Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E11 Jon Lowy | Sleeping 3 Hours Per Day & Additive Manufacturing X.0
In this engaging podcast episode, Jon Lowy shares his remarkable engineering journey, discussing everything from medical robotics to teaching, entrepreneurship, and his unique perspectives on design, communication, and innovation.
Main Topics:
- Engineering Career Evolution
- Design for Manufacturing (DFM)
- Challenges in Additive Manufacturing
- Entrepreneurial Experiences
- Communication and Teaching Strategies
- Personal Growth and Adaptability
About the guest: Jonathan Lowy is a seasoned product engineer with over 40 years of experience in product design and manufacturing. Specializing in Design for Manufacturing (DFM), he emphasizes collaboration between design and production teams to create high-quality, efficient products. Jon has also served as a STEM teacher, mentoring future engineers and sharing his expertise. Currently, he partners with Jiga to enhance custom manufacturing supply chains and help engineers build smarter solutions. His wealth of experience makes him a valuable resource in the field of product development and manufacturing.
Links:
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Honestly, the best tool any engineer can ever hope to have exists and they just don't use it enough. It's burn your calipers and a pencil and paper.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Jon Lowy, a seasoned product engineer with over 40 years of experience in design and manufacturing currently collaborating with Giga. Jon shares his extensive knowledge on design for manufacturing, otherwise known as DFM, offering valuable insights and lessons he has learned throughout his distinguished career. Jon, thank you so much for being with us today.
Jon Lowy:Thank you for the invitation.
Aaron Moncur:So what made you decide to become an engineer? Look, I think
Jon Lowy:It's a brutal truth that engineers don't decide to be engineers. They're born that way. I By the age of four, I was stealing my brother's broken toys and fixing them. I just, you know, I'm not very good with people. I have learnt over the years to kind of wear a human skin, but essentially, I talk to machines much better than I talk to people
Aaron Moncur:I already have. I have a hard time believing that in the five minutes that we spent before starting the recording, you came across to me as one of the least introverted, most social engineers I have ever spoken with. So what makes you say that, that you have a hard time talking to people because that that is not what I got.
Jon Lowy:I guess I don't believe in my own version of EQ or empathy. You know? I, I, I long ago absorbed a complete understanding of that, that old joke, how do you judge an outgoing engineer? He looks at your shoes when he's talking to you, rather than yourself, right? I learned to be human because I kind of stopped doing being an engineer and I started doing, take people's money and make interesting businesses, because the challenge in engineering, it's always satisfying, but in the end, you become systemically limited. There's only so much you can do, and if you have, I don't want to sound puffed up, but if you, if you think you have grand imagination, then engineering can become too small eventually. And that's hard to imagine, because engineering is everything. And I, I worship with the altar of engineer, and I stand on the shoulders of giants. But in the end, I wanted to do more. I wanted to be able to control the engineering, not just do it. And so I had to learn to be human.
Aaron Moncur:Well, tell me a little bit more about that. In what ways did you start feeling limited? And then this whole idea of somewhat tongue in cheek, you said, taking people's money and creating businesses out of it. Tell me more about that. How did you get started there? Has it allowed you to expand your your creativity beyond those limitations that you were seeing? Okay, so
Jon Lowy:where did it start? In my very first job out of university, I I landed my absolute dream job, I had been building bench top. Kind of think of them as as like, like, smoke cupboard, chemical cupboard, robots for moving stuff around and pouring liquids and handling stuff. I building these things since I was about nine, and I'd landed my dream job out of university, building, designing and building medical sample processing robotics. So think of them as bench top laboratories which handle test tubes and test plates and reagents and all of that stuff. And I was commissioned to build the machine that I'd been trying to build since I was nine. And it was awesome. It was absolutely amazing. And I built the first prototype, and it was 10 times faster in processing than anything that was currently on the market. And we're talking about, well at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when suddenly blood transfusion centers had to do 100% testing. And goodness, they were challenged by that because their testing standards required a. Either automation which didn't exist, or somebody with a PhD who could be trusted. And PhDs cost too much, even though they're quite cheap, they cost a lot more than robots. So the whole market became roboticized, and I joined that mid wave when there were slow, relatively cumbersome, think like screw robots that could handle tubes, okay? And they were they weren't very fast and they weren't very adaptive. So I built this amazing machine, which, I mean, I still it's a dream to have been able to do it. And the whole thing ran on superfine aircraft cables with stationary motors. So there was this kind of giant recirculating knitting pattern of stainless steel nylon encased stainless steel threads that transmitted force and move things around. And it was, it was an awesome machine, and it was so blindingly fast that nobody could afford to buy it. They didn't have enough for it. And it was a, it was a terrible mistake from the company to have commissioned the development of it, but I had a great time, and that was all good. So I built the first prototype, and it worked surprisingly well. I love when I was 2122 and I really had no idea. You know, I thought I knew everything, but I really had no idea. And I built this very clever machine, and it worked. And that was a surprise to all of us. And I had one of those moments when I'm I'm kind of unveiling the machine to the CEO, and he looked at it and went, those pulleys have got two bearings in and I said, Well, yes, they've got quite a lot of load on them. You know, the loads can become off centered, and that will destroy a single bearing setup really quickly. And he said, You need to reduce the costs and make them one bearing. And I said, No, and he fired me,
Aaron Moncur:well, you stuck to your guns anyway. That was 21 the machine
Jon Lowy:would have destroyed itself in an hour of operation, because you can't have a single row bearing carrying a dirty, skewed load. Just doesn't work right? And it I went downhill from there in terms of the need to control my environment, and that led me, over some years and a couple of career changes, into building businesses that did amazing things and they didn't fire properly. I I'm not, by nature, the right person to do the whole job, but it's the nature of the New Zealand environment that you're expected to be the CEO archetype who can do everything, and there isn't enough money to hire the people that you need. So it's it. I didn't succeed, and I freely confess my own overreach, but it led me into some interesting directions, and I made a technology that could, if it was properly implemented, in the electricity grid, would reduce carbon emissions from the electricity grid by 30% nobody wants to implement it because it's a bit scary, not technically scary, just different. That didn't work, and I moved on. The next effort that got a lot closer was I came up with a way of measuring gas levels, volatile airborne gasses at parts per trillion sensitivity. And that was amazing. And we delivered the working thing, but the shareholders couldn't handle it, and it kind of died at starvation, just at the point where the machine was was ready to go to market. So I'd, I'd done quite a lot of hard yards, and I done a lot of learning about how to not how to not be.
