Making Things and Innovating Go Together: John Liu on MIT's Role in American Manufacturing
Manufacturing Happy Hour
What happens to a country's capacity to innovate when it stops making the things it designs? On an episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour, host Chris Luecke asked that question of Dr. John Liu, principal investigator of MIT's LEAP (Learning Engineering and Practice) Group. They recorded at Miracle of Science, a bar two blocks from MIT's campus whose menu is laid out as a giant periodic table. Liu argues that manufacturing is a source of innovation and not only a downstream activity. In his view, the US has spent two decades focused on product innovation at the expense of process innovation, and universities have a role in rebuilding that capacity through research and through education aimed at very different kinds of workers.
A Researcher of How People Learn Engineering
Liu describes the "principal investigator" title as less grand than it sounds. It means he is the person responsible for a research group, the one who applies for grants and leads projects. What sets the LEAP Group apart from most MIT labs is its subject. Rather than doing engineering or science research directly, the group studies how people learn engineering and science.
Luecke asked whether manufacturing or MIT came first for Liu. MIT came first. As an undergraduate studying physics at Caltech, Liu researched microfluidics: how to work with a drop of blood, run diagnostics on it, and control its flow. At MIT he moved into medical device design. His PhD sat at the intersection of mechanical design, fluid dynamics, and biomedical applications, focused on needle-free drug injection, a technology he notes has existed longer than most people assume.
The turn to manufacturing came only after the PhD, during a postdoctoral position under Professor Dave Hardt, an expert in process control and in applying statistics to control and optimize processes on the factory floor. Liu says manufacturing came "more out of left field." The real draw was education. He had fallen in love with teaching as a graduate student, and the postdoc was his first full-time chance to work in education. The subject happened to be manufacturing. In his words, the order was MIT, then education, then manufacturing. Luecke connected this to a pattern he sees among guests: careers rarely follow a plan made far in advance.
MIT's Long History in Manufacturing
Liu offered several examples of MIT's influence on industry. The first iteration of CNC (computer numerical control) machining, he says, came out of Building 35 at MIT in the 1950s, the building he works in. Before that, machining was entirely manual, and the MIT work introduced analog controllers.
The second example is the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World, written by MIT faculty, which Luecke credited with bringing lean manufacturing into wide use. Liu explained what prompted the work. In the 1980s, some MIT faculty observed that US and European automakers were competing with Japanese companies mainly by lobbying governments to put up competitive walls, possibly tariffs. Liu noted that this is relevant again today. The professors argued that if companies kept building walls, they would never learn and innovate. They asked how to reach across those walls and learn from what was happening in Japan.
That question led to a five-year study of the practices now called lean manufacturing, then known in Japan as the Toyota Production System. According to Liu, the book's central concern was how to move away from the mass-manufacturing paradigm of Ford's Model T era, which he calls an incredible innovation for its time, toward lean production. The data then suggested that a traditional automobile factory implementing lean could cut waste roughly in half, double efficiency, and halve downtime. Liu is careful to say that James Womack and his MIT colleagues did not invent lean manufacturing. It was a Japanese innovation, and it was being implemented in ad hoc ways. MIT's contribution was to study it, formalize it, and work out how companies could actually make the transition. Liu calls this a very practical kind of work that MIT may not be known for, but says that the globalization of lean, and the knowledge of how to implement it, came from MIT.
Two Lessons From the Lean Era
Asked what 2025 can learn from that 1980s study, Liu offered two lessons. The first follows from the origin story: instead of relying on walls, learn from the best, adopt their practices, and win by being competitive. He thinks many people are asking this question today, and that it should push the industry further.
The second concerns automation. Liu points to studies showing that automation can eliminate middle-skill work while increasing low-skill work. Against that backdrop, he sees lean manufacturing as "a bit of a lighthouse example," because it pushes decision-making and innovation down to the lowest rungs of the organization. Everyone is involved in recommending ways to reduce waste in a just-in-time system. Liu finds it compelling that a paradigm now 40 or 50 years old involves people so fully. With AI and automation arriving, his question is how to use what is most human, the creative and innovative capacities of workers, to bring productivity and flexibility to the factory floor. Luecke summarized this as decision-making being pushed to the front line, a theme many of the podcast's guests raise, and Liu agreed with that framing.
3D Printing and the MIT Startup Ecosystem
Liu also described MIT's contributions to additive manufacturing. A search for the origins of 3D printing, he says, leads to a 1990s patent naming Emanuel "Ely" Sachs, who is still on MIT's faculty with an office down the hall from Liu. Liu still sees him in the machine shop, working with his hands. Liu says the term "3D printing" itself was coined by Sachs at MIT, while acknowledging there have been various earlier forms of the technology.
He listed Desktop Metal and Formlabs as MIT startups. He also said he believes, while noting he would need to check his sources, that Massachusetts has the highest density of venture funding in additive manufacturing of any state, and that many of those startups come from MIT. Luecke mentioned Natan Linder, a co-founder of Formlabs and a past guest who now runs Tulip Interfaces nearby. Liu called Linder a close colleague with whom his team works on several projects. Both connected Tulip's focus on empowering frontline workers to the lessons drawn from lean.
"We Innovate Here and We Produce There"
The conversation then turned to Making in America: From Innovation to Market, an MIT study from around 2013 that Luecke described as a critique of globalization in which technologies developed in the US were commercialized abroad. Liu framed it carefully. He says globalization has great advantages, and he thinks the study's lead authors would agree that the goal was not to abandon it. But in his view, one key thing this form of globalization took away was Americans' ability to make things.
At the time, Liu says, this was not on the public's mind or on policymakers' radar. The US government encouraged offshoring, and so did Wall Street. Large companies like Apple were moving manufacturing to Asia and elsewhere. The dominant model was "we innovate here and we produce there." According to Liu, the nation's chief economists in the late 2000s and early 2010s compared manufacturing to agriculture, as something that could be outsourced. Under the president of MIT at the time, whose name he could not recall during the interview, the institute commissioned a campus-wide study to test that assumption. The study was not about international collaboration, which Liu calls a wonderful part of globalization. It asked whether it was good for the country to design a part here and have someone else make it elsewhere. Since the US is known as a nation of innovators, the key question was whether it makes sense for an innovation economy to produce outside its borders.
