Search Engine - The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Why it’s so difficult to manufacture something entirely in America, and what happens if you try anyway. The Smarter Scrubber Grill Brush Destin Sandlin’s YouTube Channel: Smarter Every Day Support Search Engine To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay. So we're going to start the problem. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but first of all, can you introduce yourself? Can you say your name and what you do? Yeah, my name is Destin Sandlin. I'm an engineer. I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day,

but I identify as an engineer, and I don't really like being called a YouTuber. How come? I don't know. I think when I was in school, people wanted to be, I don't know, engineers, baseball players, pilots. Yes. And there's this new generation of people that want to be YouTubers.

Yes. And I feel so sad about that. So I really am because there was this whole generation of, I say generation, it's like little G. There's this whole wave of YouTubers that became YouTubers as a result of they did something before. Like they had a life, they had a job, they had a thing. And this was just, oh, by the way, I'm going to upload this thing. Yes.

And it's kind of flipped on its head, and I don't know that it's good for society. So, was that the, are we still in the intro? Where's that the intro? And we were like appropriately the thing that I wanted to talk to you about today, mainly is an engineering problem that you were trying to solve? Is it fair to characterize it that way? Absolutely, yes. The engineering problem would be this.

Destin and a collaborator would invent something, an innovative new kind of barbecue scrubber. They'd take that invention, Instead of doing the normal thing, sending their design to be manufactured outside of America, they'd attempt to make it here with American workers. How hard could that be? I mean, it wasn't an iPhone or a laptop. It was a barbecue scrubber.

But Destin, of course, would run into all kinds of interesting problems. And he'd start to understand the deeper reasons why it's so hard these days to build new things in America. Before we get to the interesting problems Destin would encounter, I actually want to start the story before those problems ever existed. I want Destin to tell the story of how he learned to make stuff. What it was like growing up in Morgan County, Alabama, where that just seemed to be what everybody did. I'm the son of blue-collar workers.

Both of my parents worked in auto manufacturing. They made rack and pinion gears, and I can remember going to see my mom work, and she pushed CV joints into rubber boots at a plant. What's the CB joint? You know, on a wheel, you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt. Yes. But your drive train's way up in the middle of the car.

So there's this joint in between the drive train and the wheel that has to transmit that torque and that power down to the wheel. And my mom, she's small, I can remember seeing her pick up these seven-pound huge hunks of metal and push it into this rubber boot. And I remember thinking, my mom does this every day on third shift? This is incredible. I just had no, you're a kid.

You don't know. Your parents go to work and they come home, and you don't realize how many. sacrifices they're making, but my mom's hands, like, literally hurt. She didn't do that all day every day. That was just, it was so physically taxing. They would only let people do that for a short period of time. But anyway, my parents worked like that. And your feeling as a kid watching her was just like, wow. Oh, I thought, so my parents would come home and their clothes would smell like cutting oil, and it smelled like work. It smelled like this is how you earn a living for your

family. And so fast forward, I didn't understand anything that was happening with global politics and economics and all this stuff, but NAFTA happened and CAFTA, Central American Free Trade Agreement. All these things happened slowly, and we watched it from afar. And I can remember my parents like, hey, we're shutting the plant down. My mom and dad just barely got out, but they were able to get a retirement from General Motors. So, I remember thinking manufacturing is important. People I knew, their parents made stuff. Yeah.

And slowly all that went away, and I didn't understand why. How and why that all went away. That's not actually today's story. But nobody really argues that it did. When Destin was growing up in the 80s, there were about 19 million American manufacturing jobs. Millions of those jobs began evaporating in the 2000s around when Destin's parents retired.

They hit a low of 11 million in 2010. Destin watched that sharp downhill graph in his hometown. He watched jobs go away and not come back. But he knew he wanted to make stuff, and so he aimed himself at the place where jobs still did exist. Engineering. I went to school to learn mechanical engineering. I had two manufacturing internships.

One was in Mississippi. I worked at a place called Eaton Aerospace. We made jet fuel pumps for aircraft. What is an intern do at a place that makes jet fuel pumps for aircraft? Like, what do they let the intern do? That's, that's, you're really good at asking questions. The answer is every engineering intern is in their mentor's way at all times. Yeah.

And so you learn pretty quick if you're, if you have a good intern or a bad one, if they go find their own jobs. And so I had a really good mentor who taught me how to interface with people. He said, hey, if you need a print, print it out, you can go stand in line and get it, or you can go to the Coke machine and you can get the favorite drink of the lady that runs the printer, and you go slide that across the one, and she'll give you to print early. And so he taught me people skills, but I wasn't learning engineering. So I slid to the back of the plant there in Jackson, Mississippi, and I found my love, which was called the test engineering test cell. Oh, what was that? imagine a room not much bigger than the little studio we're in right now, and you have a huge motor running a jet fuel pump,

and you have a lot of pipes all over the room mocking up a fighter jet wing. Like it doesn't look like a fighter jet wing, but like to the hydraulics, like the fluid thinks it's in a fighter jet wing. Yeah. And so I went back there and I asked the technicians, like the old guys that knew what they were doing. I was like, how do you do this? and like for the first week they're just mad at you all the time.