Aaron Moncur:So some time had passed. I mean, 21 at this first job where you got fired, till 4548 few businesses later, where you were in charge.
Jon Lowy:There was a lot of water under the bridge. I I've had an interesting career. I spent four years as a field engineer in Wildcat oil exploration, which was an amusing thing to have done it. It started off as two weeks every month on holiday, and it ended up as two weeks every month in prison, in prison, not in prison, but feeling like it was in prison. You know, when you've got it, you spent, spent two weeks on a on a. A drill ship west of Shetland in a storm. It's coming on hardware. It was a hugely learning experience, and it improved me as well. Did you learn from it? I learned to handle difficulty and adversity. I became anti fragile, because if I was fragile, if I failed in my job, then the ship blew up, so there wasn't much room for error, and that, it was a great education. And I went from that back into engineering I contracted doing developed a rugged PC for the British army to go with one of the new fighting vehicles for target selection, so that some poor squaddy, you know, up to his neck in water could have his PC floating in front of him, could call In fast movers or, you know, whatever it it just, it was an interesting thing. I moved on from that. I became a high school teacher. Moving on.
Aaron Moncur:Well, what did you teach in high school? Uh, bastards,
Jon Lowy:no, that's not fair. I absolutely loved teaching, but I didn't like it. Sorry. You need to understand. I store up those good answers to those very sensible questions. This is fun. Jon, yeah, teaching was again, was an awesome experience. It made me a more organized person, because what
Aaron Moncur:motivated you to go into teaching? I mean, shoot, you did some giant automated contraption when you were 21 got fired because you wouldn't remove bearings from it. Went on to do Wildcat oil drilling. Built a couple of businesses on your own particle detection. And somewhere in the middle of that teaching, which seems like a belt,
Jon Lowy:like a good thing, all over the place, yeah, definitely that. It's part of the ADHD that I get bored. And if the challenge was kind of threatening, then it's not that interesting. You know, I I'm not going to take drugs for it. I take work for it instead. So, you know, I've moved on to do bigger and more interesting things, which we can talk about. It's not really engineering, but people might, might be interested to hear about it. But so really, all of those things led me to a point in space, and it's an interesting point. And somebody that I worked for a long, long time ago, who was a very unwise person and a very pencil necked manager, said the wisest thing, possibly the only wise thing he'd ever said in his life, which was Anna was complaining about something because, you know, whinging to your boss is part of the joy of having a job. You've got somebody you can winch to. And I don't remember what I was complaining about. It didn't matter. And he he pulled me up short and said, Do you like where you are? And I thought, yeah, it's pretty good. And he said, then stop complaining about the journey. Okay. Now that was a seminal moment for me to recognize that a pathway might be a bit raggedy. It might be full of stones. You might fall over a lot cut your knees, but if it gets you where you need to go, then it was the right path. And teaching was part of that. Was hard, really hard, being staying polite, staying calm, learning to be angry without showing it was a good piece of advice when I started teaching, because it's a really hard thing to do. It's the kids will make your blood boil. Never something about that. No. Bottle it up and pack it down and then act it out under your control.
