Future-Proof Your Manufacturing Strategy (ft. The Manufacturing Millenial)

What’s happening behind the scenes in modern manufacturing? How are robotics, cobots, and AI transforming operations—and how can companies attract and reskill the next generation of talent?

In this episode, we sit down with Jake Hall, the Manufacturing Millennial, to uncover practical strategies for reskilling employees, balancing new technology with real-world challenges, and attracting the next generation of talent. Plus, get insights on emerging trends, sustainability initiatives, and how to use social media to showcase your manufacturing brand.

Packed with actionable takeaways, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to modernize and future-proof their operations!

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https://www.secretlifeofinventory.com/

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobrhall/
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0:00 - Teaser
0:24 - Intro
1:39 - How did you get into the world of manufacturing and automation?
2:53 - What kinds of automation systems did you help implement?
6:37 - How does your approach shift when dealing with large vs. smaller businesses?
9:03 - How do you encourage employees to reskill?
12:25 - What types of technology did you work with?
14:14 - Was there one system or tool that really surprised you?
18:15 - Are robots taking jobs humans don't want to do?
21:41 - What's the difference between robots and cobots?
25:22 - What's an example of a cobot?
29:21 - How do you get started with robots and cobots?
31:00 - What technology has stood the test of time?
35:49 - How have customers' needs changed?
39:07 - What content from the Manufacturing Millennial resonates the most with people?
41:57 - What opportunities have you received as the Manufacturing Millennial?
43:49 - What advice do you have for manufacturers looking to leverage social media?
46:11 - What types of content do you think perform best?
48:14 - How did you get involved with helping students?
54:33 - Can you share more about your Robot Dogs?
56:21 - What's the coolest automation you've done or seen?
57:39 - What do you enjoy about conferences?
59:32 - What emerging trends are standing out the most right now?
1:01:47 - What sustainability initiatives are you seeing?
1:04:21 - What does the future of manufacturing look like?
1:06:52 - How would you attract Millennials and Gen Z into manufacturing?
1:09:05 - Which social media platforms work best?
1:10:46 - What mistakes do companies make with their social presence?
1:11:09 - What company is doing it right?
1:12:17 - To start, where should companies modernize?
1:13:04 - What's one thing you want every manufacturer to remember?
1:13:38 - Outro

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:39 How did you get into the world of manufacturing and automation?
• 2:53 What kinds of automation systems did you help implement?
• 6:37 How does your approach shift when dealing with large vs. smaller businesses?
• 9:03 How do you encourage employees to reskill?
• 12:25 What types of technology did you work with?
• 14:14 Was there one system or tool that really surprised you?
• 18:15 Are robots taking jobs that humans don't want to do?
• 23:41 What's the difference between robots and cobots?
• 25:22 What's an example of a cobot?
• 29:21 How do you get started with robots and cobots?
• 31:00 What technology has stood the test of time?
• 35:49 How have customers' needs changed?
• 39:07 What content from the Manufacturing Millennial resonates the most with people?
• 41:57 What opportunities have you received as the Manufacturing Millennial?
• 43:49 What advice do you have for manufacturers looking to leverage social media?
• 46:11 What types of content do you think perform best?
• 48:41 How did you get involved with helping students?
• 54:33 Can you share more about your Robot Dogs?
• 56:21 What's the coolest automation you've done or seen?
• 57:39 What do you enjoy about conferences?
• 59:32 What emerging trends are standing out the most right now?
• 1:01:47 What sustainability initiatives are you seeing?
• 1:04:21 What does the future of manufacturing look like?
• 1:06:52 How would you attract Millennials and Gen Z into manufacturing?
• 1:09:05 Which social media platforms work best?
• 1:10:46 What mistakes do companies make with their social presence?
• 1:11:09 What company is doing it right?
• 1:12:17 To start, where should companies modernize?
• 1:13:04 What's one thing you want every manufacturer to remember?
• 1:13:38 Outro

Transcript

0:00

You have the manufacturing space that's being affected by robotics, you have the construction space that's being affected by robotics. Then you can go into the agriculture space. Now you can take a 100 watt laser and shoot that weed and kill the weed, robots and lasers in farming. In the future. Yeah, exactly. Hello everybody I'm Jared. Hi, I'm Melinda, and welcome back to The Secret Life of Inventory. This is a show where we dive deep into the unseen world of inventory management, and we uncover the hidden mysteries that help businesses like you optimize their workflow and succeed. Today's guest is one of the most recognized voices in modernizing manufacturing. Let's welcome Jake Hall, who's better known as the Manufacturing Millennial with 20 years of experience working with both Fortune 100 companies and small manufacturers. Jake has built an audience of over 100,000 professionals and has gained more than 150 million views by showing how modern factories actually run. From factory floors to high school robotics programs, Jake has helped businesses boost their operational efficiencies and implement automation. His expertise spans between hands on manufacturing roles and more strategic brand planning and keynote speaking, so he is the perfect blend between technical knowledge and storytelling, which helps bridge the gaps between industries and generations. So if you're curious about automation and how you can level up your workforce strategy, this episode is for you. Jake, thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for. Thanks for having me. What a what a intro so far. That was. Awesome. That's awesome. It's great to be here. Great to be here in the city of Toronto. Uh, back in Canada. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So, Jake, can you take us back to where it started? How did you get into the world of manufacturing and automation? Yeah, I would say really for manufacturing, it took off for me when I was a sophomore in high school. I started off as a shop boy, or I guess you could say broom kid for a manufacturing facility. You know, it was one of those things. I was looking for a summer job, and my my father had some friends that were in the industry and said, hey, put my son to work. And and for me, it was it was a great experience for me because growing up I always enjoyed Lego. I enjoyed erector sets. I enjoyed, you know, taking the old Lego Mindstorms sets and programming them, making moving them around as a robot on a playing mat. And I was involved in the the high school robotics program, us first, and we'll cover a lot more of that later on. But for me, it was one of those things in high school being able to see how machines were beginning to be built, how custom automation getting really my first experience seeing an industrial robot on the floor, moving parts around it was it was really exciting for me. And having that experience in high school was was awesome. And from there, it was one of those things where the next step for me was. Then after high school, I went to college. I got a mechanical engineering degree and a manufacturing engineering degree from Grand Valley State University. And, um, you know, from there it was really just continuing to go into workforce. So that's really how things kicked off for me. Awesome. So I mean, you've worked with like huge big companies as well as like smaller ones. So if you can kind of walk us through maybe like a project that you worked on with one of these larger companies, like what kind of automation system you helped them implement and like kind of what the challenge it helped to kind of solve. Yeah. You know, I'm gonna I'll share one unique that's towards, uh, really this this great combination of automation and human labor. So in Michigan, there is a ten cent demand deposit on recycling pop cans and bottles. So in Michigan, I mean, millions and millions and millions of, um, cans recycled that are brought to either a myer or a Walmart convenience store. They're put in there and then they come back in basically these automotive tote bins. And then they brought to a facility, then be recycled and processed. Um, there's a there's a company in Michigan called uh Shuppan Recycling, and they had a massive labor shortage issue where they had a hard time keeping a person on the floor, on the processing floor for more than a couple weeks at a time. Right? Imagine you're you're in on a factory floor and you are at 105, I guess, in Fahrenheit here. Yeah. The conversion, you know. 100. You convert that, you know, down below into Celsius, you know, a hundred degrees inside this facility. It's smelly. It's sticky. You're working with, you know, week, weeks old, spilt beer. It's like, you know, you remember going to college and then you had to wake. Up next. Morning and just didn't smell good. Yeah. Imagine this. But just 24 over seven. So the conditions really were not great for workers. So the company said, okay, how can we really take the these manual processes and leverage automation where we're not completely removing the worker from the process? We're just taking that really dark, dirty, dangerous, smelly, disgusting point out of it. So we helped him go in there and and take a lot of these processes that were really done, done by, um, human operators taking off the bin that was being shipped in the container and then folding down and breaking the bend, eventually be pushed in the washer. All that stuff was at one point in time manual and it had a big turnover rate. So for us, we went in there and we found out how we could implement five, six large, um, gosh, 200 kilogram payload robots, some really big industrial robots the size of this room. You know, they. Would be in all this room. If all the axes were pointing straight up. And from there it was. It was great to understand why they're not just automating because they want more profitability. They want more throughput. They realize that the human element in the manufacturing has to be something that they look at. If they want to have people who are staying at the company consistently. Mhm. Um, they got to make and remove those dirty tasks. And, and a lot of times when we look at why we automate, it's not just about the ROI, it's about the people as well. Right. A lot of times don't look at what the cost