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June 21, 2025 - Epoch Times
58:26
Why ‘Food Freedom’ Requires Made-in-America Manufacturing: John Miller
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Time Text
They made a lot of money by outsourcing to China over a short period of time but then lost their ability to make stuff and now they're paying the price.
John Miller is the CEO of Superb Industries.
He resisted mounting pressure to move his production overseas and instead innovated and grew a thriving made-in-America component manufacturing business.
Do you make decisions based on the long-term benefit that are principle-based?
Or do you make decisions for financial gain in the short term at the cost of the long term?
Miller has close ties to Ohio's entrepreneurial Amish community and is an advocate for what he calls food freedom.
We joined forces and started what we call the Food Independence Summit that brings specialists together to teach people how they can become self-sustaining on food.
even if it's only in a fractional basis.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
music.
John Miller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's a pleasure to be here.
It's been nice talking to you backstage.
I look forward to our conversation.
Absolutely.
So, I've heard for years that it's, frankly, almost impossible to do manufacturing well in America.
For a whole suite of reasons.
What do you say to that?
That's not actually true and my company, Superb Industries in Sugar Creek, Ohio, has proven that that is not the case.
It requires, however, a commitment to And we faced that when it became popular to move everything to China and were able to successfully stay in the business and now manufacture over a billion parts a year, 386 different distinct part numbers,
and 57% of that gets exported to Mexico competitively.
So, okay, astonishing, right, considering what a lot of us are even hearing today.
Why don't you chart for me, you know, what happened, how did you build this company, and how did you manage to resist the urge to shift production to China?
My family has been in metalworking literally since colonial times.
on the Miller side of the family, a gentleman by the name, or I should say, a young man by the name of Christian got to be known as Schmidt Miller.
He was born in 1763 and apprenticed as a blacksmith, moved to the western frontier of Pennsylvania.
And actually, his son moved to the village of Sugar Creek and my great-grandfather who I still remember was the blacksmith so we
So why didn't you?
It would have gone fundamentally against my values and principles.
So it was a values decision to stay here and I remember well I think this would have been in 2003.
A purchasing manager from one of our customers came to my office and she said, "John, I have to tell you that what you're doing here is great, but in three years we will be doing everything in China." I took note of that and as a family we had to make a decision on what to do and I'll jump to today.
Not only did that manufacturing not all go to China, for an extended period of time we actually manufactured in Ohio, shipped to China.
We have a warehouse in Hong Kong and we're able to support customers over there.
But today that very same customer is now still our largest customer and we support primarily their Mexican facility.
You have to make decisions.
If you're going to be sustainable in the long term, you have to make decisions that are consistent with your values.
And we founded the company and had the audacity to name it Superb when it was literally just a small operation in a garage.
But when we were faced with this decision, the question was, what do we do?
Do we sit down and...
Or do we continue our endeavor to be superb in the manufacturing arena?
And we decided to do the latter.
Now, it costs a lot of money.
We literally had to invest in millions of dollars of German and Swiss automation in order to remain competitive.
But we've done that, and that's now 22 years ago.
The company continues to grow.
You decided that you were going to deal with lower profits for a few years, looking into the long term.
I mean, that's kind of what I'm hearing here, right?
Maybe another way to characterize that is profits were acceptable for a family-run business, but the profits were being turned right back into the company and invested.
Substantial investment.
And the investments we had to make at that point, some of it had to happen on borrowed money because we had to up our game to be able to compete.
And I always like the story.
There's a story behind everything.
So I'll maybe characterize this in a way that the viewers can understand.
So our mission is to make the world a better place.
I think that motivates and gives meaning to employees rather than just making widgets and putting them in boxes.
When I get in the morning and the water in the shower is hot, the world's a better place, or at least my world is a better place.
So one of the primary components one of our customers makes is the thermostatic control for electric hot water heaters.
And it involves...
When we looked at that, and this was back again, and this was in discussion when I had the conversation I mentioned earlier with the purchasing manager.
That product was being made in Ohio, and the question was, do we...
