Tony Kelbert | Authenticity, Engineering, and the Business of Manufacturing

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The first time I thought it would be fun to be an engineer was when I was probably like 10 or 11 years old, and my dad was working on the car, and I'd never seen the underside of a car before. And I got on a creeper and I slid underneath the car, and I was like, "Holy smokes, there is a lot going on here. And so for me, engineering was like kind of a peek behind the curtain on how the modern modern world works, and I just dove down the rabbit hole and wanted to understand it more and more and more.
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Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Being an Engineer podcast.
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Today we've got Tony Kilbert, who is a mechanical engineer, manufacturing strategist, and chief burrito officer at Aero Growth, where he helps precision manufacturers get the aerospace and defense opportunities that match their core strengths. He's an advisor to a venture fund, and his career spans aerospace, defense, product development, and manufacturing business development. Tony brings a unique perspective on connecting engineering, manufacturing, supplier relationships, and business strategy to create sustainable growth. Tony, thanks so much for being here on the podcast with me.
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Yeah, thanks very much for having me, Aaron. It's been a while since we talked.
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It's exciting to get synced back up with you again.
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It has, it has, yeah. So I think Tony and I probably connected on LinkedIn originally. I don't know how long ago, few years ago, and we've loosely kept in touch over the years. But for any of you who are active on LinkedIn and are engineers, I'm sure that you see Tony all over the place because he's very active, and I think gets a lot of good press on LinkedIn. The community seems to know him very well for good reason. He puts a lot of fun, useful content out there. So I'm excited to have you on the show and see what we can learn from you, Tony.
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Yeah, thanks.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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I'm I'm excited. I think the useful might be debatable by some people, but
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bringing a smile to the faces eventually is useful. There we go. There we go.
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Yeah, yeah. You know, humor is hard to find.
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It's it's it's interesting, right? You kind of get a sense for who the people are on LinkedIn in in engineering who are pretty active, and everyone kind of has has their like specific niche.
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It seems like, and and and your your content is always just kind of humorous and lighthearted, and and not so like super hardcore technical, which which I think is a breath of fresh air, right? I mean, half the time, what we're looking for is just entertainment, anyway.
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You know, it's kind of interesting you say that. So, like, right now, my I had a really hard conversation with my boss when I decided to start getting active on LinkedIn, and it was basically, look, I have to disconnect with you. That's nothing personal.
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It's just what I'm doing on LinkedIn is completely separate from my career. My career informs it, but I can't have that idea that you're looking over my shoulder. That's not going to work. And so that was a that was a tough conversation to have, obviously, because you know, I'm sure the first thing he did was find one of his friends and send him to spy on me.
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But what is Tony really up to?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't up to anything nefarious. It's just kind of that, like, well, I think that's why LinkedIn is such an interesting platform. Actually, is because everything, everything that you post there, presumably is. is an appendix you would send along with your resume, right? Like that-that's how most people look at it. And I decided I cannot be creative if that's the format that I have to follow, because if I have the idea that my content has to produce something, it's is never going to look like me, because what I want to do is nothing like what I'm doing right now, and so I had to just completely decouple those things.
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What was it that originally got you interested in becoming active on LinkedIn?
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Yeah, I wrote an article in Like 2018, and it didn't really have anything to do with anything, and it's not very well written. But I was like, that was fun. Like I just sat down in front of the computer and I just let my thoughts spill out, and then I hit post, and it was fun. And so I didn't do anything with that at the time. I was working for Gulfstream Aerospace, so I didn't do anything with it. I stayed in a corporate setting for a while. Then I moved out into the startup world, and I started using LinkedIn more for like like sales prospecting and finding people that I needed to connect to. And what occurred to me is just like people are.
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Really accessible there, or they were, and so I just started connecting with like my favorite radio producers because why not?
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They have a LinkedIn presence.
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Like it doesn't matter that they're famous; they have a LinkedIn, and like just having conversations with like random people, like, and that was really really fun because I think it just exposed me to a whole new group of people that I never would have had contact with if I had stayed kind of in the engineering zone. And then in 2022, I was up at my in-laws' place in Wisconsin, and it just kind of like a light bulb came on. I was like, you know what?
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Why not? I'll just commit to it.
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I'm going to write every day on LinkedIn, and we'll see how it goes. And and there you go.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah, it's awesome. It's funny you talk about the how accessible people
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yes
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were on LinkedIn.
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Maybe a little bit less so now, but but still, it's a great platform for connecting with people. I I I've always been interested in in behavioral economics, consumer choice psychology, like things like that. Just I think are so fascinating. And there's this great book out there. Maybe you've read it. It's called
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The Power of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.
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Great book. It you know is like the New York top whatever. And this guy Robert Cialdini, he was a professor at Arizona State University. I'm in Phoenix, and he he had a long and illustrious career. He he went on to publish several books, and now he's there's like the Chaldeani Foundation. So he he's kind of a big deal, is my point. And I reached out to him on LinkedIn using one of the principles that he taught in his book Influence, and I, I, I was sure that he wasn't going to respond to me.
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Right, I'm, I'm a nobody. This guy's a world famous author, and he responded, and I was like,"Hey, can I take you out to lunch? And he said, "Sure, let's go out to lunch. So we, I went out to lunch with this famous author, super cool guy, fascinating stories, brilliant mind, and never would have been able to do that without LinkedIn. So there you go. Yeah, thank you, LinkedIn.
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It's kind of it's kind of funny too, like shooting the big shots like that.
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Yeah,
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like oh my goodness. So I I am an advisor to Omni Ventures, and I-I do apologize. It's starting to thunder and rain here, so if that gets intrusive, let me know. You totally find. So I am an advisor to Omni Ventures, but that-that's not something I ever would have like even attempted in my corporate role. But I went to a startup and got familiar with kind of the venture capital ecosystem, and then I was like,"Hey, you know what? This is interesting, and why not? Like, so I just sent a whole bunch of invitations to different people around here that were venture investors. I same deal. I I messaged this guy kind of at random, and he was like the ex CEO of like Pillsbury or something up in Minneapolis, like I don't know some big mugging muck, right? Like big dude. And I just showed up as me, expecting to just have a conversation. He showed up as him, expecting to have like a business strategy tête à tête or something like that. And it it wasn't a good match. Let's put it that way. It was the one of the most awkward lunches I've ever had. But you don't know unless you shoot your shot and like whatever you know. It was fun.
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Yeah. Well, how how did you get into engineering in the beginning? Did you grow up thinking to yourself engineering that's for me, or was it a little bit later that that came into focus.
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So I'll tell you what. The first time I thought it would be fun to be an engineer was when I was probably like 10 or 11 years old, and my dad was working on the car, and I'd never seen the underside of a car before. And I got on a creeper and I slid underneath the car, and I was like, "Holy smokes, there is a lot going on here. And so for me, engineering was like kind of a peek behind the curtain on how the modern modern world works, and I just dove down the rabbit hole and wanted to understand it more and more and more. And so I think that was that was the main reason for getting into engineering, and probably one of the bigger disappointments when I did get into engineering is a lot of engineering is not touching a lot of things in a limited capacity. It's getting really zeroed in onto one thing, and so for the bulk of my career, that's what I was looking for: is that opportunity to kind of zoom out and like I I want to take a broader view of this, and I want to see everything. I don't want to be a specialist. I I ended up working for a company here in Sarasota called Rob Brady Design, and during the interview, they were asking me questions about myself, and the interviewer just said, "Okay, so you've got a knowledge base that's about 1000 mile." Wide and two inches deep, and I kind of took it fence, but I'm like, yeah, okay, yep, you got me.