Yeah, why are you here? Yeah, exactly. Get out of my way. And then slowly you earn credibility by sweeping the floor literally or organizing the bolt bin. And then they start to accept you because they see value out of you. And then a little bit later, they start to like you. And when they start to like you, then they start to teach you. My next summer, I was an intern, and I worked at Little Debbie snack cakes.

Have you ever had a Little Debbie cake? I've had quite a few, yes. What's your favorite? I don't think I have. Which is the little Debbie? It's the oatmeal cream pies. Not the oatmeal cream pies. Not crazy about the oatmeal cream pies.

Yeah, zebra cakes. I like the zebra cakes. Yeah. So I worked at Little Debbie snack cakes making parts that made the snack cakes. So you weren't making the snack cakes. You were making the machine that makes the snack cakes. Right. Two processes were happening at the same time at the Little Debbie snack cakes factory.

One was visible. One was not. If you'd walked into the factory, you would have noticed the first process. A line of machines made snack cakes every day, overseen by engineers who knew how to tweak their operations. Process two, though, was slower and more subtle. Knowledge was being transferred in the factory over generations. Adult Destin later would think a lot about that second process. Young intern Destin now was mainly just focused on the first.

Specifically what I was doing is there was, do you know what Rice Krispy Cakes are? Anything that is, like, junk food, has passed into my stomach at someone. I'm not like a, I just eat everything. So the specific thing I did over the summer was, imagine a five-foot-wide river of Rice Krispy Cake all together before it solidifies, just moving constantly. And we had these ultrasonic knives sticking straight down in it

that would vibrate, that would cut the Rice Krispy Cake into strips. It worked great. Oh, it's fantastic. And then there was this guillotine that would chop them into the little, little squares as they would go along. Yeah. They had that and it worked perfectly. But then they said, oh, now we want to make a cereal bar and we want to put cranberries in it.

And so when they started running it, you can imagine what happened when that cranberry hit the ultrasonic knife. So does it down. It doesn't cut it because of this thing called impedance. Okay. A mechanical impedance mismatch or whatever. It just gums up the line. And so they're like, hey, intern, your job is to make.

a new cutter that can cut the cereal bars and the rice crispy cakes. And I had no idea what I was doing. But there were a lot of smart people that helped me there. When you're in that position where you're the intern and they're like, fix the knife because we have a, like, there's an impedance problem so that the subsonic, supersonic, how do you describe the knife? It's an ultrasonic knife. The ultrasonic knife is not, you know, like vibrating at the right frequency to cut

both of these kinds of, like, delicious junk food. And you have to figure this out. Like, you're not going to go home and Google, like, ultrasonic knife, Reddit. Like, what is the body of knowledge that you refer to? What does your nighttime look like when you're trying to figure out how to solve that problem to come back in the morning and be the smart intern who can explain it? Like, how do you even learn to think that way? Well, two things. Number one, that smirk you had on your face when you were describing mechanical engineering terms for snack cakes, that was my whole summer.

I sat in on meetings and they were discussing the topping distribution on the brownie line. And I was sitting there and I was like, man, are they talking about statistical, like, stuff for sprinkled? What? What are we doing? So first of all, that's how my whole summer felt. Also, I would say there are no smart interns. But, yeah, a lot of times you just did trial and error. So really, you're an extension of the engineer that's teaching you.

Destin saw himself as joining this chain that stretched way back, where young people had learned by becoming apprentices to the older people who already knew things, who would maybe tolerate the young if the young were graceful enough to navigate a bunch of grumpy old egos, to ply them with the right sodas from the vending machine, each successful apprentice then one day becoming themselves an old grump, extending the chain. Of course, not everybody wants to or should work in a factory, but Destin's an evangelist for the idea that it's good for people,

people to learn how to make things, fix things, for everyone to have a little bit of the MacGyver thinking that engineers make the focus of their professional lives. Destin really believes that this kind of problem-solving is something anybody can get better at. Once you get over the hurdle of, I'm scared of this, you would be surprised how many things you can fix on your own. That's a very encouraging thought. I've lately, I've been a little more physical problem-solving, curious. What have you fixed? I'm so embarrassed to even share this with you. Lately I've gotten really into just building fires.

Okay. Like just fire in a fireplace fires. I used to, if you stuck me in front of a fireplace three years ago, five years ago, I would have been like, I don't really know how to build a fire. And then like four years ago, I could have done it with fire starter, but like copious amounts of fire starter. And then sometimes I'd be trying to do it,

and there'd be a more masculine person in the room, and they'd be like, how much fire started you need? And I'm like, I don't want to do this before me. You're ruining this for me. And then something happened about a year ago where all of the sudden I was like, oh, the way you build a fire is completely about oxygen. And what you're trying to do is build a really efficient structure

that lets in lots of oxygen. But then once the fire is built, you want to make sure that not too much oxygen is coming in. And if you can do that, you'll have a really efficient fire that will burn like all the material without leaving a bunch of ash. And once I understood the parameter, of that game, it was incredibly enjoyable.

