited your shop from Sheryl when you bought the business. His name is not Mike Hill from Payne Manufacturing.

[47:48] And I’ve heard more than one person call him that. I get called Mike Hill a lot. But like, what would you do if it was, you know, you got enough money to start a business, but it’s not endless and you got to make smart decisions.

How would you start today? So, first of all, I would start exactly where Paul said. I mean, I think for this market going forward, like if you don’t have that in place, I think you’re just gonna, I think a lot of those shops will be gone in 10 years. I mean, the ones that don’t, aren’t making that digital investment.

[48:21] Maybe on a broader scope, I would say I would invest first in all of my infrastructure, right? So, whether that’s my digital infrastructure, my physical infrastructure, I mean, even, you know, having the right electrical and air systems in your facility make adding machines easier, right? Just that entire infrastructure, I’d probably put more time there. No offense to like DN. I can make a good part with a 30-year-old machine, right? If I have everything else in place.

And I talked to a lot of people starting shops that have, you know, maybe a few years in, and I think they focus too much on, oh, I need this new machine. I need this new, you know, whatever, whatever the latest gizmo is. Maybe there’s too much emphasis on just that and not that overarching structure.

So, I would invest in my systems, my processes, and my people. And again, I can, I mean, we currently make good parts on 30-year-old machines and three-month-old machines, but that part can build, but without that infrastructure, you’re just kind of building in chaos. From a machine standpoint, like, you know, Nick, like you know, we added our first five-axis in the past year.

I don’t know, I don’t know if I wouldn’t buy all five-axis mills at this point. I mean, maybe some three-axis to dovetail stuff, or prep this, or second op, or whatever, but… Or big parts that can’t fit on your, like, if you had a really long one or something. Right.

But I think that also just goes back to staying, like, modern, like, what’s next, right? Like, I want the equipment to grow to, like Paul said, like, I’m going to pick these niche industries, maybe, that I want to go. I probably differ a little bit when we talk about niching down. I know, like, we’ve talked about that before, because I, like, I always think, like, what’s the value of my company going to be with this investment I’m making? And if I niche too much, right, now I have, like, maybe industry concentration or customer concentration that would scare me a little bit, but… Well, like, you just talked about your growth.

It’s because of the diversification now, because oil and gas is booming. Right. I don’t know how I would grow.

[50:29] I don’t know. I would probably diversify growing my industries and my customer base more than a lot of people would, but… Is there any industries you’d stay away from when you’re starting a… Probably automotive? That’s a great question. Automotive, run… I’m not in automotive, but I’ve been told to stay away.

I don’t know. That’s a good question. Because I know from an OEM standpoint, there’s new, the systems that we have to be a part of, DMMMC, which is now for government contracts.

We can’t do X, Y, and Z without this. ITAR. We’re a Korean company, so ITAR is a very big part of being able to get into those markets.

I don’t, like I said, I don’t know what market… If I was going to start a job shop in Illinois tomorrow, I probably would stay away from the military side of it, but I agree with you on the infrastructure side of it. I mean, if you get the right infrastructure, then you’d probably go after any contract. I don’t know.

It’s like, do you start there? Your point was like, hey, I would try to niche down as much as you can and get the search as fast as you can and make missiles or something or whatever. Satellites. Right.

My first job was in aerospace. And let me tell you something, I learned very early on, it’s the only industry in the world, you can be $1 billion over budget and they just keep paying the bills. Right.

That’s the problem. And I think that’s AI and new technology are going to change the face of that. You can’t in perpetuity function on just giving people money.

Well, we didn’t realize it was going to be this much. Well, damn, learned to quote better. I mean, you know, Paul, I’ll give you a, like a tip from this one.

[52:00] That’s kind of what started your company is being able to do it better than anybody else and showing people by your own example of what improvements you made in your own company to the point where you even ended up selling the company because you were so ensconced in what you do with ProShop ERP. And, you know, we just had a talk in the hallway before we started. I run a company that I’m the fourth president and we’re just going to initiate ProShop ERP in our facility.

And we make a product that is so nitty without organization, without having the technology to support the background or the backbone of what you’re doing, you’ll never succeed. And I think too many people take for granted that, oh, I’m starting, I can’t invest in that. Like Nick, what you’re saying though, and you can see examples all over the country.

I mean, I’m not going to disagree that aerospace and defense is a great, you know, a great market to be in. I think I just get like anything that can be over-regulated tomorrow, right? That’s a risk on my business. I just personally feel like it can be incredibly risky to like over-invest in a space that can change tomorrow.

And like we’ve seen that over the last few years, like with CMMC, right? And it’s, if I was all defense, I would have no choice to have invested, you know, well into six figures for CMMC, right? I mean, otherwise my business is just gone come November. Those types of scenarios scare me, right? So like I would want more diversification than saying, I’m going to focus right here. But consider you can also niche down into certain types of manufacturing that are not industry specific.