Aaron Moncur:And that's and what did that look like for you? Acting it out under your control,
Jon Lowy:a performance of rage. But I could turn away to another kid speak politely and calmly and quietly about what they're doing, and then turn back and switch on the rage, acting almost totally, entirely. Teaching is definitely time on stage, and your audience is really unappreciative, and they mostly hate you,
Aaron Moncur:and they sounds a little like parenting. No,
Jon Lowy:it's very, very like parenting. I accept that it's. A bigger crowd, and they feel more empowered because you're just a low paid scumbag who's there to supervise them. You're a glorified policeman, essentially, who's there to beat knowledge into them. And mostly that's not going to work. And I loved teaching. I did the actual process of getting kids to understand stuff. It, it equipped me in a way that I didn't imagine it would. I thought I was good at explaining things. I wasn't, but I learned how, and so now I'm I'm very well equipped to talk to investors, to deal with client problems to deal with technical matters for non technical people,
Aaron Moncur:what are some pro tips that you can pass on in in terms of teaching people like, what's your process for teaching something new? They
Jon Lowy:can't be in their shoes, understand their perspective, understand, above all else. And this is the thing that I think almost all of us struggle with. Understand the communication. If it's not double ended, it's not communication. If you can't make it accessible to the person you're talking to, you're not communicating. You're you're grinding out your noises. You're on a street corner waving a Bible. You're, you're, you're bashing a drum. Nobody,
Aaron Moncur:our engineering manager likes to say the meaning of your communication is the response that you get.
Jon Lowy:That's a very nice way to put it, if you can't hear back an echo of what you said with some of the gaps filled in, you haven't done the job. So the basic rule that I think of is, hear it and forget it, see it and remember it, do it and understand it. If you can get people to metaphorically, to do the language back to you with their own twist on, then there's a chance that they've heard what you're saying. And that's it's not easy to achieve. And I work, I work incredibly hard at it, because it is not in my nature. So what you are seeing now is a performance art. It's not the natural me. The natural me is sitting in a corner and covering his face because he doesn't want to interact with anybody ever. He wants some maths in front of him. It's
Aaron Moncur:so interesting that you say that. I think, I think a lot of us feel that natural. We Yeah, it's natural. At least I feel that way, and I know others who feel this way, where, if I had my way of it all, I'd probably spend a lot of time in a room by myself, in in the quiet. But that's not how life works,
Jon Lowy:not and if you want to achieve anything, then you have to be part of a team. If you want to be part of a team, you need to not be a shit. And I, I probably was a terrible, total arrogant shit. When I was an ADHD engineer focused on how many bearings I needed to put in a pulley, I was probably very hard work. Now I'm very hard work in a different way. There's going to be a lot of ground covered, and you might have to run to keep up, because I'm an I'm a knowledge sponge. I can't forget stuff, and I read all the time, and I'm always trying to learn. I mean, just this morning, I'm studying foamed composite like, like metals, because somebody has asked me to write an article about light metals, and they thought we were talking about aluminum, and there's no way that I'm going to be boring about it. So I've had to learn about something that I've never heard of, which is foamed composites. I've dealt with foam metals before, but foamed composites, how the hell do you do that? So, yeah, communication. I mean, I'm doing it now. I talk too much because I'm trying really hard to clarify my position, so I'm not listening enough to you.
Aaron Moncur:Well, that's okay, because in certain settings, that is a bad habit, but in this setting, that's the perfect habit, right? We're here to hear from you. This is an interview of Jon Lowy, not not Aaron Moncur. I mostly just want to hear you talk. Not for me, it's not all right. Well, what is it for you? You ask a question. Go for it. It's a two way
Jon Lowy:street. Tell me. Tell me a bit about you. Because you know, doing this, if. Kind of weird, doing this for a living. I'll tell you how this got
Aaron Moncur:started. Well, I don't do podcasting for a living. This is a call. It a marketing tool for my company. I've been doing it for five years, though, one thing I think I am very good at is sticking to something right? I'm persistent. I can do something for a long time if I need to do it, and this has been a lot of fun the podcast, because I get to interact with interesting people such as yourself, and I would it's awkward for me because, like, like you mentioned, I would love to sit in a quiet room by myself for most of the day. But as we have agreed, that's not how life works. And so if I'm going to have to be out there interacting with people anyway, I might as well interact with interesting people that I get to choose. And the podcast gets me the perfect platform to do that.
Jon Lowy:Yeah, don't, don't associate with boring people. I mean, when you have to life is too short, try to be polite.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, yeah, my wife and I have a code words for when we're at gatherings or parties and, you know, it's time to get one or one of us out of there, right? I
Jon Lowy:don't bother with code words on that. It's Fuck this. Sorry. This is boring. I'm going because eventually I reach the point where the ADHD leaks out. You know, I can't, I can't always contain it, but it's a kind of basic rule of engineering. If you, if you pack it in too tight, it's going to squirt out somewhere else,
Aaron Moncur:right pressure. I've heard ADHD described as a superpower. It is, what was the analogy? It was, ADHD is like having a Ferrari for a brain with bicycle brakes. That sounds
Jon Lowy:optimistic about the brakes. I don't know about the Ferrari thing. We're getting close. I think I think of myself as a Unimog on bicycle wheels, a unit of the Mercedes military truck, six wheel drive, 12 tons of roaring German diesel, and the wheels, when they hit the ground, they stay, they stay where they are. So I've got, I've got all of that horsepower. Traction is my problem. I spend a lot of time with my will spin and they spin, really? Do you get tired? But they're just spinning.