And I really love, like, every time you try to start a fire, you have the wood you have, and maybe it's kind of wet, or maybe it's kind of dry, or maybe you need to split the wood into smaller pieces, and it is fun to not use a lot of fire starter. And just, like, every fire is, like, it's a puzzle, and it's not a very difficult puzzle, but it's a puzzle. And then once it's alive, keeping it alive is a puzzle. And it feels really, like, I now watch the fire, like,

I used to watch my phone. And a friend of mine came over the other day. He's like, how to stop? And I was like, man, things are good right now. And I was like going on. He's like, did you start a fire day? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, did you know that every time I see you and you're like this, you've been by the fire?

And every time I see you and you're like, things suck, you've not been by the fire. And like, do you understand that like a core part of your happiness is this fire? I don't think that's silly at all. Why is that not silly? Well, I think you're working with your hands. Yeah. You're solving a very, very complex problem. So my first YouTube video that I ever uploaded was called How to Light a Bonfire with Rockets.

The following is for informational purposes only. Don't be idiots like we are. Whoa. I kid you not. And so at work, my engineering job, we were testing rockets. That's what I did. Hey, it's me, Destin. Mechanical Engineers, University of Alabama, Big Loser.

likes to play with rockets. This is my buddy, Stephen. We needed something going really, really fast, and we needed to be in a very specific location. And I got this special reloadable rocket, and I put a special thing on the front of it that reflected certain radar frequencies, called a corner reflector, a certain size.

I designed it all. And I shot these rockets down this wire to train radars for the military. And I was at work one day, and I was like, man, this is cool. I was like, I could do this at home and light my bonfire with rockets. This would be awesome. So I went and bought fireworks, and I taped a straw to the rocket and hung it on a string

and pulled the string down to my Christmas tree and put gas on the fire. Duh. And lit the rockets with electric matches. Three, two, one, fire. My point is, you're not crazy. This is really fun And that's actually the first YouTube video ever uploaded. Destin uploaded that first video January, 2007, 18 years ago.

YouTube was just his hobby at first, but the channel kept growing. Viewers kept arriving, eventually millions would. His experiments would get wilder. Well before they strap you into a helicopter, you first have to learn how to be upside down underwater and let water flood your sinuses. And he'd find himself getting more and more ambitious when it came to the complexity of the concepts

he wanted to understand and explain. EBR1, the world's first nuclear power plant. How did it work? We're going to figure that out today. He even in January 2016 got to interview then-President Barack Obama. Destin, good to see you. How are you? How are you? Doing well. Shall we?

Yeah. Okay, Mr. President. Destin, through all this, kept his day job. Frankly, much longer the most successful YouTubers do. He had a channel watched by millions, while also, working full-time as a missile flight test engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense. But in 2018, he finally quits that job. He's now a full-time YouTuber, which is what he's doing in spring 2020 when the pandemic hits. The pandemic will do a lot of things to a lot of people's lives.

For Destin, the pandemic would start him on his quest to build a product in America. Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm alone, so I can take this off. In this video from April 2020, Destin's in an empty warehouse removing his face. mask, explaining his plan to start 3D printing face shields to give to local doctors and nurses. We have just spent the whole day tooling up a line to disinfect and sanitize 3D printed materials. Those are 3D printed materials that come in from the community. I'm sure I don't have to remind you in the beginning of the pandemic how hard it was to find

PPE. In Huntsville, Alabama, Destin was trying to solve that problem for his community. At that time, the thing that was worth more than his weight in gold was an N9. 95 mask. And the specific fabric that made the N95 turns out a lot of it was being shipped over from China, and we couldn't tool up plants fast enough. So what we focused on here in North Alabama is a face shield. That little piece of plastic visor, that was hard to make. And we wanted to injection mold those, but nobody knew how to make a mold really, really fast. And so we 3D printed them here in North Alabama. The whole community got involved.

They collected thousands of face shields at their drive-through drop-off. And in his video, Destin explains how other people in other towns could follow their process. It was like an internet version of those chains of knowledge he'd been learning from his whole life. This is something you can do for your city right now. The key is that you've got to work together. Now go find your team. Remember, your city fighting COVID. I'm Destin.

You're getting smarter every day. Go wash your hands. Have a good one. As successful as the project was, hundreds of people in Alabama joining forces to make all these shields. it also, weirdly, left Destin somewhat frustrated. 3D printing, relative to most kinds of production, is just slower. It's more expensive.

If you want to make something quickly at scale, you'd normally go another route, like injection molding. But there just weren't that many options for Destin to go that route. Most of the time, most of us are okay with the fact that we just buy cheap goods made in other countries. During COVID, when there were shortages of everything from masks to toilet paper to video game consoles, Maybe you briefly thought about how dependent you are on the international supply chain,

but then the world shuttered back to life, and most of us moved on. Most of us, but not destined. He found himself stuck, thinking, what if you really wanted to build a whole product here? Not because of an international emergency, but because you just wanted Americans to know how to make the products they used with their own hands. How much work would be to do that, even just once? He wanted to find out, and not much later, he'd get the chance.

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rack sore for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history. You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business available everywhere? You get it.

Welcome back to the show. So in 2020, Destin Sandlin is wrestling with this question, which seems simple enough at the time. Why is it so hard to make stuff in America these days? And that summer, he meets this person who, it turns out, is going to give him an opportunity to pick that question apart. So June 2020, you're introduced to a local entrepreneur. Can you just tell me about this person? Oh, John. Yeah.

