The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber

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Speaker 7 Okay,

Speaker 9 So we're going to start at the problem.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 Okay, but first of all, can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 12 Can you say your name and what you do?

Speaker 13 Yeah, my name is Destin Salon. I'm an engineer.
I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day, but

Speaker 13 I identify as an engineer and I don't really like being called a YouTuber. How come?

Speaker 13 I don't know. I think

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 I feel so sad about that.

Speaker 13 I really am because

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 13 was that the, are we still in the intro?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 11 Is it fair to characterize it that way?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker 16 The engineering problem would be this. Destin and a collaborator would invent something, an innovative new kind of barbecue scrubber.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 19 How hard could that be?

Speaker 20 I mean, it wasn't an iPhone or a laptop, it was a barbecue scrubber.

Speaker 6 But Destin, of course, would run into all kinds of interesting problems.

Speaker 22 And he'd start to understand the deeper reasons why it's so hard these days to build new things in America.

Speaker 24 Before we get to the interesting problems Destin would encounter, I actually want to start the story before those problems ever existed.

Speaker 17 I want Destin to tell the story of how he learned to make stuff.

Speaker 28 What it was like growing up in Morgan County, Alabama, where that just seemed to be what everybody did.

Speaker 13 I'm the son of blue-collar workers. Both of my parents worked in auto manufacturing.

Speaker 13 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 a C V joint?

Speaker 13 You know, on a wheel, you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt. Yes.
But your drivetrain's way up in the middle of the car.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 This is incredible.

Speaker 13 And 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 9 And your feeling as a kid watching her was just like,

Speaker 14 wow.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 My mom and dad just barely got out, but they were able to get a retirement from General Motors.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I remember thinking manufacturing is important. People I knew, their parents made stuff.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And slowly all that went away.

Speaker 13 And I didn't understand why.

Speaker 25 How and why that all went away, that's not actually today's story, but nobody really argues that it did.

Speaker 20 When Destin was growing up in the 80s, there were about 19 million American manufacturing jobs.

Speaker 12 Millions of those jobs began evaporating in in the 2000s, around when Destin's parents retired.

Speaker 32 They hit a low of 11 million in 2010.

Speaker 20 Destin watched that sharp downhill graph in his hometown. He watched jobs go away and not come back.

Speaker 17 But he knew he wanted to make stuff. And so he aimed himself at the place where jobs still did exist, engineering.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 34 What does an intern do at a place that makes jet fuel pumps for aircraft? Like, what do they let the intern do?

Speaker 13 That's, that's, you're really good at asking questions.

Speaker 13 The answer is every engineering intern is in their mentor's way at all times. Yeah.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 He said, hey, if you need a print printed out,

Speaker 13 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 window and she'll give you the print early.

Speaker 13 And so he taught me people skills, but I wasn't learning engineering.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 What was that?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Have you ever had a Little Debbie cake?

Speaker 10 I have had quite a few, yes.

Speaker 13 What's your favorite?

Speaker 11 I don't think I have,

Speaker 9 which is Little Debbie.

Speaker 13 It's the oatmeal cream pies and the oatmeal cream pies not crazy about the oatmeal cream pies yeah zebra cakes fancy 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 13 Specifically what I was doing is there was, do you know what rice krispie cakes are?

Speaker 9 Anything that is like junk food has passed into my stomach at some point. I'm not like a, um,

Speaker 26 I just eat everything.

Speaker 13 So the specific thing I did over the summer was imagine a five-foot-wide river of rice krispie cake all together

Speaker 13 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 krispie cake into strips.
It worked great.

Speaker 14 Oh, it's fantastic.

Speaker 13 And then there was this guillotine that would chop them into the little squares as they would go along. Yeah.
They had that and it worked worked perfectly.

Speaker 13 But then they said, oh, now we want to make a cereal bar and we want to put cranberries in it.

Speaker 13 And so when they started running it, you can imagine what happened when that cranberry hit the ultrasonic knife.

Speaker 28 It slows it down.

