What’s Holding Robotics Back? (Ft. Ken Macken) | Ep. #59

Is the robotics industry as advanced as we think?

In this episode of HIRED! The Podcast, Travis Miller talks with Ken Macken, CEO & Founder of Workr Labs, about why robotics hasn’t evolved as fast as expected—and what’s holding it back. From legacy software to the scarcity of talent, Ken unpacks the hidden challenges slowing real progress.

He also shares a bold vision for the future: one where automation is intuitive, accessible, and woven into the workforce in smarter ways. Whether you’re a robotics professional, hiring manager, or just automation-curious, this one’s worth a listen.

Ken Macken is the CEO and Founder of Workr Labs. With over two decades in manufacturing and automation, he’s focused on redefining human-machine collaboration and making robotics more accessible to the people who need it most.
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Transcript

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Nothing has changed in robotics and computer vision for over 20 years, over 25 years in my life. And the crazy thing there is, you get told that it has. Hello, I am Travis Miller and today on HIRED! The Podcast we are diving into, high tech frontier of manufacturing. And I do mean frontier with Ken Macken, CEO and co-founder of Workr Labs. Ken is not just any other tech founder. Globetrotting, startup wielding leader of the industry. His company, Workr Labs, is on a mission to reinvent human machine collaboration using AI and robotics. And ever wondered whether robots are coming for your job? Ken's the guy to talk to. And, little spoiler for the episode. He doesn't think they are. So, Ken, you do not have, well, a resume that you see very often starting on the, Australian manufacturing floor and now founding startups here in the United States centered around AI and robotics. How did you get on this path and end up here? Well, there's a there's a long story there, but I'll give you the abridged version of it. Maybe, it goes back to when I was really young. I grew up on a farm in rural Australia, and my mum said to me, because we had nothing, she goes, no one's going to make the life that you want. It's up to you to go make it. So I took that and I took it seriously, and I, I went and built my life. I've always had a passion for sort of building things. I love how things exist and ironies. Some people say that I cave for more physical things than people. Sometimes it's a bit interesting, but I think things are purpose anyway, so I ended up working in management. I've been working manufacturing for over 20 years. I actually started off working for a company that was making fiber optics. Then got acquired and was acquired by ATC, where I worked on big lasers to actually produce how the internet gets transmitted around the world. Then I've worked in solar panel manufacture sharing, where we commercialize technology for photovoltaics, to actually, take it from university projects into useful large buildings, across Australia and around the world. That company got acquired by the plants. And then, I got I worked as a, an apprentice machinist at the Royal Australian Mint, and I did my apprenticeship there. I it was the fastest ever finish that ever in Australia, where I learned so much about manufacturing. And this is, this is heavy price tooling. And I was very fortunate to work alongside amazing tradespeople, master craftsman from around the world who had put their whole lives into how you build something. And I learned from them, and it was fantastic. It was fantastic. Two reasons. One, I got the skill and the knowledge from these people that dedicate their lives to learning a skill so they, but they were also terrified of new technology. And I was at that cusp of more and more of the CNC machines, the computer controlled machines to do all this work that, that were terrified of. But I was embracing being a young person. Enjoyed technology. But but it allowed me to put my hand up and take these new roles on and also listen to those people and take their information and apply new technology. And that's where I started in robotics. This is over 20 years ago. And spoiler alert for you here is nothing has changed in robotics and computer vision for over 20 years. Over 25 years in my life. And the crazy thing there is you get told that it has marketing tells you in all the manufacturers that this has got better and it has but incrementally changed. But we'll come back to that. I then because I was working robotics, computer vision, I got headhunted to go work for a large system integrator. I worked for that company that got acquired, and then that company got acquired again, give away being a company that's acquired, it seems like, I'm the person to have on the team. I ended up then started my own system integration company, growing that out, specializing in vision guided robotics, think very generalized use robots in manufacturing. This is industrial robots. These are robots that are doing palletizing machine tending and, inspection on high speed bottling lines are welding all these solutions. And I was a had specialized team that very, very specialized skills to actually take ideas and capabilities and turn them into actually a robot doing a task. And it's really easy to get a robot to do the same tasks continuously, over and over and over again. You can fine tune it and get better and better, but when the objects that will come into it kept changing all the time, that was a really special thing. Had never even set of people to understand that, I