A transcript of the webinar, edited for clarity and readability, follows:
Jim: Hi everyone, it's Jim Anderton here with engineering.com. I'm content director for manufacturing-related subjects, and this is Manufacturing Talk. This is the first of a series of live webinars I'm going to be doing where I talk to experts in manufacturing about issues that are important in the industry. For the kickoff episode here, I'm really delighted to have a real expert, a genuine expert on hand, it's Randy Altschuler.
Randy is a CEO and co-founder of Xometry, that's a leading global manufacturing marketplace that utilizes over 4,000 manufacturing partners. And it was founded in 2013 in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Now, prior to Xometry, Randy co-founded and was executive chairman of CloudBlue. That's a leading provider of recycling services of electronic equipment. Now Randy's a member of the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland board of directors, that is the board of directors of the RMI.
He represents the interest of manufacturers across that region. He's a Princeton graduate, received an MBA from Harvard Business School and studied in Vienna as a Fulbright scholar. Randy, that's quite a list. And it's a good thing because this is really about business. We talk about manufacturing, but the core of this is money. And it looks like you're the kind of individual that has one foot in each pool.
Now, you've written quite a polemic, a real motherhood statement that's published on engineering.com about what is happening with American manufacturing. That's why we entitled this episode, The Rise Or Fall of American Manufacturing.
Let me kick off right away and just ask you right off the bat. What happened? Where are we now? How did US manufacturing get to where we are at this moment?
Randy: The United States used to be a manufacturing powerhouse. And back in the 1960s, 28% of the American workforce was in manufacturing. That's now declined to under 10%, 8% in 2017, and declining as we've gradually over the decades begun moving our manufacturing offshore to lots of different places, primarily to Asia. As cost has become one of the primary drivers, as technology, as the globalization has made it easier for us to locate to those regions.
There's certainly an economic reason behind that. And it's understandable. Price is critical for folks, but unfortunately with the cost structure in the United States, our labor rates and other things, that has made us uncompetitive in some of these areas. And as a result, a dismantling of American manufacturing, and then push it overseas to where we are today. Which is, unfortunately, a very negative situation when faced with this crisis.
Jim: When I started manufacturing the auto sector back in the 80s, we were experimenting with just in time delivery, with new and innovative ways to run the supply chains, some primitive satellite links, for example, between OEMs and their tier one and tier two suppliers. And we kind of invented a new way of getting things like component parts to assembly plants. Was that technology an enabling factor in this? Did we create communication in the supply chain so efficient that it was possible to simply source your stuff everywhere?
Randy: Absolutely. And that's led to a lot of efficiency gains and that's led to lower prices for consumers, and it's created a distributed platform where you can source components and parts from all around the world, but there's fragility with it. I'll give you a good example. BMW, who is one of Xometry’s customers, and one of our investors. And I went and had the opportunity to visit the BMW plant. And which is one of the five largest auto plants in the world in South Carolina. And remarkable place. And you go down to the plant and they asked me how much inventory for the cars do you think they have on site at any given time? This is one of the five largest automobile factories in the world, right?
They're producing many cars. And by the way, in the BMW line, they don't just produce one kind of car, they can produce all different kinds of cars. It's based on when you order the car. Which is just amazing.
I say, how much inventory is onsite? How many would you think? How much in terms of, if you were to measure in days or weeks, how much inventory do you think is onsite at any given time at that in that factory?
Jim: A couple of days’ worth?
Randy: I think it was 16 hours’ worth.
When you talk about just in time manufacturing, obviously the Japanese played a huge role in pioneering that. That has taken off everywhere. And that is really an enabler of this global economy that's taken over and displaced a lot of the American manufacturing to the point where we are overly dependent on others to meet our critical needs.
Jim: Now America is a big country, and if you go back to think about transportation links, Dwight Eisenhower famously spent a month trying to get a small convoy of US military trucks from coast to coast. About 100 years ago. It’s perhaps an apocryphal story. But he never forgot that. That justified the impetus to create the interstate highways.
If you look at it, there are few countries, 30, 40, 50 years ago that had a transportation infrastructure like this. There's rail, there's road, good air links. It's a big country, but is the physical size of America, was that a factor, did that hurt this ability to streamline supply chains? Or did all this infrastructure basically negate the disadvantage of size?