And the reason that was being considered is in order to produce the 12 million or so components that were necessary, it took 13 people.
We went to them and said, look, we can automate this process and be competitive with China.
So we were faced with coming up with an automation that would match the Chinese cost model.
And we did that.
By automating to the point where we now have one person doing what 13 people did.
So the labor advantage that China would have given them was erased from the equation.
And since this is a product that has no foreseeable obsolescence, it made sense.
It took $2 million to get there.
But we continue to manufacture those products every day of the week.
And what other types of products do you make now?
So we've always wanted to have multiple legs to stand on.
So about 30 to 35 percent, depending on the year, is automotive.
a variety of products.
Our products go into, we've got engineered components under the hood
two levels down.
So we will supply, for example, a Bosch or a TRW that supplies components like brake boosters and braking systems and powertrain.
So we make the components that go into there.
So automotive is about 35, and about 40, 45% is...
I mean, we do some work for medical.
We do some work for consumer products.
And then of late, we entered the home canning category as well.
So we're very diversified in the people we supply to.
And the advantage of that is that as, generally speaking, when audits So that tends to balance things out, which is why we do that strategically.
I mean, absolutely fascinating.
Okay, let's talk about the canning.
You figured out that there was an opportunity to basically manufacture ceiling.
Properly sealing lids for jars.
Correct.
And that just wasn't availability.
And this was right at the beginnings of the pandemic policies being implemented.
So tell me about this whole picture.
What happened?
There was a need that wasn't being fulfilled.
I literally...
And I can tell you a story about pretty much everything we do is always...
But I got two phone calls.
One from my friend at Walnut Creek Foods, which is a large distributor serving the Amish Mennonite community, and another one from Lehman Heartwear.
They're the antique hardware that supplies all the kinds of things that you normally can't get.
And he said, John, we cannot buy canning lids, and next year we're going to lose the harvest.
If we don't find another supplier, the legacy supplier, the big brand name that basically has a monopoly on it, had some disruptions.
So they asked me if we would be able to help them out, and the answer was yes.
But I did have some concerns because I knew that the disruption would likely be short-lived, so we needed to ensure that we had a lot of time.
So they supplied me with the market data necessary, and we applied the same principles that we did to compete with China.
And that is automate it, make sure that we have the integrity and the quality built into the product so that we would have a sustainable future.
So in January of 2021, we began the process.
We put a team of auditors That's really the fast track.
We really had to work hard to get that done.
That was the inception of what we now call superb canning.
Can you break that down a little bit for me?
What does it take to go from the phone call to the production line delivering how many?
Lids?
Well, we delivered a million in five months.
Today we make a million lids a week.
And I'll try to break it down because to me it's really interesting, but I'm a manufacturing engineer.
But I think a lot of people don't realize the work that goes into it.
So we got the phone call.
The first thing we did was do a cost analysis on kind of a high level to determine whether or not there was a business case.
That took about a month.
One was that the quality of the product had been intentionally reduced.
And we were able to do that by testing variants going back 20 years.
And again, we were in a community Where we had a distinct advantage because canning in the Amish community, I mean, it's just like eating breakfast for most people.
I mean, everybody does it.
So I went around and threw $20 bills at every Amish lady that would be willing to give up a dozen lids, and we ended up having lids going back 30 years.
So after doing the cost modeling and determining that there was a business case, we then started to do the engineering.
And we found out, like I mentioned, the rubber had been changed.
We were able to determine about which year.
The amount of coating to prevent corrosion had been reduced.
All of this is measurable.
So we went through and reverse-engineered in our labs and analyzed, and we had a very simple motto, Better Than Ball.
So that became our benchmark.
So we've got 23% more coating.
We have more vacuum, which ends up making the seal last longer.
And we have a higher molecular weight on the rubber.
So you just look at each of those components and then engineer in a better product.
And for us, made in the USA was absolutely important.
So all the products, the coatings.
And the raw materials are sourced in the United States.
So that's the breakdown of the engineering component.
And then what we do is to figure out what is the most cost-effective way to manufacture it.
