March 14, 2025 • 64 mins
In this engaging podcast episode, Jon Lowy shares his remarkable engineering journey, discussing everything from medical robotics to teaching, entrepreneurship, and his unique perspectives on design, communication, and innovation.
Main Topics:
- Engineering Career Evolution
- Design for Manufacturing (DFM)
- Challenges in Additive Manufacturing
- Entrepreneurial Experiences
- Communication and Teaching Strategies
- Personal Growth and Adaptability
About the guest: Jonathan Lowy is a seasoned product engineer with over 40 years of experience in product design and manufacturing. Specializing in Design for Manufacturing (DFM), he emphasizes collaboration between design and production teams to create high-quality, efficient products. Jon has also served as a STEM teacher, mentoring future engineers and sharing his expertise. Currently, he partners with Jiga to enhance custom manufacturing supply chains and help engineers build smarter solutions. His wealth of experience makes him a valuable resource in the field of product development and manufacturing.
Links:
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jon Lowy (00:00):
Honestly, the best tool any engineer can ever hope
to have exists and they justdon't use it enough. It's burn
your calipers and a pencil andpaper.
Aaron Moncur (00:24):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast, and today we have thepleasure of speaking with Jon
Lowy, a seasoned productengineer with over 40 years of
experience in design andmanufacturing currently
collaborating with Giga. Jonshares his extensive knowledge
on design for manufacturing,otherwise known as DFM, offering
(00:46):
valuable insights and lessons hehas learned throughout his
distinguished career. Jon, thankyou so much for being with us
today.
Jon Lowy (00:52):
Thank you for the invitation.
Aaron Moncur (00:54):
So what made you decide to become an engineer?
Look, I think
Jon Lowy (00:58):
It's a brutal truth that engineers don't decide to
be engineers. They're born thatway. I By the age of four, I was
stealing my brother's brokentoys and fixing them. I just,
you know, I'm not very good withpeople. I have learnt over the
years to kind of wear a humanskin, but essentially, I talk to
(01:21):
machines much better than I talkto people
Aaron Moncur (01:25):
I already have. I have a hard time believing that
in the five minutes that wespent before starting the
recording, you came across to meas one of the least introverted,
most social engineers I haveever spoken with. So what makes
you say that, that you have ahard time talking to people
(01:45):
because that that is not what Igot.
Jon Lowy (01:48):
I guess I don't believe in my own version of EQ
or empathy. You know? I, I, Ilong ago absorbed a complete
understanding of that, that oldjoke, how do you judge an
outgoing engineer? He looks atyour shoes when he's talking to
(02:09):
you, rather than yourself,right? I learned to be human
because I kind of stopped doingbeing an engineer and I started
doing, take people's money andmake interesting businesses,
because the challenge inengineering, it's always
(02:30):
satisfying, but in the end, youbecome systemically limited.
There's only so much you can do,and if you have, I don't want to
sound puffed up, but if you, ifyou think you have grand
imagination, then engineeringcan become too small eventually.
(02:52):
And that's hard to imagine,because engineering is
everything. And I, I worshipwith the altar of engineer, and
I stand on the shoulders ofgiants. But in the end, I wanted
to do more. I wanted to be ableto control the engineering, not
just do it. And so I had tolearn to be human.
Aaron Moncur (03:08):
Well, tell me a little bit more about that. In
what ways did you start feelinglimited? And then this whole
idea of somewhat tongue incheek, you said, taking people's
money and creating businessesout of it. Tell me more about
that. How did you get startedthere? Has it allowed you to
expand your your creativitybeyond those limitations that
you were seeing? Okay, so
Jon Lowy (03:31):
where did it start? In my very first job out of
university, I I landed myabsolute dream job, I had been
building bench top. Kind ofthink of them as as like, like,
(03:53):
smoke cupboard, chemicalcupboard, robots for moving
stuff around and pouring liquidsand handling stuff. I building
these things since I was aboutnine, and I'd landed my dream
job out of university, building,designing and building medical
(04:13):
sample processing robotics. Sothink of them as bench top
laboratories which handle testtubes and test plates and
reagents and all of that stuff.
And I was commissioned to buildthe machine that I'd been trying
to build since I was nine. Andit was awesome. It was
(04:34):
absolutely amazing. And I builtthe first prototype, and it was
10 times faster in processingthan anything that was currently
on the market. And we're talkingabout, well at the beginning of
the AIDS epidemic, when suddenlyblood transfusion centers had to
do 100% testing. And goodness,they were challenged by that
(04:55):
because their testing standardsrequired a. Either automation
which didn't exist, or somebodywith a PhD who could be trusted.
And PhDs cost too much, eventhough they're quite cheap, they
cost a lot more than robots. Sothe whole market became
roboticized, and I joined thatmid wave when there were slow,
(05:16):
relatively cumbersome, thinklike screw robots that could
handle tubes, okay? And theywere they weren't very fast and
they weren't very adaptive. So Ibuilt this amazing machine,
which, I mean, I still it's adream to have been able to do
(05:41):
it. And the whole thing ran onsuperfine aircraft cables with
stationary motors. So there wasthis kind of giant recirculating
knitting pattern of stainlesssteel nylon encased stainless
steel threads that transmittedforce and move things around.
And it was, it was an awesomemachine, and it was so
(06:02):
blindingly fast that nobodycould afford to buy it. They
didn't have enough for it. Andit was a, it was a terrible
mistake from the company to havecommissioned the development of
it, but I had a great time, andthat was all good. So I built
the first prototype, and itworked surprisingly well. I love
when I was 2122 and I really hadno idea. You know, I thought I
(06:23):
knew everything, but I reallyhad no idea. And I built this
very clever machine, and itworked. And that was a surprise
to all of us. And I had one ofthose moments when I'm I'm kind
of unveiling the machine to theCEO, and he looked at it and
went, those pulleys have got twobearings in and I said, Well,
(06:44):
yes, they've got quite a lot ofload on them. You know, the
loads can become off centered,and that will destroy a single
bearing setup really quickly.
And he said, You need to reducethe costs and make them one
bearing. And I said, No, and hefired me,
Aaron Moncur (07:06):
well, you stuck to your guns anyway. That was 21
the machine
Jon Lowy (07:10):
would have destroyed itself in an hour of operation,
because you can't have a singlerow bearing carrying a dirty,
skewed load. Just doesn't workright? And it I went downhill
from there in terms of the needto control my environment, and
(07:31):
that led me, over some years anda couple of career changes, into
building businesses that didamazing things and they didn't
fire properly. I I'm not, bynature, the right person to do
the whole job, but it's thenature of the New Zealand
environment that you're expectedto be the CEO archetype who can
(07:57):
do everything, and there isn'tenough money to hire the people
that you need. So it's it. Ididn't succeed, and I freely
confess my own overreach, but itled me into some interesting
directions, and I made atechnology that could, if it was
properly implemented, in theelectricity grid, would reduce
(08:20):
carbon emissions from theelectricity grid by 30% nobody
wants to implement it becauseit's a bit scary, not
technically scary, justdifferent. That didn't work, and
I moved on. The next effort thatgot a lot closer was I came up
(08:41):
with a way of measuring gaslevels, volatile airborne gasses
at parts per trillionsensitivity. And that was
amazing. And we delivered theworking thing, but the
shareholders couldn't handle it,and it kind of died at
(09:03):
starvation, just at the pointwhere the machine was was ready
to go to market. So I'd, I'ddone quite a lot of hard yards,
and I done a lot of learningabout how to not how to not be.
Aaron Moncur (09:13):
So some time had passed. I mean, 21 at this first
job where you got fired, till4548 few businesses later, where
you were in charge.
Jon Lowy (09:23):
There was a lot of water under the bridge. I I've
had an interesting career. Ispent four years as a field
engineer in Wildcat oilexploration, which was an
amusing thing to have done it.
It started off as two weeksevery month on holiday, and it
(09:44):
ended up as two weeks everymonth in prison, in prison, not
in prison, but feeling like itwas in prison. You know, when
you've got it, you spent, spenttwo weeks on a on a. A drill
ship west of Shetland in astorm. It's coming on hardware.
(10:05):
It was a hugely learningexperience, and it improved me
as well. Did you learn from it?
I learned to handle difficultyand adversity. I became anti
fragile, because if I wasfragile, if I failed in my job,
(10:30):
then the ship blew up, so therewasn't much room for error, and
that, it was a great education.
And I went from that back intoengineering I contracted doing
developed a rugged PC for theBritish army to go with one of
the new fighting vehicles fortarget selection, so that some
(10:51):
poor squaddy, you know, up tohis neck in water could have his
PC floating in front of him,could call In fast movers or,
you know, whatever it it just,it was an interesting thing. I
moved on from that. I became ahigh school teacher. Moving on.
Aaron Moncur (11:09):
Well, what did you teach in high school? Uh,
bastards,
Jon Lowy (11:14):
no, that's not fair. I absolutely loved teaching, but I
didn't like it. Sorry. You needto understand. I store up those
good answers to those verysensible questions. This is fun.
Jon, yeah, teaching was again,was an awesome experience. It
(11:38):
made me a more organized person,because what
Aaron Moncur (11:42):
motivated you to go into teaching? I mean, shoot,
you did some giant automatedcontraption when you were 21 got
fired because you wouldn'tremove bearings from it. Went on
to do Wildcat oil drilling.
Built a couple of businesses onyour own particle detection. And
somewhere in the middle of thatteaching, which seems like a
(12:03):
belt,
Jon Lowy (12:05):
like a good thing, all over the place, yeah, definitely
that. It's part of the ADHD thatI get bored. And if the
challenge was kind ofthreatening, then it's not that
interesting. You know, I I'm notgoing to take drugs for it. I
(12:27):
take work for it instead. So,you know, I've moved on to do
bigger and more interestingthings, which we can talk about.
It's not really engineering, butpeople might, might be
interested to hear about it. Butso really, all of those things
led me to a point in space, andit's an interesting point. And
(12:52):
somebody that I worked for along, long time ago, who was a
very unwise person and a verypencil necked manager, said the
wisest thing, possibly the onlywise thing he'd ever said in his
life, which was Anna wascomplaining about something
because, you know, whinging toyour boss is part of the joy of
(13:13):
having a job. You've gotsomebody you can winch to. And I
don't remember what I wascomplaining about. It didn't
matter. And he he pulled me upshort and said, Do you like
where you are? And I thought,yeah, it's pretty good. And he
said, then stop complainingabout the journey. Okay. Now
that was a seminal moment for meto recognize that a pathway
(13:39):
might be a bit raggedy. It mightbe full of stones. You might
fall over a lot cut your knees,but if it gets you where you
need to go, then it was theright path. And teaching was
part of that. Was hard, reallyhard, being staying polite,
(13:59):
staying calm, learning to beangry without showing it was a
good piece of advice when Istarted teaching, because it's a
really hard thing to do. It'sthe kids will make your blood
boil. Never something aboutthat. No. Bottle it up and pack
it down and then act it outunder your control.
Aaron Moncur (14:25):
And that's and what did that look like for you?
Acting it out under yourcontrol,
Jon Lowy (14:29):
a performance of rage.
But I could turn away to anotherkid speak politely and calmly
and quietly about what they'redoing, and then turn back and
switch on the rage, actingalmost totally, entirely.