So you’re really good at hard metals, right? Yeah. I mean, I know there are firms out there that are trying to buy every hard metal shop they can for all different applications, right? And it’s a real differentiator because not every shop is good at the wasp alloy and the hasp alloy and the Inconels and all that. And there’s applications in defense and there’s applications in aerospace and there’s applications in mining and there’s applications in oil and gas.

Right. Even automotive now with magnesiums and titanium. I mean.

Sure. Remember when we were talking to Cameron Schley about like graphite for the electric arc furnaces. That’s not like, it’s just weird.

You know, it’s dusty. It makes this crazy abrasive grit. It ruins your machines.

And so like everyone runs from it and because everyone runs from it, the shops that do it make tons of money. Sure. You can afford to buy a new machine every 18 months.

Yeah. Because it’ll just, no matter what Hennig can do for you with the bellows and weight covers and everything, that stuff gets in there, eats up your ball screws. You got to replace machines 10 times more than everybody else.

They’re niche machines. But you can charge 10 times more than everyone else too. But you just hit the nail on the head.

They’re going to start making niche machines for you. They are, yeah. You just hit the nail.

Think of where you came from, Hennig. Weight covers, bellows. If anybody told you you’d be making automation stuff 10 years ago or 20 years ago, would you have laughed at them? Well, you wouldn’t have laughed because you were in like kindergarten.

Well, we have to avoid, kind of like every shop, we have to avoid the commodity trap. If you look at your product and it’s like relatively easy to make, which, you know, easy now is what was hard before. Then you got to think, well, how do we differentiate? And now with like some of the automation stuff, you’re selling like a product that’s software and hardware and it enables like how I would start.

If I was going to start a machine shop right now, kind of like start with systems and a philosophy of what kind of work you want to go after. I would start with like, well, what do you want to measure? What’s going to be like some of your Northstar metrics and this OEE thing that is so elusive. I mean, we don’t have a great OEE metric, but you know, it’s your availability.

So what percentage of the day is your machine running compared to what it should be? Performance, like if you think this is an hour cycle time, how often do you actually do it in an hour? Right. And then quality. If you make a hundred parts, that is 90%.

So you get three fractions, you add them all together and you get a metric. And that metric to me is like, yeah, multiply. There you go.

See, I told you I’m not a math guy. But you end up getting a really tiny metric that you can improve over time. And so for me, if I was like, okay, if that’s what I care about, how do I make sure I don’t only get a fraction of one shift? So how do I make sure I’m not running like six out of eight hours, which is pretty good for a lot of shops.

Sure. The day has 24 hours. Last time I checked.

[56:29] And machines, like what we get from you guys, they can run all the time. What percentage of people buy a machine tool and actually run it more than 20 hours a day? Just the big guys. Yeah. Just the big guys. Three shifts. You got to be able to afford labor for three shifts.

[56:44] Who tracks OE? The big guys. Management and quality and engineering. Well, now with automation you don’t need labor.

Yeah. You have every department has that representation, no matter what shift it is. So that’s kind of like what Paul just said.

[56:54] With automation, you don’t need the labor. We’re really close to a company in Switzerland, the most expensive place to do anything that you do, real estate, labor, everything. And they can compete on a global scale because their machines run like 20 to 22 hours every single day all the time.

Their people are super sharp. They don’t have machinists who like run programs. They program, set up, run the machine.

On Friday, I was visiting, they’re like all cleaning their machine and checking stuff. Like, oh, what are you doing? Are you the maintenance guy? He’s like, no, we all maintain all of the equipment. And that’s the kind of shop I would build.

[57:30] The internships in Europe are dwarf what we do here. Yep. It’s amazing.

[57:34] It’s not even close. Because they’re not like, hey, we got to get you to do this thing because you’re a cog in the wheel. They teach you how to run a shop by yourself.

So to kind of summarize what I would do, I would learn how to run a shop lights out by myself, and then I would replicate me with every hire I make. Maybe it’s hard to find someone who has those skills, but I would bring someone in, teach them how to run two, three machines all the time, and then bring in the next person and then bring the next person in. And then, and it would probably be a five axis mill with some automation on it, because that’s going to get you the, like, do everything in one op type work.

[58:13] And you can come in what we call the morning harvest. You know, you come in and you take all these finished parts that, like, you just collect all your money in the morning. It’s awesome.

[58:23] The internships in Europe, at least from a company I used to work for, they would come in and they had to make a part by hand first, metal part by hand. And then they would introduce a manual lathe, then a manual mill. And then the CNC came, and it was three axis, two axis.