could be for training people. How often, how, how much do companies spend year over year on recruiting on on the onboarding processes, on the retraining. You know, it's one of those things where I looked at when you when you look at the the average first year worker, 27% of their cost is spent into training before, you know, within the first year. So it's imagine now if you have, you know, that turnover every three months on some of these really, you know, not enjoyable jobs in manufacturing. Um, you know, that's why we turn to automation. So, you know, that was just a fun one for me where it's one of those things. Oftentimes we hear about automation. It's just the big automotive lines. No, this is just a small family owned recycler that's going out there and taking what was a very dark, dirty, dull, dangerous, you know, boring task, right. And automating it. And now you have workers there that are staying there because they're doing the automation. They're learning how to program robots. Now. They're learning about being leveraged up in in their skills, talent while taking that manual task out of it. Right. So when you're working with these bigger companies, is there anything you shift when you're actually supporting the smaller companies is something that stays the same? Or do you kind of is your approach kind of the same? You know, it's. It's the same and different. The one thing that really separates small to medium sized businesses, to large businesses is a lot of times the hats that people wear. Right, right. When you look at the United States, um, 98% of businesses are classified as a small to medium sized business, which is like under 500 employees. In fact, like 78% of them are considered a small business, which is under 50. Um, when you look at a lot of these small and medium sized businesses, when companies want to go out there and they want to leverage automation, it's not like they have an entire support team that's out there like the larger companies have when they have an entire digital transformation team of 30 to 40 professionals. Yeah. You go out there and say, okay, let's look at the IT side of things. Let's look at the OT. Let's figure out what what machines we have that are connected right now to a data silo, that we can then begin to pull information out of to understand what's happening on the factory floor. A lot of times these small businesses don't have those resources. They're they're running on equipment that's 30, 40, 50 years old. And so when you're going out there and you're talking with these manufacturers, you need to understand that for them. When when you're going when they're going out there and they want to implement new automation, new technology, new digital solutions, it's it's directly pulling them from their day to day task where no longer when that person wants to, you know, leverage digital information, they will say, okay, we want to begin to pull more data from this manufacturing process or on the, on the the shipping floor or in a logistics company. You know, you're pulling that the labor directly away. So when you're working with these companies, you understand that they're going to move out of sometimes a slower pace, sometimes a faster pace. But you need to have a much better justification for why they should be moving and leveraging this technology, because they don't have the time, like a lot of other companies do, to have a specific team and task to just implement new technology. Okay, well, that makes. Sense. Especially from the risk perspective, right? You know, when companies are out there, they can throw $1 million at a project for some of these larger companies. Yeah. If it doesn't work, they learn from it. Yeah. You know. Million dollar lesson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for a lot of big companies, that's just one of those things, you know. Yeah. The early adopters will get the benefit, but it's a lot higher cost. Yeah. Um, versus, you know, the smaller companies, they can't be making those mistakes. Yeah. They're bankrupt. They pulled over this really quickly. So something you actually touched on earlier as you were talking about, you know, a reskilling, right. So and you talk about it a lot on your channel. Every day there's some new AI model or some new, you know, robotics coming out. So like, how do you, you know, how would you encourage them to keep reskilling? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I think that really just dives into, um, why I started this manufacturing millennial channel. You know, so, so kind of diving into I come from the industry from 20 years of experience. When the pandemic happened, we were all told to work from home. So we, we, we had to go out. And me being in business development at the time, I had to find a new way to communicate to my customers, my audience, the engineers that I'm talking with. So I turned to social media as a way to begin communicating what technologies transform the industry. So I had to learn a lot of new tasks. I learned how. How do I edit video? Shoot video? Man you go. You go back to some of your early videos that are on LinkedIn and YouTube and you. One of them is literally a set up where I have a broom pole with a piece of cardboard that I duct tape out to make a camera stand. And, and I had a, I had a bunch of old, um, lights that were in a old stand up lighting that were all tilted, that made to be my spotlights and stuff like that. And it was one of those things you were learning how to do things. And, and so for me, with what I want to do for the manufacturing millennials, I want to drive awareness to manufacturers on why we should be adopting new technology in the industry. Um, why we should be getting this next generation excited about working in manufacturing and a lot of the ways and how we're going to do that is we need to change the perception of what the manufacturing industry has to offer, right? And so as we move away from this dark, dirty, dull, dangerous industry into an industry that has new technologies. The the human workforce needs to follow that trend. So while a lot of manufacturers and I think this goes back, this is a great segue from from our conversation. What do you see different from small and medium sized businesses to large businesses? A lot of times it's the people. So these smaller businesses, they've been doing it the same way for 30 or 40 years. If they want to implement a new automation solution on their part, they want to implement a new robot. They need to learn how to lend leverage that robot. So that's why it's so important to work with companies on why we need to continue to reskill these, this next generation. While you do have an upcoming generation that's excited about, um, the technology you have in industry that's been you have a generation of, of of baby boomers and Gen Xers who've been in the industry already for 20, 25 years, who've been doing it a certain way, and all of a sudden you throw a new PLC at them. You throw a collaborative robot or an industrial robot. You throw a vision system on the on the floor. That's automatically doing some automated inspection and some quality inspection. It can be very intimidating. Yeah. To, you know, a new workforce. So the whole goal is we need to help educate why companies need to not only invest in technology, but they need to invest in their existing workforce to retrain them to understand these technologies. And the great part about it is there's so many amazing resources that are out there through associations that are put on trade shows. Um, in the US, we have the manufacturing extension partnerships. We have, uh, manufacturing organizations with each individual state that then create grants and information, then to give to manufacturers for constant retraining and digital adoption of technology. All of their resources. Yeah. So going back to your work experience, you must have seen a lot evolve in the 20 years you've been working there. So can you tell us more about the different types of technologies that you've worked with? The tech is still a lot the same from what it was ten, 15, 20 years ago. But the ease of implementation, the cost of robotics is significantly cut. And that's why you're seeing more and more companies adopting this automation. That's why more and more companies are picking up collaborative robots, because the ease of integration, the ease of use, the cost of implementation beforehand. If you want to do an end of line pallet project, you would have had to spend a quarter of$1 million to do it. Now you can go out there and you can buy a 20kg payload, 25 kg payload, end of line cobalt pallet taser that already has its own unique software with its own, uh, vertical stacking for pallet boxes. And you can walk out the door for $100,000 on your own. That's crazy. I know that money was a huge factor and that it's now accessible, which is crazy. Yeah, that's the whole part, right? It goes back to, you know, another Canadian company mention here. Um, they talk about democratizing automation, right. If we can make it so automation can be easily accessible to the small to medium sized business, just like the large manufacturers. Yeah. You're going to see a lot better adoption. Yeah. I think just saying robot to a small or medium sized businesses before would be like, come on, I'm not made of money. Like, there's. Got to be, you know. Just when you look at for for a lot of them, it would be very intimidating to pick up a robot. You know, you talk about when you don't have what, when, when these older generations have been working in the industry doing the same exact thing for the last 30 or 40 years. Mhm. It's it's intimidating to. Go out there. And say, okay, I'm going to give you this 30, 40,$50,000 robot. Do something with it. I don't know how to, you know, but but this technology these days is, is. Is really. What's making it exciting. That's awesome. Was there one system or tool that really surprised you? Um, you know, I would say the one thing that really blows my mind these days is, um, is 3D bin picking. 