Revolutionizing Manufacturing: Lumafield's Innovative CT Scanning Tech

Dive into the cutting-edge world of manufacturing with Lumafield!

In this episode of the CTRL+LISTEN Podcast, gues Eduardo Torrealba, CEO of Lumafield, talks with James Sweetlove and Nora Berman to explore the company's groundbreaking advancements in X-ray technology and industrial CT scanning. Explore the fascinating applications of this technology beyond traditional industries, from personal care products to consumer packaged goods, and discover the intersection of AI and manufacturing.

Listen to the Episode

Watch the Episode

 

Episode Highlights

• Advanced Technologies in Manufacturing
• AI's Impact on Engineers and Education
• Recent Advancements in X-Ray Technology
• Diverse Industry Applications of CT Scanning
• Shifting Perceptions and Future Trends

Links and Resources

• Check out some Neptune scans
• Scan of the Month
• Learn More about Lumafield
• Learn More about Eduardo

Transcript

James Sweetlove: Hey everyone, welcome to the Control Listen podcast. This is James from Octopart. I'm with my co-host Nora, and today we welcome Eduardo from Lumafield, a fantastic company that's doing some really cool stuff in the X-ray space. Welcome to the show, really great to have you on.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, thanks for having me, James and Nora, it's good to join you guys today. Excited to tell you a little bit more about what we're working on and yeah, dig in on everything X-ray, CT related.

James Sweetlove: Fantastic, so we can start there, I guess.

Eduardo Torrealba: All right.

James Sweetlove: Just to sort of introduce people, do you wanna tell them a little bit about your main product, I think it's called Neptune, is your primary focus right now? What exactly is that and how does that operate?

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, so at Lumafield, we make a few different products that all work together to deliver solutions for our customers. So our main kind of hardware product that you might've seen out there is our industrial computed tomography or CT scanner that we call Neptune. It works the same way that every other CT scanner in the world works. You take a bunch of X-ray images of an object from different viewpoints, you know, around, in a circle, around that object. Then you feed that into some really awesome math and you spit out a three dimensional reconstruction of that object. So it's like having a CAD file that you can slice through. You can, you know, you can take measurements on, you can do comparisons. It's just really, really rich detailed 3D data. Hopefully we can link out from show notes or something to a few of the scans that we've done. It's definitely better show than tell when it comes to CT scanning. But equally important to the scanner itself, Neptune, is actually our software platform that we call Voyager. And Voyager is really a big difference maker for our customers because traditionally when you're dealing with, you know, these really sophisticated instruments like CT scanners, the software is really hard to use and it's very expensive. And, you know, you have to, you kinda get one license at a time. So you might be sitting at your desk with a big computer and a USB key that you plug in that lets you access it. And it's like you're launching a missile with all the different kind of, you know, authentications you need to use this software. At Lumafield, our stuff runs in the browser. So any laptop, any operating system, you open up our website, you go to lumafield.com, you can jump into Voyager and you're up and running immediately. If you have a scanner, you can share scans to your colleagues with just a link. It's just like sharing a document in Google Docs or something. But you get access to this, like, really powerful three-dimensional software. So we think there's this combination of Voyager and Neptune that makes it a lot more easy for engineers to start using CT scanning and solving problems that they've never been able to solve before with the technology 'cause it's been so expensive previously.

James Sweetlove: Wow, it's very, very user friendly.

Nora:  Wow.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, we try.

Nora:  And what about your AI platform, Atlas? I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. I noticed on your website, one of the first points about Atlas is that, it was simplicity and that it is uses simplicity to advise on, you know, engineering questions. So I'm just kind of interested about, yeah, how you think AIs in the past was being leveraged for manufacturing, how it's being leveraged in the present and how you see it moving forward.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I think, you know, artificial intelligence to me is, it's a really powerful tool. And in the same way that a CT scanner is a tool or a computer is a tool, you know, you can kind of, you can turn it into a lot more than maybe it seems like it would be at first glance, but you can also overhype it. We're all familiar with lots of tools that have had a ton of hype around them. And you know, people have kind of said they're gonna be more than they are and, you know, maybe they didn't end up being that way. Certainly right now there's a lot of hype around artificial intelligence. So at Lumafield, you know, we really wanted to only present AI to our customers when there was kind of a clear differentiator or like real value that they could get from that. We've actually had AI in our products since day one. We have artificial intelligence that runs on the scanner to help you scan more effectively with less training. We run artificial intelligence during our reconstruction process to present three dimensional data to our customers. We use AI all over the place, but we haven't talked about that very much because we didn't wanna be seen as this company that was trying to brand ourselves as an AI company when really we were building manufacturing quality inspection tools, right? We make something that is-