In this case, because of the short timeline, we built what was called a pilot line, semi-automatic, and we did it concurrently.
This was a community effort, so we actually built equipment that we later disposed of.
Because we wanted time to market was important.
And then we looked at optimizing the process.
And we have something that we call leveraging time and space.
I explain that by saying we leverage time by making these products as fast as possible and space by reducing the amount of material that is utilized.
So you can do a lot of things.
Generally, we use 20% less material than our competition just by the way we process it.
So ultimately, the process that we now have is capable of producing 480 lids a minute.
And you can compute out what that does.
So we have capacity to make 100 million lids.
So hopefully nobody will ever have a problem with not having lids.
I can't help it.
I think to myself, you had this inn in the Amish community because you actually come originally from the Amish community and you're still connected with it.
So tell me about how that happened and how that works because a lot of people have been wondering about the Amish more and more increasingly, especially over recent years, but don't know much about them.
Well, let me talk about my personal experience myself.
I come from a 500-year In history, we trace our roots back to Bern, Switzerland.
The Amish do a great job of maintaining family records.
So, in contrast to many people, I have my family records going back several branches.
Interesting, on my grandmother, on the paternal side, from 1821 to 1837, Actually lived in a castle on the banks of Lake Constance on the Swiss-German border and then immigrated because they were being persecuted for their religion.
The Amish, the Hutterites, the Mennonites are all part of what is known as an Anabaptist persuasion.
The Anabaptists were part of the Protestant Reformation and This particular grouping didn't think that Luther and Zwingli, Zwingli was the Swiss reformer, went far enough in their reforms.
And there were a number of theological differences, but the primary one was the issue of when a person is eligible to be baptized.
Of course, at that time, and still is true, I believe, with certainly the Catholics and also the Lutherans, that you baptize babies.
At a time that approximates the eighth day.
The Anabaptists, Anabaptists is a Latin term that means to re-baptize.
In German it's Vida Teufel, which means to baptize again.
So what they began to do was to baptize adults upon their confession of faith.
That created a ruckus, actually, and heavy persecution.
The founders of what became the Anapaptist movement, all three of them died a martyr's death within three years of their founding.
So it came out of the Protestant Reformation and then emerged.
There were basically two streams that fed into the Amish Mennonite.
The Swiss stream was headed by a bishop named Jacob Amen, hence the name Amish.
The Mennonites are actually named after a former Catholic priest named Meno Simons, and he was Dutch from the Netherlands.
So today, if you look at this, you can see the impact of a particular ideology or philosophy.
As it emerged, so Mennonites, while both Amish and Mennonites go back to the same confession of faith, Schleidheim or Dortmund confession of faith, they interpret it very differently.
The Mennonites are more acculturated, where Amish dress differently, have had an aversion to technology, and if you look back, I mean, even today, the Dutch are known for being very liberal in their thinking and Swiss obviously are notorious for being conservative and that followed down through the generations to the present day.
So what happened with you?
You clearly are not looking Mennonite to me, although I hear a little bit of it in your voice perhaps.
You probably do because I was just in Germany for a week, so the accent re-emerges when I speak nothing but German for a week.
So that's a fair question.
We live in the community.
I am a Sabbatarian Christian, and that was the most difficult decision my wife and I ever made.
It was now 40 years ago.
We, after searching things out, came to the conviction that The Seventh-day Sabbath, which is Saturday as opposed to the traditional day of worship for Christians of Sunday, was important, was, as I would view it, holy time dedicated to God, and we came to that conviction and wanted to practice that.
Leaving the Amish was never something that was even a consideration.
This conviction on that issue that drove the decision.
Today it's a bit different.
In fact, there's a growing interest among the Amish in the Seventh-day Sabbath, and we have some relatives that are now practicing it.
But back then, it resulted in a total estrangement.
So for about 12 years, we were estranged from the community and lived outside the community before coming back.
Why the limited interest in technology or the active interest of limiting technology among Amish?
I mean, this is, I think, the question which a lot of people have because it's the obvious difference.
