(Intro Song) Where oh where are you night? Why did you leave me and read on my phone? I searched the world o'er and thought I found true love. You met an AI and poof you was gone. Jeff: Hi, this is Jeff Pennington, host of You Teach the Machines. No Mary Jane today. Instead, please join me for an interview with Stephan von Muelen, CEO of Poursteady, a division of Steady Equipment Corp, a manufacturer, designer, builder in Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York. Stephan and I discuss onshoring of manufacturing, domestic manufacturing, supply chain issues, and—important to this AI podcast—the potential for AI to actually aid in just-in-time manufacturing using automated methods like CNC and 3D printing. Hope you enjoy. Please check out Poursteady at poursteady.com. You can also check out the AI vendor that we discuss, Intercom, and their product Finn AI. Stephan: So, I mean... don't worry about it. Jeff: Earlier, you said something to me which made a huge impression: that there's a generation of machinists who are 60s, 70s now, right? Who picked up CNC, who picked up maybe 3D printing, sort of in the first wave of adoption of these things. Stephan: Maybe. Maybe not, but yeah. Jeff: Post-manual. Post-manual machining, right? Stephan: And manual machining in general. Yeah. Jeff: Okay. And then there are kids who want some connection between the digital world that they grew up with and the physical world. Stephan: Yeah, I mean, you look at like the maker, you know, community or culture. Like, it's been kickstarted—I guess pun intended, no pun intended—by... by everybody sort of trying to do it themselves. You know, DIY, like do it at home. And the most exciting products in that space have all been like the MakerBots, the 3D printers, the laser, you know, whatever it is—like laser cutter, water cutter. You know, that stuff for 15 years has been what's sort of been the... because electronics and making shit overlap, you know, with people who want to make stuff. It's both now, all the time. Jeff: Right. So there was... it is both. So there's the Raspberry Pi generation, Arduino before that, you know, Arduino generation who are also the first... the first home 3D printing generation. Stephan: Yeah. And... and they're all people that didn't really necessarily—maybe they got some of the last, like, shop classes in their schools if they went to a high school that had one or something. You know, like all of that education has... has been gone for since Gen X on, right? Jeff: Right. Well, that's the other—as part of that conversation, you said, there's the... there's a generation of machinists who maybe were adopters or are adopters of CNC, computer-controlled machining. Um, they still do manual machining too, whatever it takes. Stephan: Yeah, no, I mean, the... the industry adopted CNC machining in the '80s and '90s. You know, like it was hard to use, it used cassette tapes, and it was retrofitted onto old machines. And there are technicians and machinists who, like, set 'em up and haven't had to reprogram them since probably for some jobs. Jeff: Yeah. Stephan: Because they... they know how to use them and they get the job done. But then there are these kids who grew up with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and early 3D printers, and that, but no shop class. Jeff: Right, but no shop class. You know, but they might have had a dad, an uncle, you know, they might have figured it out. And that's... that's how I—I didn't... I was not brought up to be a machinist, you know. Like, I went to Catholic school and college and stuff. And it was like after college that I... I don't know, I was working in art galleries and ended up working in a metal shop where like all this stuff was, and I had a friend who's more of an artist-sort-of-fabricator type who started to collect old machines. And so I like got to touch a lathe. Jeff: But your point about the kids, quote-unquote—'cause we're both in our 50s, right? Stephan: Yeah, yeah. I think I'm older than you. Jeff: You might be older than me. I'm rooting against you. Uh, but the quote-unquote kids want a connection to the physical world. They're not... they're not satisfied with just like purely digital and virtual. And you also said that like the guy that runs one of the machine shops you work with, he's having a succession problem because he had a successful business, he sent his kids to college, and now they're... they're bankers, right? Stephan: Yeah. They're purely online, purely digital, not in the physical. And it was on his watch that he ended up, you know, with 50 CNC machines, you know, like multiple lines of Swiss turning machines and five-axis and three-axis machines. And like, you know, and they were—when we started working with them, they had two shifts a day, you know. They were doing 16 hours on 50 CNC machines with finishing and all the tracking and labeling and stuff for government work. And they hadn't updated their website in, you know, 30 years at that point—...
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