Nora: Wow, yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: Very serious and our customers have to trust. So we never wanted to have, you know, sort of a weird buzz or anything like that around, try to create a artificial buzz around the company. And so we've been using AI for a long time and we've been using the tools that, you know, a lot of really fantastic companies are investing in to build infrastructure tools. And so at Lumafield, we have something very unique, which is, you know, we have a lot of data about manufacturing from working with our customers, and we have a really great mechanical engineering manufacturing team. So whenever we started to see the evolution of generative artificial intelligence and we started prototyping things internally, like the ability to conversationally ask an AI and then have it drive our software for you, that's super powerful. You know, how many times have you walked up to an engineer's desk and said like, "Hey, can you show me this thing?" And then they do a bunch of commands and you don't know how to do that, but like, you get the result you want, right? We wanna be able to give people that experience with our software. So once we kind of cross that line, we said, "Okay, there's something interesting enough here that we can give it to people and let them start to drive the software just by asking it questions." It really changes the way you think about using Voyager when you're able to just conversationally interact with your data. And then finally, we wanted to kind of find a way around, you know, some of the hallucination problems that happen in generative artificial intelligence. I'm sure you've played with Chat GPT or, you know, Microsoft or Google or all these different tools that are out there from, you know, Meta and all and the like. Sometimes you ask it something and it just makes up something, right? So if we're gonna have-

Nora: Wait, yeah, I've never heard that term "a hallucination problem." Can you explain that? I love that.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, it's just the thing people use when they talk about these interactive AIs, right? If I say, like, if I ask an AI tool, like, how many houses are on this block? It might not know, but it might say like 37. It's just making that up entirely. Wow.

Eduardo Torrealba: It's not telling you that it's making it up, but like it just is, right? So if we're gonna put a tool in front of engineers, we wanted to make sure that we weren't going to have that problem, or at least not as frequently. So we ended up training our own, you know, version of AI on a lot of content to make sure that if you asked it manufacturing questions, it was referring to real information. And if it didn't know, it's kind of able to find a way to tell you that information. So yeah, we really use AI throughout our stack. I think as our products evolve, you'll see Atlas, you know, kind of talked about more frequently, both in our Voyager software and on our scanners and in a number of things that we're launching in the next few months. But ultimately, like I said at the beginning, artificial intelligence is a tool. It's a thing that's there to help engineers make better decisions, make faster decisions, and I think there's some amazing ways that we can leverage the things that we're building at Lumafield and combine that with some of the phenomenal advances that are happening in artificial intelligence. So that's my spiel on AI. Always happy to talk more about anything there, if that's of interest to you or your listeners.

Nora: Great.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, thank you. We talk about AI a lot just because that's in the air.

Nora: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: It's hard not to, at the moment, to discuss AI in the tech space.

Eduardo Torrealba: Are either of you using any artificial intelligence tools on a daily basis?

James Sweetlove: Yes, yeah, I am.

Nora: Yes.

James Sweetlove:  It's just the generative side of things more than anything. But yeah, it's becoming sort of a necessity to keep up with, you know, with the competition.

Eduardo Torrealba: Hmm, what are you using, if you can tell us, what are you using them for?

James Sweetlove:  Image generation and sort of copy-based stuff, like tweaking or shortening, refreshing, you know, sort of thing. I think what's really good about AI is if you use it correctly, it's just a tool to sort of, you know, fine tune things. I personally don't wanna rely completely on it, 'cause like you said, it's not quite there yet in a lot of spaces, but it's definitely worth using just to sort of help you with your day to day.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah.