But it doesn't mean a complete absence of technology, obviously.
Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
And I suppose you could answer it a number of different ways.
And I suppose if you asked So I will give you mine because I'm interested in culture and organizational structure and what drives that.
But let me just speak to the history of it for a moment.
The aversion to technology is really a relatively recent phenomenon.
So back in Europe, and there were basically two migrations, one in the 18th century and one in the 19th century.
But back in Europe there was really no distinction from a technological standpoint.
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, my forefathers in Europe were more advanced in their Most notably, fertilizing with burnt limestone was an Anabaptist innovation.
So the aversion to technology really is a post-World War II phenomenon.
And I can say that even from personal experience.
My grandfather, in 1938, moved to the southernmost part of the Ohio Amish community.
The entirety of the area was German-speaking, so whether you were Amish or Mennonite or otherwise, most people spoke German because they were immigrants.
He was the first to buy a tractor and a thresher and provide the threshing in the community.
That was 1938.
Everybody was still farming with horses.
Post-World War II, though, the decision was made, and they make decisions as a community, as a church.
They vote, so they're democratic in that sense.
They decided against using mechanized farming, in particular.
They decided against electricity.
And the automobile.
The mechanized farming, I don't really have a good answer on why that decision was made.
The automobile, the decision was made because they believed that the ability to travel quickly would take people away from the community.
And whether you agree with it or not, I think that decision has proven to be accurate.
They've kept community alive when...
And then the decision to not be on the electrical grid had a lot to do with the fundamental desire to be separate and not dependent.
Or maybe the better word is to be independent and not reliant upon others.
So that drove those decisions.
And of course, there's the mode of dress.
Also, it's a differentiator.
You come to our community and you wake up in horses and buggies trot down the road.
But I would tell you there's a sea change happening.
And a sea change is being driven by now the ability to generate your own electricity by putting a solar panel on the roof.
Come and visit us, which I hope you do for a food summit.
You will find more solar panels per square mile in Amish country than probably anywhere in the United States.
So most of the Amish homes in our community are now fully electrified.
The women have the kitchen aid and all the appliances that they need because philosophically I can now generate my own electricity.
I'm not dependent on someone else.
That's changing, and the e-bike is fast replacing the iconic horse and buggy.
I mean, that's fascinating, except I would argue that you are very much dependent on someone and someone you really don't want to be dependent on, which is Communist China, which basically holds a monopoly in, I mean, the production of these batteries that are required, right?
And certainly the solar panels.
I mean, they dumped and basically took over the market.
So, how do you explain this?
Well, I think probably most of the Amish aren't aware of that dynamic.
I mean, they purchase this device that generates electricity.
I'm certainly aware of that.
The thing about it is, it's really a national security issue at the ultimate level.
If you can't manufacture the things that provide your basic needs, Generate, you know, you think about energy, you think about hot water and all the conveniences that we take for granted.
We've outsourced that, like you said correctly, to someone that has not been very friendly to us, and they hold a monopoly over it now.
But in my community, I would say that didn't really factor into the decision because I think they're largely unaware of that.
You were estranged, you said, for 12 years from the community, but you actually live right in the community.
We moved from the area and were out of the area for 12 years.
we moved back when our children were teenagers because we wanted to get back closer to family.
And so what happens and this changes Changes family by family.
There is what is called that you're estranged in the sense that they won't buy or do business with you, which when I think back at founding Superb, I founded a company in a community that wouldn't buy from me or work from me.
I mean, what could possibly have gone wrong?
So that was an issue that took about 12 years for another generation to come up, and also for people to, I guess, make peace with the fact that we had no ill will, on the contrary, to accept this for the convictions that we had come to.
And today, there's really no barrier.
My company employs a good number of Amish.
We participate in community events.
And we have very good relations with our family.
So it's just something that takes some time.
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, say, wait a second, this doesn't look good?
Well, 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 gonna say the Amish community complied for four weeks.
I mean, they didn't have church services, for example, which, you know, that's something that they've, 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 might have been rather effective.
And, yeah, 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.
