June 18, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:40
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| During COVID, there were a lot of very authoritarian policies that were put in place. | |
| I don't think you can characterize them any other way. | |
| Are Amish or perhaps other communities as well a kind of early warning system when they start thinking to themselves, hey, wait a second, this doesn't look good? | |
| Well, I think, I mean, I can speak to the COVID and how that actually came down, the COVID situation. | |
| Their suspicion to change or the latest fad gave them pause early on. | |
| So when the shutdowns came, I'm going to say the Amish community complied for four weeks. | |
| They didn't have church services, for example, which, you know, that's something that they highly value. | |
| So about four weeks in, certainly by six weeks in, they started to normalize their lives, and they got to herd immunity. | |
| Much quicker than most others. | |
| They also have always been more open to alternative treatment, and there's a higher degree of suspicion against vaccination, for example, although they're not anti-vax in principle. | |
| So the Amish community was trialing some of the alternative off-label drugs that we now know. | |
| It might have been rather effective. | |
| And, I mean, you raise an interesting question, Jan, that I really haven't thought about that much. | |
| But in a sense, I think you're right. | |
| Philosophically and culturally, giving pause rather than just blindly adopting whatever the latest thing is does have that ability to be an early warning system. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I also, I have to confess to a conflict of interest, so to speak, because I just, I really like traditional living communities of all sorts. | |
| I have a particular liking of them, right, and Amish would definitely fit into that. | |
| You know, you're an engineer and an entrepreneur, obviously both together, and that may have been difficult to manifest in. | |
| While living in the Amish community, even though the reason you ended up leaving was seemingly completely something separate from that. | |
| Is there any connection? | |
| Have you thought about this? | |
| So actually, the Amish are extraordinarily entrepreneurial. | |
| So that was not new to me at all. | |
| My father was an entrepreneur, did manufacturing, and as I mentioned earlier, my family's been in metalworking. | |
| For centuries. | |
| So the entrepreneurial thing is almost a part of their DNA. | |
| Now, as far as higher education, the question is, what is higher education? | |
| I mean, I have a master's degree. | |
| I managed to do that over time. | |
| But the Amish stopped their formal education at eighth grade. | |
| And then learn a vocation kind of informally by working for somebody that knows how to do some things. | |
| But I will tell you this. | |
| When we interview people, we have a test that we've now used for over 25 years that does a number of assessments with regard to your basic math capabilities. | |
| And attention to detail and mechanical ability and all of that. | |
| And we had an eighth grade Amish educated young lady apply and take this test on the same day that we had a graduate engineer, not master's level, but bachelor's level engineer take the same test. | |
| And I'll let you wager who had higher score. | |
| You're going to tell me that the Amish woman had the higher score, I think. | |
| By a significant margin. | |
| And that was another deficiency that we had to address as an organization because we don't do it as a country. | |
| We established a separate entity called Superb Technical Institute with the specific purpose of modeling after the German apprenticeship programs. | |
| Right now we've got ten people in that program. | |
| Vocational education, if we're going to bring manufacturing back to the United States and do what we say we want to do, then vocational education of the apprenticeship sort is indispensable in that success. | |
| Do, in fact, because really, I mean, these vocational trainings are really apprenticeships, right? | |
| Right. | |
| So you're going to someone. | |
| Is it learning the things to be able to go and apprentice, or is it, what is its purpose? | |
| We are certified by the state of Ohio to do one-year, two-year, and four-year apprentices. | |
| I think we have one program that's three years as well. | |
| So we follow that model from a certification standpoint. | |
| But what we do that is very different maybe from most, we partner with the local vocational school. | |
| But they told us about 15 years ago, John, you have better qualified people to teach these programs than we do, as they were underfunded, frankly. | |
| So we decided to start our own institute. | |
| We still work with the vocational school, but... | |
| So, for example, our quality systems manager teaches the classes. | |
| Related to quality systems. | |
| When we're training tool and die makers, we get our best tool and die makers and we pay them something like double what their normal wage is to teach. | |
| I believe very strongly that you need the best and brightest in a particular discipline to actually teach the next generation. | |
| So that's the differentiator. | |
| We don't have |
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