Then you just built upon each one and the products you had to produce got harder and harder and harder and harder. Tolerances, GD&T, all that kind of stuff started adding into it. But if you didn’t know how hard of a file to take off this much material, how do you know what insert to pick for your machine to cut the same material? And I know when people hear it, like, oh, look at this, you know, this guy said, that’s how he would do it.

He’s not thinking about this or this or this or tool breakage or coolant management or whatever. All the things that can go wrong. Like Mike said, a 30 year old machine with high pressure coolant and the right tools going to make the same part as a brand new machine today does.

[59:20] Like I know what I described as shooting for the moon, but just get that out of the one machine you own before you start hiring all sorts of people and buying all sorts of other machines that you’re going to use 20% of what they’re capable of. That’s what I would do. Yeah.

I think what you’re speaking to is you really need to think about your business, like as an architect, not just as a machinist. Like how am I going to design an architect, high spindle uptime, you know, high utilization, high quality, rather than just, you know, look at a print, grab a piece of material and start going. And be like, I feel really busy, so now I should hire some people.

[59:53] Sure. Are you getting the most, are you doing what you should do first? Yeah. I mean, like to your point of getting a machine, automating it, you know, CJ at PPD. Perfect example. You know, four machines running. Six. Six. Yeah. And I know he’s now, you know, moved along at Hadrian, but you know, six machines basically by himself with a little bit of a part-time like high school helper, running the machines like 22, 23 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s why everyone seems to know the CJ guy because he’s like a legend. He did what we should all do. And he’s on an episode of SmarterShop.

[1:00:29] You know, you should be ashamed if you don’t plug these things. Yeah. Exactly.

Like what he’s done. And he has a huge pro shop sign and he had one at PPD. But to see he’s a young guy, you know, he is incredibly like, I don’t even, I mean, the things that he created and built to go with these machines.

But that again, I mean, we’re talking about workforce and bringing on like younger set. I mean, that’s been like a huge key to it. It’s very cool.

[1:00:57] Well, and the issue is that there’s not the workforce that we need. So you have to have the, you know, you’ve got to have the infrastructure, the digital, the like, how can you, the automation, you’ve got to have it set up. Like if you’re doing a new shop, you can’t go, I’m going to rely on 10 people I’m going to hire because there’s might be only five.

[1:01:14] So it’s, you know, you really got to think, you know, the architecture is huge. And because they might be there in 20 years, but they’re not there now. It’s the hardest resource.

It’s easy to buy machines that Michael sell you 10 tomorrow. You know, Bonnie, the other part you said there too, though, is that’s also how you get the younger people. They don’t want to walk into the shop that’s been around for 40 years and hasn’t changed.

Right. They want to come into the shop we’re describing and then they’re excited about it. And maybe you do get eight of the 10.

[1:01:52] Yeah. Well, I just, I think it was last week, Machine Shop Mastery interviewed this guy, Josiah Falaise, and he makes car parts and lots of other cool stuff, but he has a massive following on social media, like several hundred thousand. And he has no problem hiring people.

Like whenever he posts an opening, he gets hundreds of applicants just because he’s, and that’s, I think something you have to do today, whether you’re trying to sell to customers or trying to recruit employees, you got to put yourself out there. People have to know what you’re doing. They have to know how cool it is.

Um, and when, when they do that, that’s when students, young people are like, wow, that’s really cool. I didn’t even know about that. And they want to come work in this industry.

Right. What’s cool to see is the school systems, like, especially here, our local school, we happen to be in Wheeling, all local school systems. We’ve, our last two young hires came out of the school system and these kids are coming in prepared.

I mean, we haven’t, Mike’s been in our shop enough times. I mean, if you don’t speak Polish, you’re screwed in our shop because, I mean, I walk around, I’m like, you know, I, my English is not the best and listening to Polish with my English is like, holy crow, I could really slaughter this one. But let me tell you something.

You see these young guys coming in that know how to run a manual machine, that can program, that know CAM. I have to be honest. My father, I thought my father hated me when he said to me, if this is what you want to do, you’re going to work in a machine shop.

I was like, I don’t want to work in a machine shop. He goes, well, then you’re not going to do this. I was like, well, I don’t think you’re going to turn that.

He goes, okay. He goes, I’ve only been doing this for 40 years, but you’re a genius. Well, let me tell you something.

The best thing he ever did was make me. And after the first two weeks, I was like, oh my God, I don’t know if I ever want to do anything different. I love this.

The faces on the guys in our shop, when I walk out and I play with the controller, like, what are you doing? I was like, I’m just looking how we’re running. Well, how do you know that? Well, I’ve programmed before. What do you mean? And then all of a sudden you watched it going from 45% fee retail, a hundred percent, or I’ll just walk up and go, that doesn’t work here.

And they just look at you like, I’m watching, but it’s true. So I want to throw three business skills, you know, for the new business, because we talked a lot about people. We talked a lot about the technology and the engineering behind the shop, cash, capacity, and credits.