3D bin picking. So, so, um, in the automotive space, a lot of times you have these four foot by four foot. Sorry. Uh, 1.3m. Yeah. Yeah. The commercial meter sized automotive bins that have a lot of times casted parts or machine parts that go in there, an operator that needs to take that part, put it into a machine for, for a post-processing operation. So a lot of times these parts are casted or forged. They come from that manufacturer. Then they go into an area that has to then do subtractive manufacturing or finishing or something like that. You have a very manual task, right? You're working in here. You're picking up very heavy components, reaching down, bending over into a bend, grabbing them and doing that eight hours a day. Yeah, it's not fun. So now all of a sudden, we can go out there and we can leverage these robotics to go out there and be able to pick a component on its own. And and for a very low justification as well. You know, the one thing that we always hear about, um, the stories out there is robots take jobs, robots takes jobs, automation takes jobs. And, you know, you can go back to the 70s and 80s when a lot of manufacturing left the the North American region went over to, to, um, China and and around the APAC area. But now all of a sudden, what we're seeing in the 2020s is that automation is not replacing workers. It's enabling workers and companies to be more competitive in the global economy. Right. I'll give you an example of just another story that we have is, um, in the fall, every year in October, there's an event that we and I'll talk more about the organisation later on. Um, but there's an event called Discover Manufacturing. We'll bring in, um, thousands of high school students to meet with manufacturers to learn what's happening on the floor. When I was out there, I was touring a, uh, a machining company, a machine company that was making a bunch of different components for, uh, space for, um, automotive companies, for the agriculture business. They were pretty diversified. Um, but when I was talking with one of the owners there, he told me a story on how their product that they've been making for the last 20 years, went out to bid and a company overseas in China got it at a lower price. So they were saying, hey, in six months we're going to be moving the product that you've been making for us for the last 20 years overseas. And so, you know, he he was an old guy. He's been doing this for 30 or 40 years. He says, I don't know what to do. His son, who was on one of the first robotics teams, said, hey, dad, you should look at doing robot machine tending. So you go out there, you take out, you take a robot, you plug it in the side of the CNC machine, it will open the door, close the door, it will grab the spare parts, load them into the machine. It does the operation, pulls it out and then puts it in there. They were able to go out and buy four. I think 3 or 4 robots load them into these areas to do automated machine tending and keep that business. Oh, wow. So so when you look at it, the robots didn't take jobs. Robots enabled that company to stay in business. That was a significant part of their company. By staying globally competitive. By staying competitive in a global economy. So so so that not only did the robots then. Keep the business local, they were able to then keep all of the workers there employed and then actually bring on additional workers to help train and program the robots along with them, teaching the employees who were already there, sending them to robot training to then get that upskilling that job. Yeah. Quite the opposite though. Yeah. Creating jobs. Yeah. So? So at the end of the day, those robots saved that, you know, business that's been in the area for 30 or 40 years that's employed 20 to 25, you know, employees. They kept in business because that robots allowed that company to do so. And a global. Economy. It doesn't take jobs. In these jobs. Yeah. So you mentioned like that that one especially was a strenuous job, right. Picking up those pieces. The other job as you mentioned, was the the labeling thing. And no one wants that job. So do you find that companies are getting robotics to do the things that people either can't do often or like a lot. They don't. Want to do. Or they don't want to do it. Yeah. So is that the area that kind of focusing most of the attention on. Yeah. You know. Robotics I think of the day robotics is is the enabler for many different solutions. You know, one of the biggest things that I'm not super knowledgeable, I'm aware of is the construction space as well. So right now there's about 500,000, 600,000 open jobs in manufacturing in the United States. There's like 300,000 400,000 open jobs in the construction space. So one of those things, right. This next generation of millennials and Gen Zs doesn't want to go outside, work out, you know, work outside all day. So so how do manufacturing how do these companies who still need to build homes, still need to build the sky rises? You know that as I look out the window here and you have 60, you know, story tall buildings that are making this stuff, well, then there's companies out there that are, you know, enabling robotics to be able to go out there and build these construction things. So you have dusty, which is an autonomous robot that can travel around on the floor and mark and paint down where all the different plumbing and electrical wiring needs to go. So before that was a manual task that would have to look at the dimensions out there. They would go out there with with tape and measure in a, in a in a wheel stick. And they would mark all these things with paint. Now you can have a robot there that goes out there and does that all autonomously. That's great on its own. You have another company I think it's rich robotics that goes out there. And when you have these massive skyscrapers, you have the initial concrete foundation, right? That's getting built up. And then you have to then put in all of the metal guarding that will eventually hold the siding, the windows and all that stuff. A lot of that process is done manually, where you're going to have a worker who's leaning over the side of this 40 storey building. With. A drill in their hand, drilling into this concrete to then put bolts in and then hang the metal brackets that will put that up there. Now we can have robots that will go out there and they're going to hold everything. They're going to drill it off for you, and now you have a human worker that's safely standing behind. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know, so it's one of those things where you have the manufacturing space that's being affected by robotics. You have the construction space that's being affected by robotics. Then you can go into the agriculture space. So now all of a sudden you have robotics out there where you have autonomous robots that are driving down a, um, an agricultural field, and they're using AI machine vision to be able to detect what's between a plant that you're growing versus a weed. And then if you see. Weed now, you can take a 100 watt laser and shoot that weed. Control the weed, robots and lasers in farming in the future. Here's the thing, though. Now all of a sudden you're not using the you're not using pesticides. You're not using chemicals that are going on the plant. On the self. To kill those things. Yeah. Lasers for the win. Yeah, exactly. It goes out there is. Is now you have all these technologies that are merging together due to some really cool technology. Yeah I've never heard of that one. That was. That's very old. It's very sci fi. Yeah. It's. It's happening all over the place. So you have robots on there that are picking strawberries. You know, about going through areas. It's it's really incredible when you see all these technologies, from robotics to machine vision to AI. Um, you know, we talk more about the digital space in a minute. All working together. You can see some really cool solutions to the technology that are coming out. Yeah. So you mentioned you worked with more traditional robots and then the newer, more collaborative ones, which I recently learned are called robot. So what's the difference between the two? Yeah. Yeah. So so the the industrial robot is one of the original robots that came out in the 1960s, 70s. The automotive space was this early adoption. Um, in the I think early 2000, the collaborative robot market came out with really two big leaders. There was, um, there was Rethink Robotics here in the United States, and then there was Universal Robots that was coming out of Denmark. And the whole idea of the collaborative robot space was being able to create a robot that could work safely along side of a human. So you didn't have to have all this additional guarding that was around the robot, right? So if you didn't have to put in the Guardian, you could have a worker to work alongside the robot. It was safer. Um, it meant a lot of times companies could then easily adopt robotics. You know, going back to that conversation earlier, if you have companies reduce the risk of adoption, they're more likely going to adopt. Um, so, so collaborative robots took off really in a couple of unique areas. One was the original focus on making work environments safer. Um, and we found out that it kind of worked that way, uh, because you'd still have to do a risk assessment. Right? You couldn't take a collaborative robot that had a bunch of force torque sensors to basically say, hey, if I if I push them against the robot, that robot would stop, right? Versus the industrial robot, I would just plow you over. Um, so so that robot had a bunch of additional safety sensors in there to make it. So if it hit a person, it would stop and it wouldn't hurt them. Yeah, but seems important. Yeah, exactly. But here's the thing though. If you were a if you were taking if you were a work for a company called BIC and BIC razors, and you had a robot that was going out there and picking up a bunch of razor blades and swinging them around, you know, just because the robot saved doesn't mean the application that the robot's working in is safe. So it's one of those things that really wasn't a necessary, safe environment. What what collaborative robots really took off was, I would say, the ease of programming. And really what we saw coming from collaborative robots was there wasn't an old edition, wasn't really the old traditional 40 buttons on a black and white screen that, you know, had pixelated programming interface. It was like an iPad. So so you can go out there and you could do drag and drop programming code. Wow. Instead of, you know, the old structured text to be able to set up programming. So all of a sudden, you have a generation of us like millennials that are coming up there and say, hey, we played with we played with iPads. You know, growing up, we understand some basic programming. Um, all of a sudden, when we didn't have to send an engineer to a robotics, you know, training course for three weeks, four weeks to get certified, to learn how to do it, I could watch a YouTube video and learn how to program a robot. That's why collaborative robots took off so much. Because the ease of programming, ease of adoption, and they also really focused on, um, really this, this unified workspace of I'm going to have a collaborative robot, but I'm going to make sure it's going to work with the gripper that's going to pick up the part. I want to make sure it's going to work with the machine vision system that will identify where that part is, and then if I see it on an area, I know how to go and pick it right away. So so it