Randy: Well, I think in terms of what's happened is other countries, like China, have made the investments in infrastructure. That had made them. And we have a crumbling infrastructure here today. When you look at things like, as basic as power. For example, at Xometry we have got a small 3D printing plant ourselves in Gaithersburg, Maryland. And we have power outages there. And if you're running a 3D printing plant, the continual use of power is you can't afford for the machine to go down for even 30 seconds because you'll basically have to scrap what could be something that takes 10, 20 hours to build in 3D printing.
That's right here in Maryland, in the United States. And we have the inability with our infrastructure not to have continuous power. Places like China have built and invested in their infrastructure, and that's enabled them to be much more efficient. Even the machinery, upgrading their factories, use of robotics. We just haven't made those investments here. You pile on top of that the labor differential, and it makes in many instances off shore just much more compelling.
Jim: Randy, you mentioned power, of course, that's a critical factor amongst many. Are there political considerations here? in a lot of ways the United States of America is exactly that. You have 50 little autonomous governments that are running things, and there's a federal overseeing agency which has influence, but not necessarily ironclad power, to do certain things. The Germans, for example, as you mentioned the Chinese, if they want a national grid reliability program they just implement it.
Is that a model of the future? Are we going to need that? Do we need some kind of a system where you could just get everyone on the same page and say, the reliability standards industry needs, and we're going to provide it come hell or high water?
Randy: I think in certain instances you're going to have to. Because there is a much more efficient flow of information, because we are more easily connected, because the consumer has so many options. Anybody can buy from China. Anybody can buy from Mexico. Anybody can buy from Germany from their desktop computer using Amazon. Or even they can use other websites to procure from there.
The customer has choice, and for us to be competitive in that choice, and if we want to protect that base here in the United States, we probably have to take a more holistic countrywide perspective. You want to balance that with giving people, there's certainly the sovereignty of States, and I won't get political about this, but if we fall behind we will pay the price. And not every locality or municipality will know what the best standards are. And sometimes we're going to have to deliver those from a federal level, absolutely. Otherwise, we just won't be competitive.
Jim: For jurisdictions that have fallen behind infrastructure development and repair, and there are an awful lot of them everywhere, how do we pay for this? There's some who say that the backlog, in a sense, the bridges and the potholes are at a state where there's no effective way to raise enough money without a massive tax increase, it’s just politically unpalatable to get these infrastructure issues fixed. Do you think there's a way around that?
Randy: I think it also ties into education as well. I think we have to put a price of our lack of... Competitiveness is sort of a buzz word, but what does it really mean? In the instance of COVID-19, it meant that we physically can't produce enough personal protection equipment to help ourselves during this crisis, right? To outfit the men and women who are healthcare workers, who are dealing with this. We have a dire shortage right now of equipment.
That lack of competitiveness has driven out manufacturing to the extent that we can't even participate anymore. When we think about investing in infrastructure, and there's many reasons, many things we need to do to make sure we've got what we need here.
But if you think infrastructure – and we have to think about it --it seems like it's a sunk cost. And I'm not sure why we're really doing it. And why isn't the federal government stepping up to repair Amtrak, the tunnels between Boston and Washington and New York? You have to think about that. But then as you begin to quantify what the risk is if you don't have that infrastructure, and you put that into the equation, you realize it's a no brainer.
But put another way, all the efficiency gains we got by offshoring a lot of our production are probably going to be lost in the next 24 months here in the United States. When you think about the trillions of dollars we'll need to spend to bail out our economy because we had to shut it all down because we were incapable. We didn't have enough ventilators, enough masks, enough testing, and that forced us to take even more draconian measures than might have been necessary.
Certainly, some were always going to be necessary, but there were even more necessary. And even now, today, we are unequipped to deal with this disaster. We're paying the price for being “overly efficient” before. We weren't thinking too far ahead. We need to put a price on that.
It's like with emissions, I feel the same thing is true with carbon emissions. What's the real cost of the degradation of our environment? Yes, I love looking at beautiful trees, and we want animals to flourish. And I have children. I want them to grow up in a world where they can breathe, but there's also an economic cost to that. And if we have a terrible event because of climate change, and we haven't really put a value on what the cost of importing a pair of jeans from another country is, that will also end up being a lot more expensive.
We have to start thinking about the true cost of things, and then saying, okay, we as a federal government or as a country need to make those investments.