The multi-year study involved engineering, science, and social science faculty. They interviewed and mapped firms in the US, Europe, and Asia. Against the prevailing view that offshoring was all benefit and no cost, Liu says the study's resounding conclusion was that the country loses its ability to innovate when it produces elsewhere. His explanation is that taking a prototype into production forces the design to change in many ways. Design for manufacturing (DFM) is a whole category of innovation that he says is undercelebrated in the US but essential to the innovation engine. It generates new processes and new ways of making things, which carry patents and significant value. That value is lost when companies simply send CAD files and designs overseas. Liu sums up the past two decades by saying the US has been an economy focused on product innovation, and that there is "so much process innovation that we need to recapture."
Why Social Scientists Led the Study
Luecke asked why social scientists were involved in a manufacturing study. Liu said the lead researcher, Suzanne Berger, is a social scientist with a background in political science, and that she had studied the French government. In his view, social scientists bring a broader lens on how industries are affected. Their qualitative and quantitative methods can tease out connections across an entire industry. They also ask how governments, agencies, local organizations, companies, and schools do or don't work together to support manufacturing. He added that social scientists at MIT are especially interested in industrialization.
Liu described the study as influential. As he understands it, the work shifted the views of policymakers in the 2010s. Berger presented the findings to President Obama in the Oval Office before the book was published. Liu says the study became associated with the thinking behind setting up the manufacturing institutes and their continuation, though he noted that much of this happened behind the scenes.
What a 2025 Addendum Would Need to Address
Luecke asked what a second edition would need to cover. Liu said he hadn't thought about the book's shortcomings, but he identified several ways the world has changed.
First, he says, "for better or worse," and explicitly not as a political statement, countries are now more inward-looking. Tariffs are one sign of this. Each domestic economy, perhaps together with a few select partner countries, is increasingly responsible for its own supply chains, which have become more isolated. As a result, much manufacturing is coming back to the US. Liu cited Apple's announcement, a few weeks before the recording, of a $500 billion investment over the next four years, along with announcements from car manufacturers and semiconductor companies. He said he was floored by a post listing all the projects over $1 billion and the new factories planned in the US over the next decade.
His concern is what happens if this reshoring follows the current paradigm. He worries that prices would be very high, that the jobs would still not be good jobs, and that this kind of manufacturing might not contribute well to the climate. That is why MIT is asking what a new manufacturing paradigm should look like.
Liu also pointed to changed corporate structures. In the 1980s and 1990s, firms were vertically integrated. He named Intel, Motorola, and Bell Labs as examples, saying they were able to capitalize on spillover effects. That is no longer the case. Firms have broken up into small, medium, and large companies. The open question, as he puts it, is how to move to a type of manufacturing that provides good jobs, uses the best of technology while keeping humans at the center of the work, and contributes to sustainability. The original book did not set out to answer that.
An Annual Manufacturing Symposium
When Luecke asked what MIT is doing now, Liu first mentioned an annual manufacturing symposium held each May, which he supports in a helping role. The upcoming one would be the fourth. It showcases how MIT is thinking about manufacturing nationally and globally from research, policy, and industry perspectives, with talks from academia, industry, and often government. Liu says the first one was small, about 150 people, yet the New York Times and Forbes attended. He took that as a sign of more interest in the topic than the event's size suggested.
MicroMasters: Graduate-Level Principles for Working Engineers
The first education program Liu discussed is the online MicroMasters in manufacturing, which he helped launch about five years earlier. Luecke cited roughly 200,000 participants, and Liu agreed the number was about right, describing hundreds of thousands of unique learners worldwide. In any given course, he says, learners come from about 150 countries. Most are professional engineers who want to apply graduate-level manufacturing principles to their current jobs, and the median age in a class is 29.
That profile follows from the program's design. The MicroMasters is based on MIT's master's program in advanced manufacturing and design, so it assumes a four-year engineering degree, undergraduate-level mechanical engineering, statistics, and probability. Liu says people without that background, such as high school students drawn by the MIT name, often drop out within the first week or two. The intended learners are engineers already in industry who want to become leaders and eventually plant managers. Liu says graduates sometimes become factory managers or start their own manufacturing companies within a couple of years.
Four Timeless Principles of Manufacturing
At the core of both the master's and the MicroMasters is a set of principles that Liu says MIT has been refining for decades. The premise is that whatever company or era someone works in, from the printing press of the 1800s to the "so-called Industry 5.0," they must understand and apply these principles. Liu acknowledges that calling them timeless and industry-agnostic is a bold claim. He supports it by saying MIT has taught them for two decades, manufacturing has changed considerably in that time, and the principles have not.
According to Liu, there are four things a manufacturer must always control:
- manufacturing processes
- manufacturing systems
- supply
- people and finances
His reasoning is that people often equate manufacturing with robotics or 3D printing, but those things change, and anything that can change probably isn't at the core. Put process, system, supply, and money together, he says, and you have manufacturing. Luecke asked why people and money share a category, since it feels like five. Liu said the grouping mainly reflects the course structure, in which an engineering management course covers working with both people and money.
TechAMP and the "Technologist"
The second program, TechAMP (Technologist for Advanced Manufacturing Program), serves a very different audience. Liu began by defining "technologist." In recent years, he says, many manufacturing firms told him they wished engineers had hands-on skills and that technicians and operators had analytical skills. At the same time, he observed that new technologies such as robotics, IoT, big data, and AI are all connected. Implementing one means understanding how it affects processes upstream and downstream and how it communicates with other technologies. Traditional shop-floor workers often have skills tied to one or two pieces of equipment, which creates a disconnect.
Connecting those observations, Liu began to ask whether firms were asking the wrong question and actually needed a new category of worker. That worker would stay on the shop floor and still handle maintenance and equipment operation, but would also have basic engineering skills for integrating and optimizing technology and for seeing how the pieces fit together as a system. His team set out to define that category formally and build a program to produce it. He calls the technologist a technician-engineer hybrid who works on the factory floor.
TechAMP is designed for incumbent workers, not entry-level students coming from vocational high school or community college. The intended participant is a company's star production worker with three to five or more years of experience, someone a company president sees as a future leader. Unlike MicroMasters participants, these workers don't need an engineering background. Liu says rockstar frontline workers are exactly the target, which is why his team works with Tulip.
The program is also not open enrollment. TechAMP launches at a site only when enough companies in a region commit to sending incumbent workers and to giving them a wage increase, more responsibility, and fair compensation after completing it. If a cohort isn't filled, the program doesn't launch.