Speaker 13 It doesn't cut it because of this thing called impedance, impedance mismatch, a mechanical impedance mismatch or whatever. It just gums up the line.

Speaker 13 And so they're like, hey, intern, your job is to make a new cutter that can cut the cereal bars and the rice krispy cakes.

Speaker 13 And I had no idea what I was doing, but there were a lot of smart people that helped me there.

Speaker 9 When you're in that position where you're the intern and they're like,

Speaker 9 fix the knife because we have a, like, there's an impedance problem so that

Speaker 9 the subsonic, supersonic, how do you describe the knife?

Speaker 13 It's an ultrasonic knife.

Speaker 9 Ultrasonic. 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

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 14 stuff for sprinkled? What? What are we doing?

Speaker 13 So first of all, that's how my whole summer felt. Also, I would say there are no smart interns.

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 a lot of times you just did trial and error. So really, you're an extension of the engineer that's teaching you.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 22 Each successful apprentice then one day becoming themselves an old grump, extending the chain.

Speaker 26 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 MacGyver MacGyver thinking that engineers make the focus of their professional lives.

Speaker 12 Destin really believes that this kind of problem solving is something anybody can get better at.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 15 That's a very encouraging thought.

Speaker 41 I've lately, lately, I've been a little more physical problem solving, curious.

Speaker 14 What have you fixed?

Speaker 9 I'm so embarrassed to even share this with you.

Speaker 15 Lately, I've gotten really into just building fires.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And then like four years ago, I could have done it with Firestarter, but like copious amounts of Firestarter.

Speaker 9 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 Firestarter do you need?

Speaker 9 And I'd be like, I don't want to do this in front of you. You're ruining this for me.

Speaker 9 And then something happened about a year ago where all of a sudden I was like, like, oh,

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But then once the fire is built, you want to make sure that not too much oxygen is coming in.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And once I understood the parameters of that game, it was incredibly enjoyable. And I really love

Speaker 9 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 like 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 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.

Speaker 9 And a friend of mine came over the other day. He's like, how's the stuff? And I was like, Man, things are good right now.
And I was like, Going on.

Speaker 10 He's like, Did you start a fire today? And I was like, Yeah.

Speaker 9 And he's like, Did you know that every time I see you and you're like this,

Speaker 9 you've been by the fire?

Speaker 9 And every time I see you and you're like, Things suck, you've not been by the fire.

Speaker 14 And like, do you understand that, like, a core part of your happiness is this fire?

Speaker 13 I don't think that's silly at all.

Speaker 43 Why is that not silly?

Speaker 13 Well, I think you're working with your hands. Yeah, you're solving a very, very complex problem.

Speaker 13 So my first YouTube video that I ever uploaded was called How to Light a Bonfire with Rockets.

Speaker 13 The following is for informational purposes only. Don't be idiots like we are.

Speaker 44 Whoa.

Speaker 13 I kid you not.

Speaker 13 And so at work, my engineering job, we were testing rockets. That's what I did.
Hey, it's me, Destin, mechanical engineer, University of Alabama, big loser. Likes to play with rockets.

Speaker 13 This is my buddy Steven.

Speaker 13 We needed something going really, really fast and we needed it to be in a very specific location.

Speaker 13 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 at a certain size.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 I was like, I could do this at home and light my bonfire with rockets. This would be awesome.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And lit the rockets with electric matches. Three, two,

Speaker 40 one, fire.

Speaker 13 My point is,

Speaker 14 you're not crazy.

Speaker 14 This is really funny.

Speaker 13 And that's actually the first YouTube video I ever uploaded.

Speaker 22 Destin uploaded that first video January 2007, 18 years ago.

Speaker 1 YouTube was just his hobby at first, but the channel kept growing.

Speaker 27 Viewers kept arriving.

Speaker 22 Eventually, millions would.

Speaker 28 His experiments would get wilder.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 8 EBR-1, the world's first nuclear power plant. How did it work?

Speaker 46 We're going to figure that out today.

Speaker 8 And we're going to go.

Speaker 37 He even, in January 2016, got to interview then-President Barack Obama.