really began to take off, because at the end of the day, they made an ecosystem that was really easy for all these different components from different manufacturers, from different companies to be able to come in and work together. And then it was really easy to adopt. And that's why we saw the collaborative robot space take off, take off. That's probably why in the last 20 years, we've seen globally probably a quarter of a million collaborative robots sold. Can you give us an example of, like, a collaborative robot? Actually? I'm kind of curious, like how would that work? Like on my mind, it's like I got, am I in a mech suit or something like that? You know what I mean? So a collaborative robot is a six. A lot of cases, it's a six axis arm, just like industrial robots. So you have you have a robot that's can move on the base. It's going to have, you know, kind of all the same motion of just your typical arm, you know, from, from your, from, I guess you could say your waist that turns and then you have your shoulder which would be J2, J3 here, J4, you know, J5 and then J6. So basically joints six, six, six joints of motion where you would see collaborative robots is really, I would say three main cases. One is that end of line palatine thing that we talked about, okay, I can go out there instead and I can take I can take a robot wheeled up right to where a box would be coming down a conveyor or out of a the machine, grab them and then stack them onto a pallet and build that pallet up where I don't have to have an operator. Then standing there all the time picking up, you know, 20kg payload, you know, boxes and then stacking them all day, eight hours a day. That's going to be exhausting, especially if you're in a let's say you're in a, a food production facility and you're doing that inside of a freezer or a refrigerator, right. You know, where right now it sounds nice, but if you're if you're hypothermia, you know, but if you're working in a, an area where it's three degrees, you know, Fahrenheit, I don't know, it was zero degrees Celsius, you know, eight hours a day. Not as fun. So so we can see robots begin to do that stuff in the pallet space. Another example was the machine tending, going out there and being able to go out and grab components off of a tray, load them into a machine to then have subtractive manufacturing to make a finished part. Mhm. Humans don't have to do that anymore. Another great example is um, is welding and probably one of the biggest spaces over single collaborate. A lot of collaborative robots take office right now in the United States, but there's about 550,000 welders working in manufacturing. The average age of those welders is 53 or 50 or 53 or 54 years old. Wow. Like very old. In fact, when you look at a majority of like over 40% of the welders in America working in manufacturing are going to be in the next ten years, like it's a it's a significant issue that's being used in manufacturing. If I can go out there and I can take a robot and do a lot of these tasks where I can lay down a bead, I could weld a couple of components together. Um, you know, we can go out there and we can take a lot of these dirty dark tacks that welding has and allow manufacturers to still make these components and all these components together, where you don't have the skills. That once was right. We were in high school. We had shop class where every kid in high school back in the, you know, 1980s 90s and 2000 was learning how to make stuff when they were in high school still. They took all those classes out. So now all of a sudden, you have a lot of these kids that don't have the common knowledge of how to do all these things, right. And so that's one of those things robotics is coming in. It's finding a gap. It's finding a need in the workforce. And now it's doing a lot of welding. And it's really supporting actually the small to medium sized businesses. Because what what a collaborative robot welder does really well compared to an industrial one is a lot of times industrial robot welding has been around for 50 or 60 years, but it's been the automotive space where you're making hundreds of thousands of the same part year over year over year, right? Versus, hey, you work for a small, um, marine manufacturer that's making props that go on boats. You may be making a couple hundred or 1000, right? You don't you you can't afford to go out and buy a massive industrial automation system that's going to cost millions of dollars. You're never going to get to get a cost justification for it. But if you can go out there and you can buy a a collaborative robot welding solution that could weld this part. This part. This part so you could weld five, ten, 15, 20 different parts. Then all of a sudden, your ROI, your justification is a lot closer because it's so much more dynamic and flexible with what we can manufacture. So if you're to give advice to smaller manufacturers, you want to get started with robots or robots. What would you tell them? Well, the first thing I would say is go to one would be go to in-person events, go to trade shows. Uh, trade shows offer so much when it comes to seeing the technology in person, talking to subject matter experts to learn what solutions you would recommend for that. And you know, so for in the United States, um, and here in Canada, they have Canada has a CMM, CM, uh, Canadian manufacturing, I think a CMS. Don't quote me to it. We'll try. I'll try to get the information. Yeah. And the. Link down below in the description. And. The conferences. Yeah. But you know, in the United States we have fab tech IMT s automate, um, pack expo mode promo. A lot of these really good trade shows that are specific to industries where people can come in, see applications in person, can bring their products to the show and say, hey, I need these welded, I need this box this way. What type of equipment, what machines do you have? And then you could talk to 20 or 30 different companies who are all offering those type of solutions at once, and really get a better understanding of how things are being made, how things are being produced, what technology is available. There really is a great place to be. You know, the first. Place I would start, the second place I would start is spend some time on YouTube. It is. It's incredible what resources are available on YouTube these days to be able to go out there and learn how to either program robots on your own, or if you go out there and you say, hey, I have this, this product, how do I weld it? How do I assemble it? How do I pick and place to put it together? Whatever you're doing with the product, um, the resources out there are really incredible. You know, some people couple my recommendations right. Away to do. That. Awesome. So, I mean, you said that you've been in the industry obviously for a couple of decades. What technology is kind of still around? What has stood the test of time and what like what new things and exciting things have come up in that time? Yeah. I mean, I would say robots, you know, have by far, you know, stood the test of time. You know, the one thing that I would say that we're seeing stand the test of time, but at the same time is changing is how we're digitally adopting technology and manufacturing. So for a long time, manufacturers on the floor, they would create a piece of custom automation machinery, and they would have a PLC, a programmable logic controller, which would basically be its code on how we make this machine run. Um, a lot of for, for decades, all these individual machines were siloed where basically we would never know what's actually happening to that machine unless we walked up to that machine, talk to the operator and said, hey, how many parts have you run this hour so far? Have you had any scrap? Have you had any years? Um, it's still making the components, but what we're seeing changing through that time is more and more companies are wanting better digital information about what's happening on the floor, right? Right. Because if manufacturers can't act now and they're trying to act from something that happened two weeks ago, they're never going to be successful. They're never going to be drive productivity moving forward into a competitive base. So so we're seeing more companies taking the existing assets that still exist on the manufacturing floor from 30 or 40 years ago, and they're driving digital solutions for us. So basically they're taking the the the individual equipment on the floor that's siloed bringing up to an OTT network, combining that, working with an IT network solution. And all of a sudden I have real time visibility on all the equipment that's happening on the manufacturing floor. And there's a bunch of different softwares that will plug into that, from MMS to to SCADA to ERP. But what's really exciting about that is we can drive better productivity out of existing infrastructure that's on the floor without having to invest millions of dollars in new physical assets. And I think that's that's the biggest thing that I always tell manufacturers to say, hey, we want to grow. We want to be more. We want to do better. I say, what can you do with what you have now? But digitizing it, right. What what manual processes are you using in Excel that should not be being done in Excel? I'm glad that you said that. Yeah. We talk about how bad Excel is every time because of course we are. You know, we have a manufacturing software. So yeah, we and a lot of our customers are coming from Excel. Like that's just the way it is, right? Exactly. Do you ever watch Scooby-Doo when you were growing up? And, you know, they they capture the villain and they pull off the mask. And so the meme or the comic is, um, when I talk to manufacturers and say, hey, what manufacturing software do they have? I say, oh, we have manufacturing software. And I try a little bit more. What is your manufacturing software? And I say, I pull up the hood, I take off the mask. There's. Wow. That's now manufacturing. Soccer. You know. And so trying to get these companies to understand that while Excel got you somewhere. It's not the tool. Yeah. That you need to be using to drive productivity on the floor. It's not it's not a a source a software that's scalable. It's not a software that allows you as, as a company to, to, um, to really have the interaction with the human that needs to happen on the floor. Right. If I'm going out there, I want to be able to understand why is my first shift 27% more productive than my second shift? Why are these workers here better trained on running this equipment than these workers over here? How can I better understand the data that's being presented in front of me to be more productive? And I think at the end of the day, that's where we're seeing more and more companies. And that's what I was doing. Um, after I, after I left my job at