Aaron Moncur:Do you get tired? Or are you always firing on? Gave
Jon Lowy:up sleeping, actually, in the oil field, really? 3035 Yeah, 35 years ago now, because of working at a 12 on 12 off shift cycle, and then after a week doing a changeover, it's just impossible to sleep. And I look there was one, there was one drill ship that I was on that didn't have enough accommodation for the crew, and I swear I had a hot bunk, which means that somebody else used it for the other 12 hours. That's that's not that appealing, but we'll let that go. We weren't in it together because, okay, because he was, as I recall, he was a six foot, seven, 350, pound Glaswegian driller. But we'll again, let that go. I swear it was on top of a two megawatt genset, but for 12 hours, I gave up sleeping, and now I I need three hours a night, and it's not the hours.
Aaron Moncur:I'm so jealous. I wish I could operate on three hours. Do
Jon Lowy:you feel good? Though? Yeah, yeah. It looks one. One night a week I sleep more. It's as much as I can. That's just Margaret Thatcher claimed that I don't really want to be like her in any way. But she claimed the same thing, that it just wasn't it reached a point in life where it wasn't necessary, which is, it is empowering, but it's also a little bit dangerous, because it means that a lot of the time you're operating tired, but not accepting that you're tired and not doing anything about it. I'm okay, as long as the blood level in my caffeine delivery system doesn't get too high.
Aaron Moncur:I wish I could sleep for three hours. Hey, I'd be, I'd be thrilled with six hours. I need to sleep eight to nine hours a night, or I feel like I can, oh, well, I don't know. We'll see I can get by with less, you know, for a day or so. But if I go multiple days in a row with less than that amount of sleep, I feel terrible, and I wish, I wish I could get by on less sleep. I could do so much more.
Jon Lowy:Yes, I'm finding that the less sleep at the moment is is particularly useful because I've got a two year old. I. Oh, my goodness, yeah, 60 and I've got a two year old. I've also got two older kids that they don't need me at night anymore. But yeah, the two year old is wonderful. He's amazing. Getting to do this again at my age is ridiculous and probably quite offensive for a lot of people. But I'm people ask me how I can do that, the answer is, it's because I'm 14 and I'll never be older
Aaron Moncur:than that. What do you know as a father this time around that you wish you had known the first time around? Zero fear. What does that mean? Zero
Jon Lowy:fear that I'm not afraid of anything that happens, because I know that it's all under control, and I know that it's all pre programmed and like, when he gets sick, yeah, it's horrible, but I don't need to be asleep. I'm good. And because he's getting sick, he's building immunity and he's getting stronger. So all I've got to do is supervise him to make sure he doesn't get damaged by being sick. You know, confidence is is so empowering. My first my oldest son, is 24 and he's awesome. He's working stiff, makes a living. He's a mostly happy person. He's a little bit fascist, for my liking, but, you know, I don't know how that happened, but he's a he's a good man, and he's a decent, honest soul, and he was hard work because I had no bloody idea, and I was terrified, and I was 2034 and 25 35 and I was terrified, because I was frightened of what was happening, because I didn't understand it. Because, of course, our society doesn't teach you how to be a parent. And my try to put this in a nice way, my autistic father didn't teach me how to be a parent, for sure, so I had to learn it from scratch. Doing it again is awesome, because I can just look at what's going on and say, No, that's no problem. Or we're going to the doctor right now. And those are the two conditions. Anything in between, yeah. So, yeah, what have I learned? I'm, I actually think I'm quite good at it. You know, my, my oldest son's the 24 and 21 the ones in his final year of engineering, poor bastard. And the other one did a business qualification. And he's, he's helping run a courier company and managing people, and he's out on the road sometimes, and he's dealing with customers. He's robust and he's comfortable in his skin that I didn't do too bad a job on. So I'm looking at this two year old thinking, Yeah, I can do this. It's a real luxury to be a parent, looking at it, thinking, yeah, I could do this.
Aaron Moncur:I had a friend when, back 1520, years ago, when me and my friends started having kids, he had their first child, and I remember asking him, you know, are you worried about this at all? Are you scared? Are you nervous about being a father and teaching this child how to become a successful member of society someday? And he said, you know, Aaron, I feel like I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and people with lesser intelligence than me have raised reasonable children, so I think I'm going to be okay. And I thought that was
Jon Lowy:a very rational perspective, and it's very hard to maintain that perspective when they're puking on you at two in the morning. But still it is. It is exactly right. It that there is, there is a tendency towards the mean. So all you've got to do is not screw up too badly and you'll be okay. And don't screw up cereal. That's the really important one. Don't reinforce the screw ups.
Aaron Moncur:Have you taken the same perspective in engineering? Don't screw up too badly and you'll be okay.