Speaker 1 Dustin, pleasure to be channeling.

Speaker 8 Good to see you. How are you doing? How are you? I'm doing it.
Well, please. Shall we? Yeah.
Okay, Mr. President.

Speaker 21 Destin, through all this, kept his day job, frankly, much longer than most successful YouTubers do.

Speaker 21 He had a channel watched by millions while also working full-time as a missile flight test engineer for the U.S.

Speaker 22 Department of Defense.

Speaker 17 But in 2018, he finally quits that job.

Speaker 20 He's now a full-time YouTuber, which is what he's doing in spring 2020 when the pandemic hits.

Speaker 21 The pandemic will do a lot of things to a lot of people's lives.

Speaker 17 For Destin, the pandemic would start him on his quest to build a product in America.

Speaker 46 Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day.
I'm alone, so I can take this off.

Speaker 16 I am in.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 42 I'm sure I don't have to remind you in the beginning of the pandemic how hard it was to find PPE.

Speaker 22 In Huntsville, Alabama, Destin was trying to solve that problem for his community.

Speaker 13 At that time, the thing that was worth more than his weight in gold was an N95 mask.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 So what we focused on here in North Alabama is a face shield.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And so we 3D printed them here in North Alabama. The whole community got involved.

Speaker 12 They collected thousands of face shields at their drive-through drop-off.

Speaker 17 And in his video, Destin explains how other people in other towns could follow their process.

Speaker 21 It was like an internet version of those chains of knowledge he'd been learning from his whole life.

Speaker 13 This is something you can do for your city right now. The key is that you got to work together.
Now go find your team.

Speaker 46 Remember, your city fighting COVID. I'm Destin.

Speaker 13 You're getting smarter every day. Go wash your hands.
Have a good one. Bye.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 30 3D printing, relative to most kinds of production, is just slower. It's more expensive.

Speaker 12 If you want to make something quickly at scale, you'd normally go another route, like injection molding.

Speaker 4 But there just weren't that many options for Destin to go that route.

Speaker 17 Most of the time, most of us are okay with the fact that we just buy cheap goods made in other countries.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 32 Most of us, but not Destin.

Speaker 23 He found himself stuck, thinking, what if you really wanted to build a whole product here?

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 40 How much work would it be to do that, even just once?

Speaker 41 He wanted to find out, and not much later, he'd get the chance.

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Speaker 13 Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

Speaker 28 I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

Speaker 14 He's going the distance.

Speaker 13 He was the highest paid TV star of all time. When it started to change, it was quick.
He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Speaker 42 Now, Charlie's sober. He's going to to tell you the truth.

Speaker 47 How do I present this with any class?

Speaker 13 I think we're past that, Charlie. We're past that, yeah.

Speaker 17 Somebody call action. AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Speaker 16 Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 6 So in 2020, Destin Sandlin is wrestling with this question, which seemed simple enough at the time.

Speaker 17 Why is it so hard to make stuff in America these days?

Speaker 6 And that summer, he meets this person who it turns out is going to give him an opportunity to pick that question apart.

Speaker 29 So June 2020, you're introduced to a local entrepreneur.

Speaker 23 Can you just tell me about this person?

Speaker 13 Oh, John. Yeah.
Yeah. John's cool, man.

Speaker 13 There's this guy named John Youngblood. He has a company called JJ George, which he named after his kids.
Wow. And he sells grill products, like a big green egg grill or a Kamado Joe grill.

Speaker 13 He made this torch and he got it manufactured somewhere and he sells that and he sells these tables.

Speaker 14 It's just like, I don't know.

Speaker 13 He just, John just feels like American is baseball and apple pie.

Speaker 17 Dustin and John hit it off.

Speaker 11 And John told him there's this invention he dreamed up, a new kind of barbecue grill accessory.

Speaker 13 He said, hey, I've got this idea for a grill scrubber.

Speaker 13 A lot of people don't know this, but when you clean your grill, a lot of people use these metal brushes. Yeah.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 The metal bristles on a grill scrubber.