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So, and just to give the audience a little bit of context, can you talk briefly? You know, 62nd overview. What are some of the things that you've done in engineering, and then let's get into what are you doing now, and and what what motivated that trans trans not transaction transformation transition? Yeah, yeah, third time. There we go.
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Yeah. So I got into engineering. My first engineering job was at Oshkosh Defense. I was really fortunate to be part of a very cohesive and well-led team there, and that team, it would take existing Oshkosh defense products and modify them for international customers, and so it was a lot of adapting a core technology, understanding that core technology very well, understanding the customer specs very well, and then kind of like, you know, making the modifications necessary. What that meant was it was less of the diving deep into a single area of specialization, and it was much more about systems level engineering. Of okay, if we put weight was a big issue.
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The vehicle had to be able to be flown aboard a c1 130. There were a certain number of them that had to pack on. It was all part of the spec, but it got to the point where we had to like take five gallons of paint in a bucket out to the paint shop and say, "Here's the paint you get to paint the vehicle. That's it, because the weight was that critical. It was nuts, and so, but it was really cool too, because then it's like, okay, we're overweight on the rear axle. What can we do? Well, we can make storage compose storage compartments in the bumper for the tire chains, and that gets us 200 pounds forward of the front axle, which helps takes the take the weight off the rear axle, so that was really cool.
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The after that, I moved over to Gulfstream Aerospace when the g6 150 and the g2 80 were coming online, like 2014 ish. They had just a massive need for engineers, and I was like, that seems like a really cool product. So went to work on it.
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That was up in Appleton, where they do all of the interior outfitting. So, airframe built in Savannah flies up with ferry weights to the finishing facility. Take the weights out, install the interior, deliver to the customer. The coolest thing I worked on there was medical oxygen systems for medevac aircraft. That was really really cool. I have to be careful about how much I talk about this.
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There, in an aircraft, there is a rotor burst zone. So imagine if like you sucked a rock into the air into the the front of the engine, front of the turbine. If that rotor bursts, that shrapnel is going to go all over the place in kind of a cone shape. And so we had to take extraordinary care not to put medical oxygen components in that zone, obviously, because oxygen happens to be a pretty good oxidizer. Imagine that.
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That was a really cool job, and I I learned a lot about that.
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Where like, you know, that 1800 psi oxygen can start metal on fire.
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1800 psi oxygen by itself, will start metal on fire,
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simply because the molecules impinging on a flat plate create enough heat that it starts the oxidation reaction, and it will it will start it on fire. Like it doesn't even need an ignition source. It's really really cool, but it's also really scary because you have to be very careful about your bend radii and your machining radii and your burrs and all the things that go into that. So wow,
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so many details that you never even think about.
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Exactly, exactly.
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And you start diving down these rabbit holes, and it's like, wow, there's kind of like interesting stuff down here, you know. So that was cool. Yeah.
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After that, I jumped over to a startup that wanted to learn about the aerospace manufacturing industry. So there, the startup same was Form Logic. They, I was very early there, and my role was really to define the customer profile of what the perfect aerospace customer looked like, and so we kind of landed on the new space industry. But I brought that aerospace background in and said, "All right, here's what's required to work with an aerospace customer. Here's what's required to work with commercial aerospace. You know what? The new space industry-they're flying everything autonomously, so the FAA requirements drop off like big time." That's awesome. Let's target them because now we don't have to get certified before we even start building things, and it just brought that barrier to entry down. So we're able to get started there. Obviously, that role is like limited in scope once you have your ideal customer. I'm not. I wasn't a salesperson at that point, and I was like, okay, I'm done. You know,
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right? Yeah,
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and give me the
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next engineering project.
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Exactly, and then I went to real Brady Design, and I worked on the most diverse array of projects there that I ever have in an engineering job.
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I think it's probably similar to what you're doing at Pipeline, where it's like you're working on all kinds of different projects, meeting different customer specs. You have your specialties, but here's everything
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different,
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and that's wild.
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Like the variety of people you meet, I don't know. That's fascinating.
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It's super fun.
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It's a terrible business model because we're inventing something every project, right?
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And it's like, oh my gosh, I hope they order a second machine. You know, very fun, very fun. Hundreds of 1000s of
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dollars of NRE and like no path to full rate production. Yeah,
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yep, yeah,
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all too familiar.
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Yeah, and you get the crazy inventors that walk through the door and want to hand you a check and then make their dreams come true. Which yeah, and
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that check is usually like $5,000 for a$200,000 project. Yep,
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it's not much, and you don't want to like rain on their parade either. But you have to set expectations. Yeah, we've
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we've definitely got those stories. Yeah, mostly good. A few not great, but mostly good. Right.
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It's. I think that's actually kind of where I got really interested in the is this even worth doing side of things because I saw a lot of people pouring funds into things that just did not need to exist, and I'm like this this might make sense for you your specific situation, but like how big is this actual market?
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Yeah,
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and you know there are four people like you. Okay, that's cool. That's not a business, you know.
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Yeah, yeah. I like to say here at Pipeline, we sell an expensive product that not many people need. Luckily, they're just enough to keep the lights on here. But that's what it feels like, you know, building this expensive machine that is going to be used in one factory, maybe ever. PDX 2026 is October 20th and 21st in Phoenix, Arizona. It is not a typical trade show. PDX is a practical training event for engineers who design, develop, test, and manufacture physical products, whether they be medical devices, consumer products, or automated machines.
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Exhibitors teach hands-on sessions, run demos, and help attendees build skills they can use right away. If you are a mechanical engineer, biomedical engineer, product development engineer, manufacturing engineer, or engineering leader PDX was built for you. See you there.
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Yeah, but it's interesting too, and it doesn't make the technical hurdles less easy to overcome simply because there's no.
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Yeah,
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I'm. I'm actually kind of like you're interviewing me, but I'm actually kind of curious to hear about like stuff that you've worked on that you can talk about that just had crazy technical requirements.
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Absolutely,
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yeah. I'll talk about what I can. Let's see. Oh well, the one that that kind of always comes to mind, and it was purely mechanical, and it was a bicycle. An inventor approached us about developing a dual-powered bicycle, and he wanted riders to be able to use their their arms and their legs at the same time. Of course, if you've seen recumbent bicycles, that already exists, right? It's it's like a rotary motion where you're using your arms, and then you you're also pedaling with a typical crank down with your feet. But he said that's not a good or an efficient motion for.
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He was also to exercise science and and and physiology, and he said that that's not an optimal motion. You know, the the rotational like this. It really should be push and pull, push and pull. You can generate more power doing that. So is okay. I mean, if you've got money and you want to pursue this, sure, we'll we'll we'll help you with it. And we went through a few kind of major design iterations of how do you tie the the push pull motion with your arms down to the the standard crankshaft because he wanted it to be supplemental power, right? Sure.
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He he wanted you to be able to push and pull, pedal with your arms just by your arms, and not using your feet at all, and not have the the crank rotate when you're just using your arms to do that, right? So your feet can stay stay. That's where
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it gets tricky.
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That's where it gets tricky. Yes, yes, and and you needed to be able to turn the bicycle as well, right? So you're like pumping up and down.