ended up selling that company off. That was one of my first, companies I sold off. I then moved on, and worked with my friend, a very good friend of mine, Hugo Eicher, which brought me to the US, and we were building cell phones for senior citizens. We built a whole operating system. We built a cell phone. We built a telephony system, we built an app. We got backed by Qualcomm. We go backed by, Sprint. We're the first Australian company to get into text. This is back in 2012. We built that company up. We didn't succeed as well. We wanted to, but we we left that company and then moved on to third party manufacturing, building people's products, taking them from prototype up to large scale, a large OE manufacturing. I've done that across from the Fliteboard from David Trewern. Take it from prototype all the way up to world's number one brand for electric mobility in the marine sector. I've jumped in defense companies with Aim defense, where we're taking the high powered portable lasers that take down small, pesky drones in battlefields. I've done all these things, but it's always been in manufacturing, building these capabilities, having the team come together to actually do this. And then I just kept looking at it going, why hasn't robotics moved? We seem to be at that command prompt and it just don't I look, I can't wait any more. This is just bothering me so much. I'm going to build a team and we're going to go tackle this. So more people can use robots in manufacturing across a more diverse set of tasks that face the title of manufacturing, where it's not high volume and make it more accessible, like Democratize Robotics. So here I am now back in the US. I've been here since 2012 on and off. But yeah, now back here permanently. And it's been a lot of some Midwest and Karen based out here in the on the West Coast in in the Bay area. You said robotics and vision hasn't changed in 20 years. And I'd imagine that there's a lot of people in engineering and product development that a statement like that is going to piss off. Yeah. What do you mean by that? What? There's so many. You said it's just marketing, but you see so many changes and and so many new products and new capabilities. What do you mean it hasn't changed? I think I think anybody in this industry and I talked to a lot of people in this space, OEMs, everyone, all the the CI stack, all the way down to the companies that are implementing it on their factory floor. As I said, it's changed in technical capability, precision accuracy slightly got better. But there's this gap. I touched on it. I have this analogy that I come back to is we're at a point still with robotics, computer vision, where we're at. I see it as a command prompt. If you can refer to the analogy to, to a computer back in the 1970s, 80s, it's a black screen, it's a DOS prompt, and the only people that know how to use these things, the computer's a computer program, so it's a very small subset of people. They can get that computer to do anything you want, and there's new capabilities that are coming up that allow them to do it slightly better. But we didn't see that shift until we saw Microsoft Windows and Windows moment. The graphical user interface, icons, maps, everything being able to be used in a simple way, software being built. And then you also you had humans doing this. What I'm pointing out is robotics hasn't had that happen. It's incremental change, but it hasn't had a step change. And the big one that I always point back to is being picky. Having a robot pick something out of a bin to move it to another spot. We still you watch figure you watch Boston Dynamics, the latest video from a couple of days ago where they're picking something up and moving it to another place. It is still so primitive and so difficult to do. It hasn't changed. It's it's got more compute than ever. We've doing all these things and it's slightly better, but it still is not solved. And it comes down to it takes over one month to set up one of these applications that pick up one object, to put it into one machine. That only works for a high volume manufacturing. So we still we haven't moved beyond the small incremental changes. How come what's what's holding it back? What's the what's the windows moment? What's the capability for. When does it cross the line where it it makes sense for the average manufacturing company, not a high volume manufacturer to install these products to make their company better? Well, I think there's a couple of aspects to this. If people in the industry, anybody that speaks to any of the industry, they'll see that that we would have a robot in the corner with the sheet over that it hasn't worked out. Application. One of the things there is the support for robots. There's only 16,000 people in the world, like myself that know how to program these things. So if something breaks down, it fails and nobody wants to touch that again. So we need better support so more people that know how to support these tools, better tools to help people support it and like what we do with work or with my company. We built into our app the controls and makes it a lot easier to use a robot. We put a help on the dials, the integrator or whoever you need it to get support. That's an interesting sort of thing that touch on. We haven't had software being developed for the modern age. The software that runs on robotics and computer vision is still, as I said, go back to that DOS prompt if you know how they use it, it's you're fine. We need to open up that toolset to more developers to build user interfaces