Manufacturing Talks

Send us Fan Mail Having just founded Always On Energy Research, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling -experts on power generation and our creaky grids - joined us to give us their unique perspectives on America's electricity situation. They publish routinely on the subject on their Substack, "Energy Bad Boys." Isaac is the VP of Research and Mitch is the Director of Research at their new out...

Send us Fan Mail For our 102nd episode, your host is joined by his pal who helped him with a Forbes article about mining a year ago, and who has been his go-to guy for metals intelligence ever since. Konstantin Christoulakis is a senior manager of procurement and risk for a metals trading company, and has oodles of experience in supply chains in general. He talks about the coming demand for metals...

Send us Fan Mail In a recent Forbes article, your host explained how Germany was undergoing the beginnings of deindustrialization as a result of its horrible energy policies, and how that should be a warning to America. Unfortunately the current administration's regulatory policies now have the US on an even worse path than Germany. This is an existential threat to all of American industry, a...

Send us Fan Mail Yes indeed, Episode 100 is upon us! We could have a celebrity or a head of state as a guest, but it was obvious the right choice was a guy that fans of the show have heard from many times before! John Farabee, our intro and outro voice-over guy, is also one of the most knowledgeable and insightful supply chain gurus we know. So as the only other guy besides our host whose voice ha...

Send us Fan Mail Augury got its start using a unique way to monitor manufacturing machine health: the sound of the equipment! It's one of those ideas that, once you hear it, seems so blindingly obvious - except you didn't think of it! Now they have over 150 of the largest manufacturers as customers, and they continue to grow. The company uses AI to reduce waste and downtime and to improv...

Send us Fan Mail Like too much of American manufacturing, our domestic production capacity for printed circuit boards - the things on which the computer chips that power so much of our world anymore reside - departed decades ago for other lands. Now we're too dependent on foreign nations for that supply, and especially worrying is how much we're dependent on a potential geopolitical adve...

Send us Fan Mail Manufacturing looks like it's turning the corner here in the US, so now is a good time for our domestic producers to look at expanding their businesses. Frank Seidel, Managing Director at Wamser Batra USA, thinks India is a great market to look at, and he joined us to tell us why that is and what companies here need to do about it. He looks at demographics and income growth a...

Send us Fan Mail At one time, when he lived in the shadow of southwest Michigan's Palisades nuclear power plant, former business owner, author, and employee communications guru Shawn Connors opposed nuclear energy. But then he decided to do his own research and discovered that the horror stories in the media that had convinced him nukes were dangerous were just plain wrong. That's when h...

Send us Fan Mail Modiv is a real estate investment trust (REIT). That's company uses investor money to trade in real estate. For Modiv, it's not just any real estate - the company focuses entirely on manufacturing properties, investing in industrial properties via long-term net leases. Their CEO, Aaron Halfacre, joins us for Episode 95 to tell us why that's a good business propositi...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 94 once more features our friends from Aprio, a CPA-led advisory firm with over 700 clients in their Manufacturing and Distribution Practice. Simeon Wallis and Michael Lange join us to discuss their latest quarterly "Manufacturing and Distribution Insights" report, which is a great look into the state of business for American industry. Simeon is Chief Investment...

Send us Fan Mail Fluke Reliability has been a mainstay in manufacturing maintenance for a long, long time. With tools like temperature and vibration monitors and acoustic and thermal imaging, they've helped make true preventive maintenance a reality for industry. So it was extremely informative for Episode 93 to chat with their president, Ankush Malhotra, about their recent acquisition of Azi...

Send us Fan Mail Doesn't it seem like every single day now brings fresh news of another monstrous dollop of tax money is being given away somewhere in the US to coerce some manufacturer to build and "create jobs?" That's great news, right? Not so much, and James Hohman, Director of Fiscal Policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy right here in Michigan, is here to tell us...