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You got some kind of drive mechanism that's going down to the crank that allows you to turn left and right. Does not drive actively the the the foot cranks down below, but still allows you to generate that power, so that that was a really tricky mechanical problem to solve, and we we did end up solving it, and it was I mean, it was not a production. And to be fair, he he just wanted a prototype, proof of concept, right? So that's what we did, and this thing was just like this this Frankenstein thing. It was super heavy. The bike probably weighed like 70 pounds once we were done adding all these aluminum brackets to everything. Yeah, but we ended up with this really clever mechanism down at the pedals where we had a dual action rack and pinion. So we had racks that were moving in. I'm sorry, the racks were were. I'm going to use my my fingers here. So those of you who hear audio only, sorry, you can't see the racks were my my pointer fingers, and they were moving back and forth like that at the same time. And then you had two one way bearings that were offset or not offset, but but oriented in opposite directions, so that as you move those racks one direction, one of the one wave bearings turns, and the other one doesn't. And when you move it back, the other one turns. So anyway, that allowed us to add this like supplemental power without driving the the foot cranks in in a rotary motion.
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And then up on top, we had this this insane. I don't even know what to call it. It was a a curved bar with a carriage that that rode across this curve, and the curve was a compound curve.
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So in in two directions, right?
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There wasn't a flat face on this thing. It was super expensive to to machine. It was CNC machined, and so this would allow the the handlebars to like turn back and forth, and then this this like curved bar was attached to a linkage that just kind of reciprocated up and down and and drove the power down at the the foot crank. So we came up with solutions for everything mechanically. It was it was really cool, fun project, and it was time and materials. So we got paid for all of it. That was great. But yeah, what what a fun you know difficult product to engineer that will never go anywhere. Yeah, and there are three people out there who would ever use that.
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Yeah, and as you're talking about it, I hear like, okay, we had this cool mechanism down below, and I'm like, three weeks to prototype, and then we had this cool thing, and I'm like, a month to prototype. I'm like, this is like a six month long project.
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It was longer than that. Yeah, I'm sure it was. Yeah, those were always the yeah.
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They're like, we went through three or four like major design iterations before landing at at those particular mechanisms. So it was it was like a year and a half of development on this thing. It was wild.
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Even if you knew what you were designing, it would still take you yeah to get there. Yeah,
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super fun project.
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Super fun project. And then we had. I'll share one more. Do we have time for one more, Tony? I
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don't care. Yeah, I got nothing
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to do. The new host of the Being an Engineer podcast. Yeah. Okay. So we had this other project that is now closed, and this one I also need to be careful about exactly what I say because I can't really talk about the terms of why it's not going anymore, but it was a a a very sophisticated automation project, and I don't think I can say exactly what the product was, but I can describe it. Think of think of of paintbrush bristles, right? Like just thin thin polymer filament, right?
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Yep.
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We had to take these thin bristles. I'll call them bristles. They weren't actually bristles, but they were like 0.05 millimeter diameter, so a couple thou, really, really small, right? Fine, fine filament, and we would receive it in in a bundle, like a puck that was maybe a two three inch diameter puck with this stuff just like just crammed in there, right? And if you did the math on these based on the diameter of this thing and and like the puck size, it was like a million filament in this you know three inch diameter puck, and we had to take these these the filament out of this little puck and place them into a kind of elongated tray that was a rectangular shape. Like place them down in this tray. Keep them all perfectly parallel with each other, and not allow static electricity, which in Arizona especially is is really challenging. Not allow static electricity to. Just made the go poof everywhere, right? Just fly, fly out. So that was the first hard process. Yeah, yeah, I know. It was pretty, pretty simple stuff. We had some students take crack at it. They finished it in a few weeks.
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Yeah. So once we had it in this tray, then we had to pick a strip of these filament up with a long strip of Kapton tape would would go down into this this nest and pick up one strip at a time of this filament. Had to be full, right? No gaps in between the filament, just full.
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And and again, had to keep the orientation perfectly parallel relative to each other. And then there was a burnishing operation to kind of really make sure all those filament were in the capton, and then we had to laser cut one end to get it to length, and then we had to move the whole thing to another station where there was a thermal process that got applied to form these filament into a very specific shape. And then there were there were other processes that happened after that, and there were just there were robots everywhere, and we had to we had to develop all of this stuff, right? How do you get it out of the puck without static electricity blowing it everywhere? How do you keep them oriented in the same orientation? How do you how do you use heat to to basically mold the shape into something?
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The there was an existing process. Last little tidbit, and then we'll move on. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but I thought it was pretty cool what we came up with. There was an existing process for this this heat shaping idea, but it took like half an hour, and it was way too long to automate this process. Right? Previously, it was a manual process. That's the whole reason they came to us. They said we need to automate this thing, so it took like half an hour to thermally shape this this filament, and we ended up coming up with a process that took about 15 seconds, and it was awesome. It worked so well, yeah. Anyway, so all that got strung together, and it was like a big it was it was a big manufacturing line, fully automated. That's probably the most complex project that we've ever done. Pipeline now offers procurement of custom machined parts at significantly lower costs without sacrificing speed or quality. We design and build custom machines ourselves, so we consume a lot of precision machined components, over the past several years, we developed a proven overseas supply chain to support that work. And in 2025, we successfully piloted that capability with select customers. Now we're opening it up more broadly. If you'd like to see how our prices and lead times compare. Send us a drawing or two for quote. Visit teampipeline.us or message me directly on LinkedIn.
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And no one's probably ever heard of the single component that goes into that's buried in something else.
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That's you know, like that's the crazy thing to me about these projects is like there is a crazy amount of innovation that has to happen
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and incredible no one will ever see R and D. Yeah.
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Oh, yeah. So much, so much work into figuring all that stuff out. Yeah.
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It's incredibly cool.
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Yeah. Well, thank you for asking. I don't get to talk so much on this show, so it's nice. Appreciate it. Yeah.
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No. All right. The the the so I have one. This is a fun one, actually. It's it's very brief, but basically somebody came to us with a check and was like, "Hey, we really want you to find a way to break the rules of physics. Oh
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no, you
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know, because they had this idea and like it should work, right? But it was like perpetual motion machine kind of situation. I'm like, man, I don't want to call your baby ugly because, like, I know you spent a long time on this, but this is never gonna work.
00:30:14.339 --> 00:30:28.939
I okay, maybe this this episode of the podcast is just us telling stories about yeah, man, projects we've taught. Let's do this. This is going to be fun. Okay, so you brought up the perpetual motion.
00:30:26.119 --> 00:31:10.019
That reminded me of a project that I did long time ago. This was a guy in my neighborhood who knew that I was an engineer and came to me and said, "Hey, I get. I've got this idea for. It was like these spheres that were attached to a long rope, and you'd start rotating them around like two pulleys, and there was a a bath of water down in the bottom. And he his claim was that the you know the buoyant force would would keep this this chain rotating over and over and over, and then you can use that rotation, generate power, et cetera, et cetera. And so I was like, okay, so it's a perpetual motion machine. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know perpetual motion doesn't work.
00:31:06.899 --> 00:31:13.019
No, that's not what this is. But I was like, dude, this is a perpetual motion machine. You're
00:31:13.229 --> 00:31:14.129
subscribing it to me.
00:31:15.089 --> 00:31:18.929
It gets better.
00:31:15.089 --> 00:31:32.479
Okay, so he's like, I want to work on this, but my wife. Won't let me. So he says, I knew this guy. We're kind of friends, I guess. And he says, "Can I work on it in your garage in the mornings? So I was like, "Sure.
