The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber

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It's incredibly simple, and in just days, you'll be notified by email when your results are ready. Results that are accurate, easy to understand, and from a lab doctor's trust. If you have questions about your health and you're ready to get closer to answers, visit ondemand.labcore.com/surginjohn and use code search to save up to 15% on select tests. It's ondemand.labcore.com/surginjohn and use code search. Know yourself. 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 Salon. 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, and there's this new generation of people that want to be YouTubers, 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, 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? We're really intro, and we are, 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, Justin and a collaborator would invent something, an innovative new kind of barbecue scrubber, they'd take that invention, and 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 Justin, 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 Justin would encounter, I actually want to start the story before those problems ever existed. I want Justin 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 work in auto manufacturing. They made rac 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 a CV joint? You know, on a wheel, you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt, but your drivetrains weigh up in the middle of the car, so there's this joint in between the drivetrain 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, 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 literally hurt. She didn't do that all day every day, 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, I thought 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 aren't 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 Caffta, Central American Free Trade Agreement. All these things happened slowly, and we watched it from afar, and I can remember my parents were 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, 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 had 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, and we worked at a place called Eaton Aerospace. We made jet fuel pumps for aircraft. What does an intern do at a place that makes jet fuel pumps for aircraft? What do they let the intern do? You're really good at asking questions. The answer is every engineering intern is in their mentors' way at all times, and so you learn pretty quick if you have a good intern or a bad one if they go find their own jobs. 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 room and she'll give you the print early." He taught me people skills, but I wasn't learning engineering. 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. 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. It doesn't look like a fighter jet wing, but to the hydraulics, the fluid thinks it's in a fighter jet wing. I went back there and I asked the technicians, the old guys that knew what they were doing. I was like, "How do you do this?" For the first week, they're just mad at you all the time. Why are you here? Exactly. Get out of my way. 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. When they start to like you, then they start to teach you. My next summer, I was in intern, and I worked at Little Debbie Snack Cakes. Have you ever had a Little Debbie cake? I have a quite a few, yes. Which favorite? I don't think I have. Which is a Little Debbie? It's the oatmeal cream pies, and they're not crazy about the oatmeal cream pies. Yeah. Zebra cakes. I like the Zebra cakes. I worked at Little Debbie Snack Cakes making parts that made the snack cakes. So, you were 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 2, 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 crispy cakes are? Anything that is like junk food has passed into my stomach at someone. I'm not like, I just eat everything. So the specific thing I did over the summer was imagine a five-foot-wide river of rice crispy 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 crispy cake into strips. It worked great. Oh, it is fantastic. And then there was this guillotine that would chop them into 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 it's a doubt. It doesn't cut it because of this thing called impedance. Okay. It's 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 sub sonic, 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 referred to? What is your night time 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, 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 draining this chain the 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 apply them with the right sodas from the vetting 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 to learn how to make things. Fix things for everyone to have a little bit of the megaiver 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, yeah, you would be surprised how many things you can fix on your own. That's a very encouraging thought. I've lately lately I've been a little more physical problem-solving curious. What have you fixed? I'm so embarrassed to even chair 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 would have been like, I don't know, about 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 be like, how much fire started you need? And I'm like, I don't want to do this. You're ruining this for me. And then something happened about a year ago where all of a 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 of 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 parameters 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 is stuff? And I was like, man, things are good right now. And I was like, go on. He's like, did you start a fire? And I was like, yeah. And he was 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 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, a kid you're not. And so at work, my engineering job, we were testing rockets. That's what I did. Hey, it's me Destin, a mechanical engineer, a university of Alabama, a big loser, likes to play with rockets. This is my buddy Steven. 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, the 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. Destin uploaded that first video January 2007, 18 years ago. YouTube was just as hobby at first, but the channel kept growing. Viewers kept driving 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. When you first? 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 and we're going to do it. He even in January 2016 got to interview then President Barack Obama. Destin, pleasure to meet you. Good to see you. How are you? How are you? I'm well. Pleased to. Shall we? Yeah. Okay, Mr. President. Destin, through all this, kept his day a job, frankly much longer than 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 and gold was an N95 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 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 gotta 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, bye. 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 wanna 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 shuddered back to life. And most of us moved on. Most of us, but not Destin, 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 it be to do that, even just once? You wanted to find out. And not much later, you'd get the chance. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Most of us recognize Square as the quick tap to pay terminal at our favorite neighborhood spots. For instance, when I go to the best butcher in the world, shdow bits, they use Square and it makes checkout completely seamless. My receipt pops right up on my phone and I earn loyalty rewards without typing anything. But for the owners behind those counters, Square is so much more than a credit card reader. It's an all-in-one system that brings together payments, scheduling, inventory, and sales analytics. 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Its visual intelligence means you can simply point at a mess and say, "Matic, clean this." And it understands you in over 75 languages. So anyone can use it, just by talking to it. But what really sets Matic apart is how it handles privacy. We've all heard horror stories about smart devices, exposing camera feeds or floor plans through cloud security flaws. Matic solves this by processing and storing everything locally, right on the device in your home. This is one of the many reasons why Matic is rated 4.9 out of five by the families who own it. To get your Matic, go to MaticRobots.com right now. Go to MaticRobots.com/SearchEngine to get a year of free Heppabags with your purchase today. That's a $96 value and no cost to you. That's MaticRobots.com/SearchEngine. (upbeat music) 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 JJ George, which he named after his kids. And he sells grill products like a big green egg grill or a Commado Joe grill. Yeah. He made this torch and he got it manufactured somewhere and he sells that and he sells these tables. And it's just like, I don't know. He just, John just feels like American is baseball and apple pie. Destin 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 toilet brush scrubber, but it's more coarse and 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 check 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, oh, there's a 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 gain 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 it's chain mail, you know what I'm talking about, yeah. 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 soft gas. Dustin 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 weird. Like the first prototype, I'm just going to level with it. It looks like some kind of sex toy or something. It's not, and I just looked at, I was like, 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? Dustin 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 Dustin, of course, had his own motive for getting involved. Dustin'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 that last two puzzle pieces put together in this country, which is not Dustin'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 chainmail 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 Dustin'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 Dustin is not talking about tariffs. He's just stubbornly asking if something could be made in America, even just one time. Of course, Dustin is somewhat unusual. John, his new business partner in this, much more normal. John just wanted to build a damn scrubber. So back to this first prototype, they were looking at together. John tells Dustin that the chainmail 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 who 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, 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, how does he find his guy in China? And how does he find 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 gonna run more widgets and they're gonna backdoor you on Amazon and they're gonna make counterfeit versions of your thing. - Oh, so if I had an idea for a better barbecue scrubber, I could get it more, she's 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 factory. - 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 parts 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 up. Hey, do you guys want water pump housings for a Ford, whatever tractor? This whole backdoor market would start. So he started naming the parts something weird. These are rotor girders. - And that would work? - Yeah, it works. 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 Destins, he was able to infect John with it enough so that John set aside his normal entrepreneurial instincts to join Destin on his quick sonic mission. We're gonna 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 desk, 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 aided 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 wanna 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 pack together really well. And a hexagon is one of the most efficient shapes that you can do what's called tesolations. 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 Destin found himself losing track of time though 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 let 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. And manufacturing and tooling. Tooling, those are the tools. They're usually custom tools that go into the machines that make things. So when you are 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 this as I was. Picture a factory that's making spoons. The spoon starts out as a blank piece of metal. But there's a machine, like a cookie cutter, anything pushing the metal into the cookie cutter. The shape's into a spoon. That machine is the tool and die. In Germany, they have very specific programs where you will learn how to make tools for manufacturing. In the US, 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 in tool and gauge in tool and die. 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. It's 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 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 began to happen? We started feeling that about 12 years ago. I would say we really started to hit about 10 years ago where we were seeing a lot of stuff and we were doing quotings for a 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 sand on trying to keep everything in house in the US. Chris said there used to be lots of tool and die-makers back where he's from in the 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? Like, 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 die-making. We have a hard time finding tool and die-makers. They don't want to go into a four-year tool and die 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 die-maker where if somebody can come out of a tech school and make, you know, $25, $30 an hour and obviously it was press a button on the 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 Z years. The average American manufacturing worker is 44 years old. No one on the line, presumably, is calling anything go-ded. 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 pleeker. 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. so long, we've lost the skills. And the old guy didn't train the young guy, and men and women 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 Journey Men 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 Robson how we felt about all this. - You're allowed to forgive like the corniness 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 like to see in our apprenticeship. But a lot of it comes down to people who 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 gotta be honest, you know, even though on my age, I thought about that too. Well, 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 concept to completion to actually get a plastic part. That's one of the things that's sort of fun with doing the scrubber. You know, 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 is in college, he's been 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 terrorists never came up or really politics at all. Chris did say if he was in charge, the change he'd wanna 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 they were just more options for working with your hands in America. How not everybody wants a desk job? Have anything. Chris Robson, he actually didn't end up just making molds for Destin, but teaching Destin how to make them himself, which Destin obviously was excited to do. There's a 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, Destin opens the plexiglass doors to the mill and puts his hands on. Oh, Nelly. How does she look? Oh, wow. OK. 