Transcript

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00:02:51 Speaker 1

OK. So we're going to start the problem. Yeah, OK. But first, what can you introduce yourself?

00:02:56 Speaker 1

Can you say your name and what?

00:02:57 Speaker 2

You do? Yeah. My name is Dustin Salem. I'm an engineer.

00:03:02 Speaker 2

I have a YouTube channel called Smarter every day, but I like I identify as an engineer and I I don't really like being called a YouTuber. I don't. I don't know, I think.

00:03:10 Speaker 1

How come?

00:03:14 Speaker 2

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 and I.

00:03:24 Speaker 1

Bruce, yes.

00:03:26 Speaker 2

I I feel so sad about that. So I.

00:03:30 Speaker 2

I really am because.

00:03:33 Speaker 2

There was this whole generation of I I say generation this 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 and I don't know that it's good for society.

00:03:54 Speaker 2

So.

00:03:56 Speaker 2

Was that the? Are we still?

00:03:57 Speaker 1

In the 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?

00:03:57

Where?

00:04:08 Speaker 1

To characterize it that way, absolutely yes.

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Yeah.

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The engineering problem would be this. Dustin and a collaborator would invent something an innovative new.

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Kind of BBQ scrubber.

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They take that invention and instead of doing the normal thing, sending their design to be manufactured outside of America.

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They attempt to make.

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It here with American workers. How hard could?

00:04:32 Speaker 1

I mean, it wasn't an iPhone or a laptop, it was BBQ scrubber.

00:04:36 Speaker 1

But Dustin, of course, would run into all kinds of interesting problems. Banks are to understand the deeper reasons why it's so hard these days to build new things in America.

00:04:45 Speaker 1

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

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I want destined 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.

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What everybody did.

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I'm the son of blue collar workers. Both of my parents worked in auto manufacturing. They made rack and pinion gears and I can remember going to see my mom work and she pushed CV joints into rubber boots at a plant. You know, on a wheel you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt.

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What's the CV right?

00:05:22 Speaker 2

Yes, but your drive trains way 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.

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And my mom, she's small.

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I can remember seeing her pick.

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Up.

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These 7 LB huge chunks of metal and push it into.

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This rubber boot.

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And I remember thinking, my mom does this every day on 3rd shift. This is incredible. And I I just had. No, you're a kid. You don't know your parents go to work and they come home.

00:05:53 Speaker 2

And you don't realize how many sacrifices they're making. But my moms hands, like, literally hurt. She didn't do that all day, every day. That was just. It was so physically taxing. They would only let people do that for a short period of time. But anyway, my parents worked like that.

00:06:08 Speaker 1

And you're feeling as a kid, watching her was just like.

00:06:11 Speaker 2

Wow. Oh, I thought so. My parents would come home and their clothes would smell like cutting oil, and it smelled like work. It smelled like this is how you earn a living for your family and so Fast forward. I didn't understand anything that was happening with global politics and economics and all this stuff, but.

00:06:32 Speaker 2

NAFTA happened and CAFTA.

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Central American Free Trade Agreement, all these things happened slowly and we watched it from afar, and I can remember my parents like, hey, we're shutting the plant down. My mom and dad just barely got out, but they were able to get a retirement from General Motors. So I remember thinking manufacturing is important.

00:06:57 Speaker 2

People I knew their their parents made stuff.

00:07:00 Speaker 1

Yeah.

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And slowly all that went away.

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And I didn't understand why.

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How and why that all went away? That's not actually today's story, but nobody really argues that it did when Dustin was growing up in the 80s, there were about 19,000,000 American manufacturing jobs.

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Millions of those jobs began evaporating the 2000s around when Destiny's parents retired. They had a low of 11,000,000 in 2010.

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

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But he knew he wanted to make stuff, and so he aimed himself at the place where jobs still did exist. Engineering.

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That went to school to learn mechanical engineering.

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I had two manufacturing internships. One was in Mississippi and I worked at a place called Eaton Aerospace. We made jet.

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Fuel pumps for aircraft. What?

00:07:53 Speaker 1

Is an intern due at a place that makes jet fuel pumps for aircraft? Like what do they let the intern?

00:08:00 Speaker 2

Do that's. That's you're really good at asking for.

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The answer is every engineering intern is in their mentors way at all times.

00:08:10 Speaker 2

Yeah. And so you learn pretty quick if you're, if you have a good intern or a bad one. If they go find their own jobs. And so I had a really good mentor who taught me how to interface with people. He said, hey, if you needed a print, print it out, you can go stand in line and get it or you can go to the coke.

00:08:30 Speaker 2

Machine and you can get the favorite drink of the lady that runs the printer and you go slide that across and she'll give you the print early. And so he taught me people skills, but I wasn't learning engineering so I slid to the back of the plant there in Jackson, Ms. and I found my love, which was called the the test engineering test cell.

00:08:47 Speaker 1

Who was that?

00:08:49 Speaker 2

Imagine a room not much bigger than the little studio rent right now, and you have a a huge motor running a a jet fuel pump and you.

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Have a lot.

00:08:58 Speaker 2

Of pipes all.

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Over the room, mocking up a fighter jet wing like it doesn't look like a fighter jet wing, but like to the hydraulics like the fluid thinks it's in a fighter jet wing.

00:09:09 Speaker 2

And so I went back there and I asked the the technicians like the the old guys, that knew what they were doing.

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I was like, how do you do?

00:09:16 Speaker 2

Yes.

00:09:17 Speaker 2

And like for the first week, they're just mad at you all.

00:09:19 Speaker 2

The time, yeah.