Teaching is definitely time onstage, and your audience is
really unappreciative, and theymostly hate you,
Aaron Moncur (14:54):
and they sounds a little like parenting. No,
Jon Lowy (14:57):
it's very, very like parenting. I accept that it's. A
bigger crowd, and they feel moreempowered because you're just a
low paid scumbag who's there tosupervise them. You're a
glorified policeman,essentially, who's there to beat
knowledge into them. And mostlythat's not going to work. And I
loved teaching. I did the actualprocess of getting kids to
(15:19):
understand stuff. It, itequipped me in a way that I
didn't imagine it would. Ithought I was good at explaining
things. I wasn't, but I learnedhow, and so now I'm I'm very
well equipped to talk toinvestors, to deal with client
(15:40):
problems to deal with technicalmatters for non technical
people,
Aaron Moncur (15:46):
what are some pro tips that you can pass on in in
terms of teaching people like,what's your process for teaching
something new? They
Jon Lowy (15:55):
can't be in their shoes, understand their
perspective, understand, aboveall else. And this is the thing
that I think almost all of usstruggle with. Understand the
communication. If it's notdouble ended, it's not
communication. If you can't makeit accessible to the person
(16:17):
you're talking to, you're notcommunicating. You're you're
grinding out your noises. You'reon a street corner waving a
Bible. You're, you're, you'rebashing a drum. Nobody,
Aaron Moncur (16:30):
our engineering manager likes to say the meaning
of your communication is theresponse that you get.
Jon Lowy (16:37):
That's a very nice way to put it, if you can't hear
back an echo of what you saidwith some of the gaps filled in,
you haven't done the job. So thebasic rule that I think of is,
(16:59):
hear it and forget it, see itand remember it, do it and
understand it. If you can getpeople to metaphorically, to do
the language back to you withtheir own twist on, then there's
a chance that they've heard whatyou're saying. And that's it's
(17:21):
not easy to achieve. And I work,I work incredibly hard at it,
because it is not in my nature.
So what you are seeing now is aperformance art. It's not the
natural me. The natural me issitting in a corner and covering
his face because he doesn't wantto interact with anybody ever.
He wants some maths in front ofhim. It's
Aaron Moncur (17:45):
so interesting that you say that. I think, I
think a lot of us feel thatnatural. We Yeah, it's natural.
At least I feel that way, and Iknow others who feel this way,
where, if I had my way of itall, I'd probably spend a lot of
time in a room by myself, in inthe quiet. But that's not how
(18:08):
life works,
Jon Lowy (18:09):
not and if you want to achieve anything, then you have
to be part of a team. If youwant to be part of a team, you
need to not be a shit. And I, Iprobably was a terrible, total
arrogant shit. When I was anADHD engineer focused on how
many bearings I needed to put ina pulley, I was probably very
(18:29):
hard work. Now I'm very hardwork in a different way. There's
going to be a lot of groundcovered, and you might have to
run to keep up, because I'm anI'm a knowledge sponge. I can't
forget stuff, and I read all thetime, and I'm always trying to
(18:51):
learn. I mean, just thismorning, I'm studying foamed
composite like, like metals,because somebody has asked me to
write an article about lightmetals, and they thought we were
talking about aluminum, andthere's no way that I'm going to
be boring about it. So I've hadto learn about something that
(19:11):
I've never heard of, which isfoamed composites. I've dealt
with foam metals before, butfoamed composites, how the hell
do you do that? So, yeah,communication. I mean, I'm doing
it now. I talk too much becauseI'm trying really hard to
clarify my position, so I'm notlistening enough to you.
Aaron Moncur (19:37):
Well, that's okay, because in certain settings,
that is a bad habit, but in thissetting, that's the perfect
habit, right? We're here to hearfrom you. This is an interview
of Jon Lowy, not not AaronMoncur. I mostly just want to
hear you talk. Not for me, it'snot all right. Well, what is it
for you? You ask a question. Gofor it. It's a two way
Jon Lowy (19:56):
street. Tell me. Tell me a bit about you. Because you
know, doing this, if. Kind ofweird, doing this for a living.
I'll tell you how this got
Aaron Moncur (20:03):
started. Well, I don't do podcasting for a
living. This is a call. It amarketing tool for my company.
I've been doing it for fiveyears, though, one thing I think
I am very good at is sticking tosomething right? I'm persistent.
I can do something for a longtime if I need to do it, and
(20:25):
this has been a lot of fun thepodcast, because I get to
interact with interesting peoplesuch as yourself, and I would
it's awkward for me because,like, like you mentioned, I
would love to sit in a quietroom by myself for most of the
day. But as we have agreed,that's not how life works. And
so if I'm going to have to beout there interacting with
(20:46):
people anyway, I might as wellinteract with interesting people
that I get to choose. And thepodcast gets me the perfect
platform to do that.
Jon Lowy (20:53):
Yeah, don't, don't associate with boring people. I
mean, when you have to life istoo short, try to be polite.
Aaron Moncur (20:59):
Oh, yeah, my wife and I have a code words for when
we're at gatherings or partiesand, you know, it's time to get
one or one of us out of there,right? I
Jon Lowy (21:08):
don't bother with code words on that. It's Fuck this.
Sorry. This is boring. I'm goingbecause eventually I reach the
point where the ADHD leaks out.
You know, I can't, I can'talways contain it, but it's a
kind of basic rule ofengineering. If you, if you pack
it in too tight, it's going tosquirt out somewhere else,
Aaron Moncur (21:29):
right pressure.
I've heard ADHD described as asuperpower. It is, what was the
analogy? It was, ADHD is likehaving a Ferrari for a brain
with bicycle brakes. That sounds
Jon Lowy (21:48):
optimistic about the brakes. I don't know about the
Ferrari thing. We're gettingclose. I think I think of myself
as a Unimog on bicycle wheels, aunit of the Mercedes military
truck, six wheel drive, 12 tonsof roaring German diesel, and
(22:10):
the wheels, when they hit theground, they stay, they stay
where they are. So I've got,I've got all of that horsepower.
Traction is my problem. I spenda lot of time with my will spin
and they spin, really? Do youget tired? But they're just
spinning.
Aaron Moncur (22:27):
Do you get tired?
Or are you always firing on?
Gave
Jon Lowy (22:31):
up sleeping, actually, in the oil field, really? 3035
Yeah, 35 years ago now, becauseof working at a 12 on 12 off
shift cycle, and then after aweek doing a changeover, it's
just impossible to sleep. And Ilook there was one, there was
(22:52):
one drill ship that I was onthat didn't have enough
accommodation for the crew, andI swear I had a hot bunk, which
means that somebody else used itfor the other 12 hours. That's
that's not that appealing, butwe'll let that go. We weren't in
it together because, okay,because he was, as I recall, he
(23:13):
was a six foot, seven, 350,pound Glaswegian driller. But
we'll again, let that go. Iswear it was on top of a two
megawatt genset, but for 12hours, I gave up sleeping, and
now I I need three hours anight, and it's not the hours.
Aaron Moncur (23:37):
I'm so jealous. I wish I could operate on three
hours. Do
Jon Lowy (23:41):
you feel good? Though?
Yeah, yeah. It looks one. Onenight a week I sleep more. It's
as much as I can. That's justMargaret Thatcher claimed that I
don't really want to be like herin any way. But she claimed the
same thing, that it just wasn'tit reached a point in life where
it wasn't necessary, which is,it is empowering, but it's also
(24:05):
a little bit dangerous, becauseit means that a lot of the time
you're operating tired, but notaccepting that you're tired and
not doing anything about it. I'mokay, as long as the blood level
in my caffeine delivery systemdoesn't get too high.
Aaron Moncur (24:26):
I wish I could sleep for three hours. Hey, I'd
be, I'd be thrilled with sixhours. I need to sleep eight to
nine hours a night, or I feellike I can, oh, well, I don't
know. We'll see I can get bywith less, you know, for a day
or so. But if I go multiple daysin a row with less than that
amount of sleep, I feelterrible, and I wish, I wish I
(24:48):
could get by on less sleep. Icould do so much more.
Jon Lowy (24:52):
Yes, I'm finding that the less sleep at the moment is
is particularly useful becauseI've got a two year old. I. Oh,
my goodness, yeah, 60 and I'vegot a two year old. I've also
got two older kids that theydon't need me at night anymore.
But yeah, the two year old iswonderful. He's amazing. Getting
(25:12):
to do this again at my age isridiculous and probably quite
offensive for a lot of people.
But I'm people ask me how I cando that, the answer is, it's
because I'm 14 and I'll never beolder
Aaron Moncur (25:26):
than that. What do you know as a father this time
around that you wish you hadknown the first time around?
Zero fear. What does that mean?
Zero
Jon Lowy (25:35):
fear that I'm not afraid of anything that happens,
because I know that it's allunder control, and I know that
it's all pre programmed andlike, when he gets sick, yeah,
it's horrible, but I don't needto be asleep. I'm good. And
because he's getting sick, he'sbuilding immunity and he's
getting stronger. So all I'vegot to do is supervise him to
(25:59):
make sure he doesn't get damagedby being sick. You know,
confidence is is so empowering.
My first my oldest son, is 24and he's awesome. He's working
stiff, makes a living. He's amostly happy person. He's a
(26:20):
little bit fascist, for myliking, but, you know, I don't
know how that happened, but he'sa he's a good man, and he's a
decent, honest soul, and he washard work because I had no
bloody idea, and I wasterrified, and I was 2034 and 25
35 and I was terrified, becauseI was frightened of what was
(26:45):
happening, because I didn'tunderstand it. Because, of
course, our society doesn'tteach you how to be a parent.
And my try to put this in a niceway, my autistic father didn't
teach me how to be a parent, forsure, so I had to learn it from
scratch. Doing it again isawesome, because I can just look
at what's going on and say, No,that's no problem. Or we're
(27:08):
going to the doctor right now.
And those are the twoconditions. Anything in between,
yeah. So, yeah, what have Ilearned? I'm, I actually think
I'm quite good at it. You know,my, my oldest son's the 24 and
21 the ones in his final year ofengineering, poor bastard. And
(27:35):
the other one did a businessqualification. And he's, he's
helping run a courier companyand managing people, and he's
out on the road sometimes, andhe's dealing with customers.
He's robust and he's comfortablein his skin that I didn't do too
bad a job on. So I'm looking atthis two year old thinking,
(27:57):
Yeah, I can do this. It's a realluxury to be a parent, looking
at it, thinking, yeah, I coulddo this.
Aaron Moncur (28:06):
I had a friend when, back 1520, years ago, when
me and my friends started havingkids, he had their first child,
and I remember asking him, youknow, are you worried about this
at all? Are you scared? Are younervous about being a father and
teaching this child how tobecome a successful member of
(28:27):
society someday? And he said,you know, Aaron, I feel like I'm
a reasonably intelligent person,and people with lesser
intelligence than me have raisedreasonable children, so I think
I'm going to be okay. And Ithought that was
Jon Lowy (28:42):
a very rational perspective, and it's very hard
to maintain that perspectivewhen they're puking on you at
two in the morning. But still itis. It is exactly right. It that
there is, there is a tendencytowards the mean. So all you've
got to do is not screw up toobadly and you'll be okay. And
(29:04):
don't screw up cereal. That'sthe really important one. Don't
reinforce the screw ups.
Aaron Moncur (29:11):
Have you taken the same perspective in engineering?
Don't screw up too badly andyou'll be okay.