that people, humans get to get the robot to do the tasks, be more flexible. I don't sure if you got kids, Travis, but you can give an iPad to any child and they know how to open any app and get it done. Like you give a teach pendant from a robot to any PhD person and they're like, okay, give me three days and I might be able to get it to move to do a very simple program. That's the problem. I pointed out. I think that's what we need is better user interfaces, better software tools. So is it a is it a tech problem? Is it a leadership problem? Is it a front line worker problem. Where's where's the big disconnect preventing it. I think from what I am saying, where I actually say it is, it takes sorry, it takes a step change in terms of an approach to how people use robotics. We don't need an incremental approach here. We need to take a somebody has to come from the outside and go, no, this is a different way of doing it. This is how we're going to go about it. We have manufacturing companies that normally build hardware and software that needs to last ten years, minimum on the factory floor, and that's the only way they can sell. So they're going to sell the software that they know that worked ten years ago, because nobody wants to disrupt that. We need to disrupt. Disrupt is the come in. And I think right now we're seeing this and this is this is the most exciting time. We have software skills and people who are capable of building better tooling. These are this is not just tools with hammers and nails. This is the software tools like we're talking on a like a web call right now. This is the tools that we need putting some manufacturing on the other side. Now all of that we need to move them out there. So we need leaders that are going to move this. And I think we need leaders that understand the industry. You need people. You need people that have been in the industry but who are not corrupted by the industry. I say like, we want to bring in new technology. We want new minds that come in. And you say in the industry, but not corrupted by the industry. What do you mean by that? This. There's a lot of young people that are taking on the new trades. I call them in manufacturing. Okay? They go home or they pull out their phone and then they've got this capability superpower in their pocket. They can pull this out, but then they can answer any question you want. You got to chat. You say, you know, Gemini, anything you want to actually do this. But when it comes to the knowledge of how to control a machine, it's kept in somebody's head. Like I mentioned in the start of the conversation, there's all this knowledge that's kept in there, and there's this idea of that. If I tell you my knowledge, I might be out of a job. And I think that has to change. And that also goes down to the salespeople in this, in the in the industry, the vendors that are selling equipment. I work with all vendors. I'm agnostic with our software that we work with all vendors that might upset them, but it also opens up a lot of opportunities because more robots can be sold. So there's that corruption I feel like is like you can't talk about the other brands. It's like, no, no, no, you should be talking about all the brands. There's enough room in robotics to grow because we've only got 5 million robots on this planet in operation right now. And we have so much work. We have 500,000 jobs. You probably be aware in the US alone that manufacturing jobs that are out and we're bringing all this manufacturing back. We're gonna have like over 4 million in a few years. And who wants to work in them. So we need to unlock that potential that. Yeah. You recently wrote that we need to be ten times more ambitious with the robotics in the US. What does that ambition look like? What what if you were to. Create a new manufacturing facility Greenfield exercise. What is the. And we fast forward 510 years down the road. What are the capabilities that you would ideally have in that facility? What's the relationship like between the technology and the workers on the floor? I think work is going to change a lot. And the way I see this is there's going to be people that are going to be out of the current job because there's a well, as I just said, there's a lot of people that don't even want to work in manufacturing. They'd rather have a gig economy job working as an Uber driver. It's cleaner, flexible, by all means. I would probably pick that as well. Like, well, who am I to say that someone should go get dirty and do that? So what does this look like? What does this greenfield sort of system look like? You look what's happening around the rest of the world. Who's winning at being competitive, selling products that people can buy at the right price? How do the supply chains work that closely? They're not vertically integrated completely, but that network that works extremely well. I look at what happens in China, in Korea, it's happened in Japan in the past. It's kind of lost a little bit of that, what America is to do. We had this really close. We had towns, factory towns in this country, like everybody used to kind of work together in all different industries to support each other. Think of that. But with automation. So what I mean by that is you're going to have a lot more robotics, you're going to have a lot more amrs. You're going to have the logistics chains being able to move the from one facility to the next facility. But carry the information that was produced in that facility to the next facility. So you're not rewriting or creating errors, having lower yields, having