00:09:20 Speaker 2

Why are you here? Yeah, exactly. Get out of my way. And then slowly, you earn credibility by sweeping the floor literally, or organizing the bolt, then 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.

00:09:37 Speaker 2

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.

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Have you ever had a?

00:09:45 Speaker 2

Little Debbie cake I've had.

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I.

00:09:46 Speaker 1

Quite a few. Yes. What's your favorite?

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We have which is a little.

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Debbie, it's the oatmeal cream pies and.

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The sea cream pie is not crazy about the oatmeal cream pies.

00:09:54 Speaker 2

Yeah, zebra cakes. Fancy cakes? Yeah. So I worked at Little Debbie. Snack cakes, making parts that made the snack cakes.

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I like your.

00:10:04 Speaker 1

So you were making the snack cakes. You're making the machine that makes.

00:10:07 Speaker 1

The snack cakes, right?

00:10:09 Speaker 1

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 too, though, was slower and more subtle.

00:10:31 Speaker 1

Knowledge was being transferred in the factory over generations. Adult Dustin later would think a lot about that second process. Young intern Dustin now was mainly just focused on the 1st.

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Specifically what I was.

00:10:45 Speaker 2

Doing is there was. Do you?

00:10:46 Speaker 1

Know what rice crispy cakes are? Anything that is like junk food has passed into my stomach and somewhere I'm not like a a.

00:10:52 Speaker 1

I just eat.

00:10:53 Speaker 2

Everything. So the specific thing I did over the summer was imagine a 5 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.

00:11:03 Speaker 1

Oh my God.

00:11:14 Speaker 2

It worked great. Oh, this is fantastic.

00:11:16 Speaker 2

And then there was this guillotine that would chop them into the little squares as they would go along. Yeah, they.

00:11:20 Speaker 2

Had that and it.

00:11:21 Speaker 2

Worked perfectly, but then they said Ohh now.

00:11:23 Speaker 2

We want to make a.

00:11:24 Speaker 2

Cereal bar and we want to put cranberries in it.

00:11:28 Speaker 2

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

00:11:35 Speaker 1

Slows it down.

00:11:36 Speaker 2

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

00:11:40 Speaker 1

OK.

00:11:44 Speaker 2

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.

00:11:55 Speaker 2

Lot of smart people that helped me there.

00:11:59 Speaker 1

When you're in that position where the intern and they're like fixed the knife because we have a like, there's an impedance problem so that the subsonic supersonic how do you?

00:12:10 Speaker 2

Scrape the knife. It's an ultrasonic knife.

00:12:12 Speaker 1

The 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.

00:12:19 Speaker 1

And you have to figure this out.

00:12:20 Speaker 1

Like you're not going to go home and Google like ultrasonic knife Reddit like, what is the body of knowledge that you refer to? What is your nighttime look like when you're trying to figure 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?

00:12:37 Speaker 1

Way.

00:12:38 Speaker 2

Two things. Number one, that Smirky head on your face.

00:12:40 Speaker 2

When you were describing mechanical engineering terms.

00:12:43 Speaker 2

For snack cakes.

00:12:44 Speaker 2

That was my whole summer.

00:12:46 Speaker 3

This is I.

00:12:47 Speaker 3

I sat in.

00:12:48 Speaker 3

On meetings and they were discussing the topping distribution on the brownie line.

00:12:53 Speaker 3

And I was sitting there and I.

00:12:54 Speaker 2

Was like man.

00:12:55 Speaker 4

Are they? Are they talking about statistical?

00:12:56 Speaker 2

Like stuff for sprinkled what? What are we doing?

00:13:01 Speaker 2

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

00:13:05 Speaker 2

Interns.

00:13:07 Speaker 5

That's true.

00:13:07 Speaker 2

But yeah, you.

00:13:09 Speaker 2

A lot of times you just do trial and error, so really you're an extension of the engineer.

00:13:13 Speaker 2

That's teaching you.

00:13:17 Speaker 1

Dustin saw himself as draining this chain that stretched way back.

00:13:22 Speaker 1

Where young people.

00:13:23 Speaker 1

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 vending machine.

00:13:35 Speaker 1

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

00:13:40 Speaker 1

Of course, not everybody wants to or should work in a factory, but destined 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 thinking that engineers make the focus of their professional lives. Dustin really believes that this kind of problem solving is something anybody can get better at.

00:14:00 Speaker 2

Once you get over the hurdle of I'm.

00:14:01 Speaker 2

Scared of?

00:14:02 Speaker 2

This. Yeah, you would be surprised how many things you can fix on.

00:14:05 Speaker 1

Your own. That's a very encouraging thought. I've lately lately have been a little more physical problem solving current.

00:14:12 Speaker 1

What have you fixed?

00:14:13 Speaker 1

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

00:14:17 Speaker 1

Lately I've gotten really into just building fires.

00:14:20 Speaker 1

OK. Like just fire in a fireplace. Fires. I used to if you stuck me in front of a.

00:14:26 Speaker 1

Fireplace.

00:14:27 Speaker 1

Three years ago, five years ago, we've been like, I don't know how to build a fire and then, like, 4 years ago, I could have done it with.

00:14:35 Speaker 1

Firestarter, but like copious amounts of firestarter, and then so as I'd be trying to do it, and there'd be a more masculine person in the room and be like, how much faster do you need? And I'm like, I don't want to do this. Yeah, you're ruining this for me.

00:14:47 Speaker 1

And then something happened about a year ago where all this was like, oh.