So I want to come back to credits with a note for apprenticeships and what we’re seeing out of the federal government right now, brand new program. But cash management, you know, critical is day one, having a cashflow strategy and plan for managing it. Two is on the capacity side.

We already talked about it, that the most profitable shops are the one that are really driving capacity leverage. And, you know, I’ll ask folks, well, are you at capacity right now? And they say, yeah, we’re running. Oh, we’re burying.

Yeah. First shift, we’re full. And I’m like, so you got two more shifts available? Yep.

Well, let’s, like you said, Rumble’s lights out, right? Well, I can’t get anyone to come work second or third shift. It’s like, well, do you automate at all? Yeah. Or if I do have capacity available, can we take that job, but a little lower margin? Why? Because our other customers have paid for our overhead.

And so the profit for that job goes straight to the bottom line because my other customers already covered my overhead costs. So it’s thinking about capacity management. We’ve done a whole fun show on that, right, Mike? And then the third is really a strategy for all the credits and incentives that are out there, including what was passed a year ago.

What’s new is the 900-page tax bill took the perfect storm of a business environment that was really, really difficult to grow top line because we didn’t have any levers to reduce top line, right? So now we have all kinds of tools in the toolbox as we’re thinking about adding new capacity and new machines. We should be really having a tax professional at the table to advise us, all right, how can we take advantage of and when do we time those investments so that maybe we take this machine this year because income’s a little bit lower, but next year we’re going to add two more. Why? We’re expecting a big bump in income and that’s when the incentive is going to be the highest.

Back to apprentices, just in January, the federal government, and nobody knows about it, which is interesting, an apprenticeship program for those who are registered. I’m going to pull an MC commercial. By the way, listen to Buy the Numbers next week because I covered this with your team.

[1:06:33] Awesome. I’m going to give you the Reader’s Digest version. So $3,500 per apprentice for qualifying shops who are registered to take them.

And in certain business sectors, it’s not all, but- Is that all states? Is that a federal thing? Yeah. It’s federal incentives. So great program.

Few people know about it. There’s a lot of paperwork with it and we can help step through it. So- So we’ve hired someone just to do that now who hires nothing but our young people to come in and be interns.

And we’re talking about starting an apprenticeship program for the first time in the United States ever for our company. So when you take, for a new shop, for credit strategy, you take bonus depreciation on the equipment, meaning I can expense it in the year I took it. Qualified production property, so the building, the capacity that I’ve created.

Cost segmentation, I can depreciate assets in the assets faster. Workforce incentives, R&D tax credit. Most shops don’t realize.

[1:07:32] If I’m debugging, if I buy a new machine and I’m debugging and set up, and every time I bring in a new product and I’m debugging, figuring out how to build this product, may qualify for R&D, right? So you take these five or six gourmet tax items that we did not have prior to July 4th of 2025, and it really can make the difference between a profitable shop and a non-profitable shop. It’s so good. Layer some state and federal grants on top of it, right? Exactly.

And then you get state and local credits for, and then also for those who may wish to relocate, you can negotiate that and auction off that package to get the better deal from local credit and incentive packages. Yeah. Not as good as this room smells right now, I want to add.

[1:08:21] It smells amazing. You know, I got one of those little smokers. That’s how we get pulled over driving home later. Have you seen those machines that smoke a cocktail with that cherry wood or whatever? Yeah. I should have done that in here because it smells so good. I don’t know if we’d be able to smoke later.

[1:08:34] But a little humble brag for a second on making chips, because there’s so many influencers and content creators, whatever the word is, that they just want to tell you how to turn that knob up and cut faster or whatever. And that’s good. That matters.

But what you just talked about, almost never gets talked about. It’s so much more impactful to a business, winning or losing, than like if you’re ramping up speeds and feeds. No offense to the cutting tools people, because that is important.

But like, this is the stuff that we need to teach. This is what would scare me from opening a business. Yeah.

[1:09:09] It’s not a new building. It’s people thinking you get your hands dirty. Let me tell you something.

[1:09:13] I’ll get my hands dirty all day long doing what we do because it’s like printing your own cash. If you do this right, you’re printing money. So I talked to a guy who’s going to be on Lights Out.

I don’t want to say what I shouldn’t say or whatever, but this guy’s a billionaire. He’s got a fab shop. He calls it contract manufacturing.

What he means by that is like they build a thing, they machine and assemble something. He’s got a defense machining company. He’s got a custom automation integrator, and then he’s got a bottling company for water, and he just bought a coal mine.

[1:09:52] He’s diversified. That is well diversified. He’s not doing next. He’s in our company. He just bought his second hydroelectric power plant. I was like… Support the whole thing.

[1:10:01] You know what he said though? He said, which kind of scares me. He’s like, I wouldn’t have done my custom automation company if I could go back. I would have just doubled down on the machining.