Jim: Randy, you brought that issue, for example, the environmentalism, the opportunity cost in a sense. If we invest in things, we don't invest in other things. Is there a reverse opportunity cost here? Or is it basically, are we capable of thinking in terms of if we don't spend money, what are the economic implications of not spending money?
Randy: Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing it today. We have not spent the money and we are unable to open up our economy again. Or we're opening it up with our fingers crossed. We're petrified that we're going to have to shelter in place a few months from now because we don't have the right systems in place or the equipment in place. There's a huge cost to that. It's devastating. And it's a national security issue. At some point this could be used against us if we are unable to properly equip ourselves, produce the equipment that we need, then that is a very powerful weapon against the United States.
If we continue to go down this road, we'll have that. There was just an article in the Wall Street Journal two days ago. And it's the thing that I'm fearing the most, that a lot of the factories that have had to shut down during this crisis are not going to be opened up, will open up again because they've just lost too much business. Putting aside all the government assistance programs, it's just not enough. Seeing our industrial base shrink even more is going to be devastating.
Jim: It’s interesting you mentioned it as a defense issue. Oddly, it seems the DOD has been much more sensitive to this notion of maintaining an industrial capacity. We know for a fact that in some cases the Pentagon has bought tanks that they have declared they don't need. They have bought helicopters more than they need as a way of keeping a line open, to keep a knowledge base, and keep a pool of expertise active against the time they might need it at that point. Is that a way of thinking that we may have to expand to things like medical supplies, PPE? Should we potentially be stockpiling things as a national reserve, not just to have the items, but also to maintain a pool of expertise?
Randy: You're probably going to have to do that, but you don't want to produce things you don't need. The win-win here is that those factories, the DoD is, to a certain extent, subsidizing them, have the expertise and the equipment to produce robots and industrial equipment and other badly needed equipment for other industries, for aerospace, which is flourishing. You would hope that could only be one part of what these companies need to do. It's great that they've got that open capacity when we need it.
We need to make sure we can keep a segment of that work here, too. And we have to look at ourselves to understand why is that work then moving overseas? What investments we need to make. And some of those will be just: we have to have it. But some of it will be invest a dollar today, eventually get paid back and be worth it. Some of it may cost a lot but we're going to just have it for, because it is a matter of national security. We have to have the masks in the closet, but hopefully we can minimize that.
But it requires a concerted effort. It requires bringing together folks from the federal level, integrating, working together with industry and figuring out, what can we really do to change the equation? And then getting the states on board with that as well, of course.
Jim: There's a long history in American history of manufacturing, of industry stepping up and doing remarkable things under really difficult conditions. World War II, of course, being the classic example. General Motors takes on fighter plane production of a model of fighter plane from Grumman on Long Island and ends up making more aircraft at a lower cost than the original company ever did. They had no prior experience in aerospace, but they had tremendous experience in mass production, and knowing how to make a lot of things very well, very cheaply.
Now the ventilator issue has come up, but we see Ford and GM have basically done it again. They've moved heaven and earth with the unions, and they're actually mass producing a very sophisticated, regulated device in an area outside their core expertise, and they've pulled it off. Is this a bad habit that we're developing: expecting industry to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat basically after the crisis has hit?
Randy: The answer is, yes. Ideally we would want us to have enough domesticated ability and capacity that we wouldn't have to force... You wouldn't need a presidential order to force some of these companies to step forward. Not saying they all didn’t want to. But we didn't come across the way we'd want to.
We should want to do that. I also say that while they're stepping up mightily, it's not enough. I would not say that we won. Remember, World War II was fought over many years. Didn’t Roosevelt want 50,000 planes a year by, or tanks, by some year. It took us a period of time to ramp up to that.
Unfortunately, in a crisis like the COVID crisis, we don't have that kind of time. We're talking about months, not years. We are failing to meet our objectives. We're doing our best, and hats off to the industries and the companies that have pivoted to produce this. And we got lots of folks in 3D printing who've never made a nasal swab in their life, or a face shield. It pivoted in a terrific way. The workforce have been in the office despite risking their own health to do this.
That's wonderful, but it's a drop in the bucket. And Xometry, we've been using our network to produce ventilator parts, and I can't publicly name them, but there are companies that have never made ventilator parts before, large corporations that have come to use our network to produce them.
It's wonderful to see that, but it also puts a pit in my stomach when I think, oh my goodness, suddenly this company is not famous for making PPE or ventilator parts is now doing that. And they're using our network, which isn’t for that either. That doesn't feel like we're getting it done the best way. Certainly the production level is not going to be where we want it to be.