industrial control, working for the automation distributor. I went to go work for a systems integrator for for three years. And so that's what we really helped companies on, was modernizing existing infrastructure on the floor, digitizing their their manufacturing processes, helping roll out manufacturing software that's really designed to one be a very good ROI when it comes to already leveraging existing assets, but making them smarter, being able to take data and do something with the data. I think that's the that's the other biggest struggle is a lot of times manufacturers say, well, I have all the data I want. I just don't know what to do with it. You know, being able to go out there and get data and create actionable data and. Leverage. That data is really what we're seeing, you know, manufacturers doing. So what's sitting the test of time the the equipment. But what's changing. Digitizing those processes to make it so companies can be a lot more productive on the floor. What about customers needs. Like we talked a lot about like how the industry itself has changed. What about customers have. Have their needs been changing over the course of the last couple decades? Yeah. You know, this is a perfect segue from from that conversation on digitizing, right? When we come out of the pandemic in 2020, the supply chain was a mess, right? Yeah, we did it to say nice. It was a mess. We didn't know where things were being manufactured. At the end of the day, we thought they were being manufactured here, but that was actually a part that was being then sourced from a thousand miles away. Right. You know, um, that was being over here that had to come here. It was it was the nightmare. So what we're seeing now, coming from a lot of companies is more companies want to have, um, better visibility on the entire supply chain that's coming in there. And that's why we're digitizing so many stuff. Right? Because we're going out there and we are a tier one automotive company. It's not that we just want to know where the tier two components are coming from. We want to know where they getting their components from. Because all of a sudden if you go out there we have a supply issue a there is the stories of, you know, how there was like 20,000 cars at a GM lot that couldn't be shipped because of one little chip that they were missing, you know, so they were holding $80,000, 60, 70,000, $80,000 cars back for a $12 chip. Oh, geez. You know, because of the supply chain issues. So what we're seeing now is, um, manufacturers wants a lot more visibility on this entire supply chain. And I think as well as manufacturers and companies are a lot more, um, I would say aware of the value that a person brings to the manufacturing floor, where I think for a lot of times humans were very much looked as, as a number, you know, rather than as an individual. And so what we're seeing now is companies are there leveraging and seeing the value of the importance of a human worker a lot more. And that's why we're seeing today more companies that are leveraging automation to Retain the worker rather than replace it. Right. We need to keep people in manufacturing. We're not trying to replace people out of manufacturing. So what about like cost? I mean, something like like the AI, a computer vision. What would something like that cost? Is it like cost prohibitive or is it something that even small companies can even think about leveraging? It's really it's really not cost prohibitive anymore. It's one of those things where I think the technology there, it goes back to robotics as well. Um, you know, you look at going back in the year 2000, you would have a robot 20 years ago cost $150,000, and today it would cost $45,000 just for the for the standard robot arm. Um, where we're we're seeing the biggest. I guess you could say resistance is not enough skilled workers to deploy technology and solutions. Right. Um, if we would have more people who knew how to coming out of high school and, and coming out of college, who knew how to program robots, companies would be deploying automation in a much faster rate than what we are currently here in North America. Oh that's interesting. So so so I really I look at it, the cost of audit, the cost of the, the physical components themselves is not the prohibitive. It's the lack of expertise and experience that's preventing manufacturers from adopting technology. So in 2020, you mentioned how you worked as a business development manager. And then that's also around the same time you started the manufacturing millennial. So was there a one post or video that really changed the conversation or got unexpected traction? Yeah. No, I mean that that was such a bore from what it was. And, you know, the fact is, from what I did in 2020 is why I'm having a conversation with you guys now, having a podcast in Toronto. Um, you know, I turned to LinkedIn as a platform to share what I was passionate about. On sharing why manufacturing is important, to highlight the cool technology that we're using, and really showcase how things are made. I think manufacturing is one of those industries that should be celebrated. It's it's helped so many companies grow to what they, uh. Uh, countries and companies grow to what they are today. Um, and so when I chose out to be the manufacturing millennial was one of those things where being a millennial in manufacturing, you had a hard time getting this next generation excited about the industry. So, so me being the the, the millennial manufacturing, that's how that tagline and that name came to be. But, you know, for me, why or what really took off of the manufacturing space for for me, choosing to perform that and keep going with the manufacturing millennial is, um, people get excited about seeing how things are made. People get excited about hearing the successful stories of why manufacturing and why robotics, and why automation, and why digital technology is so important and and the success that it creates, the, the, the opportunities that it gives people and their careers to have a successful career to live and work in manufacturing. Um, I think it's one of those things that should be celebrated, that should be brought more, a lot more attention to you. Always hear the stories about when I talked to manufacturers and they said, yeah, yeah. I started working for a manufacturer when I was 18 years old. I didn't go to college, I didn't go get a degree. And I went there and with hard work and determination and asking the right questions and wanting to learn things, they, they they started from a entry level position to now they're in executive or vice president and, you know,$1 million company. Um, and so for, for me being able to leverage LinkedIn as a, as a platform to share these stories, to share what manufacturing and technology could do. Um, it's one of those things that just took off. And turns out a lot of people liked what I shared. Yeah. Can you share more about the different kinds of opportunities that came your way since becoming the manufacturing millennial, and how did that shift your career or purpose. Aside from this podcast? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, for me, it was one of those things is I'm able to share a lot of stories and passion that I'm that I'm really, you know, excited about, you know, diving into, um, we'll talk about the, the, the advocacy and education, you know, a little bit. But for me, being able to go out there and share what I've learned for 20 years working in the industry on the success that manufacturers have had and also the failures that that companies have had, and sharing what we've learned from them, being able to go around and travel the world. Um, I was in Germany last month for Automatica for a big event. Uh, a few weeks before that, I was in London for another automation event. Later this fall, I'm going to be going to hopefully Taiwan and then back to Japan for for a couple big robotics manufacturing shows. Um, happening this fall, it's just being able to go out there and, um, get invited to go to these places and, and see what new technologies going out there and then what I, what I think the biggest value that I bring is humanizing. What's happening? Right. I come from a I'm an engineer. Um, but a lot of times engineers have a really hard time communicating the technical aspects of it to the everyday individual person. So for me, my goal is to bring manufacturing and automation to the everyday person and talk about the importance of why that matters, and then and then breaking down those barriers that a lot of times parents put into place on wanting to prevent their kids from going into this industry. So for me, being able to do a lot of storytelling, doing a lot of speaking, um, and going to 40 events a year, Tesla is. That is very awesome. It's very, very fun. It's very. Cool. It's it's it's super exciting to me. Last week I was in, um, Minneapolis and and and down in Chicago gave me just all being all over the place has been incredible. And being able to have all these stories, it's it's a lot of fun. That's awesome. I mean, I mean, just hearing your stories now, you have so many good stories to share with us. We're like. We're learning so much about these different kinds of robotic technologies. It's incredible robotics is doing these days. So what kind of advice do you have for like small to medium sized businesses that kind of want to start leveraging like social media, like LinkedIn, TikTok. Like, is there any like obviously really overwhelming? That is my favorite question. Oh yeah. Perfect. That's one of my favorite questions to be asked. Um, when you look at the small to medium sized manufacturers, right. We talked about a 98.6% of manufacturers or small and medium sized business that are located within their city. Um, when you look at the employment that works in, they're about 60 to 65% of the employment that's there is within a 30 mile radius of where that of where those manufacturers located and where those people grew up. So when you look at the importance of what manufacturers should be doing through social media and engagement, they need to be engaging with their local community, and they need to be leveraging social media in a way that highlights their people and not necessarily showcases their product. I think a lot of times companies will turn to LinkedIn and just to showcase their line card, they go out there and they just say, hey, look what we make. Look what we do. Rather than saying, here's the problems that we're solving, here's the people that we're working with. It's either the people who work for us or the people that we help and showcasing those stories. And I think, you know, making the the industry a lot more relatable is what companies should be doing. So from a from a social media aspect, they need to be leveraging, um, LinkedIn