Yeah. John's cool, man. There's this guy named John Youngblood. He has a company called J.J. George, which he named after his kids. Wow.

And he sells grill products, like a big green egg grill or a Camado Joe grill. Yeah. He made this torch and he got it manufactured somewhere and he sells that and he sells these tables.

It's just like, I don't know. John just feels like American is baseball and apple pie. Dustin and John hit it off. And John told him there's this invention he dreamed up, a new kind of barbecue grill accessory. He said, hey, I've got this idea for a grill scrubber. A lot of people don't know this, but when you clean your grill, a lot of people use these metal brushes. Yeah.

And he explained, there's this problem that happens. They'll tell you they've had people come in the door that have this problem. The metal bristles on a grill scrubber. Yeah, this is the thing where the barbecue scrubbers that look like, it's like a toy. toilet brush scrubber, but it's more coarse in metal. Yeah. So those bristles, the little... Wires. Wire bristles will come off on the grill,

and then they'll go into the food that people are grilling, and then people eat the burger or whatever they're cooking, and then those bristles will get caught in their throat, or go down to their stomach, their colon, or whatever. So these metal wires get in people's mouths, and they get seriously injured, And it's not something you can just, oh, let me just get the wire out. You have to go to the doctor and you have to get it out.

And one of the hardest things to do is even figure out that's what it is. So they have to do x-rays. And a lot of times they'll do CT scans to figure out like, oh, there's wire in this person. And so he said, hey, what if we invented one that didn't do that? And he didn't really tell me his full idea at first. He was like, I just have this idea. And then later on, as we kind of gained trust with each other, he revealed to me, he wants to make a chain mail grill scrubber.

So instead of like brushes, like little wire brushes, he's got little links. You know what chain, like a night and shining armor where's chain mail? You know I'm talking about, right? So that, but put that at the end of a grill scrubber and that would clean the grill. That was his idea.

A better barbecue scrubber, one that does not send a small but meaningful percentage of its customer base to the emergency room with little metal wires in their esophagus. Destin liked it. And John told him he even had a prototype. He was excited to show him. And when he showed me the prototype, it looks, it looks weird. Like the first prototype, I'm just going to level with you. It looks like some kind of sex toy or something.

It's not, and I just looked and I was like, that's, that's not what you want to sell, John. You don't want to do that. And so I was like, man, can I take a crack at this? Destin wanted to help with the barbecue scrubber. Redesign it so it less resembled a sex toy and turn it into an actual sellable product. And Destin, of course, had his own motive for getting involved. Destin's dream is not just that the scrubber would work, or that lots of people would buy it, but that crucially, this barbecue scrubber will be 100% made in America. Sometimes someone will say a product is made in America, but they could just mean assembled here from foreign parts, the last two puzzle pieces put together in this country,

which is not Destin's dream. He wants it so that the handle of the scrubber will be, from metal cut in America. He wants it to be stamped into a handle-like shape in America. He wants it to be attached to the chain mail scrubby part in America. And he wants the scrubby part made here, too. This is the part that everybody, I mean, most any expert, will tell you, it's just not logical. The problem is American wages are much higher in wages in countries like China, which pushes up prices for truly American-made goods. And American consumers, like everybody else, we just want to buy things that are inexpensive. So the era of American

manufacturing is just mostly over. You'll hear this from smart people on the right, smart people on the left, that manufacturing jobs like the ones Destin's parents had are mostly not coming back. And the only people pretending otherwise are tariff-loving populists. Except that's not quite true. Because Destin is not talking about tariffs, he's just stubbornly asking if something could be made in America, even just one time. Of course, Destin is somewhat unusual. John, his new business partner in this, much more normal.

John just wanted to build a damn scrover. So back to this first prototype they were looking at together, John tells Destin that the chain mail he sourced for it, he got that from a supplier in China. That's what John was doing with a lot of his stuff. He's like, hey, I've got a guy in China.

We can just make stuff. And I said, hey, I would love to work with you, but I really want to make a thing in America. Okay, and when you say like when he would manufacture something, he would have a guy in China, it's never occurred to me to think about how this works. Does he like, like, how does he find his guy in China? And how does he connect to the guy in China? Dude, this is a rabbit hole, man.

So basically, people that want things manufactured usually find a person overseas that can help them make it. The problem is once you have something built overseas, they tool up a factory there to do it. And so, yes, they'll make you your widget that you can sell. Yeah. However, on Saturday night, they're going to run more widgets, and they're going to backdoor you on Amazon, and they're going to make counterfeit versions of your thing. Oh, so if I had an idea for a better barbecue scrubber,

I could get it more easily made in China, but then because I'm not there, someone will just come in and make knockoffs, but they're not even knockoffs because it's being made in the exact same factor. A thousand percent. I know a friend that makes tractor parts, and he used to get the castings made in Turkey, for example. It was for a specific tractor, and he realized,

I have to name the part something else, because if I say this is a water pump for a Ford whatever tractor, he would make the castings, and suddenly on the internet, up would pop of, hey, do you guys want water pump housings for a Ford whatever tractor? This whole backdoor market would start. So he started naming the part something weird. These are rotor girders.