00:14:53 Speaker 1

The way you build a fire is completely about oxygen and what you're trying to do is build a really efficient structure that lets in lots of oxygen, but then once the fire is built, you want to make sure that not too much oxygen is coming in, and if you can do that, you'll have a really.

00:15:08 Speaker 1

Efficient fire.

00:15:09 Speaker 1

That will burn like all the material without leaving.

00:15:12 Speaker 1

A bunch of ash.

00:15:14 Speaker 1

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, Sir, and just like.

00:15:33 Speaker 1

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.

00:15:40 Speaker 6

Alive, yes.

00:15:40 Speaker 1

There's a puzzle it feels really like. I now watch the fire like I used to watch my phone and a friend of mine.

00:15:49 Speaker 1

Came over the other day. He's like how to stop. And I was like, man, things are good right now.

00:15:53 Speaker 1

Like going on, he's.

00:15:54 Speaker 1

Like did you start?

00:15:55 Speaker 1

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, you understand that like a core part of your happiness.

00:16:10 Speaker 2

Is this fire? I I don't think that's silly.

00:16:10

All right.

00:16:12 Speaker 1

Ohh why is that not selling well?

00:16:14 Speaker 2

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

00:16:22 Speaker 2

So my first YouTube video that I ever uploaded was called. How to light a bonfire with rockets?

00:16:29 Speaker 7

Love.

00:16:30 Speaker 5

Is a burning.

00:16:31 Speaker 3

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

00:16:35 Speaker 2

Well, I kid you not. And so at work my engineering job, we were testing rockets. That's what I did. Hey, it's me, Destin mechanical Engineer, University of Alabama. Big loser.

00:16:46 Speaker 2

Likes to play with rockets.

00:16:48 Speaker 2

This is my buddy Steven.

00:16:50 Speaker 2

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

00:16:56 Speaker 2

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.

00:17:07 Speaker 2

And I shot these rockets down this wire to train radars for the military. And I was at work one day.

00:17:14 Speaker 2

And I was like.

00:17:14 Speaker 2

Man, this is cool. I was like, I could do this at home.

00:17:18 Speaker 2

And light my bonfire.

00:17:20 Speaker 2

With rockets, this would be awesome. So I went and.

00:17:22 Speaker 2

Bought fireworks and I taped a straw.

00:17:26 Speaker 2

To the rocket and hung it on a string and pulled the string down to my Christmas tree.

00:17:31 Speaker 2

And put gas on the fire. Duh.

00:17:34 Speaker 2

And and lit.

00:17:35 Speaker 2

The Rockets with electric matches. My point is.

00:17:37 Speaker 3

321 fire.

00:17:45 Speaker 1

This man it's like.

00:17:45 Speaker 2

You're not crazy.

00:17:48 Speaker 3

This is really funny and that's that.

00:17:50 Speaker 2

Was actually the first YouTube video ever uploaded.

00:17:57 Speaker 1

Dustin uploaded that first video January 2718 years ago. YouTube wishes his hobby at first, but the channel kept.

00:18:05 Speaker 1

Growing.

00:18:06 Speaker 1

Viewers kept driving. Eventually millions would his experiments would get Wilder.

00:18:10 Speaker 6

Well before this trip into a helicopter, you first have to learn how to be upside down underwater and let water flood your sinuses.

00:18:16 Speaker 1

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.

00:18:23 Speaker 3

Planes.

00:18:23 Speaker 6

EB R1, the world's first nuclear power plant. How did it work? We're gonna figure that out today and we're.

00:18:30 Speaker 1

Gonna he even in January 2016 got to interview then President Barack Obama?

00:18:36 Speaker 8

Meet you, Mr. President. How you doing?

00:18:36

Good to see you.

00:18:38 Speaker 2

Doing well, shall we?

00:18:40 Speaker 2

OK, Mr. President.

00:18:42 Speaker 1

Through all this.

00:18:43 Speaker 1

His day job, frankly much longer than most successful Youtubers.

00:18:46 Speaker 1

2.

00:18:47 Speaker 1

He had a channel watched by millions while also working full time as a missile flight test engineer for the US 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.

00:19:01 Speaker 1

Hits.

00:19:02 Speaker 1

The pandemic will do a lot of things to.

00:19:04 Speaker 1

A lot of.

00:19:04 Speaker 1

People's lives for Dustin.

00:19:06 Speaker 1

The pandemic would start him on his quest to build a product in America.

00:19:10 Speaker 3

Hey, it's me, Dustin. Welcome back to smarter every day.

00:19:13 Speaker 3

I'm alone so I can take this.

00:19:14 Speaker 2

Off.

00:19:15 Speaker 3

I am.

00:19:16 Speaker 1

In this video from April 2020, Dustin'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.

00:19:25 Speaker 3

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.

00:19:36 Speaker 3

Community, I'm sure.

00:19:37 Speaker 1

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

00:19:41 Speaker 1

In Huntsville, AL, Dustin was trying to solve that problem for his community.

00:19:46 Speaker 2

At that time, the thing that was worth more than his weight in gold was an N95 mask and the specific fabric that made in 95. Turns out a lot of it was being shipped over from China and we couldn't tool.

00:19:56 Speaker 2

Up.

00:19:57 Speaker 2

Plants fast enough, So what we focused on here in North Alabama is a face.

00:20:02 Speaker 2

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.

00:20:15 Speaker 1

They collected thousands of face Shields at their drive through drop off and in this video Dustin explains how other people in other towns could follow their process. It was like an Internet version of those chains of knowledge you've been learning from his whole life.