Speaker 9 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 bristles.

Speaker 13 Wires. Wire bristles will come off on the grill.

Speaker 13 And then they'll go into the food that people are grilling. And then people people eat the burger or whatever they're cooking.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And then later on, as we kind of gained trust with each other, he revealed to me he wants to make a chainmail grill scrubber.

Speaker 13 So instead of like brushes, like little wire brushes, he's got little links. You know what, like a knight in shining armor wears chainmail.

Speaker 8 You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 So that, but put that at the end of a grill scrubber and that would clean the grill. That was his idea.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 22 And John told him he even had a prototype he was excited to show him.

Speaker 13 And when he showed me the prototype, it looks, it looks weird.

Speaker 14 Like the first prototype, I'm just going to level with you.

Speaker 13 It looks like some kind of sex toy or something.

Speaker 14 It's not.

Speaker 13 And I just looked and I was like, that's not what you want to sell, John. You don't want to do that.
And so

Speaker 13 I was like, man, can I take a crack at this?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 23 And Destin, of course, had his own motive for getting involved.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 12 Sometimes someone will say a product is made in America, but they could just mean assembled here from foreign parts.

Speaker 32 The last two puzzle pieces put together in this country, which is not Destin's Dream.

Speaker 40 He wants it so that the handle of the scrubber will be from Metal Cut in America.

Speaker 15 He wants it to be stamped into a handle-like shape in America.

Speaker 12 He wants it to be attached to the chainmail scrubby part in America.

Speaker 28 And he wants the scrubby part made here too.

Speaker 43 This is the part that everybody, I mean, most any expert will tell you it's just not logical.

Speaker 33 The problem is American wages are much higher than wages in countries like China, which pushes up prices for truly American-made goods.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 26 You will 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.

Speaker 15 And the only people pretending otherwise are tariff-loving populists.

Speaker 20 Except, that's not quite true because Dustin is not talking about tariffs.

Speaker 6 He's just stubbornly asking if something could be made in America, even just one time.

Speaker 32 Of course, Dustin is somewhat unusual.

Speaker 4 John, his new business partner in this, much more normal.

Speaker 26 John just wanted to build a damn scrubber.

Speaker 28 So back to this first prototype they were looking at together.

Speaker 38 John tells Dustin that the chain mail he sourced for it, he got that from a supplier in China.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 I really want to make a thing in America.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Does he like, like, how does he find his guy in China?

Speaker 12 And how does he connect to the guy in China?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 9 Oh, so if I had an idea for a better barbecue scrubber, I could get it more cheaply made in China. But then because I'm not there, someone will just come in and make

Speaker 9 knockoffs, but But they're not even knockoffs because it's being made in the exact same factor.

Speaker 13 A thousand percent. I know a friend that makes tractor parts, and he used to get the castings made in Turkey, for example.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 he would make the castings and suddenly on the internet, up would pop a, hey, do you guys want? water pump housings for a Ford whatever tractor? This whole backdoor market would start.

Speaker 13 So he started naming the parts something weird. These are rotor girders.
And that would work? Yeah, it works. Yeah.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And it's a strange thing.

Speaker 13 And so the question is, why don't we make it in America? Why don't we?

Speaker 15 This question of Destiny'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.

Speaker 15 We're going to follow along, and to start, you just have to imagine the thing they're trying to make.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 25 It's a circular disc, it sort of looks like a hockey puck that's been wrapped in chainmail.

Speaker 37 Those are the two main parts.

Speaker 21 And in early 2021, Destin begins the design process for real, turning that first rough draft idea into a more sophisticated prototype.

Speaker 13 So the first thing I did is I went to my computer and I used computer-aided design software and I designed the scrubber.

Speaker 13 The thought was, we have the chain mail and we need a squishy thing to put behind the chainmail and we want to use the least amount of material possible.

Speaker 22 I saw a video of Destin's Dustin's computer screen that showed him designing the puck in the design software, CAD.

Speaker 13 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 tessellations.

Speaker 13 And I remember being irritated in the CAD because you'd 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.