The philisticals, Philosophically and culturally, giving pause rather than just blindly adopting whatever the latest thing is, does have that ability to kind of be an early warning system.
Yeah, I mean, I also have to confess to a conflict of interest, so to speak, because 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 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?
It's 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.
I'd just like to formally invite you to come to our summit because you'll see all of this manifested.
Everybody, whether you're a farmer or whether you have a day job, which is common, you have some kind of Secondary income and they, you know, whatever it might be.
Right now one of the things is puppies.
They raise a lot of puppies.
You might have chickens and have eggs.
It's a side income.
So the entrepreneurial thing is almost a part of their DNA.
Now, as far as higher education, I mean, I have a master's degree.
I manage to do that over time.
But the Amish stop 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 8th grade opportunity 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 the higher score.
You're going to tell me that the Amish woman had the higher score, I think.
By a significant margin.
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 sword is indispensable in that success.
What does the Technical Institute 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?
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 know, 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 we have actual practitioners that are certified in the state of Ohio as Ohio adult educators.
So, for example, our quality systems manager.
It 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 teachers that may just have a cursory knowledge of the discipline.
We're having our best and brightest in our organization teach the apprentices.
And so you've mentioned the Food Freedom Summit a number of times now, and I'm incredibly interested, I have to say, in joining you.
Now, presumably it's the canning that got you into the food freedom, or you've always been into the food freedom.
So we've always been interested in preserving our own food, and my wife has the garden and I have the orchard.
I mean, that's how we kind of divided things up.
So we've always had that.
The Food Independence Summit that is now in its fourth year was And I was with my business unit manager one day and we drove by a place where they were having a camping convention.
And I said, you know what?
We should have a canning festival where we invite people to come try our closures.
And then I talked to Marcus Wangard, who is the co-sponsor of this Food Independence Summit, and he said something that people rarely tell me.
He said, John, you're not thinking big enough.
Usually people tell me I have crazy ideas and I need to cut it back.
So he also owns a seed company.
So we joined forces and started what we call the Food Independence Summit that basically brings specialists together to teach people how they can become self-sustaining on food, even if it's only on a fractional basis.
I mean, I think you have to be realistic.
Most people don't have the time or the urge to...
I don't even do that.
We do a good bit of it.
So you have to do what you can with what you have.
And this summit, it's a two-day event in Walnut Creek, Ohio, at a campground, under a tent.
We have an A-list of speakers.
Joel Salatin, who I think you know, he's considered the grandpa of homesteading.
So he's there.
Del Big Tree.
This year we have a focus on fitness and wellness as it relates to food.
So in the morning from 8:30 until noon, we have specialists that speak from a stage on a whole variety of items.
And then in the afternoon, we've got 40 concurrent workshops and panels going on on everything from how to butcher chickens to how to do beekeeping to how to can.
And if you go to our website at foodindependence.life, we've got everything listed.
On a more personal level, this year we're also featuring a doctor from Germany.
I had an episode with chronic Lyme.
And ended up having to go to Germany for treatment.
So we're flying him in.
So any of your viewers that are suffering from Lyme, this specialist, he cured me.
It's not remission.
He eradicated the bacteria from my system.
So we expect 3,000 to 4,000 people.
And it's grown every year.
Yes, you're invited.
If you come there, I will personally give you a tour of Ohio Amish country and show you how we do homesteading as a way of life.
Sounds fantastic.
Let's talk about the Lyme for a moment.
Lyme is a disease that people suffer through their whole lives.
Try all sorts of methods to get rid of it.
I know a number of people who suffer from it as we speak.
And you're telling me that you've Correct.
That's counter to the accepted narrative.
Yeah, I was bitten by a tick, although I don't know exactly when.
And in our community in Northeast Ohio, it's almost reached an epidemic.
And I started having symptoms and I thought maybe I had...
I mean, I live a very active life.
But then I started passing out.
There were a number of symptoms.
Brain fog.
I mean, I wouldn't have been able to do this interview a little over a year ago with you.
I just didn't have the mental acuity to do it.