Jon Lowy:And I can cite examples where I've screwed up, or somebody screwed up and I had to fix it. And it's, it's, and I think of it as a muscle. It needs exercise. So a lot of a lot of human response is kind of glandular. You've got no control over it. It just happens. It's autonomic, and there's not much you can do. But if, if you work at it, you can turn glands into muscles in response terms, you can learn to control the autonomic, and it ceases to be autonomic. And that's that's quite empowering to to know that when you're afraid and it looks or. Fall, you can still control the situation, even if you're controlling the fall. You know, don't rely on drunks luck. Know how to roll. It's the thing I say to investors probably more often than I should. This is pinball. Do not Brace for impact. Just go with Well, if you're rigid, you'll get crushed. If you're drunk, metaphorically speaking, you'll bounce.
Aaron Moncur:How are you working with investors these days? Oh, that is a complicated
Jon Lowy:question. I'm not doing engineering. I write professionally for people like jigger, done a lot of work for them and for geometry, and I just, I know a lot about engineering because I've done most of it, so I'm able to spout extensively on a lot of subjects, and over the years, I learned to write reasonably coherently. I'm not I ain't had my I don't write for art. I write for knowledge. But my day job, I'm complicated to answer. I'm an the agent for a series of Chinese retail outlets, buying product for them and shipping it to China, across Australasia. And I don't it's definitely not engineering, although I treat it in the same way, in the sense that it's a flow chart and it's a sequential process, and it is all amenable to logic, and most of it doesn't need any cuddly, fluffy stuff. You're just making decisions about things, and those things have to be right. And I've spent about 40 years in factories. I know how to inspect a factory and know when they're doing something stupid. I can stop them making serious mistakes. I can make the product good quality. I understand the quality process, and it doesn't matter whether it's beer or cheese or widgets, it's the same process. So, you know, it's a spectrum of experience, and I'm having a new one now. So basically I'm a glorified shopkeeper, which is awesome because I get to ship container loads of nice things to people who want to buy them.
Aaron Moncur:You mentioned that you found engineering to be limiting, and so you branched out and started businesses, and now you're working with investors in some capacity. From a financial standpoint. Have you a, has money been very important to you and B, have you found more financial freedom in your later ventures than you did in engineering.
Jon Lowy:Money is only important to me when I run out, I have almost no interest in success measured in foldable terms. I mean, I don't mind it. I'm not offended by money, and I won't refuse it, but it's not a driver for have I achieved greater financial freedom at times? Yes. And then at times, oh, my god, no. It's a it's a Darwinian fight, and mostly I'm fighting things with bigger teeth than me. Fortunately, a lot of the time they have smaller brains than I do, but not always. You know, sometimes the things with big teeth are really fierce and smart, and then I fold. I'll do as I'm told. So what
Aaron Moncur:does drive you
Jon Lowy:success? Not exactly success, but the measurable outcomes in doing things that other people can't do my my kicks come from I'm going to wave an example at you. It's not going to work on an audio I had a client come to me and say, I like one of these floating pen things. I want to do a copy of it. And he sent me one. And I said, Dude, don't copy it. It's rubbish. Give me three months and a bit of freedom and some money to do some testing, and I'll make you something better. And he ran out of juice, but I. The production cost on this forget the cost of the pen, because pens need to be really, really nice, and they tend towards expensive. The production cost on this thing, I've got that down to about 75 cents, and it works better than the ones that people sell. That's how I get my kicks because I can this has been sitting on my desk for a year, waiting for the client to kind of wake up and come back to life and have some money so they can proceed. And I'm probably giving away his IP because you can see the magnets.
Aaron Moncur:Well no one else can see it are true.
Jon Lowy:So how do I get my kicks out of doing things that other people can't do. So a prime example of this, I when I was doing my master's degree, yeah, I had a I did a full time master's degree with a full time job and a new baby 25 years ago. That was challenging. So while I was doing my master's degree, I got very friendly with my professor, who ran the bit of the school that I was in, and I was waiting in his office to get some help with some maths that I couldn't handle. He was he is system mathematics genius, and writes the textbooks on it, and imagines that everybody else must understand exactly what he's saying and doing, because he doesn't think he's very clever, typical engineer, really. And I was scuffling around on his desk because I'm a nosy bastard, and reading some papers, and I found this paper from a final year undergraduate study of a way of chemically amplifying airborne volatiles so adsorb into a structure and then drive the desorption of the sample in a closed space, so you can essentially create a high concentration out of a low concentration. And it was okay. They hadn't really done anything. They'd just read some books and wrote a report, and they'd achieved nothing. But I could see a germ of an idea, which I slogged out for 15 years in the background, turned it into a business, found investors to back it, and we built a machine that, Okay, New Zealand is a very agricultural economy. So we make, we export 30% of all the dairy produce that is exported in the world from