Speaker 40 It was a puzzle.

Speaker 42 Frustrating at first, but then Dustin found himself losing track of time the way you do when you're working on any good puzzle.

Speaker 13 Flow is the best way to describe it.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 13 You start to have really,

Speaker 13 really serious opinions about fillet radiuses. And

Speaker 13 as an engineer, I love this part.

Speaker 25 For Dustin, the next step was to take these 3D printed parts and find someone who could build an injection mold.

Speaker 22 The injection mold lets you make plastic parts at scale by filling a cavity with hot plastic that then cools.

Speaker 32 The handle of your toothbrush, probably, somewhere in a factory in China.

Speaker 19 An injection mold shaped like that handle makes handle after handle after handle.

Speaker 17 So Destin wants to find someone who can make an injection mold shaped like his barbecue scrubber parts, but who is based in America.

Speaker 12 Early 2021, Destin and his partner John visit an injection mold company that's not too far from them.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 We want to make a mold and we want to make these at your facility.

Speaker 13 And 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.

Speaker 9 Because normally what they would do is they would have a guy in China.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 13 Yes. When he said, we don't make the mold in America, that's the moment I realized we were screwed.

Speaker 13 Because you have manufacturing and then you have tooling, and the tooling is what makes the manufacturing work.

Speaker 9 What's the difference between manufacturing and tooling?

Speaker 13 Tooling, those are the tools. They're usually custom tools that go into the machines that make things.

Speaker 9 So, when you were a little Debbie, it's like the machine that makes the snack cakes,

Speaker 9 the tool is the tooling, and then the snack cakes are the product of the tooled machine. Correct.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And so, there's this whole industry called tool and die.
It's a skilled trade.

Speaker 4 Just one more example, in case you are as unfamiliar with this as I was.

Speaker 12 Picture a factory that's making spoons.

Speaker 12 The spoon starts out as a blank piece of metal, but there's a machine, like a cookie cutter, and a thing pushing the metal into the cookie cutter that shapes it into a spoon.

Speaker 12 That machine is the tool and die.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But my dad used to be a tool and die guy. Like he used to work in tool and gauge and tool and die.
And so they said, yeah, we can't make the injection mold.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 23 This was a light bulb moment for me in the conversation.

Speaker 40 The problem is not just that we've forgotten a lot about how to make things in America.

Speaker 15 It's that we're also forgetting how to make the things that make the things.

Speaker 4 Meaning, in our factories, there are machines.

Speaker 18 The machines build the parts that the workers assemble into American products.

Speaker 15 But the people who know how to handle the tooling to make those parts, I was beginning to realize that in America, those people are disappearing.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 Can you introduce yourself, say who you are, and what you do?

Speaker 14 I am Chris Ropeson.

Speaker 8 I am the president and owner of the Ropes and Company.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 How long have you been making molds?

Speaker 8 I've been doing this for 47 years.

Speaker 8 Wow.

Speaker 29 And do you remember when the business first started moving to China?

Speaker 15 Do you remember the first time you saw that begin to happen?

Speaker 8 We started feeling that about 12 years ago.

Speaker 8 I would say it really started to hit 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 20 Chris said there used to be lots of tool and die makers back where he's from in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 36 They're mostly gone now.

Speaker 17 Many of them were his competitors, but also his friends.

Speaker 22 And with them, this whole part of the chain, parents teaching their kids, adults teaching their apprentices.

Speaker 21 Chris has watched as that chain has been broken.

Speaker 15 And why is that happening now?

Speaker 32 Like, why is that sort of family chain getting broken at exactly this moment in time?

Speaker 8 I don't see

Speaker 8 that

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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 all he has to do is press a button on a CNC.

Speaker 8 Hey, it's hard to turn away.

Speaker 32 You can see this in the numbers. Nearly half of the remaining workers in American manufacturing plan to retire in the next 20 years.

Speaker 17 And they're not being replaced by some wave of Gen Zers.

Speaker 32 The average American manufacturing worker is 44 years old. No one on the line, presumably, is calling anything goaded.