TechAMP is a 12-month certificate program. For the first nine months, participants keep working while completing a flexible online portion and in-person labs. Schedules such as weekday evenings or weekends are worked out with the company cohort, not only the student cohort. The final three months are a capstone project. Employers, the education site's faculty, and Liu's team identify a real problem on the employer's floor, and the worker applies what they have learned to solve it. Liu likens it to "free consulting hours" from faculty and his team that enable the worker to solve an actual company problem.
How Pushback From Brazil Changed Liu's Focus
Liu says he doesn't deserve sole credit for looking beyond engineers. He describes himself as having been in a "higher ed bubble." In 2020, SENAI, which he described as Brazil's federally funded training organization, contacted his team about MicroMasters. Its representatives flew to MIT to discuss their challenges. During the conversation they stopped and told Liu that MicroMasters and the master's degree served only the top 5% of their workforce pyramid. They asked about the 7 million people who would never go to university. Liu says this pushback, the argument that making an impact requires caring about the rest of the workforce, first got him thinking in that direction.
The Defense Connection and Submarine Production
Luecke then asked about MIT's collaborations with the Department of Defense and Manufacturing USA. Liu described the DoD's push to scale up submarine production, which he says must roughly double in the next few years, a task he calls daunting given how few people understand a submarine's scale. He says the Navy is focused on two classes, the Virginia class and the larger Columbia class, and is aiming for what it calls a "two plus one" strategy: two Virginia-class and one Columbia-class submarine per year. He also mentioned a recent federal executive order on rebuilding the maritime shipbuilding base, adding that his sources should be checked. Luecke said shipbuilding comes up constantly in discussions of reindustrialization.
According to Liu, the estimate for the marine industrial base, including its supplier base, is about 100,000 new workers above baseline over roughly the next decade. Some will be engineers, but he believes the three main needs are in the trades: welders, machinists, and fitters. He sees this as closely aligned with TechAMP's focus on shop-floor workers, and his team has spoken with many organizations in aerospace and in what is now called the marine industrial base (MIB), formerly the submarine industrial base.
The concrete link is funding. The DoD's Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) program funds TechAMP. At the time of recording, Liu said his team was nearly finished with industry mapping and content development, and that the plan, which he stressed was still a plan, was to launch at six sites across New England that fall.
The Role of Higher Education Alongside the Trades
Luecke closed by asking about higher education's role in reindustrialization at a time when many voices urge young people to go into the trades. He sees the two as complementary. Liu agreed that the trades are critical to the economy and pointed out that much of his own effort goes there. Luecke added that an engineering degree was the right path for him, but that different paths suit different people, and he hopes digital learning and work-and-learn models open more pathways.
Liu named two roles for higher education. The first is research and innovation. State funding, federal grants, and industry money flowing into academic research fuel much of the country's innovation, he says. He mentioned that there is a study he should be able to cite on how strong this relationship is and offered to send it later. Using technology readiness levels, he places universities at TRL 1 through 3, plus some of 4 and 5. He places the manufacturing institutes at 4 through 6, with other organizations carrying technologies through 7 to 9. He gave radar and the internet as examples of technologies that emerged from government-funded university research and later had large-scale impact. The second role is education: preparing leaders in innovation, policy, government, and industry. Liu says the country still needs tradespeople, engineers, and managers, and that they all need to work together.
Luecke tied this back to the episode's examples. CNC machining, lean manufacturing, and 3D printing either began at MIT or entered the industry's vocabulary through it, which he said shows concretely how university research feeds into manufacturing. The conversation ended with Luecke promising to return to MIT, perhaps around the 2026 symposium. The question Liu had raised earlier remained open: how to make the reshoring now underway produce good jobs, affordable products, sustainable operations, and work that keeps humans at the center.
One of the key aspects that globalization took away was the ability for Americans to make things, right? We innovate here and we produce there. Is that really a good thing for the country? We have been, I think, what I would call an economy that's been focused on product innovation in the past two decades. There's so much process innovation that we need to recapture.
MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They've been playing a role in manufacturing and equipping the workforce for decades. We're going to explore that history today as we sit down with Dr. John Liu and also explore where they're going and the new types of programs they've created to equip the next generation of manufacturing leaders from the front line to the C-suite. Dr. Liu, welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour.
Thank you so much for having me, Chris.
Yeah, I was about to say welcome back, but the last time we were having a conversation like this, it was at IMTS. It was Manufacturing Happy Hour style, but not necessarily the podcast itself.
That's right.
Before we dive into the topic of the day, we have to describe where we're hanging out right now. You suggested this bar specifically. Tell us a bit about it. We're right on MIT's campus. Describe Miracle of Science.
Well, Miracle of Science is a restaurant and a bar just right on Massachusetts Avenue. We usually call it Mass Ave for short. And it's kind of a favorite haunt for students and faculty. It's literally—and you made the walk too, I'm sure—it's just two blocks away from campus and from my office. So that's why I picked it, but it also is kind of near and dear to the MIT community.
Yeah, it's convenient, but it's also very well themed for a manufacturing and technology style podcast. We can't really see it right now, but if you look at the menus or if you look at the ones on the wall, it's basically set up in the format of the periodic table, but now you're seeing beer options or you're seeing food options as well.
Well, it's funny. I'll share a very quick story. One of the things I love about doing this podcast is showing up to the bar or brewery where over half of the episodes are recorded in person. And when I show up, it's always kind of fun figuring out what is the optimal camera angle for the day. And in this case, I was going to set us—the cameras were going to be facing the windows and things like that. I'm like, well, that's not very ideal. And then I kind of just turned around. I'm like, wait a second.
For those listening to the audio, they can't see it, but there is a giant periodic table behind us with the menu, and it's a wonderful backdrop. The folks watching the video will see folks coming in and out of the bar as well.
Very MIT.
Very MIT. And the funny thing about being at MIT is I am doing a number of podcasts at places of education these days, but a lot of those are technical colleges right now. MIT is kind of the complete opposite end of the spectrum to an extent. I think we're going to get into why. In fact, I know we're going to get into why today.
Looking forward to it.
Yeah. But let's talk about you first. Describe your role as a principal investigator of MIT's LEAP Group, which is Learning Engineering and Practice. So describe that as if you're having a drink with someone, a student, a fellow peer, someone in the industry, as if you're having a drink at Miracle of Science.