00:31:32.779 --> 00:32:02.909
You want to use some of my garage space? That's fine. Go ahead. So this dude would come to my garage in the mornings, and he'd be working. He'd be trying to build this thing, and you know, spoiler alert, it did not work. I even drew him like four free body diagrams to show him like this is why it won't work. It's like, yeah, but no, it's gonna work. You know, so this guy was out in my garage for about a month building this thing, and there's like water all over the place and parts and pieces, and yeah, spoiler alert.
00:31:59.019 --> 00:32:05.759
You gotta. The perpetual motion machine did not work in this in this instance. Yeah,
00:32:05.969 --> 00:32:09.119
who could have seen that coming? But good on you for letting them try.
00:32:07.319 --> 00:32:29.989
Honestly, like because sometimes, like I feel like you gotta just kind of brute force your weight. It. I mean, I have an eight year old and a 10 year old, and there are certain things that I can tell them that no matter what I say and no matter how sound the reasoning is, I absolutely know they will not believe me, and they'll need to try it themselves. And you know what am I going to do?
00:32:30.109 --> 00:32:32.929
Okay, go for it. Let's see how it works. You know, tell me.
00:32:33.019 --> 00:32:42.789
Yep, it's funny, and it's interesting too. So, like that kind of oh my goodness, this this could go a lot of different ways, Aaron.
00:32:45.489 --> 00:32:50.559
Let's just dive in, dive in, go whatever direction you think is going to be interesting.
00:32:51.549 --> 00:33:00.069
There's someone in my family. They had a a a lawn blow a lawnmower that they wanted to put a snowblower on the front of.
00:33:00.638 --> 00:33:00.808
Okay,
00:33:00.989 --> 00:33:37.519
and so like obviously you know the riding mower that's tricky because you've got that much weight out in the front. Your drive is in the rear. Obviously, it's going to lift through wheels and it's going to spin, and you're not going to go anywhere. He's like, okay, but here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to move the attachment point back by the wheels, and then that'll transfer all the weight to the wheels. And I'm like drawing a free body diagram and you know moment arms and stuff like that and I'm like, but you know what, he's gonna do this anyway. I just gotta let him. Like, I just gotta say, hey, you know what?
00:33:33.859 --> 00:33:37.939
I'm not gonna help you, but go nuts.
00:33:38.809 --> 00:33:39.979
Absolutely. Yep. I
00:33:40.519 --> 00:33:40.579
yeah.
00:33:41.329 --> 00:33:48.069
I remember when I was a kid, and in many ways, this probably hasn't changed even as an adult, high level.
00:33:48.159 --> 00:34:02.009
But as a kid, asking my mom about the stove and like, what, how does it work, and how does it generate heat? Right? She's like, well, you you turn this knob, and then you can use it to cook things. And I remember asking, well, can I touch it?
00:34:02.009 --> 00:34:04.439
She says, "No, don't touch it.
00:34:02.009 --> 00:34:18.179
It's really hot. It will burn you. And I said, "Well, it doesn't look that hot. And she's she's like, "Don't touch it. It will burn you, right? So later on, when she wasn't looking, sure enough, I touch it just because I had to, you know, understand that myself. Another
00:34:18.299 --> 00:34:21.000
it was hot. Who
00:34:21.329 --> 00:34:21.389
knew?
00:34:21.809 --> 00:34:33.860
And I burned myself. But I feel like that's just human nature, right? Like we, even when logical, smart people tell us something, we sometimes we just have to learn for ourselves.
00:34:34.519 --> 00:35:11.400
You know, it's kind of interesting too. And like, so we're talking engineering, but it transitions pretty neatly into what I'm doing now, which is on the coaching side. And like, you can't want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. And so, what you end up doing a lot of time is like,"All right, I'm not here to drag you along this path. I'm here as somebody that's gone down this road before you that can tell you what to watch out for and motivate you through the rough stuff, and give you some guidance when you come to ask me, but I cannot be there to push you along it to a destination that you don't even want to get to.
00:35:11.969 --> 00:35:12.029
Yeah,
00:35:12.329 --> 00:35:58.000
and so that's been really interesting. Like as I've gotten older, and actually working with my partner Dan has showed me a lot of this too, but It's like sometimes the objective actually really isn't even that important. It's the amount of development that happens on the way there, and when you look at it that way, it's like, okay, did they achieve this objective that we set out to? No, but check this out. They can now do these five things that they never would have before. They're interacting with people in a way they never would have before. All of this will lead to that outcome, but it'll look completely different than what we had planned for them because they're a different person than we are.
00:35:58.689 --> 00:35:59.019
Yeah. But
00:35:59.079 --> 00:36:27.019
just kind of helping people come become the best version of themselves. It it's almost like it's kind of like the opposite of engineering, where you know the outcome and you work back to figure out what's going to get you there. Instead, you start with this kind of pile of ingredients that everybody has and point them in a certain direction. And then help them develop the parts of themselves that they need in order to get there, and it's really, really cool and rewarding too.
00:36:28.279 --> 00:36:34.909
Do you have any stories that you could share that illustrate that point? Of course, without violating any kind of confidentiality.
00:36:35.779 --> 00:36:41.919
So, I I struggle right now, but let me just think about that for one second.
00:36:42.339 --> 00:36:42.939
Sure, I think
00:36:43.299 --> 00:37:29.329
I have more stories of times where, like, there are. I'm I'm a strong believer that people tend not to change unless there's like a forcing function, and so that can be that they aspire to something much greater than they're able to attain right now, or it can be it's just painful to be who I am right now, and I want that to stop, like help me. And so I think what ends up happening is like people have self protective mechanisms that they rely on to survive uncomfortable things.
00:37:24.799 --> 00:37:44.409
When something uncomfortable comes up, we're there to support them through it if they choose to grow as a result of it. But we're also not going to pull them through that if they choose to revert to self-preservation and go back the other direction.
00:37:39.259 --> 00:38:03.929
And so, that's been kind of interesting to to watch that unfold, and it and it's made me kind of realize something in my own life. Like, the areas where I see the greatest growth, like I don't think anybody sees growth in their own life as it happens. It's something that you catch in the rearview mirror.
00:37:59.109 --> 00:38:59.949
But for me, when I'm feeling pain in any specific way, and that could be like having a difficult conversation or working really hard to understand something or whatever it is, it's like to me that's not even a a negative thing anymore. That's just a signal like I'm growing in this area of my life, and I I really like looking at it that way and helping people because when people are in pain or they're afraid, they tend not to act in logical, predictable ways. They tend to revert back to impulse driven behavior that's a result of all of their experiences to date. But if you can help them recognize that pain, recognize it as growth, and help them kind of like, okay, this is a signal, but I don't need to pay exclusive attention to it, and it doesn't need to worry me too much. We just need to focus on this. That's really, really rewarding, and I can't, I can't give concrete examples, but it's been really cool to watch that happen.
00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:05.009
How did you get into that? How did you even know that this was something that you were good at?
00:39:07.169 --> 00:39:13.079
That's actually a result of just my own personal upbringing. Let's put it that way.
00:39:13.619 --> 00:39:13.769
Okay.
00:39:15.929 --> 00:39:47.799
I the environment I grew up in was quote stable on the surface, deeply under unstable underneath it, and I was continuously understanding what motivated people simply to kind of manipulate the outcomes because it wasn't safe for me not to just go with the flow.