as a tool to tell their story and to tell their employees and people's story. You could talk about your product, but talk about how your product is solving a problem that's relatable, not just how we're better than, you know, our competition because everyone talks about that. It's it's not what we're seeing now, especially when you look at the the strategy from the general B2C aspect. Now people are doing commercials completely differently, like The influencer market that's out there, you know. Whether people like it or not. You go on that, like influencer marketing, the whole, um, Sydney Sweeney thing right now. Right? Yeah, that's that's that's B2C marketing, creating conversations, taking an influencer and and and creating a business strategy around it. You know, and I think that's one of those things too, is you as a company need to make your leadership relatable and and approachable to future workers and generations and also your customers. That's going to be really that in social media, in my opinion, is probably the best place to do that. What about like types of content or is it like do video? Does video work really well or is it like white papers? Blogs? Like what? Is there anything that you would short form. Video content I think is some of the best content that's out there. So like, you know, for for me. Right. We're we're filming a podcast right now. You're going to find out that your best results from this podcast, it's not actually the podcast, it's the. Sales and. The. Second snippets that you're gonna pull out of this that drives the greatest value. Because for us, you know, we're we're scrolling generation now. And if you're not creating content that could be engaged through scrolling, you're not going to have people that are going to stop and watch a 10 to 15 minute video, unless they specifically go to click on that to watch the video. Right. You know, so your the best option is I'm going to say something very, you know, um, you know, exciting and buzzworthy and you say, yeah, clickbait is like. Okay, how. Are you thinking? Yeah, yeah, I'm probably pretty excited. And then and then. A wonderful conversation. Check out this full podcast with Jake. You know, and I think that's what companies need to be doing. Um, as well as they need to be going out there and they need to be showcasing, hey, here's here's a picture of a person working 35 years ago on the floor when they were just starting out. And here's some in leadership now or or hey, check out. Check out what our board of directors looks like. We both have both men and women on this board. We're manufacturing is a is a very heavily like 79% male dominated industry. If we have women leadership on our board, that's going to be more exciting to have than women want to be a part of an industry. In fact, if you looked at the if you looked at the statistics, if you had a 7% increase of women in manufacturing, that would solve our labor shortage issues. 7% women working in manufacturing. Okay. You know, so it goes back to if if we can make our industry more relatable, more exciting, more opening to people, we're going to be pulling people in. And that's what you should be doing for content. You should be finding content that's going to get me, that's going to be relatable to people. You're going to educate them, and then you're going to pull them in as a call to action. Awesome. So I mean, let's go a little bit beyond the factory floor and talk about your impact, kind of, you know, in in the community and stuff. So you do a lot of work with students who are actually studying to be have careers in Stem. Yeah. So how did you get involved in that? Oh, man. So so I was one of those students. Oh, okay. At one point in time. So for me, I was, uh, I was in high school. I did the first robotics program, FRC, for four years. Then I coached Lego League and a bunch of other competitions. And for me, it was one of those things is, um, I was abandoned as, as well, you know, growing up and and for me, it was one of those things where I was able to learn a lot, have a passion to use my brain to solve problems and then compete in a way that was really exciting on the field. And if you've, uh, if you've never been to a first robotics competition, I would highly recommend that you have, um, 40 teams with 3000, um, you know, 2000, 3000 students there driving around £120 robots, smashing into each other, competing on a game field. Um, that's half the size of a football field. Um, you know, with robots moving, you know, 20, 30km/h. It's like it's cruising on, on a very short field. Yeah. Um, and so for me, when we can go out there and we can see this next generation excited about robotics and excited about programming and learning. We knew then to to capture that enthusiasm and say, here's the career opportunities that exist for you when you graduate from high school. And so when you look at like 3D printers, right. A lot of people, if you don't have one, you probably know a friend that has a 3D printer. Well, 3D printers mean a piece of manufacturing equipment, right? You're going out there. You're either downloading a piece of of CAD or a model. You're modifying that model. You're using some free software to build that model up. You're then creating software to then layer that model, create the supports, and then you're 3D printing it, and then you're finishing it, and then you have a product, right? So all of a sudden you have kids who are middle school and high school, working with a manufacturing process and say, hey, you already understand the fundamentals. Here's a great career for you. And so for me, being able to work with, um, a future generation that can have so much promise and an opportunity to really be successful in that career. Um, it's really exciting. So, so, so some of the stuff that we work with, um, is this year was my 20th year on, um, being a part of First Robotics. In fact, if you actually look at my LinkedIn page, I have a tag up there where I did a segment with ESPN highlighting robotics. Uh, and that's one the other thing, the other things that we have in our area in West Michigan, which is why I think community is so important to to manufacturing. And what we do is we have two events in the springtime. We have an event called My Career Quest and the fall. We have an event called Discover Manufacturing. Between those two events, we connect about 20,000 middle school and high school students within a 30 mile radius of of of Grand Rapids, directly to manufacturers to teach them about what career opportunities exist for them in manufacturing, from going right out of high school to work for them through apprenticeships, um, through trade school programs, through two year college degrees, associate's degrees to four year engineering programs. You know, they can enter in working for manufacturing at any point in their career at whatever skill level they want to, and being able to go out there and say, hey, you can go and work for a manufacturer. You don't have to go to college and get $46,000 in student debt, which is the average, um, debt that a person going to a public in school thing in Michigan is right now is graduating with like $40,000 in student debt. You don't need to do that. You don't need to be 24 years old and have $40,000 in debt to your name before you even get a job. Yeah. You know, so going out there and being able to try and educate this generation and say, just because your parents say go to college, don't go to college unless you want to go for a degree that's valuable to you. Right. You know, and don't don't go to college just to go to college and put yourself in debt. You're setting yourself up for failure. Not necessarily wasting time, too. You don't want to do it for the next ten years. Yeah. You're not gonna enjoy paying off that debt. So if we can go out there and we can educate this next generation about what value manufacturing has in these jobs, that have is really important. But also it's great to then work with all the companies locally and, and really start to change the the culture and the mindset these older generations have that have been in the industry for for decades and say, listen, you need to engage with the next generation to get people excited about that. The, the, the, the job reversals have switched. In fact, when you look at, um, you have you have you have a hiring manager, you have leadership that hires people. A lot of times if you were hiring someone into a team, you might go on their Facebook page or their Twitter page or their Instagram page, say, hey, who's this person that we're interviewing? You know, you're looking up their name. You're going to see on Facebook, where are they from? Where are they going to doing that? You know, that was just a practice. Rather, it's you should be doing it or not. This is a question that's going to be a hiring manager did. Well, here's the thing though. Now 80% of of Gen Zs, which is the generation that's graduating from high school right now, will go on a company's social media page and look at their pages, look at their hiring managers pages before they even go into that job interview. So now all of a sudden, what we're discovering in manufacturing is it's no longer the hiring manager interviewing the individual to come to work for the company. Yeah, no, it's the individual saying, hey, company, why should I come to work for you when there's 14 other companies that also want to hire me? Yeah. Um, you know, who offer maybe better benefits, or I don't have to work on a manufacturing floor and work in a metal recycling facility that's dealing with, you know, a bunch of broken glass beer bottles and cans and plastic. Right? Why should I go work for you ? Well, instead of saying, hey, you're gonna be on the floor in a hundred degree weather all day. Oh, you're gonna come out here and you learn how to do robotics. We're going to pay you a lot better than just doing manual labor, because you're doing a much more valuable skill job. Mhm. And you could take those career assets and you can, you can go where you need to go in five years you know. So it's one of those things is we're seeing a shift on why we're hiring, how we need to hire, and being able to connect the next generation with the employers and then the employers with the next generation. Understanding what the what those young students are looking for is really critical. So you've built a few robots yourself that you've shared on social media. One was Robot Dog and another one which is my personal favorite, which is a beer delivery robot dog. Yes, yes. So so so so so the quadruped robot. So the base robot itself is actually from a company called unitary. Okay. So, so so they manufactured that dog robot. But I have six of those dog robots. So okay I have six of them. And so that's part of the tool where you bring them to trade shows, bring