No, we have to have that capability resident here. Some portion of critical equipment has to be kept on tap here, the capability to manufacture it. How we calibrate that and how we keep that productive so it's not just a subsidy, which I'm not a fan of, and it's just a sunk cost, that's complicated. That requires work. You got to think through how you do that.
Jim: Now you mentioned, of course, the idea of stockpiling things like critical medical devices against an emergency like this. From a manufacturing perspective, what if we take one step back from that? What about things like raw materials, chemical precursors, I'm thinking of things like tantalum, for example. Well, you know what I mean? There are no high-performance capacitors and microelectronics without those things. And there is essentially no indigenous supply.
Plastic resins, we're probably a good shape because fracking has now enabled a domestic supply. There's oil in Canada. There are reasonably secure supplies of petroleum-based things. But are we going to need to think about a strategic national reserve of everything, of critical items? And to the point that the tune of perhaps thousands or millions of tons.
Randy: Look, raw materials and the procurement of them and the safety of them had played a role in wars in the past, right? In WWII, Japan, we cut off Japan's oil supply. And likewise, a lot of the strategic decisions the Germans made, like their invasion of Russia, was to get the oil fields in Russia. Lots of decisions were made based on raw material. We need to protect our supply of materials.
It's far flung, some are on other continents. That's a global competition. You have to think about that as part of this. I do think that that's also where science and technology can help you. If you can come up with alternative materials to use, if you can think about alternative ways to produce things that are less depend.
I'll go to the electronics industry. You mentioned my previous company was an electronics recycling company. Electronics recycling companies used to make their money because of the precious metals that were in a lot of the computers that you could “mine” when you recycled it. We have evolved beyond that. Whe those precious metals aren't in it? The good news is we don't worry about our supply of copper to make computers anymore, or silver or gold. And that's a good, positive thing that we've got alternatives. The bad thing about the recycling industry is that's how they used to make their money. I think we can find alternatives.
Yes, the supply chain starts with the materials. We're seeing that with some of our projects are to make face shields, and there's some material in short supply. That is the gating factor, to procure that supply of the material. In some instances, there's a kind of foam that we're trying to procure, that's a 30-day waiting period sometimes. 30 days doesn't seem like a big deal. And maybe in the context of a multi-year war, it's not. But in the context of rushing face masks to somebody who needs to fight for life in a hospital every day, that 30 days is terribly long. An accelerated demand makes it complicated, tricky.
Jim: A lot of smart manufacturers, of course, will play hedging strategies to get around this. They're buying raw materials, or buying contracts forward, to get some kind of price certainty. Or supply certainty, they hope, using these sophisticated strategies.
This goes back, I remember the Ford Motor Company, I believe in the late 70s, early 80s, where they bought palladium forward in large quantities because it was needed for catalytic converters. And then almost overnight the technology changed and they found a way to put a thin palladium coating on a ceramic substrate, rather than use solid palladium --using an order of magnitude less of the metal in each converter. The global price for palladium imploded. They lost several hundred million dollars with the stroke of a pen.
At the time they made that hedging strategy, it seems to me that they made the right move with the right information, and they did the right thing. And it blew up in their face because of unexpected technological change. Is that the new risk now? You try and de-risk your operation and you introduce yourself to a new kind of risk?
Randy: I think it's inevitable. You make bets. As an entrepreneur I make bets all the time. And that's easy to say. Obviously you have to temper those financially and make sure that you can afford if those bets lose. But I think what we can predict with certainty is a less certain world. That there will be more COVID-like events that will occur. That climate change will be a huge disruptor. I don't think there's any question about any more, we can see with the extreme weather changes and the cost of that from Australia literally being on fire not that long ago, right?
These things are coming, so we would be stupid not to invest in them. And even though there might be in some instances a binary outcome and you'll lose, you have to make that bet. You have to. And the government has to help cushion that in certain instances where it's the best practice and companies are hesitant to make it.
But that's why this also involves investors rewarding companies that make those choices. If the investment community says, hey listen, we don't really care if your gross margin or your net margins are 13%, they can be 14%, or they can be 12%, because that 1% went to sourcing things either in a more environmentally friendly way or was done domestically. We make those choices. You can't use child labor. There's a whole bunch of things we said that's just outlawed. If we expand that list to include these threats that we know are pending to us, if investors accept that and don't penalize companies for that, that will produce a positive behavior.