00:20:28 Speaker 2

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's fighting, COVID? I'm destined. You're getting smarter every day. Go wash your hands. Have a good one. Bye.

00:20:44 Speaker 1

As successful as the project was, hundreds of people in Alabama joining forces to make all these Shields it also weirdly left destined somewhat frustrated.

00:20:53 Speaker 1

3D printing relative to most kinds of production is just slower. It's more expensive if you want to make something.

00:20:59 Speaker 1

Quickly at scale.

00:21:00 Speaker 1

You normally go another route like injection molding.

00:21:03 Speaker 1

But there just weren't that many.

00:21:04 Speaker 1

Options for destined to go that route.

00:21:08 Speaker 1

Most of the time, most of us are OK with the fact that we just buy cheap goods made in.

00:21:13 Speaker 1

Other countries.

00:21:14 Speaker 1

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.

00:21:28 Speaker 1

Most of us, but not destined.

00:21:31 Speaker 1

He found himself stuck thinking, what if you really wanted to build a whole product here? Not because of an international emergency.

00:21:39 Speaker 1

But because you.

00:21:40 Speaker 1

Just wanted Americans to know how to make the products they used with their own hand.

00:21:45 Speaker 1

How much work would be to?

00:21:46 Speaker 1

Do that even just.

00:21:47 Speaker 1

Once.

00:21:49 Speaker 1

You wanted to find out and not much later.

00:21:51 Speaker 1

You get the chance.

00:22:22 Speaker 1

This episode is brought to you in part by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask 9 experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market bear market inflation up or down. Can someone please invent it?

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00:24:30 Speaker 4

Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances. How much do you make? Who paid for that fancy dinner? What did your house actually cost on every episode of what we spend, a different guest opens up their wallets, opens up their lives, really, and tells us all about their finances for one week.

00:24:50 Speaker 4

They tell us everything. They spend their money on.

00:24:52

My son slammed.

00:24:54

Like $6 for the blueberries in five.

00:24:56

But.

00:24:56 Speaker 4

This is a podcast about all the ways money comes into our lives and then leads again, which of course we all have a lot of feelings about.

00:25:05

I really want these things. I want to own a house. I want to have a child.

00:25:08

But this morning I really wanted a coffee.

00:25:10 Speaker 4

Because whatever you are buying or not buying or saving or spending at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance. I'm Courtney Harrell and this is what we spend. Listen to and follow what we spend and obviously original podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts.

00:25:40 Speaker 1

Welcome back to the show.

00:25:42 Speaker 1

So in 2020, Dustin Sandlin is wrestling with this question, which seems simple enough for the time. Why is it so hard to make stuff in America these days?

00:25:51 Speaker 1

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

00:25:57 Speaker 1

June 2020, you're introduced to a local entrepreneur. Can you just tell me?

00:26:01 Speaker 2

About this person. Ohh John. Yeah, yeah, John's cool, man. There's this guy named John Youngblood. He has a a company called JJ George, which he named after his kids. And he sells grill products like a Big Green Egg grill or a kamado.

00:26:17 Speaker 2

You know, 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 he just. John just feels like American is baseball and apple pie.

00:26:31 Speaker 1

Dustin and John hit it off and John told him there's this invention he dreamed up a new kind of BBQ 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.

00:26:50 Speaker 2

Metal brushes, yeah.

00:26:52 Speaker 2

And he explained there's this problem that happens. They'll tell you they've had people come in.

00:26:57 Speaker 2

The door that have this problem.

00:27:00 Speaker 2

The metal bristles on a grill.

00:27:01 Speaker 1

Scrubber. Yeah, this is the thing where the BBQ scrubbers that look like, it's like a toilet brush scrubber, but it's more coarse in metal. Yeah, so those bristles the.

00:27:10 Speaker 2

Little wires. Wire bristles will come off on the grill.

00:27:15 Speaker 2

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.

00:27:36 Speaker 2

Ohh, let me just get the wire.

00:27:37 Speaker 2

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 like, oh, there's a wire in this person.

00:27:49 Speaker 2

And so he said, hey, what if we invented one that didn't do that and he he didn't really tell me his full idea at first. He was like, I just have this idea.

00:27:59 Speaker 2

And then later on, as we kind of gained trust with each other, he revealed to me, he wants to make a chain mail grill scrubber. So instead of like brushes like little wire brushes, he's got little links. You know, it's like a knight in shining armor, wears chainmail, you know?

00:28:12 Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:12 Speaker 2

Talking about right.

00:28:14 Speaker 2

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

00:28:20 Speaker 1

A better BBQ 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. Dustin liked it, and John told him he even had a prototype. He was excited to show him.

00:28:34 Speaker 2

And when he showed me the prototype, it looks.

00:28:37 Speaker 2

It looks weird like that. I'm just gonna level with you. It looks like some kind of sex toy or something like it. It's it's not. And I just looked. I was like, that's that's not what you wanna sell, John. You don't wanna do that. And so I.

00:28:39 Speaker 3

The first prototype.

00:28:52 Speaker 3

Was like, man, can I take a crack at this?

00:28:54 Speaker 1

Dustin wanted to help with the BBQ scrubber redesign it so it less resembled a sex toy and turn it into an actual sellable product.

00:29:03 Speaker 1

And Dustin, of course, had his own motive for getting involved.

00:29:07 Speaker 1

Destiny's Dream is not just that.

00:29:09 Speaker 1

The scrubber would.

00:29:09 Speaker 1

Work or that lots of people would buy it.

00:29:12 Speaker 1

But the crucially this BBQ Scarborough will be 100% made in America.