00:39:38.689 --> 00:39:56.109
Wow, And so, so yeah, it's I always I always say to Dan like coaching is white hat manipulation. It's manipulating someone with their best interest in mind.
00:39:56.679 --> 00:39:58.659
Yeah, right.
00:39:56.679 --> 00:40:01.980
Because the word manipulation gets a bad rap, right?
00:39:58.719 --> 00:40:08.069
Manipulation is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be ethical manipulation or white hat manipulation, as you put it.
00:40:06.929 --> 00:40:08.069
Yeah,
00:40:08.159 --> 00:40:22.369
exactly. And and I think the the challenge is like, um, with any skill set, any skill that you have is kind of like a a tool in your belt or a weapon in your hand, and it just depends what you use it for,
00:40:23.058 --> 00:40:45.578
yeah. So yeah, yeah, fascinating. I would love to talk just a little bit about the the technical coaching that you're doing right now, helping companies, you know, with with their their businesses. Let's say that is it primarily machine shops that you're working with, contract primarily. Yeah,
00:40:45.730 --> 00:40:48.609
menu manufacturers. Let's put it at that. Yep.
00:40:49.389 --> 00:40:58.629
So I don't know how much you're able to get into this, or or if it's even going to be the right question. And if it's not, we can just move on.
00:40:55.989 --> 00:41:13.739
But let's say that there are some manufacturing leaders who are listening to this episode right now, and they're thinking,"Man, I sure would love to get a taste of what it's like to to work with Tony and to receive some of the best practices that he's worked out over the years.
00:41:13.829 --> 00:41:58.689
And by the way, everyone, this is not a sponsored podcast. Tony pay me anything to to say any of this, but I. I always I always try to tease out some best practice or or set of information that the audience the listeners can can go and use right some kind of practical piece of education that they can go use. So when you're starting to work with a new manufacturer, what what are some of the questions that you ask to help extract the information you need to to like guide them or or to discover where they are in their journey, and then maybe what are some of the like the common obstacles that you find these manufacturers like the patterns that you see over and over, right? Yeah.
00:41:59.230 --> 00:44:15.899
So so it's helpful to frame. It's helpful to frame manufacturing broadly in order to do that. So please don't let me get back to the question of like what we do to kind of figure out where to start. But drawing the map of the entire space is useful because manufacturers typically, I'll just say machine shops. Machine shops is easy because I understand it very well. There are 30,000 of them in the United States. That's a stupid number of small businesses. Like that's insane, and 99.9 something percent of them never crack past the like about $5 million in revenue. That's kind of if you get to 10, you've really done something correct, and there is no entity apart from like a send cut send who's not you know they're not really machine shop they're more on the sheet metal side. Although they do CNC machining, there are very few that will ever just like kind of take that rocket ship and like really really scale. So what that means is there's kind of like all of these independent little islands of manufacturing all over the place that all have 10 to 20 employees and are kind of solving all of the problems of manufacturing by themselves, and so like there are trade organizations, there are networking groups, there are all of these kinds of things, but it's It's very. Imagine that you're an OEM and you're going out to quote $100 million worth of work. Where do you even start to look? Because the way things have been in the '80s and '90s is there's always pressure that somebody's going to do it cheaper and faster, and if they can't do it domestically, they'll ship it offshore. In order to keep your doors open, if you've got 10 to 20 people who are probably friends and family on your payroll, you've got to compete on price. I was talking to somebody the other day, and he was telling me a story about a machine shop that did very well up in an aerospace town. Let's call it that. And he's like, "How have you done really well? He's like, "We don't work for big aerospace customer because they get us on the hook. They pressure us. They pressure us. They pressure us.
00:44:12.959 --> 00:45:22.309
When we get to the point where we're very competitive on price, then something changes. Like they go elsewhere, and now we've committed 90% of our resources to this one customer, and they evaporate, and we're done. Like you can't survive on 10% of your revenue. Yeah, you you have to close the doors. And he's like, and then we just come around and scoop up the parts. Like you know, we hire the good people and we buy the good equipment and assimilate, and that's how we've grown. And it sounds cannibalistic, but also like there's a cautionary tale there, and just don't concentrate your customer base. If you can diversify into two to three different industry verticals with four to five customers in each, you've got a path to probably 50 million just with that customer base. But if you concentrate and you only have either one industry vertical, like we were talking about, kind of offline, like an oil and gas shop, that's a whipsaw. So, oil and gas, you might do $30 million for them one year, and you might do 10 million for them the next year. Well, how do you hire for that? Like, you can't, and you don't want to miss out on the next $30 million upside.
00:45:19.980 --> 00:45:46.869
So, you've got to take a significant loss. So that's an area where we've been able to plug in and just kind of help customers diversify. But the strategy there, you so that's the that's the map of the whole space. Typically, if you're a small shop, you don't have sales resources in house. Your CEO is going out between running jobs.
00:45:47.169 --> 00:46:09.869
He's calling customers and he's getting people on the phone and hopefully sending them some work. If you, it's very difficult to cultivate a strong sales pipeline in that mode because the only time you have to sell is when you know things are bad, and so that inherently positions you to be desperate on a sales call, which never ever works for anybody. You know, yeah.
00:46:10.889 --> 00:46:20.869
And so what we try to do, and this is what we do with the so Josh McCain facilitates our group calls, but we have business development calls, and we just say our. All right.
00:46:20.989 --> 00:46:54.819
Look, I know you're really busy busy right now. Commit to some outreach, and we'll hold you accountable for it. And then we'll get the group together, and we'll talk about what worked, what didn't work, all of this kind of thing. And we'll just put some systems behind your sales outreach, so that you can celebrate your wins with a group of people that are happy for you, and you can sales outreach sucks because 90% of the people are just going to ignore you or say no. It sucks, but if you're doing that with a group of people who are also getting told no, it sucks less.
00:46:55.989 --> 00:46:56.949
Misery loves company
00:46:57.459 --> 00:47:06.359
exactly. So that's part of what we do. But you asked how we how we get started.
00:47:01.559 --> 00:47:31.039
We always do an onboarding, so we'll fly out to a company and just spend a day or two at that company walking around. You can tell a lot about how a company works when you walk around with the owner and machine shops, especially if people are coming up to you and introducing themselves. That's great. Better yet, if the owner is walking around with you and says, "Oh, and here's James, and he runs our five axis, you know, "Hey, what are you working on today?
00:47:31.849 --> 00:47:35.209
That's an even better signal.
00:47:31.849 --> 00:48:07.529
That's a cohesive company culture. So we like to see that, and then also we get a sense for kind of like where the bottlenecks are that they might not recognize, so we're able to coach, and then we really zero in with leadership on how do I even want to say like who they are as people, what motivates them, what what's valuable to them. Like we were saying before, like engineering, you can start with an outcome and work backwards toward what you need to achieve that outcome.
00:48:04.019 --> 00:48:13.439
With people, you have the people that you have, and so if you want to achieve an outcome, you have to develop the people that you have in order to achieve it.
00:48:14.250 --> 00:48:14.309
So
00:48:14.759 --> 00:48:52.659
I'm curious. So you've worked in engineering environments, and you're now very familiar with machine shop environments, manufacturing environments. For me, culture has always been kind of the differentiating factor between a successful team and an unsuccessful team. I mentioned that what we do at Pipeline here. I said it kind of tongue in cheek, but there is an element of truth to the fact that our business model is not a great business model. It's it's difficult to make money, you know, designing one-off machines. Hopefully, we get a second one that we can sell and actually make some money there.