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 Destin's voice, I think anybody who's had a 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 2022, the scrubbers 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, those we don't 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. It 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 three X. 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, 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 for 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 we was meeting a couple of people, I was like, I'm sorry, Darlyn, 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. And it's 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 just being very principled, I don't know. 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. 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. But 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] What Desens talk 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 Desens is just doing voluntarily. Training people, tooling up factories, creating the infrastructure you need to build stuff, finding an injection-mold person in America, a bold person in America. Actually, this brings us to our next person, a handle person in America. OK, 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 die 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. Cachunk. 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 to take you? About six weeks. So are you been training him? I'm healed. He's a lot of healed. So do you feel like you know how to do the next one now? As long as I got friends to go by, I can 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. It's just a press operator actually running these presses and got the opportunity to move over as an apprentice. And I've enjoyed it every day. It's all the hands on stuff, learning stuff every day. I've really enjoyed it every since I've been open to it. That's fun. You never know this standing in the store mindlessly I'm hearing different things. barbeque scrubbers, what any of this had meant to one American engineer or to Logan, the young worker here. But this 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 barbeque scrubber, tests it on a dirty barbeque grill and then gives her verdect. Is it working? Yeah. This is great. Destin and John have a working barbeque 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 in 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 there at the facility where we ship them out. And how many people are in 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 to the head of Destin for this one, my son packed 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 second 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 you've seen 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. Oh 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 of handle, tying a string on it and somebody puts the puck on and someone 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? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chili Pad. It is incredibly hot and Brooklyn right now. And so recently I've been sleeping on a chili pad, which is wonderful. It means I don't just have a cool room, I have a cool bed, which turns out to be the whole thing. Those sleep problems are really temperature problems and once you fix the temperature, a lot of the rest just quietly takes care of itself. Chili Pad 2.0 by Sleep Me is their bed cooling system fully redesigned. 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Mercury is a Fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank, banking services provided through choice financial group and column NA members FDIC. 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. You sent, I feel like I'm in an infomercial. 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 $19.99, made in China. Although in Destin sales pitch, he'll tell you that that won't probably break in a couple years, and it might leave metal wires in your stomach before it does. Well, people pay for the smarter scrubber. I ask 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 steel. Stainless steel. Very sturdy stainless steel handle. It feels like a medieval weapon of war. 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 he's some stupid ad for it and it comes and it's plastic-y and broken, and then it's too cheap to give away. This feels like something that you would just have for a long time. I don't know if it's the heft of it or the materials, because it's more metal than plastic, but it just feels like it was made too last. That was the goal. It's a weird thing to talk about, but we showed this to a guy that has a lot of products made and overseas and we said, "Hey, what do you think about this? He's a design guy." We said, "What are your thoughts on this thing?" He picked it up and he almost made fun of it. He's like too heavy. He's like, "This feels like something made in America." What does that mean? I was like, "You mean good? What does that mean?" He's like, "It's just really strong." 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 this marker 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 the 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 YouTube. There's this trend where people will make a product and try to like rake in a bunch of money based on their products 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. That's so scary. It's terrifying, dude, and the decision, like somebody puts two bolts in front of you. You can't tell the difference. You're like, "Hey, this one's more America." This one's 35 cents and this one's 9 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 Destiny's Planet is soon. The Smarter Scrubber is quietly already for sale online but this spring, Destiny 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 this smarter scrubber will sell, largely because Destin knows how to tell the story of white shit. 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, ideas of their own. A process to look at, tweak, iterate on, improve. You never know. We'll be able to do that. [Music] Third-engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ vote, and truthy, Pinnermint Aini, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Malthus. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrean. 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.show. 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 Restennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Peralo, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Orr Curran, Josephina Frances, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schopf. Our agent is Orr and Rosenbaum, at UTA. Follow and listen to search engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. 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