00:29:17 Speaker 1

Sometimes some will say a product is made in America, but they could just mean assembled here from foreign parts. The last two puzzle pieces put together in this country.

00:29:27 Speaker 1

Which is not test and stream. He wants it so that the handle of the scrubber will be from metal cut in America. He wanted to be stamped into a handle like shape in America. He wants it to be attached to the chain mail scrubby part in America and he wants the scrubby part made here too.

00:29:43 Speaker 1

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

00:29:49 Speaker 1

The problem is American wages are much higher than 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.

00:30:01 Speaker 1

Inexpensive.

00:30:03 Speaker 1

So the era of American manufacturing is just mostly over. You will hear this from smart people on the right, smart people.

00:30:09 Speaker 1

On the left.

00:30:10 Speaker 1

That manufacturing jobs, like the ones Destiny's parents had, are mostly not coming.

00:30:14 Speaker 1

Back and the only people pretending otherwise are tariff loving populists.

00:30:19 Speaker 1

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, Destin 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.

00:30:40 Speaker 1

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

00:30:46 Speaker 2

Guess what John was doing?

00:30:48 Speaker 2

With a lot of this stuff, he's like, hey, I've got a guy in China we can just make stuff. And I said, hey, I would love to work with you, but I really want to make a thing in America.

00:30:58

Again, when you.

00:30:59 Speaker 1

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.

00:31:05 Speaker 1

Does he like?

00:31:06 Speaker 1

Like, how does he find his guy?

00:31:08 Speaker 1

In China, and how does he connect?

00:31:09 Speaker 2

The guy 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.

00:31:23 Speaker 2

Do it. And so yes, they'll make you your widget that you.

00:31:26 Speaker 2

Can sell.

00:31:26 Speaker 2

Yeah. However, on Saturday night, they're gonna run more widgets, and they're gonna they're gonna backdoor you on Amazon, and they're gonna make counterfeit versions of your thing.

00:31:38 Speaker 1

So if I had an idea for a better BBQ scrubber, I could get it more. She's leaving in China.

00:31:44 Speaker 1

But then, because I'm not there, someone will just come in and and make.

00:31:48 Speaker 1

Knockoffs. But they're not even knockoffs, because it's being made in.

00:31:50 Speaker 1

The exact same factor.

00:31:51 Speaker 2

1000% I know a friend that makes tractor parts and he used to get the castings made in Turkey for example.

00:31:58 Speaker 2

It was for.

00:31:59 Speaker 2

A specific tractor and he realized I have to name the part something.

00:32:03 Speaker 2

Else because if I.

00:32:03 Speaker 2

Say this is a water pump for a Ford whatever tractor.

00:32:08 Speaker 2

He would make the castings and suddenly on the Internet up would pop. Hey, do you guys want water pump housings for a Ford? Whatever tractor this whole back door market would start. So he started naming the parts something weird. These are rotor girders.

00:32:22 Speaker 6

And that would.

00:32:22 Speaker 2

Work. Yeah, it works. Yeah, it's.

00:32:24 Speaker 2

It's so there's this whole.

00:32:25 Speaker 2

Thing that happens with manufacturing where.

00:32:28 Speaker 2

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.

00:32:38 Speaker 2

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

00:32:47 Speaker 1

This question of dustins he was able to infect John with it enough so that John set aside his normal entrepreneurial instincts to join Dustin on his quixotic mission.

00:32:57 Speaker 1

We're going to follow along and to start, you just have to imagine the thing they're trying to make. The prototype is basically 2 main parts. 1 is the handle. You can just imagine the handle on a toilet brush and that is connected to Part 2. The scrubby part. It's a circular disk. It sort of looks like a hockey puck that's been wrapped in chain mail. Those are the 2 main.

00:33:18 Speaker 1

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

00:33:27 Speaker 2

So the first thing I did.

00:33:28 Speaker 2

Is I went to.

00:33:30 Speaker 2

My computer and I used computer aided design software and I designed the scrubber.

00:33:36 Speaker 2

The thought was.

00:33:38 Speaker 2

We have the chain mail and we need a squishy thing to put behind the chain mail, and we want to use the least amount of material possible.

00:33:47 Speaker 1

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

00:33:53 Speaker 2

And so there's certain shapes that packed together really well, and a hexagon is one of the most efficient shapes that you can do what's called tessellation.

00:33:53 Speaker 5

In.

00:34:01 Speaker 2

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 cat.

00:34:13 Speaker 1

There's a puzzle frustrating at first, but then Dustin found himself losing track of time the way you do when you're working.

00:34:19 Speaker 1

On any good puzzle.

00:34:20 Speaker 2

Flow is the best way to describe.

00:34:22 Speaker 1

It, yeah.

00:34:23 Speaker 3

You start to have really.

00:34:25 Speaker 2

Really serious opinions about fillet radiuses and and.

00:34:31 Speaker 2

An engineer I love this part.

00:34:33 Speaker 1

The destined the next step was to take these 3D printed parts and find someone who could build an.

00:34:37 Speaker 1

Injection mold.

00:34:39 Speaker 1

The injection mold, letting 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 and injection mold shaped like that handle makes handle after handle.

00:34:53 Speaker 1

Your handle.

00:34:54 Speaker 1

So Dustin wants to find someone who can make an injection mold shaped like his BBQ scrubber parts, but who is based in America.

00:35:01 Speaker 1

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

00:35:08 Speaker 2

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.

00:35:16 Speaker 2

Want to make?

00:35:16 Speaker 2

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.

00:35:29 Speaker 1

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.