00:48:47.439 --> 00:49:06.000
But I think that truly one of, if not the reason that we're still in business and doing reasonably well is we have just a wonderful culture here. People genuinely enjoy coming to work.
00:49:01.799 --> 00:49:46.209
They enjoy the the people they work with. They like the work, and everyone just kind of does what what should be done. We have core values that we actually talk about, not just platitudes at a wall. Number two is governed by productivity, not bureaucracy. And people are just productive. They do the right thing without having been told what to do, and and that to me is just a direct result of of our culture, and it's led to the success that that we've had. I'm curious to hear your observations. Have you seen fundamental differences in culture between a strictly technical engineering environment versus the manufacturing slash machine shop environment, how different are they, if at all?
00:49:46.959 --> 00:51:19.439
Yeah, so there are no systems, right? Like, so that's not that's not entirely true. I've worked for very large corporations, and like, if there's not a procedure for something, you kind of panic and you don't even know what to do, right? Like, the medical oxygen thing was really fun because there were no procedures for it, and I actually had to go up. But I spent two months trying to find the thing that would tell me here's how you do these things because everything is prescribed, and so in a machine shop, a lot of times how machine shops get started is it's. a guy and his brother. We've worked with a couple of those shops, and they're great. They have a vision of all the machines they want to buy. Here's what they want to achieve. Here's their customers. Like it's really really cool. But if how do I want to say this? I was just saying this to Dan earlier today, but like a small company lives and dies by its founders, a medium-sized company lives and dies by its systems, and so there's an interesting bridge to cross there. And I think a lot of smaller manufacturers are still living and dying by their founders, whereas an engineering organization, just the nature of engineering means that it's probably not one or two people in their garage doing this stuff. Like I know a few, I know a few engineers like that, and they do they do well and they thoroughly enjoy. But but there has to be some sort of structure there,
00:51:20.069 --> 00:51:20.129
yeah,
00:51:20.309 --> 00:51:20.669
or it doesn't.
00:51:21.379 --> 00:51:22.429
Yep, I've seen
00:51:23.809 --> 00:52:16.019
I've seen a bunch of cultures. So I've seen the the corporate very cohesive culture. I've seen the corporate very by the book cramming people into pigeonholes culture, and I've seen the small business family culture, which of the three is the one I hate the most, and it's kind of weird to say that, but the problem that can arise there is in a cohesive corporate culture. Obviously, that's great. In a pigeonholed culture, at least you know what's expected of you, you know. In a quote family culture, the politics run so deep that there are things that should be said that you cannot say because of who you'd have to say it to.
00:52:16.199 --> 00:52:19.199
Yeah. Yep.
00:52:16.199 --> 00:52:19.199
Conversations don't happen.
00:52:19.859 --> 00:52:28.879
No. No, they don't. But they have to, and they don't happen because you got to sit next to them at Thanksgiving, and like you know that's gonna suck. That's right.
00:52:29.449 --> 00:52:34.009
Yeah, the pain of that Thanksgiving dinner outweighs the pain of not having that business conversation.
00:52:34.579 --> 00:52:41.889
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and and it makes sense, right? Like business relationships can be transactional. Family relationships, you're just, hey.
00:52:42.039 --> 00:52:43.419
Yep, you stop here forever.
00:52:43.539 --> 00:52:43.899
So you're there.
00:52:44.439 --> 00:52:44.859
That's right.
00:52:44.439 --> 00:52:44.859
Yeah.
00:52:46.179 --> 00:52:52.419
So that said, like I don't know, machine shop versus engineering culture.
00:52:49.599 --> 00:53:25.099
Machine shop cultures tend to be much more like good ones are very cohesive. We work with this one group right now, and I love them so much. They're they're a family business. They have been for a long time. There's a new generation of management coming in, but the new generation of management is saying, like, look, this is all going to get better for us if we have these difficult conversations now. And this Thanksgiving might suck, but next Thanksgiving is going to be great. You know what I mean? And they're kind of willing to sacrifice that short-term pain for the longer-term gain, and it's awesome to see them evolve.
00:53:25.578 --> 00:53:29.658
That's very cool.
00:53:25.578 --> 00:54:58.808
Well, yeah. I've got a question for you that I don't even know how exactly to phrase this. So let me just speak for a minute and see how this comes out. By the way, yes, I don't think we've at least I haven't been looking at the questions at all this whole time. No, what what what a wonderful fun conversation! These are always the best ones that go completely off script and are off the rails, organic. Yes, off the rails. Also, yeah, in a good way. Okay, so I remember first looking at your LinkedIn profile description, and it said, I can't remember if it said Chief Burrito Officer, but it said, and I'm paraphrasing. I'll probably get pretty close. Can eat a chipotle burrito without spilling anything, something like that, right? And I thought, I like this guy already, because so so often, and I'm probably guilty of it myself. You you see these LinkedIn descriptions that are like, X Meta, X Tesla, you know, yeah, yeah, Ted speaker, rider, whatever, like, like, yeah, and yeah, that's all true, I'm sure. But then you see something that's just so practical, like down to earth, can eat a Chipotle burrito without without spilling it. So anyway, getting back to my question, you seem like a very curious and thoughtful person, and and I'm curious about what is it that motivates you? What gets you out of bed? And does that that statement that can eat a chipotle burrito without dropping anything does that tie in somehow to like what makes Tony tick as a person? Because I imagine that was a very intentional decision to use that.
00:54:59.498 --> 00:55:19.018
That was like a key defining moment. So, who inspired me to do that? Nathan Cunningham. His his headline. He changed it after he quit Tesla, and it was ex community pool lifeguard or something like that. And I was like, "That's cool, because I love that.
00:55:19.619 --> 00:55:29.539
Yeah, because I when I was in college, I went to Chipotle so much. I never talked to the people there really, but they noticed when I got my haircut.
00:55:26.689 --> 00:55:29.539
Like I was there all the time.
00:55:29.629 --> 00:55:29.689
Wow.
00:55:30.529 --> 00:56:22.849
Yeah. And so, like, I I did develop that skill, and and for what it's worth, it's the toothpaste method where you kind of squeeze it up from the bottom, and you know, the last bite is all tortilla, but you have to pay a price for peak achievement, I guess. But it was intentional because, like, I say this a lot. I kind of have the personality of a golden retriever. Like, I don't really have an ego, but I had to put other things in my headline because I thought that's what was going to be important to the people that wanted to hire me, and when I did that, it was like you know what I don't even know who I want to hire me, so I'm just going to go put myself out there, my least marketable, most cultivated skill, and if people get a kick out of it, super. And and that's where it started.
00:56:24.709 --> 00:56:36.709
It's so true. I was just thinking about this the other day, right? So often we we say the things out there that we think are going to appeal to the most people out there, right?
00:56:37.159 --> 00:57:03.179
And and the the the trick and maybe the the non intuitive side of that is that you shouldn't want everyone to agree with you or like there there are too many people out there. You don't want all that attention. You want to put your most genuine self out there, the self that is is actually you, that is going to resonate with the people that you're trying to attract, right?
00:57:03.809 --> 00:57:12.059
Yes, there are there are plenty of those people out there as well. So it's not like you're you're missing out on on all of these things by trying to appeal to to everyone.