So I went through all the standard tests.
I mean, we have the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic in our area.
And initially, when I passed out, We have some history of heart disease in my family.
We obviously thought it might be cardio and everything.
They literally, Jan, could not find anything wrong with me except I tested positive for the Lyme.
And then I was told that you can only medicate it into remission because the Lyme spirochetes notoriously bury themselves into the cellular walls and antibiotics can't get to them.
So I found out about this clinic in Germany that does a hyperthermia treatment, hyper, not hypo.
So they heat your core body temperature to 170 degrees F, and they discovered this quite by accident about 20 years ago when they were treating cancer patients that also had Lyme.
So I went over there for, we did, Everything came back negative.
The most interesting thing about the testing when I went to Germany is they took a blood test, very similar to how you do a glucose test.
They pricked my finger, put it between two plates of glass, and put it up on a microscope.
When the doctor was reviewing me, my blood was still alive and you could see the spirochetes swimming in between my red blood cells.
That was kind of scary.
You could literally see them moving around.
And then after two of these treatments, we did that test again and there was no evidence.
and then two months later I had the testing done in the US.
All my symptoms are gone.
I've had a few other people go over there and I'm...
I know that's a tall order and involves a lot of regulatory things, but I'm trying to get it done.
Yeah, I mean, how many people has this clinic seen?
Are you aware of those numbers?
Yes.
These numbers are approximate, but materially accurate.
They have treated over 20,000 people over the last 20, 25 years.
And in the studies they've done, they showed an 85% recovery rate.
One of the problems is you're...
So sometimes if there's someone that has a whole bunch of other co-infections, they may not fully recover, not because the Lyme is still there, but because there's damage from some of the co-infections.
Over 20,000, so that's a big number.
Dr. Dawes has lectured at Harvard Medical School, gotten awards from Harvard Medical on the process, but it just hasn't found acceptance here.
Let me see if I heard you right.
85% recovery rate?
Yes.
Does that mean like 85% have no more Lyme?
That was a study that they did on 800 patients.
And I asked a question about the 20,000, and they said, well, they had people from Australia, Denmark, 11 from the United States were all coming to this clinic just south of Munich.
They know that they've treated over 20,000.
They know that in the study they did, it was an 85% rate.
But they're not following all the patients.
Well, that's a pretty decent sample size.
800 is a respectable sample size.
That's astonishing.
Yes.
Conventional wisdom says this disease is with you forever.
That's what I was told, and I feel very fortunate to have found this.
And part of that is, I mean, I was not going to accept the fact that And I was also, because of my German background, I was comfortable with going there and getting treatment.
Right.
Okay.
I want to jump back to this idea of self-sufficiency because there's this kind of overlap here.
We're talking about the Amish wanting to be self-sufficient.
We've been talking a lot on this show and other episodes on I would love it if the Amish could understand where these solar panels come from at the moment.
Because as you mentioned, there's this great entrepreneurial spirit.
There's this great, you know, enterprising vision, you know, maybe they would.
It's a very serious issue.
Solar panels is only one example.
I mean, you may be aware of this.
I read, this has been a number of years ago, and I just recall it, that, you know, we're the F-16, which is, We're getting spare parts from countries that, let's just say, are not our friends.
And the F-35 has parts, which is the new and the latest one.
People would very quickly make the connection between national security and that issue.
But what is true at the macro level also has to be true at the micro level.
We cannot have a sustainable culture or a sustainable country if we're dependent upon enemies in particular, if we cannot make our basic energy.
Our basic needs that we consume.
Food, for example.
Or the things that we take for granted.
Take cars.
Fortunately, cars we still, for the most part, make here.
I'll jump in and just say medicines.
A very large portion of medical precursors, especially, are made in Communist China.
Some of them are exclusively made.
Some very important ones are exclusively made.
So this is very serious.
And this is, again, one example of many.
But I think the question we really need to ask goes back to the why.
Do you make decisions based on the long-term benefit that are principle-based, or do you make decisions for financial gain in the short term at the cost of the long term?