this tiny little pair of islands, which is a bizarre number, and it's because conditions are right here, just it's just chance. So among the produce is kiwifruit, which they're pretty hard to grow, right? And the problem was solved here first. So the industry developed here first, and is kind of teaching other in other areas how to do it. So a kiwifruit, newly picked has a value of about, let's say, three cents at the farm gate. It has a retail value in good condition at peak season, of about 25 cents, if you can store that fruit in peak condition for six months so that you can sell it a week before the new harvest in Singapore. One fruit is worth$5 Wow, yeah. Now it's quite a differential. So the storage of fruit, not just kiwifruit, but kiwifruit is a good example. The storage of fruit is an art form that isn't very scientific, but it is very successful in some quarters. And the vision that I had in reading this, this undergraduate paper, was that I could see how to use this mechanism to measure very low levels of ethylene around fruit. So if you pick a fruit and it can Ben ripen, it belongs to the climacteric family man, I had to learn a lot about fruit. It's awesome, though, because I don't forget anything. So the list of climacteric fruits is huge, and it's all of those which were ripened after they are picked. So most melons are not climacteric. You pick them, and they'll stay in the same condition until they rot. Most berries, they're not climacteric. Again, you pick them ripe and then you eat them. You can't keep them for long, but apples, an apple, can go through its second birthday and still be edible, not ideal, but edible. So the fruit that ripens after it's picked, if you pick it at exactly the right unripe condition. You can cold store it for months. If you can control the ripening process, then you can add value. And that's what the kiwifruit sector in this country has successfully done, that they about 5% of what they pick makes it to the end of the season, and is a stupendous value, more than the whole of the rest of the crop. And they get about 5% by a slightly messy, slightly random process that, sorry I again for audio. The nasty noise you heard was me sucking my finger and holding up in the wind so that we could gage the sense of what's going on the fruit. And I, using this sensing system, I was able to detect the essentially nano traces of ethylene in the unripe fruit and grade them for storage and my grading process was three to five times more effective than the industry standard, so you'd get three to five times as much fruit survival at six months, which means that you could sell those fruit at peak value in high value markets. And we made a machine to do this, and it was amazing. I mean, I it's necessary to overshare. My vision wasn't about fruit you've heard of Thanos, the giant fake blood testing nonsense. Elizabeth Holmes, come on, man, you've heard of Elizabeth Holmes, okay, anyway, Thanos made a machine that they claimed could do a broad spectrum blood analysis from one drop of blood, not a whole blood sample, where the normal processes require a few ccs of blood for each test.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, they're ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, you have vials and vials. Yeah, absolutely
Jon Lowy:blood. So Thanos was a giant Ponzi scheme that raised vast amounts of money on a machine that could do a broad spectrum test of a single drop of blood, and they had nothing of the kind. There just isn't enough chemistry going on in the tiny amount of sample to be able to amplify it to do anything. The only thing you can do with that is a DNA test, because you can make the DNA grow, but you can't do the blood analytics that people require, because the chemistry can't be amplified. You just need more of it, and the sensor is no use in these low levels. So I have, and I'm still storing it in my head, a vision for a version of Thanos that's based on your smell, and I can amplify your smell a billion times, probably more. Now that sounds What do you do with that? But you wear a skin patch that absorbs careful use of words there, add zorbs so it's not soaking up. It's associating with it takes in all of the volatile that come off your skin. Well, it's perfectly possible to train a dog to diagnose TB of people's breath. There's a variety of rat used in Africa trained for mine sweeping, and they smell buried minds. The sensitivity of the nose used in the right way is astonishing. If you can diagnose TB from breath with the right nose, then you can diagnose anything so by absorbing the broad spectrum of volatiles off your skin and then doing a rapid a rapid chemical analysis on a reasonably large volume of gas that's high concentrations of smell chemistries. It's going to be possible to do a broad spectrum diagnostic. So that's what I was aiming for with this chemical amplifier. Fruit was just, pardon the expression, but it was the low hanging fruit. I could get people to understand that business. So I raised money for that business. I know I can do it. The knowledge is waiting to be executed. I've got a few fascinating and fanos, Jon, you
Aaron Moncur:are a unique man, a very interesting individual. Can I ask you some silly questions?
Jon Lowy:They're the best kind of such thing.
Aaron Moncur:What do you eat? And maybe more importantly, what do you not eat? Funny that I
Jon Lowy:was vegan from teens until I had child. And I looked at this baby and thought, If I don't give it real food, it'll probably grow to be a funny shape. So I became bacon ataria again. What do I eat? A very, very simple diet. My strong preference, I make my own bread, and I put mostly unprocessed things on it, and then I eat a lot of fruit, and I eat a lot of vegetables, and I don't drink much, and
Aaron Moncur:that's kind of it. How about your your caffeine delivery system was, was that tongue in chamber you consume copious amounts of cash. No, it's not huge.