Jon Lowy (29:17):
And I can cite examples where I've screwed up,
or somebody screwed up and I hadto fix it. And it's, it's, and I
think of it as a muscle. Itneeds exercise. So a lot of a
lot of human response is kind ofglandular. You've got no control
over it. It just happens. It'sautonomic, and there's not much
(29:38):
you can do. But if, if you workat it, you can turn glands into
muscles in response terms, youcan learn to control the
autonomic, and it ceases to beautonomic. And that's that's
quite empowering to to know thatwhen you're afraid and it looks
(29:59):
or. Fall, you can still controlthe situation, even if you're
controlling the fall. You know,don't rely on drunks luck. Know
how to roll. It's the thing Isay to investors probably more
often than I should. This ispinball. Do not Brace for
(30:21):
impact. Just go with Well, ifyou're rigid, you'll get
crushed. If you're drunk,metaphorically speaking, you'll
bounce.
Aaron Moncur (30:31):
How are you working with investors these
days? Oh, that is a complicated
Jon Lowy (30:35):
question. I'm not doing engineering. I write
professionally for people likejigger, done a lot of work for
them and for geometry, and Ijust, I know a lot about
engineering because I've donemost of it, so I'm able to spout
(30:58):
extensively on a lot ofsubjects, and over the years, I
learned to write reasonablycoherently. I'm not I ain't had
my I don't write for art. Iwrite for knowledge. But my day
job, I'm complicated to answer.
I'm an the agent for a series ofChinese retail outlets, buying
(31:26):
product for them and shipping itto China, across Australasia.
And I don't it's definitely notengineering, although I treat it
in the same way, in the sensethat it's a flow chart and it's
a sequential process, and it isall amenable to logic, and most
(31:47):
of it doesn't need any cuddly,fluffy stuff. You're just making
decisions about things, andthose things have to be right.
And I've spent about 40 years infactories. I know how to inspect
a factory and know when they'redoing something stupid. I can
stop them making seriousmistakes. I can make the product
good quality. I understand thequality process, and it doesn't
(32:08):
matter whether it's beer orcheese or widgets, it's the same
process. So, you know, it's aspectrum of experience, and I'm
having a new one now. Sobasically I'm a glorified
shopkeeper, which is awesomebecause I get to ship container
loads of nice things to peoplewho want to buy them.
Aaron Moncur (32:34):
You mentioned that you found engineering to be
limiting, and so you branchedout and started businesses, and
now you're working withinvestors in some capacity. From
a financial standpoint. Have youa, has money been very important
(32:56):
to you and B, have you foundmore financial freedom in your
later ventures than you did inengineering.
Jon Lowy (33:07):
Money is only important to me when I run out,
I have almost no interest insuccess measured in foldable
terms. I mean, I don't mind it.
I'm not offended by money, and Iwon't refuse it, but it's not a
driver for have I achievedgreater financial freedom at
(33:30):
times? Yes. And then at times,oh, my god, no.
It's a it's a Darwinian fight,and mostly I'm fighting things
(33:50):
with bigger teeth than me.
Fortunately, a lot of the timethey have smaller brains than I
do, but not always. You know,sometimes the things with big
teeth are really fierce andsmart, and then I fold. I'll do
as I'm told. So what
Aaron Moncur (34:11):
does drive you
Jon Lowy (34:12):
success? Not exactly success, but the measurable
outcomes in doing things thatother people can't do my my
kicks come from I'm going towave an example at you. It's not
going to work on an audio I hada client come to me and say, I
(34:34):
like one of these floating penthings. I want to do a copy of
it. And he sent me one. And Isaid, Dude, don't copy it. It's
rubbish. Give me three monthsand a bit of freedom and some
money to do some testing, andI'll make you something better.
(34:56):
And he ran out of juice, but I.
The production cost on thisforget the cost of the pen,
because pens need to be really,really nice, and they tend
towards expensive. Theproduction cost on this thing,
I've got that down to about 75cents, and it works better than
the ones that people sell.
(35:19):
That's how I get my kicksbecause I can this has been
sitting on my desk for a year,waiting for the client to kind
of wake up and come back to lifeand have some money so they can
proceed. And I'm probably givingaway his IP because you can see
the magnets.
Aaron Moncur (35:35):
Well no one else can see it are true.
Jon Lowy (35:38):
So how do I get my kicks out of doing things that
other people can't do. So aprime example of this, I when I
was doing my master's degree,yeah, I had a I did a full time
master's degree with a full timejob and a new baby 25 years ago.
That was challenging. So while Iwas doing my master's degree, I
(36:00):
got very friendly with myprofessor, who ran the bit of
the school that I was in, and Iwas waiting in his office to get
some help with some maths that Icouldn't handle. He was he is
system mathematics genius, andwrites the textbooks on it, and
(36:24):
imagines that everybody elsemust understand exactly what
he's saying and doing, becausehe doesn't think he's very
clever, typical engineer,really. And I was scuffling
around on his desk because I'm anosy bastard, and reading some
papers, and I found this paperfrom a final year undergraduate
study of a way of chemicallyamplifying airborne volatiles so
(36:56):
adsorb into a structure and thendrive the desorption of the
sample in a closed space, so youcan essentially create a high
concentration out of a lowconcentration. And it was okay.
They hadn't really doneanything. They'd just read some
books and wrote a report, andthey'd achieved nothing. But I
(37:19):
could see a germ of an idea,which I slogged out for 15 years
in the background, turned itinto a business, found investors
to back it, and we built amachine that, Okay, New Zealand
(37:39):
is a very agricultural economy.
So we make, we export 30% of allthe dairy produce that is
exported in the world from thistiny little pair of islands,
which is a bizarre number, andit's because conditions are
right here, just it's justchance. So among the produce is
(38:00):
kiwifruit, which they're prettyhard to grow, right? And the
problem was solved here first.
So the industry developed herefirst, and is kind of teaching
other in other areas how to doit. So a kiwifruit, newly picked
(38:22):
has a value of about, let's say,three cents at the farm gate. It
has a retail value in goodcondition at peak season, of
about 25 cents, if you can storethat fruit in peak condition for
(38:43):
six months so that you can sellit a week before the new harvest
in Singapore. One fruit is worth$5 Wow, yeah. Now it's quite a
differential. So the storage offruit, not just kiwifruit, but
kiwifruit is a good example. Thestorage of fruit is an art form
(39:05):
that isn't very scientific, butit is very successful in some
quarters. And the vision that Ihad in reading this, this
undergraduate paper, was that Icould see how to use this
mechanism to measure very lowlevels of ethylene around fruit.
(39:33):
So if you pick a fruit and itcan Ben ripen, it belongs to the
climacteric family man, I had tolearn a lot about fruit. It's
awesome, though, because I don'tforget anything. So the list of
climacteric fruits is huge, andit's all of those which were
ripened after they are picked.
So most melons are notclimacteric. You pick them, and
(39:53):
they'll stay in the samecondition until they rot. Most
berries, they're notclimacteric. Again, you pick
them ripe and then you eat them.
You can't keep them for long,but apples, an apple, can go
through its second birthday andstill be edible, not ideal, but
(40:13):
edible. So the fruit that ripensafter it's picked, if you pick
it at exactly the right unripecondition. You can cold store it
for months. If you can controlthe ripening process, then you
can add value. And that's whatthe kiwifruit sector in this
country has successfully done,that they about 5% of what they
(40:36):
pick makes it to the end of theseason, and is a stupendous
value, more than the whole ofthe rest of the crop. And they
get about 5% by a slightlymessy, slightly random process
that, sorry I again for audio.
The nasty noise you heard was mesucking my finger and holding up
(40:59):
in the wind so that we couldgage the sense of what's going
on the fruit. And I, using thissensing system, I was able to
detect the essentially nanotraces of ethylene in the unripe
fruit and grade them for storageand my grading process was three
(41:22):
to five times more effectivethan the industry standard, so
you'd get three to five times asmuch fruit survival at six
months, which means that youcould sell those fruit at peak
value in high value markets. Andwe made a machine to do this,
(41:46):
and it was amazing. I mean, Iit's necessary to overshare. My
vision wasn't about fruit you'veheard of Thanos, the giant fake
blood testing nonsense.
Elizabeth Holmes, come on, man,you've heard of Elizabeth
(42:10):
Holmes, okay, anyway, Thanosmade a machine that they claimed
could do a broad spectrum bloodanalysis from one drop of blood,
not a whole blood sample, wherethe normal processes require a
few ccs of blood for each test.
Aaron Moncur (42:31):
Oh, they're ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, you have
vials and vials. Yeah,absolutely
Jon Lowy (42:34):
blood. So Thanos was a giant Ponzi scheme that raised
vast amounts of money on amachine that could do a broad
spectrum test of a single dropof blood, and they had nothing
of the kind. There just isn'tenough chemistry going on in the
tiny amount of sample to be ableto amplify it to do anything.
(42:58):
The only thing you can do withthat is a DNA test, because you
can make the DNA grow, but youcan't do the blood analytics
that people require, because thechemistry can't be amplified.
You just need more of it, andthe sensor is no use in these
low levels. So I have, and I'mstill storing it in my head, a
(43:22):
vision for a version of Thanosthat's based on your smell, and
I can amplify your smell abillion times, probably more.
Now that sounds What do you dowith that? But you wear a skin
patch that absorbs careful useof words there, add zorbs so
(43:46):
it's not soaking up. It'sassociating with it takes in all
of the volatile that come offyour skin. Well, it's perfectly
possible to train a dog todiagnose TB of people's breath.
There's a variety of rat used inAfrica trained for mine
(44:08):
sweeping, and they smell buriedminds. The sensitivity of the
nose used in the right way isastonishing. If you can diagnose
TB from breath with the rightnose, then you can diagnose
anything so by absorbing thebroad spectrum of volatiles off
(44:31):
your skin and then doing a rapida rapid chemical analysis on a
reasonably large volume of gasthat's high concentrations of
smell chemistries. It's going tobe possible to do a broad
(44:52):
spectrum diagnostic. So that'swhat I was aiming for with this
chemical amplifier. Fruit wasjust, pardon the expression, but
it was the low hanging fruit. Icould get people to understand
that business. So I raised moneyfor that business. I know I can
do it. The knowledge is waitingto be executed. I've got a few
(45:16):
fascinating and fanos, Jon, you
Aaron Moncur (45:21):
are a unique man, a very interesting individual.
Can I ask you some sillyquestions?
Jon Lowy (45:31):
They're the best kind of such thing.
Aaron Moncur (45:34):
What do you eat?
And maybe more importantly, whatdo you not eat? Funny that I
Jon Lowy (45:39):
was vegan from teens until I had child. And I looked
at this baby and thought, If Idon't give it real food, it'll
probably grow to be a funnyshape. So I became bacon ataria
again. What do I eat? A very,very simple diet. My strong
(45:59):
preference, I make my own bread,and I put mostly unprocessed
things on it, and then I eat alot of fruit, and I eat a lot of
vegetables, and I don't drinkmuch, and
Aaron Moncur (46:15):
that's kind of it.
How about your your caffeinedelivery system was, was that
tongue in chamber you consumecopious amounts of cash. No,
it's not huge.
Jon Lowy (46:23):
I'd limit myself to probably three cups coffee a
day. But when, when I saycoffee, I mean like Turkish tar.
I have an espresso machine. Ihave a really good espresso
machine. It's my one luxury. Ifunction better. I'm not great
with mornings until I've hadsome coffee. Do you eat
breakfast? Can't makes me wantto puke, makes me slow all day.