to events and bring them to schools to get excited about robotics. You're bringing the beer one to school. Yeah. I did bring I did bring, um, a, uh, a ping pong ball shooter one though. Oh, that's. My my my my girls classroom. So they really love that. I'll, I'll try and get that. If you have links I'll, I'll have a link. Yeah of course. Yeah. Well, um, but I have the robot that turned into a giant six foot walking spider for Halloween. Oh, I have the robot shooting fireworks. I had the beer delivery robot. I have the robot with a leaf blower that's cleaning my yard and making my yard. Uh, so if there's ever an uprising in the robots, you're you're screwed. Essentially. Well, no. I'm an early adopter, so they're gonna remember I'm a friend. That's true. I'll. I'll be in. I'll be in, you know, in the fall. I'll be invited to the robot's backyard. Uh, you know, barbecue party, you know, but but when they take over the world. But. Yeah. So. So using those robots is a lot of fun. And it's a great way to one create conversations, get kids excited. I mean, we did an event a couple months ago where we brought a bunch of robots to the local chick fil A. One of my our friends is one of the managers at the chick fil A restaurant. And it was one of those things says, hey, come to come to chick fil A. Kids eat free on Tuesday nights. Um, and then we had the robots out there where the kids could drive. We could have conversations and just talk with parents about. Here's what robots means in the 21st century today, what you could be doing with them. I mean, you listed a lot, but is there is there anyone that's like the coolest automation like showcase that you've ever done. That, that specifically with robot dogs? Yeah. Well, not that it could be any automation. Like anything. You've. Seen anything? I can't talk about it. Stay tuned. There's there's a lot of things that are out there that, that that NDA that we can't talk about unfortunately. Okay. Yeah. The Nazi for work or just maybe. Yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah. Okay. So stay tuned. Follow Jake for future. Yeah, yeah. There's robotics stuff that we worked on that go up into space and stuff like. Oh wow. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. It's fun, it's fun things one one day. Yeah. One day. One day. Yeah. But, um, what I can't talk about, honestly, working with that robot dog is fun. I think for the 4th of July, mounting, like, 12 bottle rockets. And it's gonna be 12 Roman candles on it and then lighting it off over my lake, you know, for the 4th of July? Yeah, that's about the most. I think your younger version of you would probably just have a single tear knowing that that was going to happen. Yeah. As you know, a, you know, the American lighting a fire in July. You know, that's, you know, if you if you're in Canada, listen to this. Yes. That's the material that's stereotypical American, you know. You know, eating, eating our burger with lighting fireworks off a lake off of a robot dog. You know. America. So, Jake, you're constantly on the move attending all these different conferences, expos and industry events. So what's that experience like? And what keeps you coming back all the time? You know, for me, it's about community. It's it's being able to go out there and, you know, going to 200 events in the last five years. Um, you really get to meet some really cool people in the industry. And, you know, you can share a lot of cool stories and from, from for me, being able to go to events is allows me to really keep my pulse on what's happening in the industry, knowing what companies are doing, new technology, leveraging results, um, and seeing when new technology is available, I think I think that's one of the coolest things. You go to trade shows, you're able to see videos of things happening. But for me, um, I want to be able to get capture footage and then showcase to my audience on what technology's feature. If people can't make it to the trade show. So every trade show I go to, I always shoot a recap video that, you know, gets thousands of views, um, showcasing all the different robots and technology that go to. But for me, um, people, I think it's one of those things at the end of the day, while we work in a digital world filled with automation, robotics, AI and technology, at the end of the day, what matters most the people that you work with. And so what will drive success for the companies who are either making these solutions or leveraging the solutions on the floor, is how do they work with the people that are around there? And I think that's just one that's what would drive success is how how people friendly do you make your product to work with? At the end of the day, if it's to integrate, if it's to use, if it's to sell. Um, at the end of day, people is what matters. And I think that's what makes me most excited about the industry right now is people is very much like the, um, the front of mind conversation when anything else is being implemented or being invented. People are always what they're thinking about first, not necessarily what they're thinking about as, as the lasting of the result of it. That's good. That's really good. Yeah. So with all of these events, what are some emerging trends that standing out the most right now? Yeah, I mean, to, uh, to summarize it, I would say we're definitely in the world of AI and robotics right now. I think it's the big thing. Um, AI is really impacting every, every area of, of manufacturing, from the data that we look with from the machine vision to the human guidance, from the digital work instructions to robotics. Um, we're really seeing AI being the impactful. But I would say, you know, the one thing is we're seeing manufacturing becoming a a digital solution. Um, and really a digital trend. I look at when another story right when I when I bought my first car, it was a 1996 Ford F-250. So we we got it off of the auction lot. And my dad brought me to AutoZone and we got a Hanes repair manual. If you don't know what that is. It's like a 200 page black and white, uh, paper, uh, paper cover book that basically has all the different ways that you can fix a car from replacing the brakes, the alternator, the spark plug, timing belt, anything you need to replace a car. Now, fast forward 20 years. Um, and we use YouTube. You know. Right. So so so so so how we solve things 20 years ago is we had paper based work instructions on how to how to learn and solve things. Now we have YouTube. 20 years ago you had your grandma's Betty Crocker cookbook, right? Today you. Have TikTok. And Pinterest and Instagram that you're. Saving the recipes. That's what. I do. Yeah. So so it's one of those things is we are now living in a fully digital mindset of how we learn how we live. Manufacturers need to adopt that mindset as well. Um, and, and I think that's what we're seeing is just everything's becoming digital everything instead of of creating, uh, work instructions on a, you know, on 4 or 5 pages, we're recording a video, we're recording a screen, we're doing a voiceover. That's how people learn these days. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, something that we're actually hearing a lot about to not just AI. I think every episode we talk about AI now or Covid. Yeah, yeah. The supply chain disruption. So Covid always comes up and then AI is always coming up. But we also talk a lot about sustainability. So I was kind of wondering like how is that working in the manufacturing world. Are like manufacturers doing any sort of initiatives to try and become greener? Yeah. You know, it's one of those things I was actually talking with a trade show happening in Las Vegas. You know, I try and keep politics out of everything. So a lot of times people say, oh, let's just say a political push from from one political party or another. Um, sustainability does have a lot of actual benefits from, from a cost perspective to driving, um, profitability. So I think it's one of those things where, um, it's important to have initiatives, but you can't. It has to happen organically. You can't push it to happen on its own if the consumer doesn't want it. Right. Um, you know, like for me, for example, this is my this is my, uh, when I'm over in Germany. I love the water bottles where the cap doesn't come off. Yes, I love those two people. It's a small thing, but. I'll say, like, they hated the idea of it, but I'm like, I love the fact I just do it and I just can have it all in one hand and drink it. You. But that's a sustainable initiative. Yeah. To keep recycling, you know. So it's one of those things where, um, if, if the invention there makes sense. Oh, here's another great one. Um, so there's a company in Ogden, Utah called Pack Size. Um, and they make it where if you order a product on Amazon, it gets shipped to you. You know, you draw a lot of. A lot of times you probably, at one point in time got a package where the box was 100 times larger than the item that you purchased, and it was filled with, you know, 90%, um, you know, wadded up, uh, paper or just a bunch of those, you know, air bubble backs. Yeah. Well, well, what pack size is doing is they're taking it so you can take a product, you put it on a conveyor belt, it'll scan the dimensions of it, and then it will cut and fold that piece of cardboard to the exact dimensions of the product that you're shipping, fully automated. So now all of a sudden, you as a user are not having to worry about where are you going to put all this cardboard that got shipped to you, and how are you going to get it thrown away to recycle because the box is way too big. Um, it's a lot cheaper to ship because the box is the actual size of it. You're not shipping this area ? Yeah, shipping 80% air. Um, and it's one of those things too. It's it's it's it's cheaper, it's easier to ship. And then the end user likes it as well because I don't have to deal with as much waste. Yeah. You know, so it's a win win win. A great focus on what's sustainable. A great sustainable technology could be, you know, for. For the industry. So what about I mean our last guest actually mentioned that exact company too, which is interesting because. Really? Yeah. I'm gonna have to go and look that up. Yeah. Right. What episode is that going to be before you? 17. 17. 18. 