00:35:39 Speaker 2

Yes, when he said we don't make the mold in America. That's the moment I realized we were screwed.

00:35:46 Speaker 2

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

00:35:53 Speaker 2

In a SEC.

00:35:53 Speaker 1

Energy, manufacturing and tooling.

00:35:55 Speaker 2

Tooling. Those are the tools. They're usually custom tools that go into the machines that make things.

00:36:01 Speaker 1

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

00:36:07 Speaker 1

The tool is the tooling and then the snack cakes are the product of the tool machine.

00:36:12 Speaker 2

Correct. Yeah. And and so there's this whole industry called Tool and die. It's a skilled trade.

00:36:21 Speaker 1

Just one more example in case you are as unfamiliar with us as I was picture of factory that's making spoons. The spoon starts out as a blank piece of metal, but there's a machine like a cookie cutter. Anything pushing the metal into the cookie cutter that shapes it into a spoon. That machine is the tool and die.

00:36:25 Speaker 6

Hey Sir.

00:36:40 Speaker 2

In Germany, to have very specific programs where you will learn how to make tools for manual.

00:36:44 Speaker 2

Factoring 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 tooling die guy like he used to work in tool and gauge.

00:36:52 Speaker 2

And tool and die.

00:36:53 Speaker 2

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 realize you're sending all the intellectual property overseas.

00:37:04 Speaker 2

And they're making it so while they're set up to make the tool.

00:37:07 Speaker 2

They'll just make 2 and.

00:37:09 Speaker 2

So I said we don't want to do that. We want to make it in America and he he almost laughed at me. He's like, yeah, you, you don't understand.

00:37:15 Speaker 2

You.

00:37:15 Speaker 2

Clearly don't understand.

00:37:16 Speaker 2

How this works and I.

00:37:17 Speaker 2

Said, well, there's got to be somebody here that makes.

00:37:20 Speaker 2

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.

00:37:36 Speaker 1

This is a light bulb moment for me. In the conversation. The problem is not just that we've forgotten a lot about how to make things in America is that we're also forgetting how to make the things that make the things meaning in our factories. There are machines, the machines build the parts that the workers assemble into American products.

00:37:54 Speaker 1

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.

00:38:03 Speaker 2

I was like, this is what my dad did and the people I grew up with, this is what they do. Why can't we do it? And so I kind of went on this little mini quest to find somebody that could do this.

00:38:15 Speaker 1

Can you introduce yourself, say who you.

00:38:16 Speaker 1

Are and what you do I.

00:38:18 Speaker 8

Am Chris Robson. I am the president and owner of the Robson company.

00:38:24 Speaker 2

So I found the 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.

00:38:33 Speaker 1

How long have you been making molds?

00:38:36 Speaker 8

I've been doing this for 47 years.

00:38:39 Speaker 1

Wow. And do you remember when the business first started moving to China and you remember first time you saw that began to happen?

00:38:44 Speaker 8

We start feeling that about 12 years ago, I would say really start to hit, you know, about 10 years ago where we're seeing a lot of stuff and we were doing quoting for new tooling projects only to find out that the 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 green.

00:39:05 Speaker 8

Would you be interested in that and I?

00:39:07 Speaker 8

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.

00:39:19 Speaker 1

Chris said there used to be lots of tool and dye makers back where he's from in Erie, PA. They're mostly gone now. Many of them were as competitors, but also as friends.

00:39:29 Speaker 1

And with them, this whole part of the chain parents teaching their kids, adults teaching their apprentices, Chris has watched as that chains have been broken.

00:39:38 Speaker 1

Why is there?

00:39:38 Speaker 1

Happening now like, why is that sort of family chain getting broken at exactly this moment in time?

00:39:48 Speaker 8

I don't see that willingness to go and vocational education. People do not want to go into town and I make it. We have a hard time finding tool and dye 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.

00:40:07 Speaker 8

And they're not going to see the pay scale until they get to be adjourned until by Maker, where if somebody can come out of a tech school and make, you know, $2530 an hour and all you have to do is press a button on a CNC. Hey, it's hard to turn away.

00:40:25 Speaker 1

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

00:40:32 Speaker 1

And they're not being replaced by some wave of Gen. Z years. The average American manufacturing worker is 44 years old.

00:40:39 Speaker 1

No one on the line presumably is calling anything goaded. There's very little rising up transpiring.

00:40:46 Speaker 1

Dustin told me before he started working on the scrubber. He'd had one understanding of why people did not manufacture in America.

00:40:53 Speaker 2

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

00:41:13 Speaker 2

You've lost the.

00:41:14 Speaker 2

Skills and the old guy didn't train the young guy and men and women working in factories haven't learned the skills.

00:41:20 Speaker 2

Says the people that knew how to do it have retired. Yeah. And so that's not something you can fix overnight. Because when I was an intern, the older engineer taught me how to do things. Tool and die interns. There's a program called Journeyman and Apprentice. If they don't have somebody teaching them, we just skip that.

00:41:41 Speaker 2

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 it made me realize in America.

00:41:50 Speaker 2

We we like.

00:41:50 Speaker 2

To push paper around and and make money on things, but if we're.

00:41:55 Speaker 2

Not actually able to produce. What do you have?

00:41:58 Speaker 1

I asked Chris Robeson how we felt about all this.

00:42:01 Speaker 1

You'll 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?

00:42:09 Speaker 1

Without an immediate person to be teaching it to.

00:42:13 Speaker 8

I feel like a dinosaur, quite frankly, I 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.

00:42:25 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 our partnership. 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.

00:42:46 Speaker 8

Thermo.