Right. Well, it's not too crazy, not as fancy as the term maybe implies. It just means that I'm responsible for leading a research group. So when I apply for grants, when I lead research projects, I'm kind of the one responsible. So that's all that means. We have a team of investigators, right? We do research, and the principal investigator, so the primary one, that's me.
So LEAP Group, as you mentioned, it stands for Learning Engineering and Practice Group. So my research group, unlike most at MIT, we look not into just engineering or science. We look into how people learn engineering or how people learn science. So that's what my group does, and I lead the group. That's all that means.
Awesome. Well, we're going to dive into the various, let's say, manufacturing-centric programs that you've been involved in that MIT has. But the one part of your story I want to dive into first is something I asked you the first time, but it just has such a nice ring to it, I have to ask it again. What came first for you, MFG or MIT?
That's a great question, Chris. For me, MIT started first. Actually, before MIT, I was studying physics at Caltech. I'm not sure if I mentioned this last time. My research at that time in undergrad was in microfluidics. So we're looking in, how do you work with a drop of blood? How do you perform a bunch of diagnostics and control the flow?
And then in grad school at MIT, I started to look into medical device design. So my PhD was really at the intersection of mechanical design, fluid dynamics, and biomedical applications, specifically where we're looking into needle-free injection of drugs. Kind of a wacky thing, but it's been around longer than probably most think.
Yeah.
And then after I finished my PhD, ironically, that's when I pivoted to manufacturing. So I'd been at MIT, gotten my master's, got my PhD. It was during my, what we call, postdoc. So it's this kind of temporary position. It's called a postdoctoral associate. You're still researching under a professor, where I started to pivot into manufacturing. This is under a professor by the name of Dave Hardt.
Yeah.
And he's an expert in process control. So how do you apply statistics into understanding how we control or optimize processes on the factory floor? So that's when I started to pivot into manufacturing.
Did you have a feeling that you might go that route at some point, or did manufacturing kind of come out of left field?
That's probably more the second, to be honest. Probably more the second. I hadn't really thought much about manufacturing when I first came to MIT. It was really the more time I spent at MIT, the more I kind of got interested through classes, but really during this postdoc, really the hook at the time was to get involved with education because, as a grad student, I fell in love with teaching.
And then here as a postdoc, it was my first kind of full-time opportunity to get into education, and the topic just happened to be manufacturing.
Okay. So it was really MIT, then education, then it was manufacturing. I mean, we talk to a lot of folks with unique career trajectories. I think if there's any lesson for Manufacturing Happy Hours, you got to be flexible, and you can't plan too far in advance to where your career is going to take you, because it could take you any number of directions.
That's right.
So I love that your story echoes that. Let's talk about MIT's history with manufacturing a little bit, because you and I have chatted about this a little bit, and I was asking you this via email last night. Because I remember you mentioning, it's like, hey, MIT's been talking about this since the 1980s, and really there are a number of things that MIT was at the forefront of manufacturing, like lean manufacturing came out of MIT.
And there was a book that you referenced, and admittedly, I love trying to read these in advance. I did not read this one in advance, but it came out in 1990, and I believe it was a number of MIT professors that wrote it, The Machine That Changed the World. And it was about finding success in automotive manufacturing, and that's where lean manufacturing came from. But I've been just filling in all the gaps on my research so far. What should people know about MIT's history with the industrial space?
It has really been around for a long time. I would just offer a few examples. Most people obviously are familiar with CNC, computer numerical control machining. That first iteration really came out of MIT from the building that I work with, just two blocks down from this bar. In the 1950s, they were the first ones who came up with analog controllers to be able to—I mean, before this, it was all manual. And that first iteration was from Building 35 at MIT.
Then you fast-forward to the book that you were talking about. That really came out of this realization that some MIT faculty had at the time that, hey, it looks like automobile companies, both in the US and Europe, the only way that they're able to compete at this point is to lobby the government to set up walls, competitive walls, tariffs perhaps. Kind of relevant to today's—
It comes up a lot on the show these days.
Yeah, that's right. And that was really the primary strategy in the '80s. The only way that US companies were competing with the Japanese companies was to set up walls. And these MIT professors in the '80s were saying, "Hey, if we just continue to set up walls, we'll never learn and innovate." And so, instead of setting up walls, how do we reach across walls and learn from all the innovation that's happening in Japan at the time?
And so they launched a five-year study in understanding these, what we now in the US and many parts of the world call lean manufacturing. At the time, from Japan, it was called the Toyota Production System, right? How do we understand all these practices that are coming to form lean manufacturing? And most importantly, and this is what the book will go into, how do you shift from these old paradigms of mass manufacturing from really Ford that was coming out in the 1920s, the Model T, which was an incredible innovation at the time? But how do we shift from that and move towards lean manufacturing?
Because a lot of the data at the time was showing, if you can implement lean manufacturing for a traditional automobile factory, you can cut half the waste, you can double efficiency, you can halve downtime. I mean, all of these incredible metrics that were coming on. So they were launching kind of large-scale studies at the time.
And then, so it's not that Womack and colleagues at MIT invented lean manufacturing, but at the time it was still considered a Japanese innovation, and it was being implemented in very ad hoc ways. What they were able to do is to study and to formalize what this means, and how do companies actually implement a transition? Actually a very practical thing, which MIT might not be known for. But yes, for globalizing lean manufacturing, how do you implement it? That's MIT.
What can we learn from the successes back then to now? If we're reflecting on the study and this book from the 1980s, what do you think is a lesson that we can learn from history that applies to manufacturing today in 2025?
That's fantastic. One, which I already alluded to, is instead of relying on walls, how do we learn from the best and implement those best practices so that you win because you are competitive? I think that's a really big question that I think a lot of us are asking today, but I think it will incentivize us even more, right, if we're driven by that kind of question.
The second one is, and something that I've always been inspired by lean manufacturing is, especially with all the conversation today about automation and how that might take away jobs, or actually there's been many studies at this point on how automation can take away middle-skill, increasing low-skilled work. Lean manufacturing still today stands to me as a bit of a lighthouse example, because lean manufacturing, what it does is it pushes decision-making and innovation to the lowest rungs, right? All folks are involved with making recommendations for decreasing waste in just-in-time manufacturing, right? They're all involved.
And so that full-bodied involvement in an old paradigm—we could say it's 40 years old, 50 years old at this point—in today's world when we have AI and automation coming in, how does that make humans, how do we leverage what is most human and the creative or the innovative aspects of humans in order to push productivity, flexibility onto the factory floor? That, I think, is a really compelling question for me.