Nora: Yeah, and like what you said, Eduardo, about having a conversation with AI to come up with solutions, but I guess that makes me wonder about, you know, imagining what it's like to be a 20 year old engineering student that's learning, you know, these skills along with the AI and it's like, how much, yeah, how much is the tool relied on, I wonder?

James Sweetlove: I think people said the same thing about calculators and computers. Everything, for a long time. So-

Nora: Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I don't know, I think the kids are okay.

James Sweetlove: Yeah. I'd love to jump back a little bit to talk about X-ray tech. So what have sort of been the advancements in the last decade or two in that space? How far have we come in the last two decades in that area?

Eduardo Torrealba: Not super far. There are some, you know, I think the closer you are to a space, the more revolutionary incremental advancements feel to you.

James Sweetlove: Okay.

Eduardo Torrealba: But if you were to go to, you know, a laboratory with an industrial X-ray CT scanner in 2005, I think it would look almost identical to what you have today.

James Sweetlove: Okay. That is an industry that's really, you're building scientific equipment. And scientific equipment is all about sort of, you know, I like to say it's like the cutting edge of how far we've gone down the tech tree as a species, right? Like, people that are making industrial CT scanners are building these amazing instruments that are in the world of like, you know, semiconductor fabrication. There's just crazy stuff that's going on to achieve, you know, sub 10 nanometer resolution or whatever it might be that you're trying to do with, you know, with an industrial CT scanner, or really super powerful, like, there's CT scanners out there that are built off of particle accelerators.

James Sweetlove: Wow.

Eduardo Torrealba: That, you know, how much innovation is there really gonna be in particle accelerator technology? a new particle accelerator every year, right? So the rate of change has been pretty slow in this industry. I think usually product launches are measured in decades. Like there's probably like one big product launch per traditional company every decade or so, and this is all, you know, hand wavy, right? I'm not, I'm not trying to like paint the entire history of industrial CT, but-

James Sweetlove: Sure.

Eduardo Torrealba:  I think in the same way that like rocket engines, you know, that technology really evolved that much over a 20 year period? Probably not. You know, a lot of these things are just like kind of how they are. And we've taken a very different approach at Lumafield. We've said, "What if your goal was not the best performance humanity can achieve, but your goal was accessibility, affordability, you know, speed to market, ease of manufacturing?" We really kind of rethought this whole thing, we end up with a system that is, you know, comparable to much more expensive hardware. It's a little bit slower, but if your options are "never" or "a little bit slower," you know, it's pretty cool to have the option to use the technology.

James Sweetlove: Yeah.

Nora: So an emphasis on accessibility.

Eduardo Torrealba: That's right, yeah, an emphasis on going after customers that have never had CT scanning before.

Nora: Wow.

Eduardo Torrealba: Most of the traditional companies are trying to sell to the same customers that have bought their machines in the past. You know, they wanna sell into jet engine manufacturing or medical implants or really high-end medical devices. Those are the kinds of places that we see existing CT scanners, and we're going after athletic equipment companies and consumer packaged goods and 50 other things that are just very, very different than traditional industrial CT scanning.

Nora: So less in the medical field?

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, that's a great distinction. We do not make a medical device. So yeah, when I say industrial CT scanning, I'm really talking about a cabinet with a X-ray source and a detector and a turntable. The traditional medical CT scanner is more like a big donut and you put a person inside of it and then you spin the donut around. And so we don't make anything like that. We don't make anything that like human beings go inside of. We make a cabinet that you can fit like a basketball inside of and then scan something about that size.

Nora: Wow.

James Sweetlove: I did see on your website, it might be in your YouTube channel, you had a video where you were using to scan a, I think laundry detergent, is that what it was?

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: yeah, so that ties into that sort of retail goods space that you're talking about, packaging space, right?

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, right. So companies that make consumer packaged goods, companies that supply consumer packaged goods companies are customers of ours. And we, you know, we serve automotive, tier one automotive suppliers, automotive OEMs, major medical device companies as well. But we're really, we're kind of coming in with a much more accessible version. I guess if you're a company that already had CT scanning, you probably had one or two of them globally, we're giving you the ability to put them everywhere. And if you've never had it before, we're giving you the chance to have that technology for the first time.