00:42:47 Speaker 8

They're aimed at trying to fill the academic roles as opposed to the vocational roles, and I gotta be honest, you know, even though at my age I said I thought about that too. Why am I doing this when I can certainly go somewhere else and make about two grand a week and be a lot happier?

00:43:06 Speaker 1

And writing that.

00:43:07 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.

00:43:19 Speaker 8

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.

00:43:30 Speaker 1

When Chris in college, he's been a summer working at a machine shop because he just wasn't enjoying school anymore.

00:43:36 Speaker 1

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

00:43:42 Speaker 1

He and I talked for almost an hour, and the subject of terrorist.

00:43:45 Speaker 1

Never came up.

00:43:46 Speaker 1

Really politics at all? Chris did say if he was in charge, the change, he'd want to make would be more education, support for young people looking for apprenticeships, maybe trying to remove some of the stigma we've attached to the skilled trades.

00:43:59 Speaker 1

It made me think about the friends I have raising teenagers who've told me how much they wish there were just more options for working with your hands in America. How about everybody wants a desk job?

00:44:13 Speaker 1

If anything, Chris Robson, he actually didn't end up just making molds for Dustin, but teaching Dustin how to make them himself, which Dustin obviously was excited to do.

00:44:26 Speaker 1

There's a video of this.

00:44:27 Speaker 1

Dustin, wearing safety glasses a CNC mill behind him.

00:44:31 Speaker 3

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

00:44:34 Speaker 3

Hours.

00:44:35

She is almost.

00:44:36 Speaker 5

Done. Can't see in there just yet.

00:44:39 Speaker 1

He's standing next to a monitor.

00:44:40 Speaker 1

With his G code scrolling across it.

00:44:42

Almost 1,000,000 lines.

00:44:45 Speaker 3

Of G code.

00:44:48 Speaker 1

The machine turns off. Dustin opens the plexiglass doors to the mill and puts his hands up.

00:44:53 Speaker 5

Ohh Nelly.

00:44:58 Speaker 5

How does she look?

00:45:01 Speaker 5

Ohh wow OK.

00:45:04 Speaker 1

You see a shiny circular metal part with a hexagonal pattern cut.

00:45:08 Speaker 1

Out of it.

00:45:09 Speaker 1

Physical proof for Destin that his code works.

00:45:12 Speaker 5

This is a big deal.

00:45:15 Speaker 7

This is a very big deal, all right.

00:45:19 Speaker 3

We can make things now. People can't tell us now anymore.

00:45:23 Speaker 2

We can make.

00:45:23 Speaker 5

Whatever we want, this is huge.

00:45:26 Speaker 1

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.

00:45:34 Speaker 1

It's just a very human kind of joy, this feeling of creation.

00:45:39 Speaker 1

By February 2022, the scrubbers plastic parts now have a full chain of people and knowledge behind them. They are ready.

00:45:46 Speaker 1

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

00:45:51 Speaker 1

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

00:45:55 Speaker 1

Handle a bolt.

00:45:58 Speaker 2

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

00:46:06 Speaker 2

I put out a.

00:46:07 Speaker 2

Tweet and said I'm looking for an American manufacturer for this bolt.

00:46:13 Speaker 2

And the quotes I got from overseas are like $0.09 a bolt? Yeah, the cheapest I'm getting over here is the absolute cheapest is 1/4.

00:46:24 Speaker 2

So it's 3X.

00:46:26 Speaker 2

But most people are coming in at $0.50.

00:46:29 Speaker 2

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.

00:46:42 Speaker 2

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 the more expensive bolt just to have them made in.

00:46:51 Speaker 2

America, you guys are being vegans about.

00:46:53 Speaker 2

It. Yeah, we maybe.

00:46:54 Speaker 2

I am, I think ultimately I want the skills to be in America. That's what I want.

00:47:02 Speaker 2

Because I see them going away and I want to bridge the.

00:47:05 Speaker 2

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 a.

00:47:12 Speaker 2

Hard tail about.

00:47:12 Speaker 1

It and for you. It's not. You're not like I really want to make a BBQ smaller.

00:47:16 Speaker 1

Because I want.

00:47:17 Speaker 1

To make a giant briefcase full of money from my BBQ scrubber. You're like, people need jobs. They need things to do. They need skills.

00:47:25 Speaker 1

I'm going to create something that gets made here so that those.

00:47:28 Speaker 1

Things happen my.

00:47:29 Speaker 2

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.

00:47:38 Speaker 2

And we was meeting a couple of people. I was like, I'm sorry, darling. Why? Why are you laughing? And she goes. Oh, I'm sorry. We've.

00:47:43 Speaker 2

Lost such incredible amount of money.

00:47:44 Speaker 3

That's.

00:47:46 Speaker 3

But, but we ultimately think.

00:47:48 Speaker 2

It's going to be worth it in the long run, so it it required an incredible initial investment and no, this is not about money. This is about something I'm passionate about. On paper, it's stupid. It's really stupid to try to do it this way. We could have already sold scrubbers to you.

00:47:57 Speaker 1

In the shop.

00:48:03 Speaker 2

Years ago, if we had just done it the way everybody does it, but I just being very principle, I don't know. I I like to imagine it being principled, but it it it's probably stubborn is probably the the real word.

00:48:17 Speaker 2

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

00:48:38 Speaker 2

And the next thing you come up with, you can go to them and.

00:48:40 Speaker 2

Ask them to do it.