Two great lessons from history there: learn from the best, and I'm going to phrase it in a way I think that comes up on Manufacturing Happy Hour quite a bit, is decision-making is pushed to the front line. And there's a lot of conversation right now, fantastic, that many guests share. It's like, hey, frontline workers are really becoming some of the key decision-makers more so than ever within manufacturing operations.
That's a fantastic way of summarizing. Absolutely.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you had some pretty big moves in additive as well, additive manufacturing, 3D. Am I making that up? I thought. Okay, okay.
So, yeah. If you or our audience Googles 3D printing, it actually comes out of a patent in the '90s. And if you look at the patent, you'll see Ely Sachs. Well, that's the nickname, Emanuel Sachs. We call him Ely Sachs. He's still a faculty at MIT. He's in an office just down the hallway, and I'll see him often in the machine shop when I'm passing through the machine shop. He's still there, putting his hands to the work.
That term 3D printing was coined from Ely Sachs, really from MIT. One of the earliest iterations. I mean, there's been different forms and whatnot, but as we call it today, that term also came from MIT. So large contributions to additive. If you look at some of the major startup companies today, Desktop Metal, Formlabs, these are MIT startups. I believe, and I need to kind of check my sources here, but I believe as far as state goes, the largest density of VC funding in additive manufacturing is Massachusetts. And if you look at startup companies, a lot of them are MIT.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. One of the original founders of Formlabs, Natan Linder, he's been on the show before. He's just over in, gosh, what, Tulip Interfaces. Yes, he's just right across the water right now. Not too far from here at all.
And Natan is a dear colleague of ours. We work very closely with him on some of our projects that you know about.
That doesn't surprise me. That makes a lot of sense. That makes sense.
You're talking about empowering frontline workers. That's all that's all about.
100%, 100%. Yeah. So you're seeing where some of these lessons have come from before now.
Well, let's jump to 2013 as well. There was another study that I believe was done. I might have my date wrong, but Making in America: From Innovation to Market. And I believe I'm going to say this incorrectly, but that's kind of the point. It was a bit of a critique on globalization. I believe this report discussed things that were developed here in the US but ultimately commercialized abroad. Am I on the right track? How would you summarize this if you were having a beer with someone?
No, absolutely. So I do think there are great advantages to globalization. And I think even the lead authors of this study would say it's not that we want to go away with globalization.
Sure.
But one of the key aspects, I think, that globalization, or in this form that globalization took away, was the ability for Americans to make things, right? And I think this is a real issue. At the time, as you mentioned, this really wasn't on the public consciousness, both for the normal person walking down the street, but also for policymakers, right? Both the American government was
Encouraging, but also Wall Street and large companies like Apple were shifting their manufacturing operations to Asia and other places. And this was the dominant paradigm: we innovate here and we produce there. And even the chief economists of the US at the time, both in the late 2000s to the early 2010s, basically said, hey, manufacturing is like agriculture. We can outsource this thing.
And what MIT decided to do, and this was first under the leadership of a president at the time, I'm blanking on her name, but essentially commissioned an MIT-wide study on, hey, is that really true? If we just offshore all of our manufacturing capability—not collaborations, and there's really wonderful parts of globalization.
Sure.
But this part, which is like we design a part here and someone else makes it out there. Is that really a good thing for the country? I think the US is known for being innovators, right? So in an innovation economy, does it make sense to produce outside? That's really the key question.
Okay.
And so this was a broad, multi-year study involving engineering, science and social science faculty at MIT, but then interviewing and mapping firms in the US and Europe and Asia, really looking at, hey, what happens when you do this kind of thing?
Yeah.
And unlike the current understanding at the time, which was, hey, this is all benefit and no cost, right?
Yeah.
The resounding conclusion that came out of that multi-year study was that we lose our ability to innovate if we produce elsewhere. Why? Because when you actually are forced to go from prototype to make a lot of these things, the design changes in all these sorts of ways. I'm sure you have many people, both in your audience but also people that you interview on the podcast, who talk about DFM, design for manufacturing. That's a whole type of innovation that is not as celebrated in our country today.
Yeah.
And yet it is incredibly important to the innovation engine. You end up creating whole new types of processes, whole new types of ways of making things that have patents, that have a lot of value that we lose if we just send our CAD and send our designs outside of the US.
And so we have been, I think, what I would call an economy that's been focused on product innovation in the past two decades.
Yeah. But if you look at broadly the US and other countries, there's so much process innovation that we need to recapture.
Great way to summarize it. I also love the example of going into when we think of the US as an innovative place, but DFM, design for manufacturing. When you're not manufacturing in a particular location, you lose that entire subset of innovation. One thing you mentioned that stuck out: why were social scientists involved in this? Because I think a lot about economics and business and engineering, but why social scientists as well?
It's interesting because the lead researcher was Suzanne Berger, who is a social scientist.
Okay.
Actually, she comes from political science. Her background was studying, I think, French government at the time. Really, social scientists come in with often a broader perspective, broader lens on what are the impacts on industries. Their qualitative and quantitative methods can help us tease out these larger industry-wide connections.
There's large questions also on how do governments and government agencies, local organizations, companies, schools, how do all of these work together or not work together to be able to enable the manufacturing industry? These are questions that often at least our type of social scientists like to ask. And as you can imagine, social scientists at MIT, they're really interested in industrialization.
Sure. I think it's a great answer. I just had to dive into that one a little deeper. Last question before we change gears here a little bit. This report, I believe, or this study was done close to a decade ago, essentially. What's not included in that? Because I'm going to include a link to it so people can access it and take a peek at it in the show notes page. But what is not included in that report that you think should be now, or something that's relative to today? I know this is kind of a deep question, a very introspective one, but is there something that you wish were in there, particularly as it pertains to manufacturing and industrialization in 2025?
Wow. Okay, that's a really interesting question, Chris. I haven't really thought about the shortcomings of the book.
And it's not to say the shortcomings, but just what would be the appendix that gets up? What would be the second edition?
What's the addendum in 2025?
Yeah, because a lot really has happened, as you mentioned.
Right. And this book made a very large impact in industrial—to my understanding anyway is that it shifted a lot of policymakers' perspectives in the 2010s. So folks in the Obama administration, Professor Berger ended up sitting across the table in the Oval Office from President Obama at the time to present the findings before the book was published.