00:57:12.719 --> 00:57:18.149
Well, and it's really really hard to be a good actor too, and it's a skill I've never ever wanted to cultivate.
00:57:18.299 --> 00:57:30.769
And so I was like, well, so why am I wearing a costume? Like, this isn't this isn't me. Like I don't. Anyway, um, yeah, it's so much easier just to be yourself, get comfortable being yourself.
00:57:30.949 --> 00:57:36.799
Actually, it's very difficult to get comfortable being yourself because it's not always safe.
00:57:33.379 --> 00:57:54.519
Honestly, yeah. Like I, I think that's why there is a lot of posturing, especially on like LinkedIn and stuff. Is like if you said, you know, best side by side driver this side of you know the Mississippi River or something like that, like you're gonna go into a job interview and like that doesn't mean anything, you know?
00:57:54.699 --> 00:57:55.389
Yeah, right.
00:57:56.379 --> 00:57:59.679
But at the same time, I'd hire that guy, right?
00:57:59.769 --> 00:58:03.389
Like I, I want to get to know him a little bit, you know. You hire
00:58:03.509 --> 00:58:08.759
that guy because you are that guy, right? You, you're. Wow, that's fair. That's your people. That's your people.
00:58:09.269 --> 00:58:20.279
Yeah, and I'm saying that's not a bad thing, right? Like, yeah, I don't want to go to work for some corporate type who doesn't share any of my values, who only cares about the bottom line, who's going to do anything to get there. Like, that's not me.
00:58:20.849 --> 00:58:25.279
I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't find any joy in that environment. So I think I think that's a good thing.
00:58:26.119 --> 00:58:32.389
So I'm. I'm curious too. Like I wasn't able to make it to PDX yes last year.
00:58:29.059 --> 00:58:38.839
I was really excited when we talked about it a while back, and I kind of overcommitted and underdelivered on what I was going to be able to do there.
00:58:38.989 --> 00:58:52.029
Obviously, but I am really excited about what you're doing because I think it needs to exist. Like there needs to be that community of engineering people that of engineers that are learning from each other.
00:58:48.339 --> 00:58:57.009
And I'm, would you mind sharing just like a little bit about what PDX was about and what your vision for it is? Because I I love what you're doing there.
00:58:57.549 --> 01:01:02.189
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you for asking. So PDX is not the Portland Airport. First of all, it is the Product Development Expo, and I own a business, right? So I'm I'm always thinking about how can I feed my people, how can I keep my people healthy, and one of the things that we've done is attend trade shows. We were at MDNM, which is a giant medical device and manufacturing trade show, we did that for five years, and we really didn't see much come from it. And I'm I'm an entrepreneur, right? I love creating things. It's just in my genes to create. Someone referred to my my coming up with new ideas as incessant, and and that might be an appropriate description. I just can't help myself, so I thought, you know, there's got to be a better way to do this, and I think the the format really is not very conducive to like getting to know people, and and in what we do, the price tags are usually pretty high. You know, it's not this $20 purchase on Amazon that's just transactional. Like you need to get to know a person and trust them and like them before working with them on$100,000 project, a half million dollar project. So I thought, what could we do to like facilitate better connections like that? And I thought, you know, engineers love to learn, right? What if we had this training first format where exhibitors come and these exhibitors are not necessarily just like the salesperson or the marketing person, but they're technical people, maybe a sales engineer, and and they're subject matter experts in whatever it is, you know, project management for engineering, scanning and reverse engineering, GDNT, advanced CAD design, right? All these disciplines that that we as hardware engineers need, and what if they taught these engineers something like really truly taught them something, not a veiled sales pitch, but gave them some practical, expert-led information that they could go back and start using in their jobs right away? Surely that would be a better format for for both the attendees and the exhibitors alike, right?
01:01:02.789 --> 01:01:26.569
Attendees, they get something truly practical and valuable out of it. The exhibitors now, hopefully, the attendees know them, like them, trust them because they've they've given them this value. They've spent 3060, minutes teaching them something useful. So that that was the whole idea behind PDX, and last year was the first year that we did it, and. You know, it it wasn't perfect, but it went. the The core idea worked.
01:01:27.739 --> 01:01:30.019
Exhibitors and attendees both told us this was really cool.
01:01:30.199 --> 01:01:32.329
I've never seen this before.
01:01:30.199 --> 01:01:57.939
I've never seen this format before. Awesome. I actually walked away having learned something, and it it was it was a it was a cool vibe. Like people were were having actual conversations. It wasn't this stilted like, oh, I don't want want to look at this booth because they're gonna try and pull me in and like sell me something, so I'm just gonna walk past. Like they were actually talking and people were connecting, and it was it was pretty cool. I I was very happy with with how it went. Yeah, thank you for asking.
01:01:58.509 --> 01:02:34.579
Yeah, no, that's that's awesome. I I was digging around on my. I've got 3d printer back here with a bunch of stuff. My 3d printers are primarily used for storage right now, so I'm not printing anything, unfortunately. But I was working on this project, like so. This is a Roku remote, but it's in the shape of the indestructible Nokia cell phones, and you know, so Rokia remote anyway, because I break Roku remotes all the time. So, but I was like, this is kind of a cool, small, compact, you know, reasonably scoped project.
01:02:35.809 --> 01:03:23.329
I've I've often thought about like just okay, but what if I made this a senior design project for somebody and sat in with as an advisor or something like that. Like, just I don't know. I feel like there are two things that I have a feeling there's a lot of underutilized brain power in the engineering talent pool, and it just needs an outlet, and so I feel like there are engineers with latent teaching capabilities that they'll never really be able to to use because they're just not called upon in their in their daily work to do that. And I've often thought like it would be really cool to just set up scopes for projects, turn somebody loose on it. If they turn it into a project and it makes product, it makes money.
01:03:23.719 --> 01:03:30.079
The only requirement I would have is that it would just be open source and just whatever.
01:03:27.559 --> 01:03:34.009
If you make money on it, I don't care. But like, let anybody replicate it that wants to in their garage. I don't care.
01:03:34.549 --> 01:03:38.299
The cool idea. So, open source product development, basically, right?
01:03:38.419 --> 01:03:42.279
Kind of, yeah.
01:03:38.419 --> 01:04:09.689
Because I, there was a time in my corporate career where I was very frustrated because there was very lack there was lacking opportunity in developing anything. And back then, I should give some context for why that is. Defense is very cyclical in nature, and so you can be 90 miles an hour with your hair on fire and then be like completely dead in the water for three months, and there's really nothing to do about it except for wait for the next contract to come through.
01:04:07.079 --> 01:04:11.730
You're not going to get fired for not doing anything. It's just the nature of the business.
01:04:12.419 --> 01:05:28.969
But like sitting at your desk not doing anything sucks so much. It's so boring, and so I just started getting really looking for ways to leverage technical expertise, and I found this website, and it was like innocentive.com. It's changed since, but it was like crowdsourcing engineering. And looking back on it, it was kind of exploitative, probably like they're probably just looking for IP to be shared from people, but at the same time, I developed a medical waste incinerator that could be used in the middle of nowhere using a 55 gallon drum and a couple pieces of pipe and stuff, and making sure it got up to a certain temperature. I just did that out in the middle of a field for no money because it was better than sitting there not doing any thinking. You know? Yeah, yeah. And so I feel like, like with PDX, I mean, I love what you're doing on the training side. It's fascinating, and also like giving people a way to focus that on something, or you know, something to be working towards and employing those new skills. I think there's there's something there.