And that would work? Yeah, it works. Yeah. So there's this whole thing that happens with manufacturing where, yes, you can get things made somewhere else. And yes, it's way less expensive. But ultimately you will be undermined. And it's a strange thing. And so the question is, why don't we make it in America?

Why don't we? This question of Destin's, he was able to infect John with it, enough so that John set aside his normal entrepreneurial instincts to join Destin on his quixotic mission. We're going to follow along. And to start, you just have to imagine the thing they're trying to make. The prototype is basically two main parts. One is the handle. You can just imagine the handle on a toilet brush. And that is connected to part two, the scrubby part. It's a circular disc. It sort of looks like a hockey puck that's been wrapped in chain mail. Those are the two main parts. And in early 2021, Destin begins the design process for real, turning that first rough draft

idea into a more sophisticated prototype. So the first thing I did is I went to my computer, and I used computer-rated design software, and I designed the scrubber. The thought was, we have the chain mail, and we need a squishy thing to put behind the chain mail, and we want to use the least amount of material possible. I saw a video of Destin's computer screen that showed him designing the puck in the design software, CAD. And so there's certain shapes that packed together really well. And a hexagon is one of the most efficient shapes that you can do what's called tessellations. And I remember being irritated in the CAD because

you think that would be a really easy thing to do, just say, make me a honeycomb. But it turns out there's not an easy way to do that in CAD. It was a puzzle. Frustrating at first. But then Dustin found himself losing track of time the way you do when you're working on any good puzzle. Flow is the best way to describe it. Yeah. You start to have really, really serious opinions about fillet radiuses. And as an engineer, I love this part. For Destin, the next step was to take these 3D printed parts and find someone who could build

an injection mold. The injection mold lets you make plastic parts at scale by filling a cavity with hot plastic that then cools. That handle of your toothbrush, probably. Somewhere in a factory in China, an injection mold shaped like that handle makes handle after handle, after handle. So Destin wants to find someone who can make an injection mold

shaped like his barbecue scrubber parts, but who is based in America. Early 2021, Destin and his partner, John, visit an injection mold company that's not too far from them. I went to this facility and I said, hey, we've designed this thing, I 3D printed it,

this is what it looks like, can you please make us a lot of these? We want to make a mold and we want to make these at your facility. And the guy goes, sure, no problem. And we said, oh, by the way, we want to make the mold in America.

We want everything about this to be done in America. And they said, we can't do that. Because normally what they would do is they would have a guy in China. The guy in China would make the mold, send the mold to the plant in America, and then they would make the plastic part in America? Yes. When he said, we don't make the mold in America, that's the moment I realized we were screwed.

Because you have manufacturing and then you have tooling. And the tooling is what makes the manufacturing work. What's the between manufacturing and tooling? Tooling, those are the tools. They're usually custom tools that go into the machines that make things. So when you were a little dabby, it's like the machine that makes the snack cakes, the tool is the tooling, and then the snack cakes are the product of the tool machine?

Correct. Yeah, and so there's this whole industry called tool and die. It's a skilled trade. Just one more example, in case you are. as unfamiliar with us as I was, picture of factory that's making spoons. The spoon starts out as a blank piece of metal, but there's a machine, like a cookie cutter,

and I think pushing the metal into the cookie cutter that shapes it into a spoon, that machine is the tool and dye. In Germany, they have very specific programs where you will learn how to make tools for manufacturing. In the U.S., we have that too, but it's not as strong as they do over in Germany, but my dad used to be a tool-and-die guy.

He used to work and tool-engage and tool-and-dye. And so they said, yeah, we can't make the injection mold. We send that off and we'll get that back from China and then we'll run your part. And then I realized you're sending all the intellectual property overseas and they're making it. So while they're set up to make the tool, they'll just make two. And so I said, we don't want to do that. We want to make it in America. And he almost laughed at me.

He's like, yeah, you don't understand. You clearly don't understand how this works. And I said, well, there's got to be somebody here that makes it. And he said, good luck. And that terrified me. It actually terrified me because it made me realize if we can't make the tools to make our parts, then China has us.

Yeah. Or whoever has us. This was a light bulb moment for me in the conversation. The problem is not just that we've forgotten a lot about how to make things in America, is that we're also forgetting how to make the things that make the things. Meaning in our factories, there are machines.

The machines build the parts that the workers assemble into American products, but the people who know how to handle the tooling to make those parts, I was willing to realize that in America, those people are disappearing. And I was like, this is what my dad did, and the people I grew up with,

this is what they did. Why can't we do it? And so I kind of went on this little mini quest to find somebody that could do this. Can you introduce yourself, say who you are and what you do? I am Chris Robson. I am the president and owner of the Robson Company.

So I found a guy that could do it. He's an old-school guy. He was from Pennsylvania. He moved down to Alabama, and he has an injection molding facility. But he knows how to make molds. How long have you been making molds? I've been doing this for 47 years. Wow.

And do you remember when the business first started moving to China? Do you remember the first time you saw that begin to happen? We start feeling that about 12 years ago. I would say really start to hit about 10 years ago, where we were seeing a lot of stuff. And we were doing quotings for new tooling projects only to find out that they went overseas for them. And some of them even approached us by saying, well, you know, we got these molds in from China and they need to be groomed. Would you be interested in that?