James Sweetlove: So scalability obviously is a big part of this.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: What, how does it work with sort of like the pricing? Because it's so much more compact. Have you managed to make them at a cheaper cost rate than competitors who are operating those more industrial, high-end spaces?

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I won't go into too much information on our, like, unit economics, but yeah, we make money on our systems. We have a very good, like, cashflow business, so yeah, we're able to make them for quite a bit less money per unit than traditional CT scanning systems.

James Sweetlove: That's awesome.

Eduardo Torrealba: That's because of a lot of technological innovations. We've done a huge amount of just like roundup redesign and then we actually operate our own factory. We have a factory here in Massachusetts where we manufacture all of our scanners ourselves. So we have complete control over everything that's going into building these systems, which is very different than kind of traditional high-end medical devices.

James Sweetlove: Love that. That's awesome.

James Sweetlove: So just going back for one second to the packaging sort of thing with that laundry detergent, what would be the benefit of a company scanning something like that? What would they hope to learn from scanning plastic packaging?

Eduardo Torrealba: Totally, so, you know, I'll maybe juke a little bit and talk about a related industry. So we have a company that makes cosmetics as a customer of ours, and they have a factory where they're making lipstick. And you know, lipstick is not a jet engine turbine blade, right? That costs like $10,000. But if you are, if you're using your lipstick and it breaks off in your mouth, you probably aren't gonna buy that brand of lipstick again. And so this company is being really cautious. They make sure that they don't ship any product where they think there could be an internal defect. And the way they find that right now is by an external, you know, kind of inspection. So they're looking at the surface, and if they see certain kinds of defects that they think could indicate that there's an internal problem, they rework that part and they get rid of it. Nope, this company, as a customer, you know, they have a pretty high rework work that they have to do. So they're interested in being able to see inside of these items to make better decisions and lower their kind of rework rate. And then be able to take the people who do that work and have them do other more valuable work inside the factory. Because ultimately, you know, manufacturing in America is really capacity limited based on the people. There are not enough people doing manufacturing domestically to kind of man all the kind of production capacity that we want to have as a country. And so people wanna take people out of inspection and put them into, you know, more valuable, more difficult tasks if they can automate that with systems like ours. So the same thing would be true for laundry detergent, right? Do you have a leak pathway where your detergent could come out of the bottle while it's shipping? We have another consumer packaged goods company that does like personal care products and, you know, we went into their facility and they showed us this huge vibration table that they put everything on, and they run it like crazy to simulate shipping something like across the United States in a truck to see if it leaks. Because if this, you know, bottle of personal care product leaks into a package that also has an iPhone and they ruin the iPhone, like, they have to pay for that. And there's, you know, there's fees and penalties and all these sorts of things. So yeah, there's a lot of really interesting ways that, you know, products can fail and that companies are trying to prevent. And it doesn't matter if it's a $5 thing of lipstick or a $10,000 jet engine turbine blade, CT scanning can give you that information in a way that no other kind of inspection technology can do.

James Sweetlove: That's great.

Nora: Yeah, wow.

Eduardo Torrealba: I think that's something people don't really think about. You know, you don't associate CT scanning with objects like that.

Nora: Right.

James Sweetlove: I love the fact that you are changing that. It's really cool.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

James Sweetlove: Well, also, yeah, with sustainability being so important with importing and exporting goods-

Eduardo Torrealba: Yep.

James Sweetlove: It seems like having this tool to make sure that your product can travel safely across the world in a sustainable way is like really crucial at the moment.

Nora: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: And gonna be even more and more.

Eduardo Torrealba: So, sustainability is a big thing too. I mean, just to go off of that, we have another personal care product company who they have a commitment to move to a hundred percent sustainable materials by a certain date, you know, in the next few years. And that involves changing the materials that they're using for caps and bottles and packaging and all these things. And when you change the material, you have to change the design and you can't just have the exact same design as you had with, you know, a polymer that contains chlorine, for instance. And so, you know, if you're going with a more sustainable polymer or a totally different material for that, then you have to rethink the design and that process of validating a material or a supplier or a new injection molding process because you have a new material, that all is something that we can help with at Lumafield.

James Sweetlove: So I guess we're almost at time here, but I had another question I wanted to ask you and this is a little bit more of a general one. What trends are you seeing in the tech sector in general that you can sort of expect to affect the market that you're operating within?