Jon Lowy:I'd limit myself to probably three cups coffee a day. But when, when I say coffee, I mean like Turkish tar. I have an espresso machine. I have a really good espresso machine. It's my one luxury. I function better. I'm not great with mornings until I've had some coffee. Do you eat breakfast? Can't makes me want to puke, makes me slow all day. So I tend to eat once a day, like late afternoon, evening, and I might graze a little bit during the day, but I try to avoid eating because I get fat, particularly since I stopped smoking, which is a very long time ago, but I got fat when I stopped smoking, and it was hard work to get back to the weight that it's funny. When I left school, I did a whole bunch of shit jobs before I went to university, and one of them wasn't shit. It was really, really awesome. I was a kind of care assistant in an old people's home for about six months, eight months, something like terrible pain, awful conditions, but a wonderful experience. And the striking thing about that is that all of the old men were skinny. That was a valuable lesson. If you're not skinny, you ain't going to get old. And I'd like to live, not forever, but, well, you know, I'm 60, I've got a two year old. I want to be able to see him out into the world. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, my father was skinny and lived in 94 so I don't eat a lot, and the older I get, the less I eat because you just don't need it. You're not You're not doing the self repair. You're just running on the resources that you've got. Do
Aaron Moncur:you exercise? The dirty word,
Jon Lowy:I move. I don't do exercise for its own sake, but if I have to go and get some milk, I'll walk to the shop. If I have a staircase, I won't walk up it. I'll run up. If there's an elevator, I'll only use it I'm forced to. If I'm being polite, I'll use the stairs so I don't. The gym is really alien, but movement is not and this is a bit kind of like Plato's Golden Mean, a little bit of everything is good. Too much of anything is a really bad idea. And my knees tell me that exercise is a really bad idea, yay.
Aaron Moncur:What's the most scared you've ever been?
Jon Lowy:It's stuck in a I was leading a caving party thing. I was 1718, and I was leading a caving party, and I went through a sink, a sample. So that's, that's a an underground underwater pipe that you have to swim through to get through to the air on the other side, and I was roping for others to follow. And then there was a flash flood came through, and the chamber that I was in flooded, and I was down to like an inch of roof space. And then the flood subsided, and I was all good, but it was a very interesting experience walking out of the cape to the cave rescue group who were coming to pick up my corpse. Wow, that was that was an experience that was worth having. What else has scared me? Four hours up a derrick in a snowstorm west of Shetland. In deep water, heaving seas, fixing equipment with the company man and the driller with two bullhorns screaming at me because I was stopped. My equipment was stopping drilling that was there was another one, actually, on the same rig I'd strapped up a hydrogen bottle. Yes, a hydrogen bottle, and it broke its strapping in a storm, and fellow broke off its valve and shot across the deck like a rocket. So I'm in the company man's office, no, the rig manager's office being fired. He's screaming at me about my incompetence and my company's incompetence for the racking that wasn't good enough to do the job, couldn't withstand the storm forces. And then I quietly said to him, it's your rack. Get out of my office. Boy, so
Aaron Moncur:if it's not scary, this reminds me of your experience with the CEO. Yeah, no, it's not dissimilar getting fired. I'm
Jon Lowy:an arrogant bastard? No, I've probably been fired more often than I've quit. I just I'm really no good at being told to do stupid things by stupid people. And it's a birth it is. It's made my life less stable than it might have been, but it's also been what's a tool that
Aaron Moncur:what's the tool that doesn't exist, but if it did, you think would allow engineers to work 10 times faster, 100 times faster? That's
Jon Lowy:hard. If you'd asked me that 10 years ago, I would have said rapid prototyping that was useful. Yeah, now the rapid prototyping is useful. It just needs to be cheap enough. Honestly, the best tool any engineer can ever hope to have exists and they just don't use it enough. It is that their brain learn your calipers and a pencil and paper, understanding what's going on because you you've evaluated it rather than looked at it. The tool that doesn't exist? That's a really good question. I'm not sure I've ever thought about that, except that I'm always trying to make the tool that doesn't exist, and it's that stupid Star Trek thing, whatever they call it, the materializer, no, the teleporting, no. Now that would be useless, because somebody would merge me with a fly, and then it would turn into a movie, and that would be terrible. No, I, I like the journey, so I'm not, I'm not terribly interested in teleco. No, they, they punch a button and out pops a mug of hot tea or piece of cake or a gun, or whatever it is. It is rapid prototyping. It
Aaron Moncur:is yes, yeah, right. Additive Manufacturing on a molecular level? Yes.