And I go, no. If we're not building them, we're not going to service them. That's the way we've taken our stand on trying to keep everything in-house in the U.S. Chris said there used to be lots of tool and dye makers back where he's from in Erie, Pennsylvania. They're mostly gone now. Many of them were his competitors, but also his friends. And with them, this whole part of the chain,

parents teaching their kids, adults teaching their apprentices. Chris has watched as that chain's been broken. And why is that happening now? Why is that sort of family chain getting broken at exactly this moment in time? I don't see... that willingness to go into vocational education. People do not want to go into tool-and-dye making.

We have a hard time finding tool-and-dye makers. They don't want to go into a four-year tool-and-dye apprenticeship because that means they've got to take extra classes and they're not going to see the pay scale until they get to be a journeyman tool-and-dye maker, where if somebody can come out of a tech school and make, you know, $25, $30 an hour, and all I have to do is press a button on a CNC, hey, it's hard to turn away.

You can see this in the numbers. Nearly half of the remaining workers in American manufacturing plan to retire in the next 20 years. And they're not being replaced by some wave of gen's ears. The average American manufacturing worker is 44 years old. No one on the line, presumably, is calling anything goaded. There's very little risen up transpiring. Destin told me before he'd started working on the scrubber, he'd had one understanding of why people did not manufacture in America.

But as he worked on it, he understood a different logic, one which he found much pleaker. The argument to get things made in China was, well, you get it made in China because it's cheaper. That's what the argument has always been. And then I realized, oh, that's not the argument anymore. Now the argument is we can't do it because we've been outsourcing it for so long, we've lost the skills. And the old guy didn't train the young guy, and men and women are, working in factories haven't learned the skills because the people that knew how to do it have retired.

Yeah. And so that's not something you can fix overnight because when I was an intern, the older engineer taught me how to do things. Tool and die interns, there's a program called Journeyman and Apprentice. If they don't have somebody teaching them, we just skip that generation and that doesn't just come back. You have to have somebody to teach you that stuff. And so the reason it's so scary is because it made me realize.

in America, we like to push paper around and make money on things, but if we're not actually able to produce, what do you have? I asked Chris Robeson how we felt about all this. You'll have to forgive the cornyness of this question, but does it make you feel sad just to be a person who has this knowledge without an immediate person to be teaching it to? I feel like a dinosaur, quite frankly. I am. I am almost 70 years old.

I've trained the person I have working for me now, and he wants to actually take over my business someday. But as far as education, I just don't see the same quality coming out of the tech schools that I'd like to see an apprenticeship. But a lot of it comes down to people don't want to work with their hands. They can spend time in front of a computer. They're happy as a clam. Also, the high schools don't push it either.

They're more aimed at trying to fill the academic roles as opposed to the vocational roles. And I've got to be honest, you know, even though on my age, I thought about that too. Why am I doing this when I can certainly go somewhere else and make about two grand a week and be a lot happier? And why didn't you do it? I love what I do. I love the creativity. I love the aspect that I can help somebody design something and go from concepts. up to completion to actually get a plastic part. That's one of the things that was sort of fun with doing the scrubber. We got a chance to go right from conception and work with those guys to make it

happen. And that's a lot of fun. When Chris was in college, he spent a summer working at a machine shop because he just wasn't enjoying school anymore. In the shop, he discovered the joy of working with his hands, of creating things that wouldn't exist otherwise. He and I talked for almost an hour, and the subject of tariffs never came up, or really politics at all. Chris did say if he was in charge, the change he'd want to make would be more education, support for young people looking for apprenticeships,

maybe trying to remove some of the stigma we've attached to the skilled trades. It made me think about the friends I have raising teenagers who've told me how much they wish there were just more options for working with your hands in America, how not everybody wants a desk job. A funny thing, Chris Robson, he actually didn't end up just making molds

for Destin, but teaching Destin how to make them himself, which Dustin obviously was excited to do. There's video of this. Destin wearing safety glasses, a CNC mill behind him. All right, here we go. I've been doing a test cut for almost 20 hours. She is almost done. Can't see in there just yet. He's standing next to a monitor with his G-code scrolling across it. Almost a million lines of G-code. The machine turns off, Dustin opens the Plexiglass doors to the mill, and puts his hands on. Oh, Nelly. How does she look?

Okay. You see it, a shiny circular metal part with a hexagonal pattern cut out of it. Physical proof for Destin that his code works. This is a big deal. This is a very big deal. All right.

We can make things now. People can't tell us now anymore. We can make whatever we want. This is huge. The joy in Dustin's voice, I think anybody who's had the privilege of seeing something that existed as an idea in their head become actually real. It's just a very human kind of joy, this feeling of creation. By February 2020, the scrubber's plastic parts now have a full chain of people and knowledge behind them.

They are ready. But the scrubber has a bunch of non-plastic parts, and those we know need to be made in America as well. For instance, the scrubber design calls for a big bolt to connect the scrubby part to the handle. A bolt! a bolt that goes on the thing. It's a quarter-20 stainless steel one-inch-long bolt. The simplest mechanical object. I put out a tweet and said,

I'm looking for an American manufacturer for this bolt. And the quotes I got from overseas are like nine cents a bolt. Yeah. The cheapest I'm getting over here is the absolute cheapest is a quarter. So it's 3X. Yeah. But most people are coming in at 50 cents. And so as a businessman, John and I disagree on this.