Sure.
So a lot of really large impacts. I think it ended up tying into, or being associated with, thoughts towards setting up the MIs and the continuation of that. There's a lot behind the scenes. In 2025, as you mentioned, we're in a very different place.
Yeah.
Right. Things have changed. So one of the things that I would say the book didn't set out to answer then, and I think we do have to think really critically today, is that, for better or for worse, I'm not trying to make a political statement, but companies are more internally, inwardly looking these days, right? We just talked about the tariffs. What that means then is that it's really up to each domestic economy plus maybe a few more select, at least in the US, a few more select countries to have their supply chain. Supply chains are a lot more isolated.
Yeah.
In that sense, and so what this means is, yes, a lot of manufacturers coming back to the US. You're seeing Apple, what, three, four weeks ago announced the $500 billion investment in the next four years. You're seeing all of these announcements from companies, car manufacturers, semiconductor. There's a lot of stuff that, just five years ago, I wouldn't have thought about building some of that stuff here.
Yeah, I'm sure you've seen it, but I was floored, I think a few weeks ago, to see a post of all the $1 billion-plus projects that are being announced and new factories being set up in the US in the next decade. It's massive.
So a lot of manufacturers coming back. But if we continue on our current paradigm, I think the concern is we will not be able—I mean, the prices will be so high.
Yeah.
We will still not be able to offer good jobs. The kind of manufacturing we have might not contribute very well to the climate. And so a big question that we're asking at MIT is, hey, what's a new manufacturing paradigm? Let me backtrack here. At the same time, financial structures are different. In the past, firms in the '80s, '90s, they were vertically integrated. And so you had your Intels or your Motorola, your Bell Labs, very able to capitalize on spillover effects. That's not the case anymore, right? There's a lot of breaking up of firms, small, medium-sized, large ones.
And then finally, given the difference in age today, how do we move to a new type of manufacturing that can provide people good jobs, that can take the best of technology and yet be able to center humans in the work, and that can contribute to sustainability? And so the book doesn't really set out to do that. And we're also in a very different age today.
Yeah. And I think you actually asked the better question, right? What would be the addendum? I wish I'd come up with that to begin with, but I think that makes a lot of sense. I want to focus to, hey, what is MIT doing about it today a little bit? And that's some of the programs that you've been involved in as well. So I have some specific questions, but I will ask the general one first. What is MIT doing about it today?
Okay. Well, Chris, I don't know if this is the right response first, but in May we have a big symposium for manufacturing at MIT.
This will be out in May.
And it hasn't really been going on for that long. I think this is the fourth symposium we've done. I'm always helping in some way, I would say, in a supportive capacity. But if anyone is ever interested in coming out to see, hey, what is MIT going to do about it? Maybe I can share with you the link and you can share with your audience.
Totally. And it's good to know that it's something you're doing on a regular basis now, because even if someone listens to this six months down the line, they can always catch the 2026, or whatever year it is, edition of that.
Absolutely.
This is great. So every year now, and this will be our fourth one, basically showcasing how MIT is thinking about the conversation in manufacturing, both nationally and globally, and from a research perspective, from a policy perspective, from the industry perspective. How do we imagine we can both contribute and also learn from what is happening from the best? So in that day, you'll see a host of talks, and then government often will show. It's kind of funky. I think maybe our first time hosting this, it was a very small gathering, like 150, nowhere near—
That's usually how it goes.
Very small, but you had New York Times and Forbes showing up. So I think it's a bit lopsided. I think there's a lot of interest in it, but it's not a big—
MIT has some brand recognition, right? Forbes will show up more for them than they will for Manufacturing Happy Hour, I'll put it that way.
Chris, you're welcome to come.
It's a very pragmatic plug, because not only are you doing events, but I'm going to ask you about some of the programs that you've been involved in, because you were recently involved in the MicroMasters program. Tell us a little bit about that and how that is impacting manufacturing, because I think it's to the tune of something like 200,000—
Yeah, just about.
Students or folks that have been involved in the program. Tell me a bit more about that.
Yeah, so this is an online program that I helped set up about five years ago. And to your point, there's hundreds of thousands of unique learners across the globe. I think any given course I have about 15 learners from 150 countries represented. So a very international audience.
And most of them, by and large, are professional engineers who are seeking to apply graduate-level manufacturing principles into their current work. Median age of a learner in a class is 29. So not your normal university-level course. And why is that the case? Well, it's because we based this MicroMasters on our master's at MIT in advanced manufacturing design, which is a grad-level, I mean, it's a master's program.
Yeah.
Right. So this is really targeting folks who have been in the industry for a few years or some time. They want to come back to pick up what we would call the principles of manufacturing. I can dig into that a little bit.
Yeah.
And then we send them out again, and sometimes within a couple years they're factory managers or they're starting their own company to try to impact the manufacturing space and whatnot. I talked about manufacturing principles, or the principles of manufacturing.
Yeah. Go into that a bit more.
This is a set of principles that we've been actually distilling for the past few decades. This is at the core of our master's program, and it's the premise of no matter which company you work in in manufacturing, no matter what generation, 1800s printing press, 2025, so-called future Industry 5.0, whatever you want to call it, you will always have to understand and apply these principles. And that's kind of a bold claim.
They're timeless.
Yes, we would call them timeless and industry-agnostic principles. I know it's a bit of a bold claim, but we've been teaching it for two decades. Manufacturing has changed quite a bit in the past two decades, and yet these principles we've seen haven't changed.
How many are there?
Four.
Four. Give us the at-the-pub version of this.
Principles are, again, no matter what age, what company, you always have to be able to control four things: manufacturing processes, manufacturing systems, the supply, and the people and finances. Always these four. So often people are saying manufacturing is robotics or it's 3D printing. All those things can change.
Yeah.
Right? If they can change, that probably means they're not at the core of what manufacturing is. What is manufacturing? You put these four together, the process, the system, the supply and money, you got manufacturing.
Why didn't people and money each get their own category? Why did they get lumped together? It feels like five.
It feels like five.
I'm just throwing that out there.
Well, because really it's lumped into our class structure, that we have an engineering management course. Okay, well then that's how do we work with people and money together? It's a great question, but it's really more through the class.
I can see how people and finance are related, but yes, I appreciate that part of this is a class structure logistics aspect to it.