Send us Fan Mail Starting first with the supply chain and production disruptions of the pandemic, and now being reinforced by the unrest in the Middle East, the idea that outsourcing manufacturing is always a cost savings move has been shown to be wrong. Harry Moser, founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative, has been saying that for years. In fact, he came up with a calculation tool, the...

Send us Fan Mail Grace Stanke spent her reign last year as Miss America promoting nuclear energy. And she knows what she's talking about - in December she graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in nuclear engineering! She joined us for Episode 90 to talk about why nuclear is safer and less expensive than you might think, and why there are even bigger things on the horizon wi...

Send us Fan Mail Appearing on Broadway in Les Misérables... playing a part on General Hospital... and launching an AI-driven industry software services company? Yep, yep, and yep, if you're Michael Lynch. He joined us for Episode 89 to chat about all of it. After earning a living singing, dancing, and starring on stage and screen, Michael served as CEO of Right Hemisphere Inc., a provider of...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 88 is another must-listen. Energy economist, entrepreneur, commodities trader, and author Dr. Lars Schernikau joins us to talk about his latest book, *The Unpopular Truth about Electricity and the Future of Energy,* which he co-wrote with Professor William Hayden Smith. Lars dives into just why our current path of rapid additions of variable renewables is wrong and why bat...

Send us Fan Mail It's been a while since we covered 3D printing here. Who better to chat with about it than Blake Teipel, who joined us for our Episode 87? He co-founded Essentium, maker of high-speed extrusion 3D printers and materials, and they were just acquired by Nexa3D. Now Blake is Chief Strategy Officer for the combined company, and he'll be there at the helm taking Nexa3D into t...

Send us Fan Mail Montana isn't just one of America's fastest-growing states in population. It's also rapidly expanding its manufacturing base, growing it by 14% last year alone! Why? Not because of giant dollops of taxpayer-funded subsidies. Governor Greg Gianforte, a serial entrepreneur and former small businessman himself, and the Montana legislature have focused on improving the...

Send us Fan Mail For our Episode 85, we're joined by Jeffrey Korzenik, chief economist at one of our major American banks and author of the very important book, Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works for Your Business and the Community . He tells us all the critical reason we should all be taking a look at hiring those who've previously been incarcerated or have criminal records...

Send us Fan Mail If you're doing any kind of show about manufacturing, then you want to be just like Damon Pistulka and Curt Anderson, creators and hosts at Manufacturing eCommerce Success! These two wrote the book on how to make engaging content focused on industry. Plus they were some of the originators at LinkedIn Live, showing the rest of us how to do it right! They joined us for Episode...

Send us Fan Mail The funniest polymath around joins us once again, this time to do a deep dive into his latest book. Mark P. Mills, now Distinguished Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Contributing Editor at City Journal, waxes poetic about his predictions for a whale of a decade in *The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and...

Send us Fan Mail Guru on all things power generation Meredith Angwin comes back to the show, this time to focus entirely on the big points of her superb book, *Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid.* (https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electric/dp/1735358002/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1702947902&sr=8-1) Tune in to learn all about the c...

Send us Fan Mail Eric joins us once again for Episode 81! We chat about the recent news of the $10 billion share buyback at GM, the continuing news of the huge scaling back of the pork-laden Ford battery plant in Michigan, and general discussion of how those companies seem to be going off the rails. Eric also offers his take on the recent clean energy legislation that Michigan Democrats have foist...

Send us Fan Mail With a background as an engineer on the production front lines for GM and Tesla, Ryan Kuhlenbeck set out to found a tech company focused on helping the floor operators solve their biggest problems. He's co-founder and CEO of Pico MES (https://www.picomes.com/), which facilitates solutions such as visual task instructions on screens right on front of the worker, ready communic...

Send us Fan Mail If you're a manufacturer almost anywhere in the world, you're having some challenges hiring the people you need. That's been Magda Dexter's specialty at Saint-Gobain North America, where she's Sr. VP of Communication and Human Resources. She joins us to tell all about their excellent efforts to attract the talent they need, with initiatives like formal men...