higher cost to recreate the wheel every single time. The world, the America has to change the American, the American manufacturers right now that a leading other ones that are using automation. And what I mean by automation, it's not just the robot, it's the software that comes from the engineering office or from the the logistics or ordering or from e-commerce all the way down that stack. Now, those companies that are winning, guess what? They employ the most people, they just need new roles. They're in assistive roles. They're in more of a human related result, roles as well. They're using their brain in a different way that robotics hasn't adapted to it yet. And we're so far away from that. But going back to when I was a younger engineer, when I was starting off as a system integrator, I used to get told this robot's going to take my job, and it's like, possibly, but your job might also now be you need to look after five robots because someone's got to do it. They don't look after themselves yet. And that's what happened every single time. The other side of this is if we don't automate, if you do not automate this, just pretty much you're going to be out of business. And I've seen this happen and it's sad. That's what America doesn't want, that we want people to have roles within the business. It doesn't matter what your role is, but you want to feel like you're you've got purpose, like you go value. You're doing something, you're proud, you're going to go back to your family and feel good about yourself. You're going to have a great family life. You're going to be great in the community. Your community thrives. You don't have that when you're just a factory worker or owner in the coal mine sort of, sort of thing. You need to unlock that. So I think America, if we go to great builds, is thinking automation first, not second. How are we going to apply it? It's how do we build this factory with automation? How do we work? How do we set up the workforce for this? What skills do we need and then build it out that way instead of going put in what we know today and then we'll adapt to over time. You've seen a lot of companies implement automation. Yeah. What what are the ones that get it right doing versus the ones that get it wrong doing it. Can you think of any specific stories about ones that really screwed the pooch on getting this set up? It's if somebody's thinking about it, there's a lot of horror stories out there about bad automation. Wasted time, wasted money. What can somebody do to ensure that they're not investing? All this money in this thing just sits in a corner like my treadmill, collecting laundry. I think I think there's too many of those, robotic robots that's so solutions. They put in the corner with the shape of a robot. We don't want to talk about it anymore. We're not. We're not going to talk about it for another three years. What it is, is generally somebody doesn't understand the problem they're trying to sort of solve. So generally manufacturing it's a task or a capability that you're after. How do I work out what the ROI should be. What is the yield I require. Is it am I looking at this as a today problem like it's a bottleneck today, or is it a bottleneck? Once I unlock this, where's my next bottleneck? So should I be looking at a broader part of this solution? Like a problem as a solution. I've seen so many, robots being put in. It works, but then it highlights all these other problems behind it, because the person that was installing it looked at that one little isolated world. Okay. And then it just causes havoc in behind, upstream or downstream from this that causes the factory to collapse or it causes more issues because there's there's not enough skill or capability around the set, the services around it. The worst thing is, and I hate to say this, because I want to be power more and more people to have the skills is some companies think they have the skills to implement automation themselves, and by all means they should and we should have better tools so they can. But automation isn't just buying a robot that you find on eBay for $10,000, plugging it in and automation done. The hardware is the tiniest little part. The software programing is I think 75%. I saw this recently and this is on current stats. Back in the past it was about 80%. That's that's the change. That 5% difference which is a little bit of money that we don't have the skill. Still, we're not training enough people on how to have these sort of, to maintain a robot. We don't know how to justify the ROI. We don't know what to do. We don't have a plan in place for when the robot stops. Like we're not looking at maintenance. We're not looking to support, we don't look at uptime. It's like, how do we fix this? And it's have more people skilled in this have better tools and better support around these robot system thinking. Put in ask the right. Have we have a system integrators that play an integral part to to sort of supply all this information have? It's not just about the ROI of this task, it's the ROI of it's life that it's going to be in the factory. It's going to be there for ten years. What does this look like over ten years? I'm going to have new customers come into me over that ten years. Is it going to be able to adapt? No. Okay. Well how does this adapt? What do we need to think about that? That's the thing that a lot of people fail to look at. And the only people that do see this, Travis, a large scale volume manufacturers that have done this going back in time, robots been around for 60. So he is they