Eduardo Torrealba: I think the biggest trend that comes up in my world, so I try to spend about one day a week at a customer's facility, like a customer factory. So I get to fly all over the country and visit our customers and see how they're making things. And the trend that comes up over and over again is the desire to move manufacturing out of China. People really want to have more control over their supply chains. The events of the last few years have really, I think, shaken a lot of the assumptions that were built into the offshoring movement over the past 40 years. And so, you know, when I talk to customers, it doesn't matter what industry they're in, any of the things I just mentioned, they don't wanna be in a position where their supply chains are just cut off without notice for even if it's a week, right? That's just like incredibly disruptive to their business. And so they're looking for ways to do nearshoring and onshoring. It's a topic of conversation unprompted that comes up on every single factory I visit. And so their desire is like, how do we use, how do we leverage, you know, sophisticated tools, to be able to do way more production outside of where we've been doing it before. If we try to emulate what's going on in traditional manufacturing facilities, then they're aware that they're not gonna be able to do that. There just are not enough people in, you know, the United States to be able to like replicate that kind of system. And so, yeah, we're hearing a lot about, like, everything from logistics and tracking solutions for, you know, I talked to somebody today who is working on a startup that they have a camera system that like counts how many boxes are going into a truck, like every single step along the way to see where those, you know, if something goes missing, where did it go missing? That's a thing that a person could do, but if you don't have enough people in your supply chain, your logistics organization, they can't be counting all these boxes. Boom, artificial intelligence with a camera can start to do that. And that kind of thing multiplied by a hundred is happening across supply chains and factories I think around the country right now. A lot more interest in robotics, it's just something I'm seeing. I went into a factory that made, you know, sort of like building infrastructure equipment and they had robots doing like crazy weird little stuff that like normally would not think would be assembled by a robot, but there's a bigger appetite for those kinds of things. So I guess if I had to sum it up, I would say automation, artificial intelligence, and onshoring are really the big ones that we see the most when we go out and talk to our customers.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, I definitely agree with you from what I've been reading in the industry news, that's kind of, those are the topics, those are the buzz points. And then the other thing is Central and South America and Southeast Asia, there's so much talk about expanding those markets as well.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have a lot of customers who wanna take our scanners and put them in, you know, all of those markets that you just mentioned. So there's certainly a big appetite for those things and we're excited to get to be a part of that, you know, that wave for all those customers.

James Sweetlove: Great. So I guess-

Nora:  I have a question.

James Sweetlove: Oh, go ahead Nora.

Nora: Oh, sorry.

James Sweetlove:  Sorry.

Nora: Yeah, before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask one question. Where do you like to, what's your go-to news source for anything supply chain manufacturing related?

Eduardo Torrealba: I mean, I have to confess, I haven't found a really great one. I tend to-

Nora: Okay.

Eduardo Torrealba: You know, I have a lot of Google alerts.

Nora: That's what I normally get.

Eduardo Torrealba: That's what you normally get?

Nora: Yeah, most people seem to agree. There's not like one central news source.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I, you know, I read, I read a lot of major international news publications. I kind of skim them every day. So BBC, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, just kind of trying to keep the general pulse on what's happening up there. But then I have a lot of Google alerts for topics that I care about personally and try to skim through and see if there's any interesting news stories that way. I get a lot of information off of Twitter, to be honest, or I guess it's X now, but like, people who are actually building things tend to talk more publicly there. You can find some interesting things that way. But yeah, I think, you know, most industries I've been close to, the, like, hyper-specific web content is usually not very high quality. And so usually I have to find, you know, The Economist writing about something to get a really great insight into that space. But all of that is by, you know, it's like on a scale of one to 10, that's like one. 10 is like I go talk to people that are running factories. So I'm going and like-

Nora: Wow, I like that.

Eduardo Torrealba: Talking to people that are in charge of a factory in, you know, North Carolina and asking them these similar questions, honestly, some of the things you're asking me.

Nora: Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: That's how I learn about what's actually going on in the world. I think primary sources are really important, especially in today's day and age where we talked earlier, right? Generate content and at a crazy rate, how are you gonna trust that kind of stuff? Even some of the legacy media that I talked about, hard to really know how true some of those things are sometimes. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, it's just like, how accurate is this?