And I think the reason that we have medicines being imported, that we have all these supply chain things being imported, rests on the fact that we were looking for short-term gain at the expense of long-term viability.
And until that mindset changes, Can you have food independence without manufacturing independence?
Well, no.
I mean, I can't...
How am I supposed to...
I mean, even at a fundamental level, if I plant my garden, I have to till the soil, right?
So if I'm dependent on China, for example, to build the tiller, and they decide...
I guess I'm going to have to go back to a hole, which is going to be mighty impractical and uncomfortable.
So we need to look at the long-term effects of those decisions and make decisions that are viable in the long term.
And here's my experience.
We made some difficult decisions.
For the long-term benefit at the expense of short-term returns.
But if I track my company's profitability and viability in comparison to the S&P over time, which I, just for kicks and giggles, I did that, and we've outperformed the S&P consistently over the last 20 years.
So if you make the hard decision and the right decision for the long term, it will I have customers who made those decisions who we have one in particular that I will not name for obvious reasons where their receivables are no longer insurable because of their financial condition.
And they made a lot of money by outsourcing to China over a short period of time but then lost their ability to Make stuff and now they're paying the price.
Do you see a way to deal with that?
I think that's a management decision and a commitment to long-term thinking and that is something that is cultural that's very difficult to change.
You've probably heard the maxim that says Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every time.
Meaning that if you put a strategy in place that is counter to the culture, the culture will overrun it.
And I've seen that happen in organizations time and again.
To change culture you have to change the structure.
And the question is how would we do that in a culture that is It's going to be a very difficult thing to change that probably, I mean change normally comes when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of the change.
So I think we're going to have to have some hard times in order to make that shift.
Hopefully some of the recent events with And I think mid-sized and smaller companies probably tend to do that more anyway.
I don't have a pat answer on what it would take to change that.
We're just...
Well, the impact we're seeing is we've processed over 200 what we call requests for quotes for customers that want to onshore.
We have not been awarded any of those programs because a lot of companies are kind of taking a wait and see.
But I think the Trump administration, in my estimation, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, or whether you like the person or not, you have to give them credit for highlighting problems that were either being ignored or being unaware of.
And I count myself in that.
The tariff, you asked about tariffs.
I, like everybody else that went to college, was taught that Tariffs are bad because the consumer will pay for it.
So I was rather concerned in what I call Trump 1.0 on what the impact might be.
And I think what we've learned is that I respect academia.
Like I said, I have a master's degree myself.
But we also need to understand the limitation.
The computations that were done and the formulas that were done in order to show that conclusion were untested in reality.
And when Trump tested it in reality with China in particular, what the academics failed to account for is the fact that the largest customer usually gets what he wants.
And the United States is China's largest customer.
So the cost of the tariffs, which the Biden administration left in place, were largely absorbed by China, not passed on to the consumer.
That being the case, if that works in the long term, which it probably will, if the tariffs are at a maybe 10 or 20 percent, something reasonable, the notion of funding our federal government
I mean, the idea of not paying taxes on overtime and tips, I mean, that's a populist idea.
And people being people are going to spend that money.
So that is going to because when I ask people to work overtime, they say, "Well, you know what, I won't have..." I mean, I've literally had, especially our tool makers say that, "I work another 10 hours, I get kicked into the next bracket and I end up taking home very little more."
Now, if they get to take all of it home, you might free up another...
So there are a lot of things there that, frankly, I don't think we've thought about in a long time.
So I'm interested in seeing how it'll all work out.
Well, John, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me.
A final thought, perhaps, as we finish up?
It's really easy to be pessimistic, given all the uncertainty in the world.
And one of the things that I'm optimistic about is the free flow of information.
western civilization as we call it it's the the freest most prosperous um in the history of man and and i believe the gutenberg press which made the bible
If we can continue to push that forward, I think good things can happen.
If we don't, some really bad things can happen as well.
Well, John Miller, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It was a pleasure to be here.
I hope to see you at the Food Independence Summit in Ohio.
Thank you all for joining John Miller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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