And I will tell you as somebody who's got my own investors, and I'm a private company, my valuation is in many ways very subjective. Like public companies, right? And if investors as a class say, we are going to give value or create value or drive up valuations, pay more for stock because these companies are exhibiting this behavior. That's a strong, positive carrot to hand out to entrepreneurs or CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and drive good behavior. They've got a lot of power, a lot of leverage with companies. Let's have them use it for good, because right now it's really just about the money.
Jim: In factories in the United States you regularly hear how “OSHA is killing us” or “the EPA is killing us.” They perceive all regulatory regimes as drivers of high cost and low productivity, inhibitors to progress in their manufacturing operations. You go to a places, Germany, for example, you don't hear that. They don't quite perceive it that way. Is there a fundamental attitude shift that's kind of rooted in culture about that? And is it necessarily a bad thing if OSHA comes in and finds something unsafe on your plant floor?
Randy: You never hear a CEO during an investor call recite how many days without an injury. You know they've got those signs up at the factory but that’s never recited on the call. Or, I've never heard an analyst from a bank, a sell center, buy center analyst say, how's your incident rate right now? How's your worker’s compensation premiums, have they been going down because nobody's been getting hurt?
You never hear those questions. If we can train the investors to start, or encourage them to start asking those questions and reward people for having great safety records, I know I would be all in on it. But if it just becomes something perceived as mandated and costly, that people's safety has no net benefit, if you're otherwise penalized for doing the right thing, that makes it tough.
Look, I'm a capitalist, but we have to understand that the cost of not doing the right thing, even for a capitalist, can be devastating. And again, we're seeing that today. There are a real dollars and cents consequences for bad behavior.
it also plays into the whole conversation about diversity. A lot of people say, there's a value to having diversity and we believe in diversity, but there's an economic value to it, also. If you have a diverse workforce, if you have more gender equality, if you have people from different backgrounds, your product will be better. And there's the metrics behind it to show it. If you have better insights into your customers, you'll be able to market to them better.
There's lots of things you're going to gain from that diversity of opinion and background, into your boardroom and individual meetings. There's financial benefit to it. We need to make that same argument now for, is it safety or for doing the right thing environmentally, or for supply chain security. There's a real cost to it. Let's put that on the table here so investors know that, the whole world knows that.
Jim: You touched on an important issue involving the sentiment of the investor security of Wall Street. In Japan, for example, Honda embarked on a program to make a business jet, completely out of the automotive realm at this point. It took 20 years for them to see a return on that investment. Now it's been a great success, but they could turn to their board and their shareholders and say, we're going to sink millions of dollars into this, and you may not see a return on this investment in your lifetime. But it's a good thing overall, and stay with it.
On Wall Street, you tend to see the opposite. It's about growth. It's about the dividend at all cost. We'll borrow money to buy back shares rather than reinvest in capital equipment. Is there a right or wrong here? Is there a happy medium?
Randy: I believe in the end that the companies that do the right thing, will in the end often, not always, reap a benefit. Sometimes you should buy back your shares. And there's a lot of talk now in this election about banning buybacks and things like that. I'm not sure that's always wrong. But, again, it goes back to, what is the investment community? How are they coming up to multiples? Were they valuing things? What's the P/E ratios? What do these ratios look like? They're very subjective. There's not that much science behind it, why one industry trades at this versus another industry.
Contract manufacturers trade at very low multiples, because it's perceived as a commoditized, low margin business. Now if we saw a disappearance of capacity, because a lot of factories are forced to shut down as a result of this pandemic, should those multiples inch up? And should now something-something trade at four times versus three times? I think that will drive different behaviors.
If shared buybacks are the only thing that are creating value for a company, a company is going to be forced to turn to those. If they have other alternatives to drive value and investors accept those, then they'll do the right thing.
What I love about America is that often our way of doing business creates innovation. It puts us in a hurry. We don't want to wait 20 years. There's a lot of positive from that, but sometimes that super hyped up short-term thinking bites us in the behind. And I think we're seeing that today. We've got to find a happy medium and be able to model out just a little bit longer. And if you do that, then maybe we won't have these issues and we can do better.
There's a happy medium. I don't want to stop being an American and being in a rush. But on the other hand, we got to be smarter here. We are thinking super short-term and a little stupid sometimes.