(46:45):
So I tend to eat once a day,like late afternoon, evening,
and I might graze a little bitduring the day, but I try to
avoid eating because I get fat,particularly since I stopped
smoking, which is a very longtime ago, but I got fat when I
stopped smoking, and it was hardwork to get back to the weight
that it's funny. When I leftschool, I did a whole bunch of
(47:09):
shit jobs before I went touniversity, and one of them
wasn't shit. It was really,really awesome. I was a kind of
care assistant in an oldpeople's home for about six
months, eight months, somethinglike terrible pain, awful
conditions, but a wonderfulexperience. And the striking
thing about that is that all ofthe old men were skinny. That
(47:33):
was a valuable lesson. If you'renot skinny, you ain't going to
get old. And I'd like to live,not forever, but, well, you
know, I'm 60, I've got a twoyear old. I want to be able to
see him out into the world.
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, myfather was skinny and lived in
94 so I don't eat a lot, and theolder I get, the less I eat
(47:59):
because you just don't need it.
You're not You're not doing theself repair. You're just running
on the resources that you'vegot. Do
Aaron Moncur (48:07):
you exercise? The dirty word,
Jon Lowy (48:12):
I move. I don't do exercise for its own sake, but
if I have to go and get somemilk, I'll walk to the shop. If
I have a staircase, I won't walkup it. I'll run up. If there's
an elevator, I'll only use itI'm forced to. If I'm being
polite, I'll use the stairs so Idon't. The gym is really alien,
(48:38):
but movement is not and this isa bit kind of like Plato's
Golden Mean, a little bit ofeverything is good. Too much of
anything is a really bad idea.
And my knees tell me thatexercise is a really bad idea,
yay.
Aaron Moncur (48:55):
What's the most scared you've ever been?
Jon Lowy (49:02):
It's stuck in a I was leading a caving party thing. I
was 1718, and I was leading acaving party, and I went through
a sink, a sample. So that's,that's a an underground
underwater pipe that you have toswim through to get through to
the air on the other side, and Iwas roping for others to follow.
(49:26):
And then there was a flash floodcame through, and the chamber
that I was in flooded, and I wasdown to like an inch of roof
space. And then the floodsubsided, and I was all good,
but it was a very interestingexperience walking out of the
cape to the cave rescue groupwho were coming to pick up my
corpse. Wow, that was that wasan experience that was worth
(49:49):
having. What else has scared me?
Four hours up a derrick in asnowstorm west of Shetland. In
deep water, heaving seas, fixingequipment with the company man
and the driller with twobullhorns screaming at me
(50:12):
because I was stopped. Myequipment was stopping drilling
that was there was another one,actually, on the same rig I'd
strapped up a hydrogen bottle.
Yes, a hydrogen bottle, and itbroke its strapping in a storm,
(50:34):
and fellow broke off its valveand shot across the deck like a
rocket. So I'm in the companyman's office, no, the rig
manager's office being fired.
He's screaming at me about myincompetence and my company's
incompetence for the rackingthat wasn't good enough to do
(50:55):
the job, couldn't withstand thestorm forces. And then I quietly
said to him, it's your rack. Getout of my office. Boy, so
Aaron Moncur (51:13):
if it's not scary, this reminds me of your
experience with the CEO. Yeah,no, it's not dissimilar getting
fired. I'm
Jon Lowy (51:19):
an arrogant bastard?
No, I've probably been firedmore often than I've quit. I
just I'm really no good at beingtold to do stupid things by
stupid people. And it's a birthit is. It's made my life less
stable than it might have been,but it's also been what's a tool
that
Aaron Moncur (51:41):
what's the tool that doesn't exist, but if it
did, you think would allowengineers to work 10 times
faster, 100 times faster? That's
Jon Lowy (51:51):
hard. If you'd asked me that 10 years ago, I would
have said rapid prototyping thatwas useful. Yeah, now the rapid
prototyping is useful. It justneeds to be cheap enough.
Honestly, the best tool anyengineer can ever hope to have
exists and they just don't useit enough. It is that their
brain learn your calipers and apencil and paper, understanding
(52:15):
what's going on because youyou've evaluated it rather than
looked at it. The tool thatdoesn't exist? That's a really
good question. I'm not sure I'veever thought about that, except
that I'm always trying to makethe tool that doesn't exist, and
it's that stupid Star Trekthing, whatever they call it,
the materializer, no, theteleporting, no. Now that would
(52:36):
be useless, because somebodywould merge me with a fly, and
then it would turn into a movie,and that would be terrible. No,
I, I like the journey, so I'mnot, I'm not terribly interested
in teleco. No, they, they puncha button and out pops a mug of
hot tea or piece of cake or agun, or whatever it is. It is
rapid prototyping. It
Aaron Moncur (52:57):
is yes, yeah, right. Additive Manufacturing on
a molecular level? Yes.
Jon Lowy (53:02):
And strangely enough, I have a plan, but this does not
surprise me. Yeah, well,somebody challenged me to this.
It was a head of an accountancyfirm. We were talking about
investment in something else. Hesaid, Should I put money into
rapid prototyping, into additivemanufacturing? And I said, yeah,
if you want to be disappointed,you know, Oh, yeah. But
(53:23):
everybody's telling me that it'sthe thing to do. It will be in
20 years, but now it's kind ofrubbish. You know, it's quicker
to quicker make one the old way,and it'll be better if you want
to make a million of them.
There's no way you're going todo it that way. It's not
additive manufacture. That's whyI tend to not use the phrase,
because it really isn'tmanufacture. It is prototyping.
(53:44):
And, yeah, okay, NASA can buy aline of machines and make shelf
brackets to go into the spacestation. It's all for show. It's
all nonsense. DARPA, they canhave mobile centers printing
parts for tanks, but if theywant them to be any good,
(54:08):
they're not going to come offthose machines. They'll be
quicker, but they won't be verygood. So, yeah, the machine that
doesn't exist is additivemanufacturing. That really is
additive manufacturing, ratherthan investor pretense. And I
know this partly because I spent10 years running a prototyping
(54:29):
agency alongside a consultingbusiness, so I tend to know
quite a lot about additivemanufacturing. I keep up with it
because people are always askingme to write stuff about it, so I
have to study so I have tostudy, yeah, the tool that
doesn't exist is additivemanufacturing that's not shit or
poisonous
Aaron Moncur (54:53):
input, your requirements and outcomes. A
perfect cup of coffee, a couplelittle food tight or. I'd
Jon Lowy (55:00):
like a fan, yeah, I'd like the perfect, I don't know,
look a machine that could printa bearing that would work, yeah,
that's the go, a sealed bearing,
Aaron Moncur (55:11):
right? That's the go. Different materials,
multiple materials. Yeah,precisely. That's what a lot of
non technical, non engineers,thought what was going to happen
15 years ago, when startedgetting
Jon Lowy (55:25):
so popular and the investors are still actively
disappointed, that's what'shappening, when, in reality,
yeah, I look, I can cite anexample that that really I find
quite inspiring. My designcompany was commissioned to do a
thing that actually was mysecond tier obsession came out
of the robotics. It was makingprosthetic hands. It was making
(55:52):
prosthetics that actually mimicthe organic in their flexibility
and motion. And they came to usto do this, and it was an
interesting project, and theyreally, really, really. It had
some some intricate gear boxesin the fingers. We'd managed to
squeeze motors into the firstjoint of each finger so that we
(56:13):
could reduce the overall messand complexity and power
transmission, force transmissionsetups. And it required some
intricate gear boxes with lovelylittle clutches in them. And it
was a them. And it was, it was abeautiful thing, and these parts
were very tricky, and they wereneeded to be very precise, and
they needed to be extremelystrong. And the client
absolutely obsessed about theidea of additive manufacture
(56:37):
these gearbox components. And soI we put it into a race, and I
had machined parts in 14 daysthat worked, and they had rapid
prototype parts in titanium infour months that were garbage,
(57:01):
because it was difficult, andwhen it comes down to the
finesse needed, you know, ifyou're trying to make a support
to bolt onto a bridge, then theadditive processes work
awesomely well. You can, youcould quickly make something
that is strong enough to do thejob. Trying to make a gearbox
that fits into a knuckle. Yeah,can't do it. Different story,
(57:24):
and it's going to be a very longtime, because in the end, it
doesn't matter how strong yourparts are, if they haven't
achieved the surface finish thatyou require, they're not
finished. If you have to machinethe surface finishes on there,
you have to do the machining.
Why the hell did you print it?
You've not saved them. So that'sthe tool, that's the one that's
missing, and it's coming. But abit like fusion, it's probably
(57:49):
another 40 years or more. That'sa big technology. Fusion is not
coming. It's not coming in 40years at all.
Aaron Moncur (57:58):
Well, Jon, I think we'll wrap it up there. This has
been a really fun interviewagain for I feel bad now we
didn't talk about any of thequestions that I had prepared
this one in a completelydifferent direction, and it was
delightful. I loved it. Thankyou.
Jon Lowy (58:14):
I'm, yeah, very happy to have sounded human.
Aaron Moncur (58:19):
Jon, how can people get in touch with you?
Jon Lowy (58:23):
I suppose through LinkedIn, the large tends to be,
think of it as lucked out. Youknow, lucked out goes with face
plant and Twitter and all of theother social networks that
they're really not. They're forpeople with loud voices, not
people with deep thoughts
Aaron Moncur (58:42):
and, well, that's where I found you. LinkedIn. No,
Jon Lowy (58:44):
I so I'm having to revise my thoughts on this,
because jigger, they're tryingto create a presence, and
they're trying to use myknowledge and people, few people
like me, to amplify theirpresence, because it's a good
marketing tool. It's a good wayof contacting people who need
stuff done. And so I'm having torevise my opinion of LinkedIn,
(59:08):
simply because it is a bettertool than it used to be. I quit
it years ago because it wasn'tuseful. It was just a club for
people to talk nonsense. Andthen COVID came along and club
the psychotics to talk bollocks,and I quit. And so I've had to
come back to it and reassess it,and I'm doing that, and I'm here
(59:33):
with you. That was that's aninteresting experience. And how
do people get in touch with me?
J, O N, at W H, I O T E, C h.comso again, J O N, at W H, I O T
E, C h.com just for background,there that sophio Tech, which is
(59:54):
my kind of post. Or operatingspace. The Fauci is the native
New Zealand blue duck, which isa pretty little creature, and
it's one of those stories thatlike the drop bear. So you've
heard of the drop bear inAustralia, you've never heard
(01:00:15):
Okay, so tourists in Australiaare warned when you walk under
trees, be careful of the dropbears, because they'll drop down
on your nails. On you andthey'll savage you. This is
koalas. They, they, they don'tsavage anything. But people want
the most vicious, vicious,terrifying, terrifying creature,
right? And so, like my goldendoodle, exactly, yes, yes. So
the New Zealand equivalent ofthat is the FiO field, the blue
(01:00:37):
duck, which is introduced topeople who are going near water
in New Zealand as the NewZealand carnivorous duck. So I
like the idea that my my ownoperating space is a terrifying
lie. So for your tech, I lovethat nobody can pronounce but
(01:01:03):
they don't need to. That's finebecause it's not really a
business. It's just where Ithink
Aaron Moncur (01:01:09):
I was actually going to ask you how you
pronounce that I kept trying tosay wheel tech couldn't make
sense of it. The
Jon Lowy (01:01:17):
Maori language, the native New Zealand language, is
difficult to grasp, but veryfrenetic. So when you see a New
Zealand word that looks weird,just say all of the letters and
you'll be about right. Don't tryand make anything clever out of
it. So no, okay, but just sayall the letters. So if you said
(01:01:37):
real check, people wouldunderstand.