So John's the business guy. I'm the engineer. Yeah. And so John's like, hey, man, I'm just being real with you. From a business perspective, we're stupid for doing this. Also, we have to do it if we ever want manufacturing to work in America. And so we're making the decision to buy the more expensive bolt just to have them made in America. You guys are being vegans about this.

Yeah, maybe I am. I think ultimately I want the skills to be in America. That's what I want. Yes. Because I see them going away, and I want to bridge the gap. And so I want people to learn the skills again. And in order to do that, you have to be a little bit of a hard tale about it. And for you, it's not, you're not like, I really want to make a barbecue scrubber because I want to make a giant briefcase full of money from my barbecue scrubber.

You're like, people need jobs. They need things to do. They need skills. I'm going to create something that gets made here so that those things happen. My wife, we do this yearly meeting, and I said, yeah, we're still not in the positive on the scrubber thing, and she burst out laughing.

And it was me and a couple of people at the table. I was like, I'm sorry, darling, why are you laughing? And she goes, oh, I'm sorry, we've lost an incredible amount of money on this. But we ultimately think it's going to be worth it in the long run. So it required an incredible initial investment. And no, this is not about money. This is about something I'm passionate about.

On paper, it's stupid. It's really stupid to try to do it this way. We could have already sold scrubbers two years ago if we had just done it the way everybody does it. But I've just been very principled. I like to imagine it being principled, but it's probably stubborn. It's probably the real word.

I don't know the difference between those two things. I don't know. But the deal is it has to make money because people will not make things in America if it doesn't make money. So the goal of this project is to prove that you can make something in America that will make money. I want to show, yes, you can do it, and it's smart. It's in your best interest to do it, because then you have a person in your hometown that has the skills,

and the next thing you come up with, you can go to them and ask them to do it. What Destin's talking about building here, really, it's manufacturing capacity. It's funny, for people who want tariffs, part of the idea is that tariffs might force Americans to build more capacity. If foreign goods were more expensive to buy, more people might do what Destin's just doing voluntarily. Training people, tooling up factories, creating the infrastructure you need to build stuff. Finding an injection mold person in America. A bolt person in America. Actually, this brings us to our next person.

A handle person in America. Okay, for the metal handle, you've got to have a person that can cut them out with a laser cutter. People can imagine that. but the building of the dye that stamps the handles, that's a whole person. And there's this really beautiful moment where we go work with this facility and we pay them for the tool.

It was like $30,000 to make the tool. It's very expensive. And so we pay them for this tool. We go all the way through the process and the guy's name is Logan. We go to the facility and we're like, hey, we're going to make a part. We're finally going to make a part.

And we go there and he loads a flat piece of metal and he hits the button and the press comes down, Kachunk. So cool. Can I grab it? Yeah. Pull straight out. Wow.

And then he takes it out and he moves it to the next station. It's a multi-station tool. Yeah. And he goes all the way to the end and he pulls it out and he holds it up and it's done. And I look at him and I said, hey, is this the first tool you ever made? He designed and built the tool.

He said, yeah, this is the first one I've ever done. This is the first one you've made? Yes, sir. And how long did it take you? About six weeks. So are you been training him? I'm hell. He'd a lot of help.

So do you feel like you know how to do the next one now? As long as I got friends to go by, I could feel it, yes, sir. Really? Did you ever think you would have this skill? I never knew anything like this really existed. During high school, with everything, I didn't know what I was going to do. I started out up here at just a press operator actually running these presses and got the opportunity to move over as an apprentice,

and I've enjoyed it everything. It's all the hands-on stuff, learning stuff every day. I've really enjoyed it ever since I've been over to you. That's fun. You never know this, standing in the store, mindlessly comparing different barbecue scrubbers, what any of this had meant to one American engineer, or to Logan, the young worker here.

But the scrubber now has an American-made handle. Once Destin and his partner John have all their pieces, they put them all together. Now they're just beta testing the hell out of it. They get it in the hands of as many people as they can. There's this very sweet video of John's mom outside, her grandson watching, as she, this small woman holding this very large barbecue scrubber, tests it on a dirty barbecue grill and then gives her verdict.

Is it working? Yeah. This is great. Destin and John have a working barbecue scrubber. They've patented it. And in November 2024, they finally start assembling it in batches. And once you have all the parts, where does the thing get assembled into one thing? We're doing it in our hometown.

Okay. Yeah, we're literally doing it in our hometown. So the puck and the chain mail and everything, we have a place where we send them, and we're paying a subcontractor to assemble those components out of state, but in America. So we take the chain mail and the puck and the rubber and all that. They assemble those. They bring it back. We get the handles, laser, the brand on the handles,

and then we assemble them all. all there at the facility where we ship them out. And how many people work at the facility? Right now, there's five or six depending on, you know, we bring people in. A lot of times college kids that are home from school in the summer. Destin shared a video. It depicts some of the most adorable child labor you've ever seen.