Speaker 22 There's very little rising up transpiring.

Speaker 32 Desson told me before he'd started working on the scrubber, he'd had one understanding of why people did not manufacture in America.

Speaker 32 But as he worked on it, he understood a different logic, one which he found much bleaker.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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 journeymen 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.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 22 I asked Chris Robeson how he felt about all this.

Speaker 12 You're all have to forgive like the corniness of this question, but does it make you feel sad just to be a person who has this knowledge

Speaker 30 without an immediate person to be teaching it to?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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 in an apprenticeship.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 They're more aimed at trying to fill the academic roles as opposed to the vocational roles. And I got to be honest, you know, even though I'm my age, I thought about that too.

Speaker 8 You know, why am I doing this when I can certainly go somewhere else and make about two grand a week and be a lot happier?

Speaker 29 And why didn't you do it?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 That's one of the things was 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.

Speaker 17 When Chris was in college, he spent a summer working at a machine shop because he just wasn't enjoying school anymore.

Speaker 26 In the shop, he discovered the joy of working with his hands, of creating things that wouldn't exist otherwise.

Speaker 26 He and I talked for almost an hour, and the subject of tariffs never came up, or really politics at all.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 33 How not everybody wants a desk job.

Speaker 29 A funny thing, Chris Robeson, 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.

Speaker 29 There's a video of this. Destin wearing safety glasses, a CNC mill behind him.

Speaker 13 Alright, here we go. I've been doing a test cut for almost 20 hours.

Speaker 13 She is almost done. Can't see in there just yet.

Speaker 12 He's standing next to a monitor with his G-code scrolling across it.

Speaker 13 Almost a million lines of G-code.

Speaker 30 The machine turns off.

Speaker 29 Dustin opens the plexiglass doors to the mill and puts his hands in.

Speaker 14 Oh,

Speaker 13 Nelly.

Speaker 13 How does she look?

Speaker 13 Oh wow.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 29 You see it.

Speaker 17 A shiny circular metal part with a hexagonal pattern cut out of it.

Speaker 30 Physical proof for Dustin that his code works.

Speaker 13 This is a big deal.

Speaker 13 This is a very big deal.

Speaker 13 All All right. We can make things now.
People can't tell us no anymore. We can make whatever we want.
This is huge.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 35 it's just a very human kind of joy, this feeling of creation.

Speaker 15 By February 2022, the scrubber's plastic parts now have a full chain of people and knowledge behind them.

Speaker 19 They are ready.

Speaker 23 But the scrubber has a bunch of non-plastic parts, and those we know need to be made in America as well.

Speaker 15 For instance, the scrubber design calls for a big bolt to connect the scrubby part to the handle.

Speaker 14 A bolt,

Speaker 13 a bolt that goes on the thing. It's a quarter 20 stainless steel, one inch long bolt, the simplest mechanical object.

Speaker 13 I put out a tweet and said, I'm looking for an American manufacturer for this bolt.

Speaker 13 And the quotes I got from overseas are like nine cents a bolt.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 13 The cheapest I'm getting over here is

Speaker 13 the absolute cheapest is a quarter. So it's 3x.
Yeah. But most people are coming in at 50 cents.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 From a business perspective, we're stupid for doing this.

Speaker 14 Also,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 You guys are being vegans about this.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And in order to do that, you have to be a little bit of a hardtail about it.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 You're like, people need jobs, they need things to do, they need skills.

Speaker 15 I'm going to create something that gets made here so that those things happen.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And it was me and a couple of people at the table. I was like, I'm sorry, Darlene, why are you laughing? And she goes, Oh, I'm sorry.
We've lost an incredible amount of money on this.

Speaker 13 But, 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.

Speaker 13 And 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.

Speaker 13 But I just being very principled, I don't know. I like to imagine it being principled, but it's probably stubborn is probably the real word.

Speaker 35 I don't know the difference between those two things.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 23 What Destin's talking about building here, really, it's manufacturing capacity.

Speaker 4 It's funny, for people who want tariffs, part of the idea is that tariffs might force Americans to build more capacity.