01:05:29.718 --> 01:05:35.418
You know what else I really want to do with this, and there's zero reason I can't.
01:05:32.328 --> 01:06:56.378
And in fact, I'm just going to put this out here right now publicly for anyone who wants to take me up on this. Please reach out, and if there's still a spot available, I will make this happen. All of our exhibitors, they're they're companies, right? They're companies who are selling a product or a service, which is great. That's that's you know that's we live in a commercial society, so that is what it is. But I would love to have a couple of booths that that PDX us as the event organizers just sponsor the booth. There's no cost to be in this booth, and we just have industry experts not selling something, not who are working for X Y Z, you know, component supplier or whatever, but just engineers who are really good at their craft and and want to share something, and they have a little talk or. You know, a piece of educational content that they want to share, or or maybe they're just there for attendees to come and and approach them in like office hours, right? And say, I'm trying to solve this problem. I don't know how to do it. How would you approach it, right, mr. or mrs. Engineer? I think that would be such a great addition to to the event. So I'm putting that out there right now. Here it is officially. If you would like to be in that booth, you you have your you know maybe probably a more senior level engineer, and you just want to give back and and and share your knowledge. Get in touch with me. Send me an email.
01:06:52.808 --> 01:06:57.368
Hit me up on on LinkedIn, and let's make that happen.
01:06:58.179 --> 01:07:06.029
I yeah, I have a feeling you're going to be overwhelmed with responses because I think there are a lot of people. Yeah, I hope I am.
01:07:06.119 --> 01:07:06.239
Yeah, yeah.
01:07:07.559 --> 01:07:20.279
I hope Dave Cooper hears this podcast and and volunteers. He's just a fantastic guy. He's XC 130 Navigator, but I I met him.
01:07:15.000 --> 01:07:46.989
We've got a we've got a Discord community in Good Think Labs and like I put the idea out there that we should make a robotic coin flipper, and just just because, like I don't know this, just because anyway, and he built it, and he built it in his garage with his with his son, and it's up to like 17,000 coin flips or something like that, and it's so cool. And anyway, he's he's phenomenal guy. But
01:07:47.199 --> 01:07:51.549
yeah, sometimes the destination matters much less than the journey, right?
01:07:52.419 --> 01:07:55.000
Yes, 100% I love trips like that.
01:07:56.408 --> 01:08:01.348
Oh boy, this podcast might be an example of that. Yeah, yeah,
01:08:01.469 --> 01:08:01.529
yeah.
01:08:02.609 --> 01:08:15.179
I was gonna say, I I have another question that I I wanted to ask you. This this might be a little bit deep. So, to the extent that you're comfortable answering this, what if you could learn anything, what would you learn?
01:08:16.409 --> 01:08:37.640
I mean, I am a believer that like there's there's something fundamental that ties all of this stuff together, and I don't know what it is, but like if you look down far enough or out far enough, you might be able to find it.
01:08:37.670 --> 01:09:00.730
And so, like for me, the really niche, hard to understand aspects of like quantum physics as we understand it today would be fascinating to get to understand better, because I think it's our. I don't think it's the final understanding of how the whole universe works, but I think it's our next step to understanding how the universe works, and it would just be fascinating to see what becomes possible as a result of that.
01:09:01.118 --> 01:09:28.309
100% Okay, tell me if you've had this experience where talking about quantum physics, right? You think about the universe, right? This this giant, apparently infinite expanse of of matter out there and empty space out there, large beyond comprehension, right? And then, and then you zoom in to like subatomic particles, right?
01:09:23.719 --> 01:09:34.399
The the quantum realm, and it's like like this the tiniest tiniest thing. But but somehow, and and maybe this kind of tangentially gets to your point.
01:09:34.429 --> 01:09:48.579
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's us as a species is programmed in our DNA. I don't know. But somehow, I like I have this sense internally that, like, in that that little subatomic particle is the entire universe. Is another
01:09:48.699 --> 01:09:51.939
universe. Yes.
01:09:48.699 --> 01:09:59.769
Yes. You can go infinite inward and infinite outward and never see the end, and yet we live in this little slice. Yeah. Yeah.
01:09:56.048 --> 01:10:14.429
No, I'm I'm glad you you elucidated it better than I ever possibly could have, but I've had that same experience where, like, my understanding of the world is so narrow, and no matter how far outward I look, I'll never understand the greatest things, and no matter how far inward I like, I'll never understand the the least things.
01:10:14.880 --> 01:10:15.449
Fascinating to
01:10:16.289 --> 01:10:21.349
me, it it's like it would be so satisfying if it was all a loop,
01:10:22.010 --> 01:10:32.539
right? Yes, it's circular somehow, right? It just it feels like somehow it is like you go far enough down, and eventually you just come out the other end and go all the way around.
01:10:32.659 --> 01:10:34.789
Just like inverting toroid kind of thing.
01:10:34.970 --> 01:10:35.420
Yeah, yeah.
01:10:37.579 --> 01:10:38.270
No, oh man,
01:10:38.990 --> 01:10:51.880
yeah. I don't know how you prove that with math, but everything that I've read about so far leads me to believe that that's more plausible than a lot of other explanations. You know, it
01:10:51.909 --> 01:10:57.490
it just it feels right somehow, like at this fundamental level. Well, well,
01:10:58.329 --> 01:10:58.480
cool.
01:10:58.630 --> 01:11:10.260
What what a fun conversation this has. Yeah, man, Tony. We we didn't. I don't know that we had a single question that was on the list, but this was just a blast. This this to me was a 10 out of 10 episode. Thank you for
01:11:10.380 --> 01:11:10.650
awesome
01:11:11.159 --> 01:11:11.969
sharing this time with me.
01:11:12.750 --> 01:11:15.539
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was it was really fun. Thanks for having me on.
01:11:16.110 --> 01:11:19.829
Yeah. All right.
01:11:16.110 --> 01:11:26.329
Well, before we sign off, how how can. People get in touch with you, or how do people at least like follow you online?
01:11:23.930 --> 01:11:27.920
Because you're always like we talked about. You're always putting out fun stuff.
01:11:29.000 --> 01:11:52.480
Yeah, I mean, start on LinkedIn, and everything spirals out from there. So, yeah, LinkedIn is where I'm most active, and I always post daily, sometimes twice, and that's the best place to find me. Actually, I'm I'm going up to IMTS in September, and I plan to have a shirt that's just a big QR code with my LinkedIn page.
01:11:55.780 --> 01:11:57.760
That seems so on brand for you. Great idea.
01:11:59.890 --> 01:12:01.619
Got pink t-shirt or something. I don't know.
01:12:02.250 --> 01:12:04.320
Walking around with a Chipotle burrito. Yeah,
01:12:05.100 --> 01:12:08.730
there we go. Oh, cool. Yeah, great talking to you, Aaron.
01:12:09.208 --> 01:12:10.588
All right, thank you so much, Tony.
01:12:11.220 --> 01:12:12.329
All right, we'll see you later.
01:12:15.389 --> 01:12:38.689
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.
01:12:32.359 --> 01:12:42.939
Visit us at teampipeline.us to join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit thewave.
01:12:43.838 --> 01:13:12.539
Engineer. Thank you for listening. Being an engineer has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic, and listen to what's most relevant to you. See you on the next episode.