Yeah. So I recall talking to you about this now, because what I found interesting about the MicroMasters program is it wasn't—what would you say differentiates it from, let's say, a tech school then, right? Because at least what I heard, you're really focusing on people that are already deep in it. This is for experienced folks that are taking their career to the next level, which I get the sense is what differentiates it from something that a tech school might do. But tell me a bit more of what you think of that.
So we gear it towards folks who have already finished a four-year university degree in engineering.
Interesting.
So we're assuming you have undergrad-level understanding of mechanical engineering. You've taken statistics, you understand probability. We assume a lot. And so folks who see MIT, they're really interested, maybe they don't have this background, maybe they're a high school student or they haven't taken university, and they go in, first week or two, they're kind of out.
Got it.
And so it's a very different audience. So the people who show up, they've already done four years in engineering. They're an engineer in industry, and now they're thinking, how do I level up? How do I become a leader? And from the technical side, how do I eventually become a factory plant manager? Those are the kinds of folks that the MicroMasters is after. And apparently there's plenty of them. A lot of people have finished this program.
Yeah, I was going to say, just looking at the numbers that are there, there's a vast number of folks that have gone through it. But the fact that having that engineering background is a prerequisite makes a lot of sense.
So that's very different than a lot of programs out there.
But let's talk about the TechAMP program then, because that one's
Different. That's the TechAMP, that's an acronym basically for Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program. Before you tell us about that, define technologist first, because I think this is really an important part of that question.
That's a good question. So technologist, this really stemmed out of, over the past few years, I've spoken with a lot of manufacturing firms, and many of them complain to me, like, "John, I wish engineers had hands-on skills. I wish technicians or operators had analytical skills."
Yeah.
And at some point you think about what the technology requirements are in this day and age. It's not implementing a new h, for example, or new 3D printer. These new technologies of robotics or IoT, think about big data or AI, they're all connected. Why is that important? Why is this an important word? Because if you're going to implement a technology, then you have to understand, well, how does it impact upstream? How does it impact downstream? How does it talk to other technologies?
For that to happen, then your shop floor worker, your traditional shop floor worker, who often is, they have a specific skill set often tied to one or two pieces of equipment.
Yeah.
There is a disconnect there. And I started to tie that together with this complaint of, engineers, we want hands-on skills; technicians, we want analytical skills. So at some point, I started to ask, Chris, maybe we're asking the wrong question. Maybe we're really after a new category of worker.
Yeah.
Maybe we need a worker that is on the shop floor but is able to bridge this gap between technicians, engineers.
Yeah.
That is, yes, they still think about maintenance, or they still think about how do we operate this piece of equipment, but now they have a basic set of engineering skills to be able to think through technology integration, optimization, to think through on a systems level, how do the pieces fit together?
And so then we set out to think, hey, do we need a new kind of worker category that we can formally define and then really develop a program to produce that kind of worker? And so that's the technologist. You could say it's a technician-engineer hybrid who's on the factory floor.
And the TechAMP program is helping create that new breed of worker, correct?
That's right. And TechAMP really stands for Technologist for Advanced Manufacturing Program. So it's a program to develop this technologist workforce to help firms move in advanced manufacturing.
What does that program look like? Are we talking like a certificate, a two-year, four-year degree? What does that look like?
We designed this for incumbent workers.
Okay.
Again, I'm sure you know of even more workforce programs than mine. Mine is not designed for entry-level folks straight out of vo-tech high school or community college or one year of experience.
This program is designed for companies to send their star production worker who's been there for three-plus, five-plus years, who maybe a president might look at that guy or gal and say, "Hey, there's a trajectory here. I want this person to be a leader. Let me send that person to TechAMP." So that's the first thing. We didn't really, as a normal kind of program that's entry-level.
And did I hear that that person, unlike the MicroMasters program, they don't necessarily need that engineering background? They could just be one of the rockstar frontline workers.
Rockstar frontline workers. That's exactly what we're after, which is why we work with Tulip, right? Because Tulip wants those rockstar frontline workers.
Makes a lot of sense.
So it's not entry-level. It's not for a fresh student. It's for incumbent workers. And this sounds a little funky, but it's not open enrollment.
Mhm. Okay.
We will only launch TechAMP at a place if there's enough companies in a region and a site that's saying, "I'm going to commit to sending my incumbent workers here, and I'm going to promote and give a wage increase after TechAMP, give them more responsibilities, compensate them fairly." And so unless a cohort is filled, we don't launch TechAMP.
TechAMP is a one-year, and back to some of your earlier questions, it's a 12-month certificate program. So they have about nine months when they're with us doing things. They're still working, right? These are incumbent workers. We can't take that away.
Right.
So we'll work with them to figure out, with the company cohort, right, not just student cohort, company cohort: is this weekday nights? Are these weekends? What works for this cohort? And then the online portion, so that's flexible. They could do it at home, and then there's in-person labs. So that's the first nine months.
Last three months is a capstone project. Capstone project, not like a normal one, though. This is a project where we will work with employers directly, and we will work with the education site faculty and my team, and we try to figure out, hey, what's a real problem on your floor that this student, but worker, can apply their learnings to solve a problem for your company? It's almost like free consulting hours from the faculty and my team to enable this worker to solve a real problem.
Right.
What I've enjoyed about this segment of the interview and talking about some of the programs that are specific to MIT is that you're showing the breadth of what higher education is doing.
Oh yes.
In terms of enabling the worker of the future, right? What do we do for the engineers that need that next level of experience, but maybe they're not going to go back for that full-on master's degree? What do we do for the folks that have that tech school education that have risen through the ranks within their organization? You have something for them as well in the TechAMP program. So I think that's very cool. And I'm sure if I were to do this interview at other institutes, we'd hear what they're doing as well.
That's right. You would. And Chris, I don't want to take credit here. I actually didn't think about—I was still in my higher ed bubble for a while. I was in my MicroMasters one. Someone, it was an organization called SENAI. So this is the federally funded training organization in Brazil.
Okay.
They, back in 2020, had reached out to my team and saying, "Hey, we heard about this MicroMasters. Can we meet?" So they flew up here and said, "Hey, here's our problems. What do you want?" And we were talking about MicroMasters, we were talking the Master of Engineering, got really excited, and they kind of took a pause and was like, "John, that's just the top 5% of our pyramid of workforce. What about the seven million folks who will never go to university?"