Speaker 32 If foreign goods were more expensive to buy, more people might do what Destin's just doing voluntarily.

Speaker 28 Training people, tooling up factories, creating the infrastructure you need to build stuff.

Speaker 26 Finding an injection mold person in America, a bolt person in America.

Speaker 33 Actually, this brings us to our next person.

Speaker 26 A handle person in America.

Speaker 13 Okay, so for the metal handle,

Speaker 13 you 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We go all the way through the process. And the guy, his 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.

Speaker 13 And we go there and he loads a flat piece of metal and he hits the button and the press comes down. Kachunk.

Speaker 13 Like that.

Speaker 14 So cool. Can I grab it? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Pull straight out.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And I look at him and I said, hey, is this the first tool you ever made? He designed and built the tool.

Speaker 13 He said, yes, this is the first one I've ever done.

Speaker 45 This is the first one you've made? Yes, sir. And how long did it take you? About six weeks.

Speaker 46 So are you training him?

Speaker 45 I'm health.

Speaker 45 Need a lot of help.

Speaker 46 So do you feel like you know how to do the next one now?

Speaker 45 As long as I got friends to go by, I can feel it. Yes, sir.
Really?

Speaker 46 Did you ever think you would have this skill?

Speaker 45 I never knew anything like this really existed. During high school and everything, I didn't know what I was going to do.

Speaker 45 I started out up here as just a press operator, actually running these presses and got the opportunity to move over as an apprentice. And I've enjoyed it ever since.

Speaker 45 All the hands-on stuff, learning stuff every day. I've really enjoyed it ever since I've been over there.
That's fun.

Speaker 21 You would never know this, standing in the store, mindlessly comparing different barbecue scrubbers.

Speaker 19 What any of this had meant to one American engineer or to Logan, the young worker

Speaker 28 But the scrubber now has an American-made handle.

Speaker 1 Once Destin and his partner John have all their pieces, they put them all together.

Speaker 6 Now they're just beta testing the hell out of it. They get it in the hands of as many people as they can.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 45 Is it working? Yeah.

Speaker 7 This is great.

Speaker 22 Destiny and John have a working barbecue scrubber.

Speaker 21 They've patented it.

Speaker 12 And in November 2024, they finally start assembling it in batches.

Speaker 9 And then once you have all the parts, where does the thing get assembled into one thing?

Speaker 13 We're doing it in our hometown. Okay.
Yeah, we're literally doing it in our hometown. So the puck and the chainmail and everything, we have a place where we send them and we're paying a subcontractor.

Speaker 13 to assemble those components out of state, but in America. So we take the chainmail and the puck and the rubber and all that.
They assemble those, they bring it back.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 15 And how many people work at the facility?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 12 Destin shared a video.

Speaker 41 It depicts some of the most adorable child labor you've ever seen.

Speaker 21 Destin's young son in one corner of the warehouse boxing up scrubbers.

Speaker 1 We got the assembly line going great to Dustin.

Speaker 46 So So this is my son pepping them up.

Speaker 14 What do you think?

Speaker 45 Good. It's good.

Speaker 46 These are some going out.

Speaker 46 This is me and John's boys over here doing this. Wait, y'all taking a break?

Speaker 20 A short distance away, John's teenagers are also working.

Speaker 6 They're sitting down, tying on tags, and putting American flag stickers on the barbecue scrubbers.

Speaker 45 What's going on? What's going on? Are you taking a break?

Speaker 45 I'm about to fall asleep.

Speaker 15 It's funny seeing these American teenagers on an assembly line instead of, I don't know, playing Fortnite.

Speaker 23 They look maybe a little bored, but they're being good sports.

Speaker 13 Oh man, you're applying stickers.

Speaker 46 You feel patriotic when you do that?

Speaker 37 Yes, very patriotic. God bless America.

Speaker 46 Boxes, yes, I can make you more boxes.

Speaker 13 You'll have somebody getting out a handle, tying a string on it, and somebody puts the puck on, and then somebody puts a little sticker on it. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And so we have a little assembly line that's very inefficient. It's just kind of bootstrapping right now.