get it because they know what their factory needs to look like tomorrow and the next year the next year. A lot of small medium enterprise has no idea because they've never tasted robots or their automation capabilities are very low. There's a massive gap here. We need to train people first, support those people, have these new skills that the internal team can have. You don't get rid of people. You need to reskill them into new jobs. Whose responsibility is that for success? If there's a that mid-size manufacturer that you talk about that has very little automation or wants more automation, whose responsibility is that to ensure that they're not just looking at the one problem right now, they're looking at all the problems now and potential problems in the future is that their responsibility to learn themselves, to find the right integrator, to hire the right people, who should, who should the buck stop with and whose responsibility is that for ensuring the most likelihood of success? Well, it does come down to leadership, and it's leadership through the stack. It's leadership from the OEMs, it's leadership from government and industry supporting industries around it. It's leadership within the business, the SME. It doesn't matter. It's large all the way down the small. It's them willing to say change is inevitable. Okay, we already know that change is always going to happen. It's uncomfortable for change. But what we learn from change is that we we learn and we grow and we all move together. We shouldn't be scared of automation, and it shouldn't be scared of automation because this is the way we've always done it within our business. So why should we need? Why should we change? It should be. We understand that automation can empower our business and our team to feel better about themselves and what we're producing. Higher yields, higher quality, very rarely is it a labor problem. It's quality. Yield. It's it's we we need to we've got more customers and we need to service the customers. We can't find people. As he spoke about the stats, nobody wants to work in a factory. We need to get more robots into this market. So it's we're not building businesses of yesterday. We're building businesses for tomorrow. We need people to look at it like that. What is how do we work out ROI and that of companies I speak to? And, Travis, you probably spoke to a lot of people in this space. How do they justify ROI for automation expenditure for capital expenditure, for resource expenditure, for a human? The ones that say we don't have enough modern thinkers in that space that are looking at how do we how do we how do we train these people? How do we train manufacturers to look at this? It's we need to learn continuously. We need to update our skills continuously. It needs to come from the top. It shouldn't be a bottom up sort of push that's never worked in manufacturing. It's really hard to push from the bottom. We need the leaders that come from the top and say, look, we don't know what to do. We need help doing this. Is anybody else doing this? Can we partner together and you showing me and I can show you a skill. And going back to that, that let's share this information. Because if they succeed in the almost like in to succeed and you can work together to grow and you're going to be able to ask each other questions and move this factory along with a lot. So it comes from the top. It comes from, it comes from the top, and it comes from, I think, curiosity and and vulnerability to be a leader of a large or midsize organization, leader of any organization, to say. I don't know, I need help, I know that I don't know. How do they find the people who have the most ability to help them gain the knowledge, or at least. Help sort. I'm looking for help shore up their areas for growth. To put it kindly. If they don't know. Yeah, look. For over 20 years of going to manufacturing exhibitions around the world, in Europe, Asia, here in the US, North America, South America. I've seen more and more new companies coming to this space. New startups, we'll call them. I come from a tech world, so I it's a startup thing who who've got great ideas but need the exposure within a business to work on a project to get a case study done to, to show hand in hand with a company that they can do something to improve their business. Looking to the old guard in the world that have done amazing to get us to this point there, they're not trying to move into the new world of how they can support them to be better. They're just trying to sell the next thing. The the younger companies, I think, are the ones who are really trying to help manufacturers to actually just just move the needle up 3% in terms of yield or quality or increase margin by a couple of percent. They're the ones that are probably the most useful to a lot of manufacturers and willing to be vulnerable on that side as well. They need help. The manufacturer needs help. We see it right now, Travis. Everybody's talking about I everybody's like, I should be using AI. And you see the big companies coming out and say, oh, he's AI on a stick here. There you go. Sale. That's not what company people like. What do I do with it. Like and then you see younger smaller companies coming out and say, hey, I've got this tool that will look at your invoicing or your quota system, and it looks over them and it tells you you should look at this one, because this one's got the highest value for you and your company's capabilities. You should probably answer this one quickly. It does that one little task, but that's kind