Jim: Is the media as popular culture partially to blame here? if you look at what you do, contract manufacturing, for example. The more you scratch the surface of how contract manufacturing actually works and how distributed manufacturing resulting works, the more fascinating it becomes.
I look at the coders on the West Coast, for example, who are programming video games or AI or something, and there's that level of complexity here. There's some fascinating things going on that have global implications, important social and economic implications at the same time. But if you turn on CNN or any of the major networks at this point, if they show you a stock image of a factory, they'll show you a 1960s image of Fords going down an assembly line.
Basically, is manufacturing being shortchanged by a public perception driven by media misconceptions?
Randy: I think there is still an old fashioned skill positions. Running a five-axis mill is a super skill position, high paying and there’s a shortage of people who can do it. And it’s producing something that provides real value. That is not cherished in the United States culture, though. Right? If you tell people my job is to go to a machine shop and run a five-axis mill, they think you failed. Or if you say my son is a machinist, or my daughter. They think they didn't do very well. There is that perception. And as a parent, and I wrote this in an article, I'd be proud to say they ended up going into manufacturing.
In popular culture and the media, there’s not a lot of stories about manufacturing. There’s a lot of stories about the latest fashion, or the latest video game, or the latest food delivery service. That, at the end of the day, those are not going to be the important drivers for success for our country or the success of our species. The imaging machine that has to be built for you to get your X-ray or your MRI, or the medical device that's going to be inserted into your body because you need it to live longer, or whatever. Or the next generation source of energy that's going to power your car, those are going to be much more important than how quickly you could get to McDonald's or your whatever it might be.
Yes, manufacturing is not recognized. And how do we do that? We as parents, we as consumers stand up and applaud those people who go into those industries. I think during this crisis, there's been a lot of attention on healthcare workers. And my brother is an attending physician in a New York city hospital. He's very brave and I love him dearly. It's great he's done that, but the men and women who have gone to the meat packing, to the food processing plants, or in the grocery store, and here in Maryland, the Giant, those people also need to be celebrated for risking their lives so the rest of us can be sitting at home and not starve.
And the men and women who are in the factories producing the PPE, and producing the very basic stuff that we need to run our infrastructure, those people need to be celebrated, too, and they're not. And it's just, it kills me. And then we have this misconception that the world could be run by your desktop, and everybody can be at home. That is wrong.
And everything in your office right now, today in my office, has been produced. And that requires somebody to be in a factory, somebody to program a machine, somebody to create a CAD file, somebody to source the material, all that stuff has to happen so you can spend your day running your business from your house.
Jim: We're fast approaching our hard stop, but I've got to get this question in while we still can. Your outlook for the future, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, will we see America emerge again as the world's number one manufacturing nation? Or, has the concept of leadership in that conventional sense now disappeared?
Randy: I'm an optimist, and this is a wakeup call to America that we don't want to be seen to be begging other countries to provide us the personal protection equipment we need. It is grim that we are dependent on other countries to make sure we have enough masks. That doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals didn't have what they need. There's nothing heartwarming about somebody using a bandana in an operating room. It's sad.
This should appeal to our American pride. And by the way, this is a problem that every country has with their own local manufacturing, so it's not unique to America. But I'm an American and I think we will rise to the occasion here. I think some of the technology trends like 3D printing, some of the software innovation, will level the playing field where a wage differential will be less important.
Because we're never going to be price competitive when you talk about just wages, that's just not our quality of life here. And I think those things will negate a lot of that advantage and will make it more attractive to mass manufacture here. And I think there is hopefully a new appreciation for that.
I'm optimistic about it. We do need federal leadership that embraces that. And I would encourage both parties to dig deep and to put aside their partisan bickering and focus on, what do we need to do here to make this work? And also, encourage universities and community colleges and secondary schools to also start teaching the students in their schools about the value of going into manufacturing.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a great policy statement and a great recommendation for the administration, perhaps, to think about for ways to get manufacturing moving in the right direction.
I can't thank you enough for joining us, the inaugural Manufacturing Talk. here. We're right up against our hard stop. We could go on like this for hours. I hope we get a chance to do this again. That was highly insightful. And I thank you again for joining us. And thank you folks for joining us too as attendees on this little fireside chat called Manufacturing Talk. We look forward to seeing you again next time. I'm Jim Anderton. Randy, thanks very much.
Randy: Thank you so much.