Nora: Yeah, yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: I'm sure you both had an experience of like reading an article in a very reputable publication about something you're an expert in and you're like, "all of this is wrong," like- Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: crazy, right? And then you turn the page and read something else and you're like, "Oh, I guess this must be true." It's probably all like that.

Nora: Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: So I think like talking to the people doing the real stuff, that's the number one source I would encourage anyone running a business is go talk to your customers, go talk to the people that are building things. They're gonna tell you what's actually happening in the world. 

James Sweetlove: I think it's also really important to have a broad spectrum of news because it's good to hear different opinions on different subjects. And that way you kind of form your own more reasonable opinions somewhere in the middle between both sides.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I totally agree. I think having a pretty diverse information diet and then honestly just not spending too much time on these things. Like, I can't control that stuff and it's not a thing I need to spend very much time on.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, no, definitely.

Nora: Yeah, I like that sentiment, though, that experience is the key. It's like when you hold something and you're in it, in actuality in real life, it's much more powerful, or you can see it more clearly.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah.

Nora: I think like the internet is, can be so smoke-and-mirror-y where-

Eduardo Torrealba: Right.

Nora:  Yeah, there's a lot of illusions to sort through. And it's kind of draining.

Nora:  The other thing is it's just, there's only so much that a person can know about a topic that they've never actually worked in that space or been in that space.

James Sweetlove: Yeah.

Nora: So a journalist can never fully understand what it's like.

Nora: Harsh truth.

James Sweetlove: Like it's, they're writing about it from what they've read online, but they may, they wanna know what it's actually like for that person working there.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, and you know, I think manufacturing is one of those areas where the ratio between how important it is for our society and how much attention it actually gets is like way skewed. I mean, I bet there is significantly better quality work being done on agriculture than there is on manufacturing, and they're both massively important things, right? I mean, and this happens in politics too, right? There's a lot of politicians, every side of every issue that wanna talk about manufacturing. How much do those people really know about it? I mean, very little, right? Like, we elect a lot of lawyers. We don't elect people that have run factories in the United States. In some other countries it's a little bit different, but like domestically, we're electing people that have career political, you know, experience. So this is not an area that there is a lot of expertise through the kind of traditional, you know, like name a movie that's about manufacturing. You know, there's no, like, there's no popular television show where it's like about a factory, right? You know, it isn't a thing, like, yeah, great, I would love to, I mean, maybe it's gonna be a terrible show, but like, I would love to see something-

James Sweetlove: I think you've discovered what you need to do.

Eduardo Torrealba: No, but I mean there's just, there's so little information about how manufacturing happens in the the general media and I think that's a shame. Like, maybe it'd be better if there was, but like maybe it's an advantage to be interested in things other people aren't.

James Sweetlove: We had a guest on our last episode we recorded who's a, he has a lot of trend-based analysis and that sort of thing in this space.

James Sweetlove: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: And he was saying he attended a leadership conference where they gave some statistics on interest in younger generations in pursuing different career paths and manufacturing only got like 2%.

Eduardo Torrealba: Sure.

James Sweetlove: Selected as a primary choice by, you know, people studying, deciding on career paths.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, but if you rebranded that as robots, I think a lot of people would be pretty interested in it, right?

James Sweetlove: Well, exactly, that's what he said. It's a perception issue and it's a marketing and branding issue because people still think manufacturing is standing over a conveyor belt hitting things with a hammer, and it's not.

Eduardo Torrealba: Right, exactly. If that's what people think manufacturing engineers do, they're not gonna wanna do that job, right? But if you get to see that you're like actually the like puppet master for 16 AI, that sounds pretty cool and I wanna do that job, you know?

James Sweetlove:  Exactly, yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, I think that the is pretty important on issues like this. I don't dunno if I really trust those stats, but yeah, we need to get more people working in manufacturing.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, and the thing is, I think, because we have this massive push on reshoring and onshoring, as you said, and we're pushing to have the US be a manufacturing hub for, you know, advanced electronics and that sort of thing. But there were, I've read a lot of papers on this issue, that I think it was 2030, they're gonna have a massive slump where they have this huge deficit of where they have all these factories and facilities constructed, but no one to actually work in these specialized roles to actually manufacture the goods.