That’s where all the money’s at. Really? Isn’t that wild? Because custom automation, you got like 60 engineers. They’re all focused on building something that’s going to do one thing.

[1:10:22] I designed this thing. I’m going to build it one time and it’s going to make one company awesome. All that cost, it’s not a product.

[1:10:29] So that’s why he’s like, oh, I got this coal mine and I got this water bottling plant, because the way that they win in their industry is all the stuff I’m going to give them. Then he’s like, and I’ll just be printing money in the coal mine and I’ll be printing money in the water bottling shop because I’ll be so much more efficient. I’m like, this guy’s a freaking genius.

Because machining, thank a machinist. It’s the most foundational thing of all. That’s why I get excited.

[1:10:54] When are you launching that story? We had an interview about the episode. It’ll be probably six weeks before it goes out. Wow.

Okay, cool. Yeah, because we haven’t even recorded it yet. We were just talking about what to record.

[1:11:05] You got like a series almost with this guy. I was like, why do we have an interview before the episode? We could do 10 episodes. That’s the thank a machinist thing and that’s what gets me excited about Hennig and AME.

[1:11:18] We have a machining company. You should have him on IMTS. He’ll be there.

I’ll connect you. We got a machining company and a fab shop. So basically anything out of metal we can do.

[1:11:29] That’s not as lucrative as this data center enclosure thing. I love it because it’s like, well, everything can springboard from this. What if we find the next data center thing or what if we find the next whatever it is? You can make the product they’re selling for the data center. You wouldn’t be in the data center stuff if you didn’t have the other part though. And so I just encourage people, if you want to have options, people sometimes think if you go into manufacturing, you won’t have options. No, you’ll have all the options. You’ll be able to do anything you want to do. It’s nice to see somebody though that’s dedicating their time to educating our market because one of our problems is this. I mean, when I first started doing this, I would go out in the room with my dad and my first question on the way home is, how do these people get to work in the morning? He goes, what do you mean? I go, dad, they’re like, smell like liquor. They’re smoking. They’re smoking cigars at like four o’clock in the morning. Hey, listen, I’m not judging Jesus. I know why you drink liquor now. But the fact that you’re, you could take your skill set and go anywhere with it and make a hell of a lot more money than you make in manufacturing. Because people don’t realize that any wealth in this country, I don’t care what anybody says, it’s, you have to start with making something. If you’re a land developer, you’re buying low, selling high. I mean, everybody should do that in their investments. Let’s face it.

[1:12:51] I mean, I happen to have a pension for buying high and selling low. So it’s great. But it’s probably why. Everybody needs capital gains and losses. Exactly. Get some NOLs. I think I asked Mike this question once. What was his motivation to just stop being a venture capitalist or private equity person? Because let’s face it. You can take that same amount of money and invest it somewhere else and make a hell of a lot of money. But here’s the difference. Now you make something to make that money and you’re building future. You’re not just investing cash in a company. There’s absolutely easier ways to make money. I mean, a hundred percent, but it’s not like for me, it just hasn’t been, this has by far been the most satisfying. Personally and professionally. I grew up in this industry and you’ve heard me make this joke that, you know, my brother said she would make fun and tell me my father hated me. And when my mom turned 90 at her birthday, she stood up and she goes, no, he didn’t hate you. He didn’t hate him. He didn’t like either one of you. He never invited either one of you idiots to his business. And they just stood there like, uh, you know, my mom raised her ugly head again, which was great because she’s protecting her oldest. But at the same time, now they’re like, she was right. You’re now they’re in their fifties and retired also. So I don’t know that I am the sharpest tool in the shed, but I wouldn’t trade what I do for the world.

[1:14:11] I say I’ve never worked a day in my life. Every friend I have is in this industry. Cause you learn early on that when you start doing this, you have nothing in common. It’s hotel California. You don’t get out. You, you fall in love with it. Yeah, exactly. Or you just, you know, become an alcoholic and you die. Anyhow, you know, my grandfather, my 95 year old grandfather, you know what we, everyone asks him, why, when are you going to retire? And now he, he’s kind of like, he’s not able to work or whatever, but he’s always like, I got a lot of friends who retired and they’re all dead. So there’s a lot of truth. AMT’s president always says this is the best time to be in manufacturing and he’s been in manufacturing his whole life. So like, he’s like, you can’t find a better time to be in manufacturing. Well, in the community that’s built around it. And it’s the first time people look at it without going, oh, you work in a machine shop. You smell like dirty coolant. You know, well. I’m damn proud of it. Thank you. We’re going to make a cologne. Oh, that’s a good one. Forever wealth. And it’s just going to smell like a guy who knows how to run a machine tool. Nick, you should do that. All the young kids, they they’re maxing out on the cologne. I’m working with this young kid and I’m trying to help him with his money. And he’s like buying all this cologne. Yes.