of like what say an SMB needs. They need to evaluate these these they've got a billion things going on. They want to look for those contracts that are going to be most valuable. A big company is not providing that. All they might want to be lost in some sort of massive suite costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. While a startup might offer this as a SaaS product, which is constantly $50 a month, no, but it unlocks one contract. It's $100,000 and you're having 1,315% margins. It might sound like a little bit there, but wow, now I've got high utilization on my machines. I'm paying per performance like a lot of money that my machines sit idle. That's just unlocked. A lot that come from is from a smaller business. Being able to say, hey, this is how directly affect your business and move the needle. Let's give it a go. Low risk low. Make sure behold your hand will love that service to get it to move it along. These are the tools that I'm talking about that will actually help manufacturers who don't know what to do because they're willing to help the big guys. Maybe they'll help if you're a big enough company, but the smaller guys and the smaller people are trying to really move the needle here. And I think this country, I'm in this country, I live in this country for one reason. Innovation will always outpace, like what happened yesterday. Like we're trying to move the needle in this country always, but really try. We should foster that. And that comes back to my comment on let's get the younger people to help out. Who, I want to spend some time talking about this country and what's going on, because it's a very complicated situation right now, and we're recording this a little bit in advance before it comes out. So I'm hoping that this is still relevant. But there's a lot of and maybe it's since time immemorial, but I seem to see it more a list of what I'm calling the wait and see excuses. There's always this thing just a little bit off in the distance that leaders are uncertain about, and they're saying, well, we're going to wait and see what happens there before we make this decision. And I get it, get it to an extent. But at some point it's crippling a lot of organizations. What do you do in the face of consistent uncertainty to ensure that you're not staying stagnant for far too long? In some cases. That's it's hard. Yeah. And why it's hard to make those decisions a lot of the time is you don't want to lose your business. You want to make sure you your employee, your team is going to be there tomorrow. You don't want to let anyone go because it's really hard to find anybody that will show up to work. And if they leave to go next to you, if you're out of business there, how do you how do you tackle this? It's it's challenging times. This comes back to like true leadership. And I think pretty much every person that runs a company, especially when it's founder led or family owned, they care about this company, but they need to make tough decisions and they can't sit there on their hands waiting. Okay. They shouldn't make radical decisions. It's due diligence sitting down, looking at risk, looking at what they need to do. But there's something that's really key here. There's an opportunity. There's a massive opportunity. They can look at this space and go, if I do nothing, I'm going to have nothing will change. Or it could probably go worse. Okay. That's probably the outcome here. If I in that change it's going to stay the same or if not get better, there's a high chance because I'm going to commit to this. I need to look at where these opportunities are right now. Where am I been in this business can benefit okay. There's a lot of manufacturing companies out there who are so unsure what to do right now because they don't have a raw material is going to come from what the price of that's going to be. They're not even sure if they're going to have labor tomorrow to actually fulfill an older. So what are you going to do? They need to actually look at this space and go, what are we good at? What do our customers love about buying? Or for us? Like, what is that one thing that we do really well, let's go talk to those customers and see if we can take on more of their work. Let's say we're going to work with them, get a better price for them, but we're going to for that, we're going to take on more of your work. What you do there is, you know, secure a relationship and you should probably do that with a couple of customers. You don't put your eggs in one basket, but show them that you're going to be there. I'm going to commit to this so we can support you to actually have the products that you want tomorrow and be there. We're going to do this across more products and take that leadership. You know what happens. I've seen this with a couple of companies right now, Travis, in the last few weeks. And maybe this is time relevant. But those customers, those customers that are doing these things, that taking that that step to secure a business for tomorrow, every single one of them has signed a deal that is brought in like 3 to 5 times the amount of work with the same customer because they're like, wow, that means that I can rely on you. And if I can rely on you, that's one less person I have to worry about. And that's what I need right now. That's the difference. And what and what that unlocks for that customer, that the supplier there who's producing these goods is they go, okay, I've got this customer who have secured a contract for like two years, three years. What's my ROI that I can get on equipment? How