Aaron Moncur (01:01:40):
Jon, this has been a delightful conversation.
Jon Lowy (01:01:42):
Awesome.Thank you for your time.
I'd enjoy the break.
Aaron Moncur (01:01:47):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team's
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(01:02:11):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You
Honestly, the best tool any engineer can ever hope
to have exists and they justdon't use it enough. It's burn
your calipers and a pencil andpaper.
Aaron Moncur (00:24):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast, and today we have thepleasure of speaking with Jon
Lowy, a seasoned productengineer with over 40 years of
experience in design andmanufacturing currently
collaborating with Giga. Jonshares his extensive knowledge
on design for manufacturing,otherwise known as DFM, offering
(00:46):
valuable insights and lessons hehas learned throughout his
distinguished career. Jon, thankyou so much for being with us
today.
Jon Lowy (00:52):
Thank you for the invitation.
Aaron Moncur (00:54):
So what made you decide to become an engineer?
Look, I think
Jon Lowy (00:58):
It's a brutal truth that engineers don't decide to
be engineers. They're born thatway. I By the age of four, I was
stealing my brother's brokentoys and fixing them. I just,
you know, I'm not very good withpeople. I have learnt over the
years to kind of wear a humanskin, but essentially, I talk to
(01:21):
machines much better than I talkto people
Aaron Moncur (01:25):
I already have. I have a hard time believing that
in the five minutes that wespent before starting the
recording, you came across to meas one of the least introverted,
most social engineers I haveever spoken with. So what makes
you say that, that you have ahard time talking to people
(01:45):
because that that is not what Igot.
Jon Lowy (01:48):
I guess I don't believe in my own version of EQ
or empathy. You know? I, I, Ilong ago absorbed a complete
understanding of that, that oldjoke, how do you judge an
outgoing engineer? He looks atyour shoes when he's talking to
(02:09):
you, rather than yourself,right? I learned to be human
because I kind of stopped doingbeing an engineer and I started
doing, take people's money andmake interesting businesses,
because the challenge inengineering, it's always
(02:30):
satisfying, but in the end, youbecome systemically limited.
There's only so much you can do,and if you have, I don't want to
sound puffed up, but if you, ifyou think you have grand
imagination, then engineeringcan become too small eventually.
(02:52):
And that's hard to imagine,because engineering is
everything. And I, I worshipwith the altar of engineer, and
I stand on the shoulders ofgiants. But in the end, I wanted
to do more. I wanted to be ableto control the engineering, not
just do it. And so I had tolearn to be human.
Aaron Moncur (03:08):
Well, tell me a little bit more about that. In
what ways did you start feelinglimited? And then this whole
idea of somewhat tongue incheek, you said, taking people's
money and creating businessesout of it. Tell me more about
that. How did you get startedthere? Has it allowed you to
expand your your creativitybeyond those limitations that
you were seeing? Okay, so
Jon Lowy (03:31):
where did it start? In my very first job out of
university, I I landed myabsolute dream job, I had been
building bench top. Kind ofthink of them as as like, like,
(03:53):
smoke cupboard, chemicalcupboard, robots for moving
stuff around and pouring liquidsand handling stuff. I building
these things since I was aboutnine, and I'd landed my dream
job out of university, building,designing and building medical
(04:13):
sample processing robotics. Sothink of them as bench top
laboratories which handle testtubes and test plates and
reagents and all of that stuff.
And I was commissioned to buildthe machine that I'd been trying
to build since I was nine. Andit was awesome. It was
(04:34):
absolutely amazing. And I builtthe first prototype, and it was
10 times faster in processingthan anything that was currently
on the market. And we're talkingabout, well at the beginning of
the AIDS epidemic, when suddenlyblood transfusion centers had to
do 100% testing. And goodness,they were challenged by that
(04:55):
because their testing standardsrequired a. Either automation
which didn't exist, or somebodywith a PhD who could be trusted.
And PhDs cost too much, eventhough they're quite cheap, they
cost a lot more than robots. Sothe whole market became
roboticized, and I joined thatmid wave when there were slow,
(05:16):
relatively cumbersome, thinklike screw robots that could
handle tubes, okay? And theywere they weren't very fast and
they weren't very adaptive. So Ibuilt this amazing machine,
which, I mean, I still it's adream to have been able to do
(05:41):
it. And the whole thing ran onsuperfine aircraft cables with
stationary motors. So there wasthis kind of giant recirculating
knitting pattern of stainlesssteel nylon encased stainless
steel threads that transmittedforce and move things around.
And it was, it was an awesomemachine, and it was so
(06:02):
blindingly fast that nobodycould afford to buy it. They
didn't have enough for it. Andit was a, it was a terrible
mistake from the company to havecommissioned the development of
it, but I had a great time, andthat was all good. So I built
the first prototype, and itworked surprisingly well. I love
when I was 2122 and I really hadno idea. You know, I thought I
(06:23):
knew everything, but I reallyhad no idea. And I built this
very clever machine, and itworked. And that was a surprise
to all of us. And I had one ofthose moments when I'm I'm kind
of unveiling the machine to theCEO, and he looked at it and
went, those pulleys have got twobearings in and I said, Well,
(06:44):
yes, they've got quite a lot ofload on them. You know, the
loads can become off centered,and that will destroy a single
bearing setup really quickly.
And he said, You need to reducethe costs and make them one
bearing. And I said, No, and hefired me,
Aaron Moncur (07:06):
well, you stuck to your guns anyway. That was 21
the machine
Jon Lowy (07:10):
would have destroyed itself in an hour of operation,
because you can't have a singlerow bearing carrying a dirty,
skewed load. Just doesn't workright? And it I went downhill
from there in terms of the needto control my environment, and
(07:31):
that led me, over some years anda couple of career changes, into
building businesses that didamazing things and they didn't
fire properly. I I'm not, bynature, the right person to do
the whole job, but it's thenature of the New Zealand
environment that you're expectedto be the CEO archetype who can
(07:57):
do everything, and there isn'tenough money to hire the people
that you need. So it's it. Ididn't succeed, and I freely
confess my own overreach, but itled me into some interesting
directions, and I made atechnology that could, if it was
properly implemented, in theelectricity grid, would reduce
(08:20):
carbon emissions from theelectricity grid by 30% nobody
wants to implement it becauseit's a bit scary, not
technically scary, justdifferent. That didn't work, and
I moved on. The next effort thatgot a lot closer was I came up
(08:41):
with a way of measuring gaslevels, volatile airborne gasses
at parts per trillionsensitivity. And that was
amazing. And we delivered theworking thing, but the
shareholders couldn't handle it,and it kind of died at
(09:03):
starvation, just at the pointwhere the machine was was ready
to go to market. So I'd, I'ddone quite a lot of hard yards,
and I done a lot of learningabout how to not how to not be.
Aaron Moncur (09:13):
So some time had passed. I mean, 21 at this first
job where you got fired, till4548 few businesses later, where
you were in charge.
Jon Lowy (09:23):
There was a lot of water under the bridge. I I've
had an interesting career. Ispent four years as a field
engineer in Wildcat oilexploration, which was an
amusing thing to have done it.
It started off as two weeksevery month on holiday, and it
(09:44):
ended up as two weeks everymonth in prison, in prison, not
in prison, but feeling like itwas in prison. You know, when
you've got it, you spent, spenttwo weeks on a on a. A drill
ship west of Shetland in astorm. It's coming on hardware.
(10:05):
It was a hugely learningexperience, and it improved me
as well. Did you learn from it?
I learned to handle difficultyand adversity. I became anti
fragile, because if I wasfragile, if I failed in my job,
(10:30):
then the ship blew up, so therewasn't much room for error, and
that, it was a great education.
And I went from that back intoengineering I contracted doing
developed a rugged PC for theBritish army to go with one of
the new fighting vehicles fortarget selection, so that some
(10:51):
poor squaddy, you know, up tohis neck in water could have his
PC floating in front of him,could call In fast movers or,
you know, whatever it it just,it was an interesting thing. I
moved on from that. I became ahigh school teacher. Moving on.
Aaron Moncur (11:09):
Well, what did you teach in high school? Uh,
bastards,
Jon Lowy (11:14):
no, that's not fair. I absolutely loved teaching, but I
didn't like it. Sorry. You needto understand. I store up those
good answers to those verysensible questions. This is fun.
Jon, yeah, teaching was again,was an awesome experience. It
(11:38):
made me a more organized person,because what
Aaron Moncur (11:42):
motivated you to go into teaching? I mean, shoot,
you did some giant automatedcontraption when you were 21 got
fired because you wouldn'tremove bearings from it. Went on
to do Wildcat oil drilling.
Built a couple of businesses onyour own particle detection. And
somewhere in the middle of thatteaching, which seems like a
(12:03):
belt,
Jon Lowy (12:05):
like a good thing, all over the place, yeah, definitely
that. It's part of the ADHD thatI get bored. And if the
challenge was kind ofthreatening, then it's not that
interesting. You know, I I'm notgoing to take drugs for it. I
(12:27):
take work for it instead. So,you know, I've moved on to do
bigger and more interestingthings, which we can talk about.
It's not really engineering, butpeople might, might be
interested to hear about it. Butso really, all of those things
led me to a point in space, andit's an interesting point. And
(12:52):
somebody that I worked for along, long time ago, who was a
very unwise person and a verypencil necked manager, said the
wisest thing, possibly the onlywise thing he'd ever said in his
life, which was Anna wascomplaining about something
because, you know, whinging toyour boss is part of the joy of
(13:13):
having a job. You've gotsomebody you can winch to. And I
don't remember what I wascomplaining about. It didn't
matter. And he he pulled me upshort and said, Do you like
where you are? And I thought,yeah, it's pretty good. And he
said, then stop complainingabout the journey. Okay. Now
that was a seminal moment for meto recognize that a pathway
(13:39):
might be a bit raggedy. It mightbe full of stones. You might
fall over a lot cut your knees,but if it gets you where you
need to go, then it was theright path. And teaching was
part of that. Was hard, reallyhard, being staying polite,
(13:59):
staying calm, learning to beangry without showing it was a
good piece of advice when Istarted teaching, because it's a
really hard thing to do. It'sthe kids will make your blood
boil. Never something aboutthat. No. Bottle it up and pack
it down and then act it outunder your control.
Aaron Moncur (14:25):
And that's and what did that look like for you?
Acting it out under yourcontrol,
Jon Lowy (14:29):
a performance of rage.
But I could turn away to anotherkid speak politely and calmly
and quietly about what they'redoing, and then turn back and
switch on the rage, actingalmost totally, entirely.