James Sweetlove:  Sure.

Eduardo Torrealba: And so we need to really change the perception of that industry in the next 10 years, I would say, to try and get people pursuing that career path in time to actually meet that demand. But I think ultimately it's not about, it's not exclusively about perception, it's also about-

James Sweetlove: Sure.

Eduardo Torrealba: Salaries, you know, the locations these things are happening, their population centers and factories do not typically go together. Like when I visit a customer, my normal trip itinerary is drive to the Boston Airport, fly to a major airport in the United States, and then drive two hours. Like, these things are not close to transportation hubs and population centers. And we might need to change that. We might need to be able to use more advanced technology to shrink the footprint of these things and put them in places with more people, right? Like people do jobs and all kinds of jobs. And I'm not saying factories are bad jobs, I'm just saying like, if you're gonna put them in the middle of nowhere when there's 4,000 people in the town around the factory, it's gonna be tough to recruit into-

James Sweetlove: Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: Into the places. So, yeah, but I think you're right. You can't just build a bunch of empty warehouses and expect to have production facilities. You really need to think through this in a lot more detail to be able to attract the talents and get people into those places and doing those jobs. And I think we will, if there's one thing we're really good at in America, it's innovation and new technology. And I think you're seeing more and more people that are raising their hands saying they're really interested in this topic. That's been very encouraging. Four years ago when we started Lumafield, I think we were still seeing kind of the beginning of that. There's quite a bit more of it happening now. I talk to young founders all the time, graduating from college, starting manufacturing companies, and I'm like, this is awesome. This is not what was going on when I was 23 or 24.

James Sweetlove: That's great to hear.

Nora: Yeah.

James Sweetlove: I think what you said is really true about the manufacturing hubs in the population areas. And I think that as we bring in these tighter regulations about pollution and also ways to make the industry cleaner as we manufacture, it'll be much easier to shift those factories closer to these population centers without issues.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, potentially, sure. I think, you know, there's also this whole challenge around like, what do you mean when you say manufacturing, right? Like, chemical production is manufacturing. Like, I have family in Houston and the Houston refinery is gigantic, right? But like, you don't have to have that everywhere, right? You don't need that to have like the plastic assembly that you could do in a lot of other places. So there's a huge range and I think, yeah, being able to understand the nuances of this issue is gonna be a big part of being successful. If you regulate all manufacturing like it's a chemical plant, you're probably gonna have a hard time you know, growing the install base. And if you go the other direction, it's probably the wrong decision too. So there's some nuance, but I think ultimately it's about, you know, how do we move faster here? How do we accelerate the rate of, you know, production that we're bringing on board. Right now, the United States, it's not like we don't do any manufacturing at all. There's a gigantic amount of it happening here. It's roughly half the manufacturing output of China last time I checked the numbers. So there's a lot. We can grow that number, but I think we're gonna get there through innovation, through technology as we have so many other times in history.

James Sweetlove: Right, so that actually brings us to time, but I just wanted to ask you one last question, which is if people want to check out your products, follow you on social media and all that sort of thing, what are the best places to do that?

Eduardo Torrealba:  Yeah, just go to our website, lumafield.com. It's gonna have lots of information. I'd also encourage people to check out scanofthemonth.com. It's a fun website that we put together where we publish some really cool deep dives into technology. It's like a celebration of design and engineering and manufacturing with CT scanning as kind of the, you know, the lens of photography that we use there. And then I'm pretty easy to find if you just search like Eduardo Torrealba Lumafield on Google, I'm sure I'll pop up. I'm, you know, available on X or Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm not that active, but you can find me if you're looking for me.

James Sweetlove: Great.

Eduardo Torrealba: Great.

James Sweetlove: Well, thank you so much for your time. It was really great speaking with you and learning about your product.

Eduardo Torrealba: Yeah, thanks for having me, it was a lot of fun.

Nora: Yeah.

Eduardo Torrealba: Anytime.

Nora: Super interesting conversation.

James Sweetlove: And for anyone listening at home, just tune in next time, I'll have another guest for you.