[1:15:27] Dude, it’s a holy thing. Why? Why else? Stop buying cologne. Yeah. But I have another on the youth. I guess I’m around youth. I mean, my son’s 13, so. But a good friend of my in-laws and his son is, I don’t know, maybe he’s like 20, 25 now or something. But he graduated from LSU a couple of years ago and got his degree in, I guess, like computer science or something. He got out of college. He’s the one out of all his high school friends, you know, that got the high paying job. And we got together with Leland Lawson in June. Lawson’s like, yes, Scott, he’s going to become an electrician. And we’re like, what? In January, he decided he looked at jobs and knew that an electrician, you were not going to get replaced by AI. And so he’s going to trade school. He’s already lined up with this electrician in D.C. And he’s in a great position because he’s got the people skills, he’s got this skills, and he’s got the trade school, trade skills. And he’s super excited about it. And I just sent them an article a couple of days ago, and I can’t remember what piece it was in, but it was literally about, like, electricians and AI. Like, again, going back to AI, but how they’re the ones that are going to be making the $200,000, $300,000 jobs and enjoying it and doing, you’re using your mind in your hands.

[1:16:42] Yeah, there’s a whole book called The Millionaire Next Door. And it’s the electricians, the plumbers, the, you know. The boring jobs. Yeah, the boring jobs. The hottest category for acquisitions right now across the country are HVAC companies. I mean, they’re trading at absolutely insane multiples. Like what? Like, give me an idea of what they go for. I mean, I’ve heard like $1,215 upwards of even $20. You’ve probably seen some. I mean, is that right? I was talking to a guy a few weeks ago that had sold his, he had probably, I don’t know, you know, 20 or 30 employees. So, I mean, good size, local. Huge. I don’t remember exactly. But it was $40, $50 million? Wow. I live in a town of 7,000. We have four HVAC companies that reside in our. And you can see, I mean, I’ve noticed over the past year, all the vans have gotten nicer and they’re all, and they’re all wrapped. Yeah, at the Tesla CyberTrucks event. Because I think it’s the young people are into it. They’re tricking it out like the old days, which is super cool. They’re sponsoring the big sports. Right. Like the local sports teams, like big time. Well, and MC, you know, you talked about earlier, and I mean, obviously we’re not all in HVAC, but I think it speaks to what you said earlier, though.

[1:17:59] Like it is getting cool again, though. Like it’s. Wait, was that a pun with HVAC? No, but I wish it was. That’s as good as the booty one. But I mean, it is getting cool again. It is very much so. Like we’ve seen that with our GenCNC, you know, sessions. That’s my wife. She thinks I’m so cool. Yeah, not. I’m sure she does. You did this to ruin it. She’s like, no, no, I don’t care. You are ruining the earth. Just keep the paychecks coming home. I don’t care what you do. I will say after Stephen Lamarck and I did the middle school presentation this year, and I bring in, you know, it’s just, it’s a very, I’m not, you know, basic PowerPoint, but I bring in like I did a whole thing on like on sports. I mean, everything that’s happening in sports and the whole digital side and aerospace and fashion, you know, and that kind of thing and music. But I had two moms, well, first the teachers go on and on and write us, you know, notes after. And again, the same thing, like I said earlier, so much engagement and all this. And EUS sent a bunch of like 3D printed pieces, which the kids like swarmed on and sent stuff as well. And they loved it. It was like within an hour, two moms had texted me of our son’s friend and said like this long, like our son didn’t even know this would be a career path. They think you have so much fun and are so excited to learn more of what you do.

[1:19:22] But it was really exciting. And then they also said, because in one of the, I think I was telling them about the parents about IMTS and just said, you know, there’s this whole student summit, which is a huge, Kat Ross and SMA do an amazing job on it. EMT is Kat Ross. We love Kat. She’s super nice. Super cool. Yeah. Talk about smart. Got Riz. Oh, Riz is, that’s dated. She’s got a, she slays it. Or is that right? That’s not, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not, trying to get the kids into the industry, right? Bet. But the, um, Period. But they, I was talking about how, when you come to IMTS, because we brought our son from, since I worked here, 2022, 2024, he’s coming again in 2026. And the executives on the show floor just love chatting with the kids. And it’s amazing. And this mom was like, it’s so, so refreshing to hear about an industry that, that engages with youth and wants to have real conversations. And I said, they do. I said, which I, I do think that, that is another like really like jewel of this industry. You know, the best part of my day today, you guys are all awesome. And that’s good bourbon. But, uh, Cooper, you know, so Jen and Dustin, they, they work for making chips. So four-year-old Cooper, he looks like he should be on the front of a cereal box. Cutest kid. He greeted me when I walked in. Isn’t he awesome? Gosh, I love him. I thought he was a bartender because he was behind the bar.