Teaching is definitely time onstage, and your audience is
really unappreciative, and theymostly hate you,
Aaron Moncur (14:54):
and they sounds a little like parenting. No,
Jon Lowy (14:57):
it's very, very like parenting. I accept that it's. A
bigger crowd, and they feel moreempowered because you're just a
low paid scumbag who's there tosupervise them. You're a
glorified policeman,essentially, who's there to beat
knowledge into them. And mostlythat's not going to work. And I
loved teaching. I did the actualprocess of getting kids to
(15:19):
understand stuff. It, itequipped me in a way that I
didn't imagine it would. Ithought I was good at explaining
things. I wasn't, but I learnedhow, and so now I'm I'm very
well equipped to talk toinvestors, to deal with client
(15:40):
problems to deal with technicalmatters for non technical
people,
Aaron Moncur (15:46):
what are some pro tips that you can pass on in in
terms of teaching people like,what's your process for teaching
something new? They
Jon Lowy (15:55):
can't be in their shoes, understand their
perspective, understand, aboveall else. And this is the thing
that I think almost all of usstruggle with. Understand the
communication. If it's notdouble ended, it's not
communication. If you can't makeit accessible to the person
(16:17):
you're talking to, you're notcommunicating. You're you're
grinding out your noises. You'reon a street corner waving a
Bible. You're, you're, you'rebashing a drum. Nobody,
Aaron Moncur (16:30):
our engineering manager likes to say the meaning
of your communication is theresponse that you get.
Jon Lowy (16:37):
That's a very nice way to put it, if you can't hear
back an echo of what you saidwith some of the gaps filled in,
you haven't done the job. So thebasic rule that I think of is,
(16:59):
hear it and forget it, see itand remember it, do it and
understand it. If you can getpeople to metaphorically, to do
the language back to you withtheir own twist on, then there's
a chance that they've heard whatyou're saying. And that's it's
(17:21):
not easy to achieve. And I work,I work incredibly hard at it,
because it is not in my nature.
So what you are seeing now is aperformance art. It's not the
natural me. The natural me issitting in a corner and covering
his face because he doesn't wantto interact with anybody ever.
He wants some maths in front ofhim. It's
Aaron Moncur (17:45):
so interesting that you say that. I think, I
think a lot of us feel thatnatural. We Yeah, it's natural.
At least I feel that way, and Iknow others who feel this way,
where, if I had my way of itall, I'd probably spend a lot of
time in a room by myself, in inthe quiet. But that's not how
(18:08):
life works,
Jon Lowy (18:09):
not and if you want to achieve anything, then you have
to be part of a team. If youwant to be part of a team, you
need to not be a shit. And I, Iprobably was a terrible, total
arrogant shit. When I was anADHD engineer focused on how
many bearings I needed to put ina pulley, I was probably very
(18:29):
hard work. Now I'm very hardwork in a different way. There's
going to be a lot of groundcovered, and you might have to
run to keep up, because I'm anI'm a knowledge sponge. I can't
forget stuff, and I read all thetime, and I'm always trying to
(18:51):
learn. I mean, just thismorning, I'm studying foamed
composite like, like metals,because somebody has asked me to
write an article about lightmetals, and they thought we were
talking about aluminum, andthere's no way that I'm going to
be boring about it. So I've hadto learn about something that
(19:11):
I've never heard of, which isfoamed composites. I've dealt
with foam metals before, butfoamed composites, how the hell
do you do that? So, yeah,communication. I mean, I'm doing
it now. I talk too much becauseI'm trying really hard to
clarify my position, so I'm notlistening enough to you.
Aaron Moncur (19:37):
Well, that's okay, because in certain settings,
that is a bad habit, but in thissetting, that's the perfect
habit, right? We're here to hearfrom you. This is an interview
of Jon Lowy, not not AaronMoncur. I mostly just want to
hear you talk. Not for me, it'snot all right. Well, what is it
for you? You ask a question. Gofor it. It's a two way
Jon Lowy (19:56):
street. Tell me. Tell me a bit about you. Because you
know, doing this, if. Kind ofweird, doing this for a living.
I'll tell you how this got
Aaron Moncur (20:03):
started. Well, I don't do podcasting for a
living. This is a call. It amarketing tool for my company.
I've been doing it for fiveyears, though, one thing I think
I am very good at is sticking tosomething right? I'm persistent.
I can do something for a longtime if I need to do it, and
(20:25):
this has been a lot of fun thepodcast, because I get to
interact with interesting peoplesuch as yourself, and I would
it's awkward for me because,like, like you mentioned, I
would love to sit in a quietroom by myself for most of the
day. But as we have agreed,that's not how life works. And
so if I'm going to have to beout there interacting with
(20:46):
people anyway, I might as wellinteract with interesting people
that I get to choose. And thepodcast gets me the perfect
platform to do that.
Jon Lowy (20:53):
Yeah, don't, don't associate with boring people. I
mean, when you have to life istoo short, try to be polite.
Aaron Moncur (20:59):
Oh, yeah, my wife and I have a code words for when
we're at gatherings or partiesand, you know, it's time to get
one or one of us out of there,right? I
Jon Lowy (21:08):
don't bother with code words on that. It's Fuck this.
Sorry. This is boring. I'm goingbecause eventually I reach the
point where the ADHD leaks out.
You know, I can't, I can'talways contain it, but it's a
kind of basic rule ofengineering. If you, if you pack
it in too tight, it's going tosquirt out somewhere else,
Aaron Moncur (21:29):
right pressure.
I've heard ADHD described as asuperpower. It is, what was the
analogy? It was, ADHD is likehaving a Ferrari for a brain
with bicycle brakes. That sounds
Jon Lowy (21:48):
optimistic about the brakes. I don't know about the
Ferrari thing. We're gettingclose. I think I think of myself
as a Unimog on bicycle wheels, aunit of the Mercedes military
truck, six wheel drive, 12 tonsof roaring German diesel, and
(22:10):
the wheels, when they hit theground, they stay, they stay
where they are. So I've got,I've got all of that horsepower.
Traction is my problem. I spenda lot of time with my will spin
and they spin, really? Do youget tired? But they're just
spinning.
Aaron Moncur (22:27):
Do you get tired?
Or are you always firing on?
Gave
Jon Lowy (22:31):
up sleeping, actually, in the oil field, really? 3035
Yeah, 35 years ago now, becauseof working at a 12 on 12 off
shift cycle, and then after aweek doing a changeover, it's
just impossible to sleep. And Ilook there was one, there was
(22:52):
one drill ship that I was onthat didn't have enough
accommodation for the crew, andI swear I had a hot bunk, which
means that somebody else used itfor the other 12 hours. That's
that's not that appealing, butwe'll let that go. We weren't in
it together because, okay,because he was, as I recall, he
(23:13):
was a six foot, seven, 350,pound Glaswegian driller. But
we'll again, let that go. Iswear it was on top of a two
megawatt genset, but for 12hours, I gave up sleeping, and
now I I need three hours anight, and it's not the hours.
Aaron Moncur (23:37):
I'm so jealous. I wish I could operate on three
hours. Do
Jon Lowy (23:41):
you feel good? Though?
Yeah, yeah. It looks one. Onenight a week I sleep more. It's
as much as I can. That's justMargaret Thatcher claimed that I
don't really want to be like herin any way. But she claimed the
same thing, that it just wasn'tit reached a point in life where
it wasn't necessary, which is,it is empowering, but it's also
(24:05):
a little bit dangerous, becauseit means that a lot of the time
you're operating tired, but notaccepting that you're tired and
not doing anything about it. I'mokay, as long as the blood level
in my caffeine delivery systemdoesn't get too high.
Aaron Moncur (24:26):
I wish I could sleep for three hours. Hey, I'd
be, I'd be thrilled with sixhours. I need to sleep eight to
nine hours a night, or I feellike I can, oh, well, I don't
know. We'll see I can get bywith less, you know, for a day
or so. But if I go multiple daysin a row with less than that
amount of sleep, I feelterrible, and I wish, I wish I
(24:48):
could get by on less sleep. Icould do so much more.
Jon Lowy (24:52):
Yes, I'm finding that the less sleep at the moment is
is particularly useful becauseI've got a two year old. I. Oh,
my goodness, yeah, 60 and I'vegot a two year old. I've also
got two older kids that theydon't need me at night anymore.
But yeah, the two year old iswonderful. He's amazing. Getting
(25:12):
to do this again at my age isridiculous and probably quite
offensive for a lot of people.
But I'm people ask me how I cando that, the answer is, it's
because I'm 14 and I'll never beolder
Aaron Moncur (25:26):
than that. What do you know as a father this time
around that you wish you hadknown the first time around?
Zero fear. What does that mean?
Zero
Jon Lowy (25:35):
fear that I'm not afraid of anything that happens,
because I know that it's allunder control, and I know that
it's all pre programmed andlike, when he gets sick, yeah,
it's horrible, but I don't needto be asleep. I'm good. And
because he's getting sick, he'sbuilding immunity and he's
getting stronger. So all I'vegot to do is supervise him to
(25:59):
make sure he doesn't get damagedby being sick. You know,
confidence is is so empowering.
My first my oldest son, is 24and he's awesome. He's working
stiff, makes a living. He's amostly happy person. He's a
(26:20):
little bit fascist, for myliking, but, you know, I don't
know how that happened, but he'sa he's a good man, and he's a
decent, honest soul, and he washard work because I had no
bloody idea, and I wasterrified, and I was 2034 and 25
35 and I was terrified, becauseI was frightened of what was
(26:45):
happening, because I didn'tunderstand it. Because, of
course, our society doesn'tteach you how to be a parent.
And my try to put this in a niceway, my autistic father didn't
teach me how to be a parent, forsure, so I had to learn it from
scratch. Doing it again isawesome, because I can just look
at what's going on and say, No,that's no problem. Or we're
(27:08):
going to the doctor right now.
And those are the twoconditions. Anything in between,
yeah. So, yeah, what have Ilearned? I'm, I actually think
I'm quite good at it. You know,my, my oldest son's the 24 and
21 the ones in his final year ofengineering, poor bastard. And
(27:35):
the other one did a businessqualification. And he's, he's
helping run a courier companyand managing people, and he's
out on the road sometimes, andhe's dealing with customers.
He's robust and he's comfortablein his skin that I didn't do too
bad a job on. So I'm looking atthis two year old thinking,
(27:57):
Yeah, I can do this. It's a realluxury to be a parent, looking
at it, thinking, yeah, I coulddo this.
Aaron Moncur (28:06):
I had a friend when, back 1520, years ago, when
me and my friends started havingkids, he had their first child,
and I remember asking him, youknow, are you worried about this
at all? Are you scared? Are younervous about being a father and
teaching this child how tobecome a successful member of
(28:27):
society someday? And he said,you know, Aaron, I feel like I'm
a reasonably intelligent person,and people with lesser
intelligence than me have raisedreasonable children, so I think
I'm going to be okay. And Ithought that was
Jon Lowy (28:42):
a very rational perspective, and it's very hard
to maintain that perspectivewhen they're puking on you at
two in the morning. But still itis. It is exactly right. It that
there is, there is a tendencytowards the mean. So all you've
got to do is not screw up toobadly and you'll be okay. And
(29:04):
don't screw up cereal. That'sthe really important one. Don't
reinforce the screw ups.
Aaron Moncur (29:11):
Have you taken the same perspective in engineering?
Don't screw up too badly andyou'll be okay.
Jon Lowy (29:17):
And I can cite examples where I've screwed up,
or somebody screwed up and I hadto fix it. And it's, it's, and I
think of it as a muscle. Itneeds exercise. So a lot of a
lot of human response is kind ofglandular. You've got no control
over it. It just happens. It'sautonomic, and there's not much
(29:38):
you can do. But if, if you workat it, you can turn glands into
muscles in response terms, youcan learn to control the
autonomic, and it ceases to beautonomic. And that's that's
quite empowering to to know thatwhen you're afraid and it looks
(29:59):
or. Fall, you can still controlthe situation, even if you're
controlling the fall. You know,don't rely on drunks luck. Know
how to roll. It's the thing Isay to investors probably more
often than I should. This ispinball. Do not Brace for
(30:21):
impact. Just go with Well, ifyou're rigid, you'll get
crushed. If you're drunk,metaphorically speaking, you'll
bounce.