Jon Lowy:And strangely enough, I have a plan, but this does not surprise me. Yeah, well, somebody challenged me to this. It was a head of an accountancy firm. We were talking about investment in something else. He said, Should I put money into rapid prototyping, into additive manufacturing? And I said, yeah, if you want to be disappointed, you know, Oh, yeah. But everybody's telling me that it's the thing to do. It will be in 20 years, but now it's kind of rubbish. You know, it's quicker to quicker make one the old way, and it'll be better if you want to make a million of them. There's no way you're going to do it that way. It's not additive manufacture. That's why I tend to not use the phrase, because it really isn't manufacture. It is prototyping. And, yeah, okay, NASA can buy a line of machines and make shelf brackets to go into the space station. It's all for show. It's all nonsense. DARPA, they can have mobile centers printing parts for tanks, but if they want them to be any good, they're not going to come off those machines. They'll be quicker, but they won't be very good. So, yeah, the machine that doesn't exist is additive manufacturing. That really is additive manufacturing, rather than investor pretense. And I know this partly because I spent 10 years running a prototyping agency alongside a consulting business, so I tend to know quite a lot about additive manufacturing. I keep up with it because people are always asking me to write stuff about it, so I have to study so I have to study, yeah, the tool that doesn't exist is additive manufacturing that's not shit or poisonous
Aaron Moncur:input, your requirements and outcomes. A perfect cup of coffee, a couple little food tight or. I'd
Jon Lowy:like a fan, yeah, I'd like the perfect, I don't know, look a machine that could print a bearing that would work, yeah, that's the go, a sealed bearing,
Aaron Moncur:right? That's the go. Different materials, multiple materials. Yeah, precisely. That's what a lot of non technical, non engineers, thought what was going to happen 15 years ago, when started getting
Jon Lowy:so popular and the investors are still actively disappointed, that's what's happening, when, in reality, yeah, I look, I can cite an example that that really I find quite inspiring. My design company was commissioned to do a thing that actually was my second tier obsession came out of the robotics. It was making prosthetic hands. It was making prosthetics that actually mimic the organic in their flexibility and motion. And they came to us to do this, and it was an interesting project, and they really, really, really. It had some some intricate gear boxes in the fingers. We'd managed to squeeze motors into the first joint of each finger so that we could reduce the overall mess and complexity and power transmission, force transmission setups. And it required some intricate gear boxes with lovely little clutches in them. And it was a them. And it was, it was a beautiful thing, and these parts were very tricky, and they were needed to be very precise, and they needed to be extremely strong. And the client absolutely obsessed about the idea of additive manufacture these gearbox components. And so I we put it into a race, and I had machined parts in 14 days that worked, and they had rapid prototype parts in titanium in four months that were garbage, because it was difficult, and when it comes down to the finesse needed, you know, if you're trying to make a support to bolt onto a bridge, then the additive processes work awesomely well. You can, you could quickly make something that is strong enough to do the job. Trying to make a gearbox that fits into a knuckle. Yeah, can't do it. Different story, and it's going to be a very long time, because in the end, it doesn't matter how strong your parts are, if they haven't achieved the surface finish that you require, they're not finished. If you have to machine the surface finishes on there, you have to do the machining. Why the hell did you print it? You've not saved them. So that's the tool, that's the one that's missing, and it's coming. But a bit like fusion, it's probably another 40 years or more. That's a big technology. Fusion is not coming. It's not coming in 40 years at all.
Aaron Moncur:Well, Jon, I think we'll wrap it up there. This has been a really fun interview again for I feel bad now we didn't talk about any of the questions that I had prepared this one in a completely different direction, and it was delightful. I loved it. Thank you.
Jon Lowy:I'm, yeah, very happy to have sounded human.
Aaron Moncur:Jon, how can people get in touch with you?
Jon Lowy:I suppose through LinkedIn, the large tends to be, think of it as lucked out. You know, lucked out goes with face plant and Twitter and all of the other social networks that they're really not. They're for people with loud voices, not people with deep thoughts
Aaron Moncur:and, well, that's where I found you. LinkedIn. No,
Jon Lowy:I so I'm having to revise my thoughts on this, because jigger, they're trying to create a presence, and they're trying to use my knowledge and people, few people like me, to amplify their presence, because it's a good marketing tool. It's a good way of contacting people who need stuff done. And so I'm having to revise my opinion of LinkedIn, simply because it is a better tool than it used to be. I quit it years ago because it wasn't useful. It was just a club for people to talk nonsense. And then COVID came along and club the psychotics to talk bollocks, and I quit. And so I've had to come back to it and reassess it, and I'm doing that, and I'm here with you. That was that's an interesting experience. And how do people get in touch with me? J, O N, at W H, I O T E, C h.com so again, J O N, at W H, I O T E, C h.com just for background, there that sophio Tech, which is my kind of post. Or operating space. The Fauci is the native New Zealand blue duck, which is a pretty little creature, and it's one of those stories that like the drop bear. So you've heard of the drop bear in Australia, you've never heard Okay, so tourists in Australia are warned when you walk under trees, be careful of the drop bears, because they'll drop down on your nails. On you and they'll savage you. This is koalas. They, they, they don't savage anything. But people want the most vicious, vicious, terrifying, terrifying creature, right? And so, like my golden doodle, exactly, yes, yes. So the New Zealand equivalent of that is the FiO field, the blue duck, which is introduced to people who are going near water in New Zealand as the New Zealand carnivorous duck. So I like the idea that my my own operating space is a terrifying lie. So for your tech, I love that nobody can pronounce but they don't need to. That's fine because it's not really a business. It's just where I think
Aaron Moncur:I was actually going to ask you how you pronounce that I kept trying to say wheel tech couldn't make sense of it. The
Jon Lowy:Maori language, the native New Zealand language, is difficult to grasp, but very frenetic. So when you see a New Zealand word that looks weird, just say all of the letters and you'll be about right. Don't try and make anything clever out of it. So no, okay, but just say all the letters. So if you said real check, people would understand.
Aaron Moncur:Jon, this has been a delightful conversation.
Jon Lowy:Awesome.Thank you for your time. I'd enjoy the break.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You