17? Yeah. Episode 17. Yeah. But something else that he actually mentioned was, um, I was getting huge buzz about five years ago. I think he said it was lights out, warehousing. So basically, you know, warehouses that are completely done autonomously. No humans in the warehouse. It's just all robots. And now they've kind of shifted away from that notion. And they're now seeing that, you know, using technology and humans collaboratively is more the way to go. So what do you see for the future of manufacturing? Do you see it more of the same like that? The whole lights out was a big push. I think we found out that, um, humans can do a lot more than what we, what we originally thought robots could replace for. Yeah. And so what we are seeing is we are seeing now less of a fully 100% automated process. We're finding out how can humans stay in the work and automation can do 90% and then the humans can do that last 10%. That would cost double the cost of automation, right? So a lot of times when we're looking at the the cost of automation, you can you can you can pay for a system. Let's just say it's going to cost $100. I'm doing very low cost terms here. Right. It's going to cost $100 to, um, you know, put this item in a box and tape it, it would cost you then $300 to put the item in the box, tape it and make sure the label was perfectly straight, you know, so or would you rather just have a human put that label on at the end of it? You know, so it goes back to the entire thing of we can automate everything, but at what cost? Does the ROI not make sense anymore? Right. I think, you know, a great a great quote from, from, uh, Elon Musk. I know he's all over the news all the times, but, you know, one of the things that he had when working at Tesla was he said, um, the the human worker is, um, is extremely underestimated with the value that they can bring to the manufacturing floor, because originally, when they tried to point the Gigafactory, they tried to automate everything in the robotics, um, and they had the opportunity to because they were a greenfield facility, they didn't have a lot of the the boundaries and walls that the, the, a lot of the existing automotive places had for, for decades. Um, but they found out really quickly that some things it just makes sense to have a human worker. Right. And I think that's what we're seeing as well, is there's that lights out focus. But at the end of the day, you can't lights out, light out everything. You still need the human in there. And and the focus is, is how do you then make sure that human brings as much value and you have that you you give um, I guess you could say you you give value to that human for the job they have where they're not just doing the boring, repetitive tasks. Um, okay. So before we wrap up the episode, we're going to talk a little bit about, um, you know, one of your passions, which is modernizing the industry and attracting the next generation, you know. So what would you give? Like, what kind of advice would you give to like, manufacturers who are trying to attract, you know, the Gen Zs, the millennials into the industry? Yeah. I mean, I'll take this as the call to action. Yeah. You know, for me, I would say the first one is you need to get involved with your community. If you if you're a manufacturer and you are out there and you're complaining about having a labor shortage and you're complaining about not being able to, um, get the talents that you need on the floor, you need to be engaging with local workforce, at least with the local community. That's either the high schools, if that's the the tech career programs, the local colleges or universities. Um, if you are, as a manufacturer, not engaged with the education side that needs to happen there, there needs to be a better collaboration between education and the industry. Um, so that would be my first call to action is find a way to, to get involved with local schools, Bring kids in. Have them walk on the floor. Have them see how things are being made in the backyard. I think one of the biggest things, and that's why I love showing what I do on video all the time, is because a lot of times, um, last week, last week was, was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Chocolate chip. Cookie. It was. Oh, I missed it. God. I shared a video on how a collaborative robot was taking, um, cookie dough that was coming out of a dispenser that was making the right size, you know, ball plopping on a train. And it was going out there and it was politicizing, um, or. Yeah, Palatine or whatever, whatever that word would be. It's dispensing, you know, a sheet of 24 cookies on a baking tray. And then it takes that baking tray, puts it in a rack that will eventually go into the oven and then grabs another train, does it right. So you have people love chocolate chip cookies. I mean, people love cake. People love food. Yeah. So I can show it and say, hey, here's a really cool task on how a robot is making something that you consume and you eat every day. people are like, oh, that's really cool. That's how I understand it. Yeah, that's what manufacturers need to be doing. They need to be showcasing why what they do met, why what they do matters to the industry, to the people and to the community around it. Right, right, I love that. What about like platforms? Are there any like just like LinkedIn work better or is it TikTok? I mean, all the young kids are on TikTok. So it's one of those things, right? It's it's who's your who's your market? Who are you talking to? Okay. You know, for me, I obviously I leveraged LinkedIn because I'm much more of a B2B right type of person. But if you're out there and you're a manufacturer and you're making products that go directly to consumers, absolutely. You should be on where consumers are leveraging, which is maybe Instagram, which should be Facebook, which is going to be YouTube reels. Um, yeah. TikTok. That's where you should be. You should be on those platforms to, uh, to, you know, not even necessarily talk about your product, just be a brand that's relatable and recognizable. You know, if you're going out there and you're a manufacturer that's making work gloves, go out there and show how you work. Let's go. Go out there and try em and get your work gloves as dirty and and and, you know, gross as they can be and show that they work, you know, and find a way that is leveraging memes to go out there. And say, you know. You know, go out there and get one of your workers instead of, you know, Sidney Sweeney saying, I have great genes. I have great gloves, you know. Hey, lean into the meme. Yeah, lean into it. And I think that's why it's so important, though, for you as a manufacturer to to adopt and hire a younger generation, because 40 year old, a 40 year old person in the office has no idea. If I went out there and I tried to recreate an American Eagle jeans commercial with gloves. Yeah. If I go out there and I work gloves and do it, you have a really good story to do. Yeah, that's a great. We should do that actually. Yeah. And it goes out there. It's you're you're making your brand and your story relatable to an audience. And that's what brings people in. What about are there any like mistakes that you see companies making when it comes to their social presence. Um, yeah. When they just talk about their product all the time, no one cares about their product. No one cares about a line card. No one cares about, um, a product that doesn't solve a problem. So for me, I think it's one of those things where, um, be people oriented, right? Product second. Yeah. Do you have do you know of any companies that can give you an example of, like a company who's like, doing it, right? Like you're like, wow, they are doing an awesome job. People are really gravitating towards. I mean, for, for for me, I think, I think pack size was was a fun one because they're going out there and they're just randomly boxing up like random items. Oh, I love that. Yeah. That's so in showcase, like, hey, here's a Tickle Me Elmo and or or like here's like a miss Rachel. If you have kids, you know who Miss Rachel is. Like, I miss Rachel, you know, toy putting it in there and then boxing it up. It just it makes it relatable. I think that's why you got to see and connected to current events, because the industry and the stories moves so quickly. But you can really get excited. Like, I went up there and I posted, um, my TikTok, um, uh, a TikTok video with my robot leaf blower. And I got, I think, 17 million views. Oh, wow. TikTok. Yeah. Awesome. Very relatable topic, though, you know. Yeah. It was it was one of those things like I was using one of the current songs that was like trending. Yeah, the time to get trending. Right. And so if you understand the current trends and stuff like that, you know, you're gonna have a lot of success. Yeah. So if a company can only change one thing to modernize, where would you recommend they start? Oh, that's a tough question. What the what if they could change one thing to modernize? Um. You can say death to excel if you want. Or just. We like talking trash about Excel around here. It's probably paper based work instructions and paper based information. If you if you could if you could leverage and make the way people learn, communicate, and process information digitally. You're going to have probably the best results. That's what that's the. I would say that if companies could modernize one thing, it would be removing the manual paper based data collection information and bringing it to a digital platform. Lastly, what's one thing you want every manufacturer to remember as they plan for the future? Um, you'll never be productive without your people. Um. People first. I think I think it's one of those things is with whatever you do, focus on how will it drive opportunity and success with people who are currently on your manufacturing floor, and then who will eventually come and work for you one day? You know, I think, yeah, I love people. Orientation is what matters. Yeah. That's important. I mean, especially if you're trying to attract new talent, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's all about the culture. Yeah. Mhm. That's a wrap on today's episode. Thank you so much Jake for being here and giving us a nice behind the scenes look at all the manufacturing things going on. Yeah. Thank you so much. We learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners did too. Oh, man. Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having. Me. And before we let you go, can you tell us about what's next for you? Are there any upcoming shows or anything you want to plug in? No. For me, I think the biggest thing that I would say is, um, go to a show or a conference and if I'm there, please stop by and see me. I love talking to people. I love hearing their stories. So reach out to me on social media, on LinkedIn as well. I will try and get back to your message on LinkedIn. I get about 200 messages a day, so it's a little tough. But I do read them all. And um, yeah, if there's anything I can do to help people out in the industry, let me know. Awesome. And if you liked today's episode, please give us a like, subscribe, share, do all the things, give us a five star review. And as Jake mentioned, all the links will be down below. Definitely go follow Jake and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye everybody.