Aaron Moncur (30:31):
How are you working with investors these
days? Oh, that is a complicated
Jon Lowy (30:35):
question. I'm not doing engineering. I write
professionally for people likejigger, done a lot of work for
them and for geometry, and Ijust, I know a lot about
engineering because I've donemost of it, so I'm able to spout
(30:58):
extensively on a lot ofsubjects, and over the years, I
learned to write reasonablycoherently. I'm not I ain't had
my I don't write for art. Iwrite for knowledge. But my day
job, I'm complicated to answer.
I'm an the agent for a series ofChinese retail outlets, buying
(31:26):
product for them and shipping itto China, across Australasia.
And I don't it's definitely notengineering, although I treat it
in the same way, in the sensethat it's a flow chart and it's
a sequential process, and it isall amenable to logic, and most
(31:47):
of it doesn't need any cuddly,fluffy stuff. You're just making
decisions about things, andthose things have to be right.
And I've spent about 40 years infactories. I know how to inspect
a factory and know when they'redoing something stupid. I can
stop them making seriousmistakes. I can make the product
good quality. I understand thequality process, and it doesn't
(32:08):
matter whether it's beer orcheese or widgets, it's the same
process. So, you know, it's aspectrum of experience, and I'm
having a new one now. Sobasically I'm a glorified
shopkeeper, which is awesomebecause I get to ship container
loads of nice things to peoplewho want to buy them.
Aaron Moncur (32:34):
You mentioned that you found engineering to be
limiting, and so you branchedout and started businesses, and
now you're working withinvestors in some capacity. From
a financial standpoint. Have youa, has money been very important
(32:56):
to you and B, have you foundmore financial freedom in your
later ventures than you did inengineering.
Jon Lowy (33:07):
Money is only important to me when I run out,
I have almost no interest insuccess measured in foldable
terms. I mean, I don't mind it.
I'm not offended by money, and Iwon't refuse it, but it's not a
driver for have I achievedgreater financial freedom at
(33:30):
times? Yes. And then at times,oh, my god, no.
It's a it's a Darwinian fight,and mostly I'm fighting things
(33:50):
with bigger teeth than me.
Fortunately, a lot of the timethey have smaller brains than I
do, but not always. You know,sometimes the things with big
teeth are really fierce andsmart, and then I fold. I'll do
as I'm told. So what
Aaron Moncur (34:11):
does drive you
Jon Lowy (34:12):
success? Not exactly success, but the measurable
outcomes in doing things thatother people can't do my my
kicks come from I'm going towave an example at you. It's not
going to work on an audio I hada client come to me and say, I
(34:34):
like one of these floating penthings. I want to do a copy of
it. And he sent me one. And Isaid, Dude, don't copy it. It's
rubbish. Give me three monthsand a bit of freedom and some
money to do some testing, andI'll make you something better.
(34:56):
And he ran out of juice, but I.
The production cost on thisforget the cost of the pen,
because pens need to be really,really nice, and they tend
towards expensive. Theproduction cost on this thing,
I've got that down to about 75cents, and it works better than
the ones that people sell.
(35:19):
That's how I get my kicksbecause I can this has been
sitting on my desk for a year,waiting for the client to kind
of wake up and come back to lifeand have some money so they can
proceed. And I'm probably givingaway his IP because you can see
the magnets.
Aaron Moncur (35:35):
Well no one else can see it are true.
Jon Lowy (35:38):
So how do I get my kicks out of doing things that
other people can't do. So aprime example of this, I when I
was doing my master's degree,yeah, I had a I did a full time
master's degree with a full timejob and a new baby 25 years ago.
That was challenging. So while Iwas doing my master's degree, I
(36:00):
got very friendly with myprofessor, who ran the bit of
the school that I was in, and Iwas waiting in his office to get
some help with some maths that Icouldn't handle. He was he is
system mathematics genius, andwrites the textbooks on it, and
(36:24):
imagines that everybody elsemust understand exactly what
he's saying and doing, becausehe doesn't think he's very
clever, typical engineer,really. And I was scuffling
around on his desk because I'm anosy bastard, and reading some
papers, and I found this paperfrom a final year undergraduate
study of a way of chemicallyamplifying airborne volatiles so
(36:56):
adsorb into a structure and thendrive the desorption of the
sample in a closed space, so youcan essentially create a high
concentration out of a lowconcentration. And it was okay.
They hadn't really doneanything. They'd just read some
books and wrote a report, andthey'd achieved nothing. But I
(37:19):
could see a germ of an idea,which I slogged out for 15 years
in the background, turned itinto a business, found investors
to back it, and we built amachine that, Okay, New Zealand
(37:39):
is a very agricultural economy.
So we make, we export 30% of allthe dairy produce that is
exported in the world from thistiny little pair of islands,
which is a bizarre number, andit's because conditions are
right here, just it's justchance. So among the produce is
(38:00):
kiwifruit, which they're prettyhard to grow, right? And the
problem was solved here first.
So the industry developed herefirst, and is kind of teaching
other in other areas how to doit. So a kiwifruit, newly picked
(38:22):
has a value of about, let's say,three cents at the farm gate. It
has a retail value in goodcondition at peak season, of
about 25 cents, if you can storethat fruit in peak condition for
(38:43):
six months so that you can sellit a week before the new harvest
in Singapore. One fruit is worth$5 Wow, yeah. Now it's quite a
differential. So the storage offruit, not just kiwifruit, but
kiwifruit is a good example. Thestorage of fruit is an art form
(39:05):
that isn't very scientific, butit is very successful in some
quarters. And the vision that Ihad in reading this, this
undergraduate paper, was that Icould see how to use this
mechanism to measure very lowlevels of ethylene around fruit.
(39:33):
So if you pick a fruit and itcan Ben ripen, it belongs to the
climacteric family man, I had tolearn a lot about fruit. It's
awesome, though, because I don'tforget anything. So the list of
climacteric fruits is huge, andit's all of those which were
ripened after they are picked.
So most melons are notclimacteric. You pick them, and
(39:53):
they'll stay in the samecondition until they rot. Most
berries, they're notclimacteric. Again, you pick
them ripe and then you eat them.
You can't keep them for long,but apples, an apple, can go
through its second birthday andstill be edible, not ideal, but
(40:13):
edible. So the fruit that ripensafter it's picked, if you pick
it at exactly the right unripecondition. You can cold store it
for months. If you can controlthe ripening process, then you
can add value. And that's whatthe kiwifruit sector in this
country has successfully done,that they about 5% of what they
(40:36):
pick makes it to the end of theseason, and is a stupendous
value, more than the whole ofthe rest of the crop. And they
get about 5% by a slightlymessy, slightly random process
that, sorry I again for audio.
The nasty noise you heard was mesucking my finger and holding up
(40:59):
in the wind so that we couldgage the sense of what's going
on the fruit. And I, using thissensing system, I was able to
detect the essentially nanotraces of ethylene in the unripe
fruit and grade them for storageand my grading process was three
(41:22):
to five times more effectivethan the industry standard, so
you'd get three to five times asmuch fruit survival at six
months, which means that youcould sell those fruit at peak
value in high value markets. Andwe made a machine to do this,
(41:46):
and it was amazing. I mean, Iit's necessary to overshare. My
vision wasn't about fruit you'veheard of Thanos, the giant fake
blood testing nonsense.
Elizabeth Holmes, come on, man,you've heard of Elizabeth
(42:10):
Holmes, okay, anyway, Thanosmade a machine that they claimed
could do a broad spectrum bloodanalysis from one drop of blood,
not a whole blood sample, wherethe normal processes require a
few ccs of blood for each test.
Aaron Moncur (42:31):
Oh, they're ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, you have
vials and vials. Yeah,absolutely
Jon Lowy (42:34):
blood. So Thanos was a giant Ponzi scheme that raised
vast amounts of money on amachine that could do a broad
spectrum test of a single dropof blood, and they had nothing
of the kind. There just isn'tenough chemistry going on in the
tiny amount of sample to be ableto amplify it to do anything.
(42:58):
The only thing you can do withthat is a DNA test, because you
can make the DNA grow, but youcan't do the blood analytics
that people require, because thechemistry can't be amplified.
You just need more of it, andthe sensor is no use in these
low levels. So I have, and I'mstill storing it in my head, a
(43:22):
vision for a version of Thanosthat's based on your smell, and
I can amplify your smell abillion times, probably more.
Now that sounds What do you dowith that? But you wear a skin
patch that absorbs careful useof words there, add zorbs so
(43:46):
it's not soaking up. It'sassociating with it takes in all
of the volatile that come offyour skin. Well, it's perfectly
possible to train a dog todiagnose TB of people's breath.
There's a variety of rat used inAfrica trained for mine
(44:08):
sweeping, and they smell buriedminds. The sensitivity of the
nose used in the right way isastonishing. If you can diagnose
TB from breath with the rightnose, then you can diagnose
anything so by absorbing thebroad spectrum of volatiles off
(44:31):
your skin and then doing a rapida rapid chemical analysis on a
reasonably large volume of gasthat's high concentrations of
smell chemistries. It's going tobe possible to do a broad
(44:52):
spectrum diagnostic. So that'swhat I was aiming for with this
chemical amplifier. Fruit wasjust, pardon the expression, but
it was the low hanging fruit. Icould get people to understand
that business. So I raised moneyfor that business. I know I can
do it. The knowledge is waitingto be executed. I've got a few
(45:16):
fascinating and fanos, Jon, you
Aaron Moncur (45:21):
are a unique man, a very interesting individual.
Can I ask you some sillyquestions?
Jon Lowy (45:31):
They're the best kind of such thing.
Aaron Moncur (45:34):
What do you eat?
And maybe more importantly, whatdo you not eat? Funny that I
Jon Lowy (45:39):
was vegan from teens until I had child. And I looked
at this baby and thought, If Idon't give it real food, it'll
probably grow to be a funnyshape. So I became bacon ataria
again. What do I eat? A very,very simple diet. My strong
(45:59):
preference, I make my own bread,and I put mostly unprocessed
things on it, and then I eat alot of fruit, and I eat a lot of
vegetables, and I don't drinkmuch, and
Aaron Moncur (46:15):
that's kind of it.
How about your your caffeinedelivery system was, was that
tongue in chamber you consumecopious amounts of cash. No,
it's not huge.
Jon Lowy (46:23):
I'd limit myself to probably three cups coffee a
day. But when, when I saycoffee, I mean like Turkish tar.
I have an espresso machine. Ihave a really good espresso
machine. It's my one luxury. Ifunction better. I'm not great
with mornings until I've hadsome coffee. Do you eat
breakfast? Can't makes me wantto puke, makes me slow all day.
(46:45):
So I tend to eat once a day,like late afternoon, evening,
and I might graze a little bitduring the day, but I try to
avoid eating because I get fat,particularly since I stopped
smoking, which is a very longtime ago, but I got fat when I
stopped smoking, and it was hardwork to get back to the weight
that it's funny. When I leftschool, I did a whole bunch of
(47:09):
shit jobs before I went touniversity, and one of them
wasn't shit. It was really,really awesome. I was a kind of
care assistant in an oldpeople's home for about six
months, eight months, somethinglike terrible pain, awful
conditions, but a wonderfulexperience. And the striking
thing about that is that all ofthe old men were skinny. That
(47:33):
was a valuable lesson. If you'renot skinny, you ain't going to
get old. And I'd like to live,not forever, but, well, you
know, I'm 60, I've got a twoyear old. I want to be able to
see him out into the world.