And so it was because of pushback from folks who were saying, "You've got to care about the rest of the workforce in order to make an impact." And that's what first started to get me thinking about it.
I appreciate you sharing some of the things that people won't necessarily be able to look up online, like the backstories and things like that. When I started this part of the interview and said, "Hey, what's MIT doing to take action?" that was a bit of a leading question. I knew you were doing a lot of different things. One thing we haven't touched on yet is your collaborations with the DoD and Manufacturing USA. Tell us a bit about that.
Yeah. So you're very well aware, maybe some of us in the audience are aware, DoD is really ramping up submarine production.
Yes.
Right. So they've gone essentially, they need in the near-term future, in the next few years, to double submarine production, which is a daunting task. Most people really aren't aware of the scale of a submarine.
That is a topic I'll be going into on this show hopefully sometime this year.
Yes. Awesome.
It's on the list to get some guests on.
But there's really two main classes that the Navy is concerned about. You have the destroyer class, which is called Virginia class, and then you have this larger class, which is called Columbia class. And basically, the Navy needs to ramp up to what they call a two-plus-one strategy. So that's two Virginia class and one Columbia class per year.
I've seen some very concerning infographics about the amount of ships we're able to build on an annual basis versus what other countries are able to build.
Actually, the federal administration just recently released, I believe, we should check my sources on this, but I think an executive order talking about restrengthening or rebuilding the maritime shipbuilding base. This is a really big thing.
Yeah, it comes up a lot.
Okay. Not surprised, right? This is a big—
And I don't necessarily mean on this podcast, just the conversations on social media. It's one of the things that when people talk about reindustrializing or manufacturing again, that is one of the first priorities, is shipbuilding. And shipbuilding is huge.
Yeah, absolutely. So what that basically means is the marine industrial base, a lot of subs, the supplying base, but just that is, the estimate here is they need new, above baseline, they need 100,000 new workers in the next decade or so, which is just an astounding number of folks. These are, yes, they're engineers, but really I believe the main three are in the trades: welders, machinists, and fitters.
I think you're right. I think that's what I've come across as well.
Right, which is, again, well aligned with what we're trying to do in TechAMP, because we're trying to get to the folks who are on the shop floor. We've spoken with a lot of folks in both aerospace but also what we call the MIB now, right? It used to be called the SIB, but the marine industrial base.
Yeah.
So huge.
Yeah. Now, are there formal programs you're involved in then with them? What does that look like in terms of what you can talk about as well?
So DoD, IBAS, Department of Defense. IBAS stands for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment. They are the funders of TechAMP.
Okay. Oh, there we go.
So that's the connection. That's the main connection.
Perfect. I wanted to make sure we got those two things linked up here, because I'm like, I know there's something here.
There's a real link. Very concrete.
Thank you for adding that in.
So we're just about to finish industry mapping and content development on TechAMP, and then we'll be launching into, or the plan is, we'll see, but the plan is to launch into six sites across New England coming this fall.
All right. I look forward to following that. I will have links to everything we've talked about in the show notes.
Last topic to cover in today's conversation. I think it will provide a good wrap around everything we've talked about. What is the role of higher ed in reindustrialization in this new, let's say, manufacturing-focused world that I see us entering, or let's say with this manufacturing resurgence? What is the role of higher ed, especially at a time when we keep hearing from the Mike Rowes of the world, it's like, "Get into a trade, get into a trade," right? Because I feel like these are two very complementary things. We need both. I'd love to hear your take on the role of higher ed.
Yeah, and you're totally right. I think the trades are incredibly important. They're very critical to our livelihood as an economy. I'm biased, obviously, but clearly that's where I'm putting my time in.
I have the conversation often, right? An engineering degree was the right path for me. What I've learned is there are a lot of different right paths for a lot of different people over time. And hopefully now, with so much more in the digital learning space, now with a lot more understanding around work-learn models and innovative models out there, hopefully there's more and more pathways to enable a lot of people to find their own path.
Right. That would be, I think, a big win for everyone.
Yeah. So I think higher ed's important. I think trades are important. Higher ed is important in a number of ways. I would say one is, and this hearkens back to the beginning of our podcast, how has MIT been involved in manufacturing? And it's not just MIT. A lot of higher ed is involved with innovation. So whether it's state funding, federal grant money, industry funds that go into academic research, that really is fueling a lot of the innovation in our country.
Yeah.
I should be able to cite a study here. Maybe I'll send you later, but especially this day and age, there's a lot of work to be able to tease out that relationship. It's very, very strong. And so I think in terms of how do we get to the technology readiness level starting from one to three, right? Your MIs are working four to six, and then you have other things that are going to seven to nine. But the one to three, that's often where universities shine, plus a little bit of four and five.
So that's very important, I think, for the university to be involved with creating new technology, but creating new knowledge. Often the largest, radar or the internet, all of these things came out of often government-funded university research that ends up impacting at scale.
So that's one. Two is educating our leaders in innovation or policy or government or companies. Often higher ed is still deeply committed to the cause of education. And so we need folks who are in the trades. We also still need our engineers. We still need our management folks. All of these, we all need to work together.
Yeah, that makes sense. And I appreciate the first part of that answer, where new tech, new knowledge, if you look back just in our interview today, when we talked about 3D printing, when we talked about lean manufacturing, a lot of these aspects were either in some way started here or they became part of the vernacular here. So I think today's episode is a very concrete example of how that all looked. And I also like that you talk about, hey, we need those engineers out there. We need those folks that are also educating the leaders, the policymakers that are making the big decisions that will impact how things are made or not made in a particular spot.
That's well put.
We've covered a lot of ground. This is always my last question. Is there anything you wish I would have asked that I haven't yet? One final thought or action for the audience.
When are you going to come back to MIT?
Hey, if you recall in September after we finished our interview, I'm like, I need to come out to Boston for a full-fledged conversation. I just want to say I fulfilled that first half of the bargain right there.
Yes, you did.
So, hey, I love coming to Boston. I had a big seafood tray last night, like a shellfish tray. I have a great time coming here every time I'm here. Springtime is always a variable time of year, but the fact that we're here, Miracle of Science, drinking with the windows open right now, beautiful day. I'll be back. Maybe next year around the symposium. I don't think I'll be able to pull off 2025, but next year. Let's make it happen around 2026.
Absolutely. Love to have you.
Well, Dr. Liu, thank you so much for jumping on today. Enjoyed the conversation. Cheers.
Cheers.
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