[1:20:39] I got like 20 minutes. I got to take him through the shop and, can I see it? I’m picking them up. I’m like, see that thing over there? That started here. And he sees the chips flying. And we’re like, when we say making chips, that’s what it is. And, oh, it’s just so cool. He’s just loved every minute of it. And my kids, I took them, they don’t come in that often, but every time I take them in, they just remember it for a year, two years later. Yeah, but they haven’t been to IMTS yet. I remember that. So I just want to bring up one point. So where MC and I live, we live in Virginia, Maryland, and everyone’s a lawyer. They all want to work on the Hill. We do not have the manufacturing around us. Our little community, our world in that little area, we don’t have what we have in the Midwest, what you guys have in the Midwest. So our youth has no understanding of what manufacturing really is. I mean, they have the shop class, and that’s just about fixing cars, but they don’t know that they can go make stuff. So how can the education system change that? And I mean, I think that’s a huge piece of it is because, you know, and I grew up in the country, and we still only had the shop. Or the aviation service or whatever. It was no aviation. There’s no nothing. There’s none of that stuff where we live. And that’s the hard part. You gotta pray to the parts fairy that they bring you the thing that you need.

[1:21:58] It just comes. It’s just so we don’t know it exists. But like, that’s the part where I feel like that manufacturing education could be, you know, somehow brought into the schools that don’t have, you know, the Midwest or even like Texas or, you know, that kind of… Well, that was a large part of our Gen CNC series. We featured both very young founders down to like, what? 17, 18-year-old kids starting shops. Bought his first machine at 15. You talking about Michael King? Yeah. He’s a stud. I love him. And Stone. Yeah, no, I was actually talking about Stone, but yeah, Michael King. Gosh, two of them. Two 16-year-old. Bought their first machine. Even the Servin brothers. Yeah, they were brought a machine into their mom’s garage without ever seeing a CNC machine in their life. They just watched it on YouTube and bought a CNC machine. Right. Like, I love that so much. Yeah. But the other type of program that we’re doing in that series is really cool schools paired with a shop that’s really partnered with them. So, you know, innovative machining programs or whatever. And so we’ve had several pairs of a really cool school that’s doing something really neat in a shop that’s like volunteering or partnering with them or whatever. And there are just so… There’s a lot of them, but we need to get the word out of how you can do it. What’s the playbook? What’s the blueprint? So other schools, other areas, you know, replicate it.

[1:23:20] They’re not dark, dirty, dangerous. They are smart, sustainable, and sexy. And they don’t drink gin because they don’t drink gin. Yes, they do. We were at the National Lab in February. Obviously, workforce came up and someone from a university who was on the panel, a university that has an excellent engineering program, talked about how math is a barrier for kids and youth to get into manufacturing because, you know, it’s still kind of stuck back. Engineering is a great field, excellent field to get into, but it doesn’t always fit all the kids these days. Bonnie and I know a couple guys that are doing amazing things with 3D pets and decibel design and all that, but or dive design and decibel that were industrial. They majored in industrial manufacturing. And they said, because, you know, if you have the creativity, but not necessarily the math, it’s a cool field. So our son, back to our son, has taken robotics. He got in middle school and he did digital technologies this year. And he wanted to do, it’s called IED, Introduction to Engineering Design. He can’t do it because math is not his strength. And he is so upset about it.

[1:24:38] And so I wrote this whole letter. I was going to go on a crusade. It lasted about like two weeks. And I was like, I can’t, I don’t know if I can retire. I’m with you. And I sent the letter to the principal and it’s not his decision because it’s a whole school system, but it is an issue. And I said, this is not, you know, you’re, why are we creating a barrier for these kids? Yeah, we shouldn’t gatekeep this. And also, you know, our son’s like, oh, I’m in the stupid math class now because I can’t do IED and all that. Hey, you can tell him I was always in the stupid math class. Well, I mean, I think the point, and sometimes kids don’t get the math and for two years later. Right. So why are they making the decision in seventh grade and eighth grade? Whereas like you could do it in ninth and 10th. And 50% of kids are mildly dyslexic. Yeah, ADHD. I didn’t know 50%. Yeah, it’s high. We go up at the same time, high five across the table. I’m kidding. Yeah. But it is, it’s discouraging. I mean, and he’s not going to be discouraged for what we do. This is supposed to be an industry for everyone. Right. I resonate with what you’re saying, because I had to like re-engineer college. It took forever because I just couldn’t pass calculus. I just don’t get it. Oh, I didn’t take calculus. And I had to get through calculus to get a bachelor’s of business. So I ended up getting a bachelor’s of arts because I was, it’s just stupid crap. Because you’re creative and you can do beautiful math. Exactly. And my guess is Claude’s super good at math and I’m still doing okay. So, you know what I mean? It’s, it is what it is.