Destin's young son in one corner of the warehouse, boxing up scrubbers. We got the assembly line going with right ahead of Dustin. So this is my son packing them up. What do you think? It's good. It's good. These are some going out. This is me and John's boys over here doing this.

Wait, you all taking a break? A short distance away, John's teenagers are also working. They're sitting down tying on tags and putting American flag stickers on the barbecue scrubbers. What's going on? What's going on? Take a break? I'm going to fall asleep. It's funny seeing these American teenagers on an assembly line instead of, I don't know, playing Fortnite.

They look maybe a little bored, but they're being good sports. Man, you're applying stickers. You feel patriotic when you do that? Yes, very patriotic. God bless America. Boxes, yes, I can make you more boxes. You'll have somebody getting out a handle, tying a string on it,

and somebody puts the puck on, and somebody puts a little sticker on it. Yeah. And so we have a little assembly line that's very inefficient. It's just kind of bootstrapping right now. So Destin has the product he's stubbornly insisted on. A barbecue scrubber that was both made and assembled,

in America. We're going to take a short break and then come back to the final part of our question. Will anybody really buy this thing? Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney,

Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.m.m. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Welcome back to the show. Destin and I met up late this January. He was visiting New York, and he came by the studio, and we looked at his barbecue scrubber together. Do you want to see that? You sent... I feel like I'm in an infomercial.

I know. See, this is the part I don't like. The Smarter Scrubber. Destin and John are selling it direct for $59.99, which is expensive. You can buy a much cheaper wire scrubber on Amazon for $1999, made in China. Although in Destin's sales pitch, he'll tell you that that one will probably break in a couple years. And it might leave metal wires in your stomach before it does. Will people pay for the smarter scrubber?

I asked myself that, holding the finished product in my hand, thinking about all the people who had solved all the little problems to make it real. It has a very sturdy. It's a steel? Stainless steel. Very sturdy, stainless steel handle. It feels like... Like a medieval weapon of war?

No, I was just saying it feels like something that you're not going to throw in the trash in 14 months. Like there's so many things I buy off Amazon because I see some stupid ad for it, and it comes, and it's plasticy. and broken, and then like, it's too cheap to give away. And this feels like something that you would just have for a long time, which I don't know if it's the heft of it or the materials because it's like more metal than plastic, but it just feels like it was made to last.

That was the goal. It's a weird thing to talk about. But it's, we showed this to a guy that has a lot of products made overseas, and we said, hey, what do you think about this? He's a design guy. And we said, what are your thoughts on this thing? And he picked it up.

And he kind of like almost made fun of it. Because it's too heavy? He's like, this feels like something made in America. What does that mean? And I was like, you mean good? What does that mean? And he's like, it's just really like strong. And I was like, that's good, right?

And he was like, yeah, I guess so. And I was like, I don't like you anymore. But it's just really, it's beefy. and it's made to not break. I am not a barbecue scrubber reviewer yet, but I like the beefy feel of the thing. It reminds me a little bit of how American cars used to be, back before they were all edgeless blobs.

Destin says if the smarter scrubber does succeed, he knows it'll be in no small part because he has something almost no other random American inventor starts with, a big megaphone. It's the only reason we can take the gamble like this, because I have a YouTube channel and I can tell the story, and the story hopefully will sell.

But ultimately, the product has to stand or fall on its own. It's going to come down to a lady in an aisle at a store in Iowa looking at two items on a shelf, and she's going to look at two products, and she's going to make a decision. So I think the YouTube thing, the marketing power of YouTube, it's a big trend these days where creators, that's the gross term that people say for you,

too paid. There's this trend where people will make a product and try to like rake in a bunch of money based on their... But the product's always like... Yeah, very bad. Right? And so we're hoping to get it started with that, but ultimately it has to stand or fall on its own. The market's going to tell the truth. It's so scary. It's terrifying, dude. And in the decision, like, somebody puts two bolts in front of you, you can't tell the difference. You're like, hey, this one's... Feels more American. This one's 35 cents and this one's nine cents. Tell me, which one was in America, and you can't.

And we're making the decision to do it. Like, it doesn't make sense on paper what we're doing. But I think in the long run, I think it's smart. Like, it's long-term thinking. And sometimes capitalism doesn't lend itself well to that because the most important rule is line go up. Yes. And so we're doing it backwards, and I hope it works.

We'll find out how realistic Destin's plan is soon. The Smarter Scrubber is quietly already for sale online, but this spring, Destin officially announces it to his YouTube channel, which is their real actual marketing push. Right now, Destin and John, they're pretty far in the red, but the hope is that the smarter scrubber will sell, largely because Destin knows how to tell the story of why it should. If it works, it'll still just be one barbecue scrubber,

just a single American-made product. But the hope is, maybe this whole process, this story could be a kind of rough draft itself. For other American engineers, inventors, with ideas of their own. A process to look at, tweak, iterate on, improve. You never know. We'll see. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinnam and Aeney,

and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant. If you'd like to support this show, keep it alive, and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus episode, please consider signing up for our incognito mode.

You can learn more at search engine.com. We are also about to launch our merch. I mentioned in our last episode. It's coming very soon. There will be a discount for incognito mode members. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perelo, and John Schmidt.

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