Speaker 22 So Destin has the product he's stubbornly insisted on, a barbecue scrubber that was both made and assembled in America.

Speaker 4 We're going to take a short break and then come back to the final part of our question.

Speaker 40 Will anybody really buy this thing?

Speaker 48 Go further with the American Express Business Gold Card. Earn three times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels when you book through MXTravel.com.

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Speaker 4 Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 29 Destin and I met up late this January.

Speaker 32 He was visiting New York and he came by the studio and we looked at his barbecue scrubber together. Do you want to say that?

Speaker 22 You sent...

Speaker 9 I feel it. Now I feel like I'm in an infomercial.

Speaker 14 I know. See, this is the part I don't like.

Speaker 22 The smarter scrubber. Destin and John are selling it direct for $59.99, which is expensive.

Speaker 18 You can buy a much cheaper wire scrubber on Amazon for $19.99, made in China.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 32 Will people pay for the smarter scrubber?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 9 It has a very sturdy... Is this steel?

Speaker 13 Stainless steel.

Speaker 9 Very sturdy stainless steel handle. It feels like...

Speaker 13 Like a medieval weapon of war?

Speaker 9 No, I was gonna say, it feels like something that you're not gonna throw in the trash in 14 months.

Speaker 9 Like, there's so many things I buy off Amazon because I see some stupid ad for it, and it comes, and it's plasticky and broken, and then like it's too cheap to give away.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 13 That was the goal.

Speaker 13 It's a weird thing to talk about but it's it's we showed this to a guy that has a lot of products made in overseas and we said hey what do you think about this he he's a 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 he's like

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 And he was like, yeah, I guess so. And I was like, I don't like you anymore.

Speaker 13 But it's just really, it's beefy and it's made to not break.

Speaker 41 I am not a barbecue scrubber reviewer yet.

Speaker 16 But I like the beefy feel of the thing.

Speaker 41 It reminds me a little bit of how American cars used to be, back before they were all edgeless blobs.

Speaker 41 Dustin says, if this martyr scrubber does succeed, he knows it'll be in no small part because he has something almost no other random American inventor starts with.

Speaker 11 A big megaphone.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But ultimately, the product has to stand or fall on its own. It's going to come down to

Speaker 13 a lady in an aisle at a

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 34 very bad.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 35 It's so scary.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 14 more American.

Speaker 13 This one's 35 cents and this one's nine cents. Tell me which one was in America.
And you can't.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And sometimes capitalism doesn't lend itself well to that because the most important rule is line go go up yes and so

Speaker 13 we're doing it backwards and uh i i hope it works

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 24 But the hope is that the smarter scrubber will sell, largely because Destin knows how to tell the story of why it should.

Speaker 18 If it works, it'll still just be one barbecue scrubber, just a single American-made product.

Speaker 8 But the hope is maybe this whole process, this story, could be a kind of ref draft itself for other American engineers, inventors, with ideas of their own.

Speaker 19 A process to look at, tweak, iterate on, improve.

Speaker 43 You never know.

Speaker 8 We'll see.

Speaker 17 Search Engine is a presentation of of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

Speaker 39 It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Speaker 12 Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

Speaker 12 Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Speaker 1 Additional production support by Sean Merchant.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 1 You can learn more at searchengine.show.

Speaker 1 We are also about to launch our merch. I mentioned in our last episode, it's coming very soon.

Speaker 17 There will be a discount for incognito mode members.

Speaker 1 Our executive producer is Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Speaker 12 Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Skidney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.

Speaker 1 And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Speaker 28 Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

Speaker 17 Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

Speaker 1 Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 12 We'll see you next week.

Speaker 12 Yo, this is important, man.

Speaker 45 My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're called Pacebreakers, Pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.

Speaker 45 I just got back from vacation and I left them in my hotel room. And, dude, I need to replace these shorts.
I wear them like three times a week. Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Speaker 45 Oh, also, my birthday is coming up soon. So, anyways, thanks, bro.
Talk soon.

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