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, myfather was skinny and lived in
94 so I don't eat a lot, and theolder I get, the less I eat
(47:59):
because you just don't need it.
You're not You're not doing theself repair. You're just running
on the resources that you'vegot. Do
Aaron Moncur (48:07):
you exercise? The dirty word,
Jon Lowy (48:12):
I move. I don't do exercise for its own sake, but
if I have to go and get somemilk, I'll walk to the shop. If
I have a staircase, I won't walkup it. I'll run up. If there's
an elevator, I'll only use itI'm forced to. If I'm being
polite, I'll use the stairs so Idon't. The gym is really alien,
(48:38):
but movement is not and this isa bit kind of like Plato's
Golden Mean, a little bit ofeverything is good. Too much of
anything is a really bad idea.
And my knees tell me thatexercise is a really bad idea,
yay.
Aaron Moncur (48:55):
What's the most scared you've ever been?
Jon Lowy (49:02):
It's stuck in a I was leading a caving party thing. I
was 1718, and I was leading acaving party, and I went through
a sink, a sample. So that's,that's a an underground
underwater pipe that you have toswim through to get through to
the air on the other side, and Iwas roping for others to follow.
(49:26):
And then there was a flash floodcame through, and the chamber
that I was in flooded, and I wasdown to like an inch of roof
space. And then the floodsubsided, and I was all good,
but it was a very interestingexperience walking out of the
cape to the cave rescue groupwho were coming to pick up my
corpse. Wow, that was that wasan experience that was worth
(49:49):
having. What else has scared me?
Four hours up a derrick in asnowstorm west of Shetland. In
deep water, heaving seas, fixingequipment with the company man
and the driller with twobullhorns screaming at me
(50:12):
because I was stopped. Myequipment was stopping drilling
that was there was another one,actually, on the same rig I'd
strapped up a hydrogen bottle.
Yes, a hydrogen bottle, and itbroke its strapping in a storm,
(50:34):
and fellow broke off its valveand shot across the deck like a
rocket. So I'm in the companyman's office, no, the rig
manager's office being fired.
He's screaming at me about myincompetence and my company's
incompetence for the rackingthat wasn't good enough to do
(50:55):
the job, couldn't withstand thestorm forces. And then I quietly
said to him, it's your rack. Getout of my office. Boy, so
Aaron Moncur (51:13):
if it's not scary, this reminds me of your
experience with the CEO. Yeah,no, it's not dissimilar getting
fired. I'm
Jon Lowy (51:19):
an arrogant bastard?
No, I've probably been firedmore often than I've quit. I
just I'm really no good at beingtold to do stupid things by
stupid people. And it's a birthit is. It's made my life less
stable than it might have been,but it's also been what's a tool
that
Aaron Moncur (51:41):
what's the tool that doesn't exist, but if it
did, you think would allowengineers to work 10 times
faster, 100 times faster? That's
Jon Lowy (51:51):
hard. If you'd asked me that 10 years ago, I would
have said rapid prototyping thatwas useful. Yeah, now the rapid
prototyping is useful. It justneeds to be cheap enough.
Honestly, the best tool anyengineer can ever hope to have
exists and they just don't useit enough. It is that their
brain learn your calipers and apencil and paper, understanding
(52:15):
what's going on because youyou've evaluated it rather than
looked at it. The tool thatdoesn't exist? That's a really
good question. I'm not sure I'veever thought about that, except
that I'm always trying to makethe tool that doesn't exist, and
it's that stupid Star Trekthing, whatever they call it,
the materializer, no, theteleporting, no. Now that would
(52:36):
be useless, because somebodywould merge me with a fly, and
then it would turn into a movie,and that would be terrible. No,
I, I like the journey, so I'mnot, I'm not terribly interested
in teleco. No, they, they puncha button and out pops a mug of
hot tea or piece of cake or agun, or whatever it is. It is
rapid prototyping. It
Aaron Moncur (52:57):
is yes, yeah, right. Additive Manufacturing on
a molecular level? Yes.
Jon Lowy (53:02):
And strangely enough, I have a plan, but this does not
surprise me. Yeah, well,somebody challenged me to this.
It was a head of an accountancyfirm. We were talking about
investment in something else. Hesaid, Should I put money into
rapid prototyping, into additivemanufacturing? And I said, yeah,
if you want to be disappointed,you know, Oh, yeah. But
(53:23):
everybody's telling me that it'sthe thing to do. It will be in
20 years, but now it's kind ofrubbish. You know, it's quicker
to quicker make one the old way,and it'll be better if you want
to make a million of them.
There's no way you're going todo it that way. It's not
additive manufacture. That's whyI tend to not use the phrase,
because it really isn'tmanufacture. It is prototyping.
(53:44):
And, yeah, okay, NASA can buy aline of machines and make shelf
brackets to go into the spacestation. It's all for show. It's
all nonsense. DARPA, they canhave mobile centers printing
parts for tanks, but if theywant them to be any good,
(54:08):
they're not going to come offthose machines. They'll be
quicker, but they won't be verygood. So, yeah, the machine that
doesn't exist is additivemanufacturing. That really is
additive manufacturing, ratherthan investor pretense. And I
know this partly because I spent10 years running a prototyping
(54:29):
agency alongside a consultingbusiness, so I tend to know
quite a lot about additivemanufacturing. I keep up with it
because people are always askingme to write stuff about it, so I
have to study so I have tostudy, yeah, the tool that
doesn't exist is additivemanufacturing that's not shit or
poisonous
Aaron Moncur (54:53):
input, your requirements and outcomes. A
perfect cup of coffee, a couplelittle food tight or. I'd
Jon Lowy (55:00):
like a fan, yeah, I'd like the perfect, I don't know,
look a machine that could printa bearing that would work, yeah,
that's the go, a sealed bearing,
Aaron Moncur (55:11):
right? That's the go. Different materials,
multiple materials. Yeah,precisely. That's what a lot of
non technical, non engineers,thought what was going to happen
15 years ago, when startedgetting
Jon Lowy (55:25):
so popular and the investors are still actively
disappointed, that's what'shappening, when, in reality,
yeah, I look, I can cite anexample that that really I find
quite inspiring. My designcompany was commissioned to do a
thing that actually was mysecond tier obsession came out
of the robotics. It was makingprosthetic hands. It was making
(55:52):
prosthetics that actually mimicthe organic in their flexibility
and motion. And they came to usto do this, and it was an
interesting project, and theyreally, really, really. It had
some some intricate gear boxesin the fingers. We'd managed to
squeeze motors into the firstjoint of each finger so that we
(56:13):
could reduce the overall messand complexity and power
transmission, force transmissionsetups. And it required some
intricate gear boxes with lovelylittle clutches in them. And it
was a them. And it was, it was abeautiful thing, and these parts
were very tricky, and they wereneeded to be very precise, and
they needed to be extremelystrong. And the client
absolutely obsessed about theidea of additive manufacture
(56:37):
these gearbox components. And soI we put it into a race, and I
had machined parts in 14 daysthat worked, and they had rapid
prototype parts in titanium infour months that were garbage,
(57:01):
because it was difficult, andwhen it comes down to the
finesse needed, you know, ifyou're trying to make a support
to bolt onto a bridge, then theadditive processes work
awesomely well. You can, youcould quickly make something
that is strong enough to do thejob. Trying to make a gearbox
that fits into a knuckle. Yeah,can't do it. Different story,
(57:24):
and it's going to be a very longtime, because in the end, it
doesn't matter how strong yourparts are, if they haven't
achieved the surface finish thatyou require, they're not
finished. If you have to machinethe surface finishes on there,
you have to do the machining.
Why the hell did you print it?
You've not saved them. So that'sthe tool, that's the one that's
missing, and it's coming. But abit like fusion, it's probably
(57:49):
another 40 years or more. That'sa big technology. Fusion is not
coming. It's not coming in 40years at all.
Aaron Moncur (57:58):
Well, Jon, I think we'll wrap it up there. This has
been a really fun interviewagain for I feel bad now we
didn't talk about any of thequestions that I had prepared
this one in a completelydifferent direction, and it was
delightful. I loved it. Thankyou.
Jon Lowy (58:14):
I'm, yeah, very happy to have sounded human.
Aaron Moncur (58:19):
Jon, how can people get in touch with you?
Jon Lowy (58:23):
I suppose through LinkedIn, the large tends to be,
think of it as lucked out. Youknow, lucked out goes with face
plant and Twitter and all of theother social networks that
they're really not. They're forpeople with loud voices, not
people with deep thoughts
Aaron Moncur (58:42):
and, well, that's where I found you. LinkedIn. No,
Jon Lowy (58:44):
I so I'm having to revise my thoughts on this,
because jigger, they're tryingto create a presence, and
they're trying to use myknowledge and people, few people
like me, to amplify theirpresence, because it's a good
marketing tool. It's a good wayof contacting people who need
stuff done. And so I'm having torevise my opinion of LinkedIn,
(59:08):
simply because it is a bettertool than it used to be. I quit
it years ago because it wasn'tuseful. It was just a club for
people to talk nonsense. Andthen COVID came along and club
the psychotics to talk bollocks,and I quit. And so I've had to
come back to it and reassess it,and I'm doing that, and I'm here
(59:33):
with you. That was that's aninteresting experience. And how
do people get in touch with me?
J, O N, at W H, I O T E, C h.comso again, J O N, at W H, I O T
E, C h.com just for background,there that sophio Tech, which is
(59:54):
my kind of post. Or operatingspace. The Fauci is the native
New Zealand blue duck, which isa pretty little creature, and
it's one of those stories thatlike the drop bear. So you've
heard of the drop bear inAustralia, you've never heard
(01:00:15):
Okay, so tourists in Australiaare warned when you walk under
trees, be careful of the dropbears, because they'll drop down
on your nails. On you andthey'll savage you. This is
koalas. They, they, they don'tsavage anything. But people want
the most vicious, vicious,terrifying, terrifying creature,
right? And so, like my goldendoodle, exactly, yes, yes. So
the New Zealand equivalent ofthat is the FiO field, the blue
(01:00:37):
duck, which is introduced topeople who are going near water
in New Zealand as the NewZealand carnivorous duck. So I
like the idea that my my ownoperating space is a terrifying
lie. So for your tech, I lovethat nobody can pronounce but
(01:01:03):
they don't need to. That's finebecause it's not really a
business. It's just where Ithink
Aaron Moncur (01:01:09):
I was actually going to ask you how you
pronounce that I kept trying tosay wheel tech couldn't make
sense of it. The
Jon Lowy (01:01:17):
Maori language, the native New Zealand language, is
difficult to grasp, but veryfrenetic. So when you see a New
Zealand word that looks weird,just say all of the letters and
you'll be about right. Don't tryand make anything clever out of
it. So no, okay, but just sayall the letters. So if you said
(01:01:37):
real check, people wouldunderstand.
Aaron Moncur (01:01:40):
Jon, this has been a delightful conversation.
Jon Lowy (01:01:42):
Awesome.Thank you for your time.
I'd enjoy the break.
Aaron Moncur (01:01:47):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team's
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(01:02:11):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You
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