can I get this installed in time? How do I upskill my staff? And how do we go on this journey? That's what they're looking at now, and that's why I'm talking to them, because I'm here to help them and many other integrators and many other people in the industry, robotics industry, a lot about the startup. So like, yeah, like how can we help? We can do this for free. We'll help you out. We'll move this needle. And then when we see value, we'll ask for something like for something to come from that. There. But it comes back to that later saying like how do I secure a job? How do I secure more work? How do I make my customer feel comfortable? And then how do I upskill and go this way? The technology exists. Anybody that's out there going, can automation do this? Yes, guaranteed 100%. But is it the right tool for the job? Speak to somebody that might not. It doesn't have to cost you a lot of money. When I started 20 years ago when manufacturing robotics were very expensive, now they're a lot cheaper and have a have dropped considerably in price. And there's the only thing we need right now is the people who support us. We need more and more people to support it, to embrace it here in this country, not don't worry about it, not be scared of it, but actually embrace it. Because the more robots we have, the more people get trained, the more support you'll have generally. Overall. You're talking about a topic. I've been reading a book called The Jolt Effect by, Dickson, Matthew and Ted McNamara. And kind of the thesis of it is, is that there's an epidemic in this country of people who are paralyzed by. They are so much more scared of making the wrong decision than no decision at all. And it's because if I make the wrong decision, it's tangible. You can see it. I made this decision and it caused something to go wrong. Whereas if I sit here and I stick with the status quo and I make no decision at all, things could still go wrong. But it's not because of a decision that I made. And it seems like you're talking about the people who are embracing the, the challenge and having the courage to do their due diligence, not do everything, but to take the chance on making a decision. Yeah, I think it's it's a decision you need to commit to something. And everybody makes bad decisions. But the best people adapt, make a new decision. That's that's what that's what leaders are doing. That's what true pioneers of anything that and that draws a crowd into people go, wow, can I come work for that company? Why do people want to go work for certain companies? Because they look at the leadership and go, there. They go in this way. I want to get on the I want to get on that bandwagon. I want to be part of that is you're going to sit there and do nothing. We want wants to be a part of a company, especially young people who want to become a part of a company that's just doing the same as yesterday. And guess what? Tomorrow is the same. Maybe worse. I think that's that's the thing I look at and that's what people gravitate towards. People wanting to move the needle back to the US here is it's a land of innovation. Support that innovation, fostering innovation. It can come from anywhere, anywhere in the stack of people, and we just support it and get behind it. It's a really important time where it's super important and there's some really great leaders out there. Travis, like I come from the machining, the dirty, dull and dangerous parts and manufacturing and insane. See, machines are all machine tools. And then you have people like, what's his name? Titan Gilroy, who runs Titans of CNC. He's got a million followers. And and he's he's so passionate about this industry of manufacturing in his country. And he's driving this people are gravitating towards. I want to be part of this, this, this new world that he's unlocking, and he's training people for free, and he's empowering these people. And it's like, you should get out. They should be proud of be machinists. You should be proud of being a tool set up. He should be proud to be working on these multi-million dollar machines that, you know, build the world. And he's and people are like, I want to be part of that. And he subscribers going up like this now he's like he's looking for he's getting to robots. He's got robotic systems. He's like, how do we get people into more robots? And he's driving this change and everybody's wanting, I want to be part of it. I'm sending you a machine. You know, he's it's like, that's what we need. I think that's one example. But I mean, this has happened across manufacturing as well. Well, I'm proud to know you can, this has been fantastic. And I'm excited to see where you are going to continue to drive and shape the industry. Who are the people that should be reaching out to you? And what's the best way for them to find you? Best way. I'm on LinkedIn. Simple, Ken Macken. You'll find me. Company is Workr Labs. You'll see us around everywhere. But. Yeah. Reach out. We're looking for people to join our team that are passionate about manufacturing. Travis. That's a big thing. And across the stack from marketing people all the way. People to boots on the ground. We need to sort of empower our local people out there in the field to have better tools and to enjoy and be part of manufacturing. We're at a critical time here. We need more and more people to jump into this space. Massive opportunity. So please reach out. Ken. It has been a pleasure. A big thank you to Noah Cuff, our producer. This has been HIRED! The Podcast. I'm Travis Miller. Talk to you again soon.