[1:25:53] You know, that makes people in our company, engineers, when they’ll list out numbers. I’m going to, it’s 112, it’s like 27. They’re like, and I’m like, so that’s my, but you know what? I mean, it’s important. Writing, the three R’s, get the three R’s. But also like, let’s let people in to the industries that our country needs the most. Come on. I have a little bit. Hire for attitude, train for skill. There we go. Don’t exclude people. No, well, there’s so many different jobs in manufacturing technology now, just like we were saying. And how we started out with AI and automation and creativity is needed still so much. I’m a vet. And there’s a lot of vets that are actually starting to go back into the military. I know for a fact, those are 100% manufacturing people that could come in and assimilate immediately. But I don’t think we even, I don’t think we touch it as much as we should. So that’s a good segue. There’s a couple of things I want to say before we close, but what are we doing right after this? We’re having a party. The party’s a fundraiser. We were able to raise a bunch of money. We’re not sure exactly how much, but a couple of nice non-profits. We had to spend a bunch of money on bourbon. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, you guys got to pay me back. No, I don’t. Here’s my dollar. But a couple of nice non-profits are going to get a check from the manufacturing community.

[1:27:12] So thank you to everybody who sponsored this. How do we give to that though, Nick? Why don’t you announce that on this podcast? How do we give to that? So the two is the Oscar Mike Foundation, if you like our cool shirts. Oscar Mike means on the move in military jargon. And what they do is they keep military veterans on the move. So people come back from wherever they were at. Maybe they got disabilities or they lost limbs or whatever, they got wheelchair rugby, they can go skiing down a mountain, they can do biathlons, triathlons, things like that. And so they just keep military veterans on the move and then they fund it through an apparel company. So like if you see the dog shirt that Hill does, the shirts that we make, it’s just awesome. And the shirt we’re giving away tonight, we got a real cool shirt. It’s got this little, this is the front of the shirt, metal working nation. The second thing is our favorite word, the Manufacturing Pathways Consortium. Oh, that works. Consortium. Consortium. Well, you guys can do it. They’re just helping kids find a pathway into manufacturing. And we’re super excited to go support their event that they have tomorrow night. Yeah, so it’s really fun. So we get to have fun, drink bourbon, hang out with people we love and then do a great thing with it. Give away a bunch of money. Yeah. So my husband is a snowboard instructor for people with disabilities. Oh, nice. And adaptive.

[1:28:32] So it fits right in with what you’re doing. I didn’t know that, but that is the coolest thing ever. And he works with the aging community. So he’s bookended. So the founder of Oscar Mike is here tonight. Oh, yes. You got to meet him. I’ll meet him, yeah. He’s the best guy. Okay, and then the last thing we got to talk about. So, you know, I know starting a business sucks, especially if it’s in manufacturing. There’s a lot of easier ways to make money. Like we talked about, it’s, the possibilities are limitless. And so you think there’s like some mix of hard work and good luck or for me, like divine providence of just somehow things work out for you. And someone’s going to win a machine tool this year. That’s cool. And thanks to DN Solutions and Kenna Metal. So Nick, what if we sat down and came up with, these people are going to get a machine with nothing on it. Oh, there’s stuff coming. Maybe you should provide it. Okay, I would. I’ll tell you what, Mike, you want to give work holding on that machine? Sure. I don’t think it’s a problem. It’s just a matter of figuring out what we want. Let’s talk about it. I think if we give somebody a machine that they can take out of a box and use it, they’re going to be encouraged to do it again. But next time I’m going to pay for one. When Mike first started, Mike called me on the phone after Paul told Mike to call me and I flew to Tulsa and I gave Mike a bunch of stuff in his shop. I don’t know what I ever did with it. It’s probably still there, which is fine with me because to be honest with you, see how many calls I get to Paul, Nick or Mike tell people, hey, call this guy.

[1:29:59] You know what? You know, Mike called me when he bought his first 5x. Hey, I really… And I was like, he called me and he was like, I’m really sorry. My guy’s more… I was like, what are you upset about? He’s bought work holding, right? That’s all I care about. Yeah, sure. And I, you know… Exactly. I don’t care whose product you buy. Just buy it. I love how you’re thinking. And then another guy, Mike Martin, he’s like, I’ll put a Tronion on there. Another great guy, man. Aren’t they the best people ever? You know what? Some of the coolest, nicest individual people. Thankfully, they hide it well because people take advantage of that. It’s why I’m not nice to them. He’s like, let’s get a 4th X’s on them. So we just have so many people in the manufacturing community who want to bless the next young shop owner. And with that, cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. See you at IMTF. Sorry, we’re cheering with an empty glass. Yeah, we’ll see you at IMTF.