00:48:45 Speaker 1

What Dustin's talking about building here, really. It's manufacturing capacity. It's funny for people who want tariffs. Part of the idea is that tariffs might force Americans to build more capacity if foreign goods were more expensive to buy, more people might do what destiny's just doing, voluntarily training people, tooling up factories.

00:49:04 Speaker 1

Creating the infrastructure you need to build stuff.

00:49:07 Speaker 1

Finding an injection mold person in America, a boat person in America. Actually, this brings us to our next person, a handle person in America.

00:49:18 Speaker 2

OK, for the metal handle.

00:49:21 Speaker 2

You got to have a person that can cut them out with a laser cutter.

00:49:24 Speaker 2

People can imagine.

00:49:25 Speaker 2

That, but the building of the dye that stamps the handles, that's the whole person. And there's this really beautiful.

00:49:33 Speaker 2

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. His name is Logan. We go to the facility. We're like, hey, we're going to make a part. We're finally going to make a part and.

00:49:52 Speaker 2

We go there and he loads.

00:49:54 Speaker 2

A flat piece of metal and he hits the button and the press comes down could chunk.

00:50:02 Speaker 7

So cool. Can I grab it? Pull straight out?

00:50:06 Speaker 7

Well.

00:50:07 Speaker 2

And then he takes it out and he moves it to the next station. It's.

00:50:09 Speaker 2

A multi station tool.

00:50:11 Speaker 2

Yeah. And he goes all the way to the end and.

00:50:13 Speaker 2

He pulls it out and he holds it up and it's done.

00:50:16 Speaker 2

And and I look at him and I said.

00:50:18 Speaker 2

Hey, is this the first tool you ever made he designed?

00:50:21 Speaker 2

And built the tool.

00:50:23 Speaker 2

He said yes, this is the first one.

00:50:24 Speaker 2

I've ever done.

00:50:25 Speaker 7

This is the first one you've made. Yes, Sir. And how long it?

00:50:27 Speaker 7

Take you about 6.

00:50:29 Speaker 3

Weeks. So you are you been training?

00:50:31 Speaker 5

Him.

00:50:34 Speaker 7

A lot of.

00:50:34 Speaker 3

Hell, so do you feel like you know how to do?

00:50:36 Speaker 7

The next one now, as long as I got friends to go back.

00:50:40 Speaker 7

Yes, Sir. Really.

00:50:44 Speaker 3

Did you ever think you would have?

00:50:45 Speaker 7

The skill I never knew anything like this really existed there in high school, and 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 and apprentice and I've enjoyed it.

00:51:01 Speaker 7

Everything. It's all the hands on stuff. Learning stuff every day. I've really enjoyed it ever since I've been over.

00:51:07 Speaker 1

There, that's fine. You never know this standing in the store mindlessly comparing different BBQ scrubbers. What any of us had meant to 1 American engineer or to Logan, the young worker here.

00:51:19 Speaker 1

But the scrubber now has an American made handle.

00:51:22 Speaker 1

Once Dustin and his partner John have other 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.

00:51:31 Speaker 1

There's this very sweet video of John's mom outside her grandson watching as she this small woman holding this very large BBQ scrubber, tests it on a dirty BBQ grill and then gives her verdict.

00:51:46

That's great.

00:51:46 Speaker 1

Dustin and John have a working BBQ scrubber. They've patented it.

00:51:51 Speaker 1

In November 2024, they finally started assembling it in batches and then once you have all the parts, where does the thing get assembled into one thing, we're.

00:52:00 Speaker 2

Doing it in our hometown.

00:52:01 Speaker 1

OK.

00:52:02 Speaker 2

Yeah, we're literally.

00:52:03 Speaker 2

Doing in our hometown, so the puck and the chain mail and everything, we we have a place where we send them and we're paying a subcontractor.

00:52:11 Speaker 2

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.

00:52:20 Speaker 2

Handles laser the brand on the handles, and then we assemble them all there at the facility where we ship them.

00:52:27 Speaker 2

Out.

00:52:28 Speaker 1

And how many people are in the facility?

00:52:30 Speaker 2

Right now there's 5 or 6 depending on, you know, we bring people in a lot of times, college kids that are home from school in the summer.

00:52:38 Speaker 1

Dustin shared a video. It depicts some of the most adorable child labor you've ever seen. Dustin's young son in one corner of the warehouse, boxing up scrubbers.

00:52:46 Speaker 3

We got the assembly line going. Go ahead to Dustin.

00:52:49 Speaker 3

Is my son.

00:52:49 Speaker 5

Packed.

00:52:50 Speaker 5

Them up. What do you think? It's good. I'm going out.

00:52:56 Speaker 5

They.

00:52:58 Speaker 5

This is me and John's boys over here doing.

00:53:00 Speaker 5

This, you know, taking a break.

00:53:02 Speaker 1

A short distance away, John's teenagers are also working. They're sitting down, tying on tags and putting American flag stickers on the BBQ scrubbers. It's funny seeing these American teenagers on an assembly line instead of, I don't know.

00:53:10 Speaker 5

What's going on? What's going take a break?

00:53:13 Speaker 5

I'm. I'm gonna fall asleep.

00:53:20 Speaker 1

Fortnite they're maybe a little bored, but they're being good sports.

00:53:24 Speaker 3

Man, you're applying stickers. You feel you feel patriotic when you do that.

00:53:26

50.

00:53:28

Yeah, it's very patriotic. Bless America.

00:53:30 Speaker 8

Yeah.

00:53:32 Speaker 3

Boxes. Yes, I can make you.

00:53:34 Speaker 8

More boxes.

00:53:35 Speaker 2

You'll have somebody getting out a handle, tying a string on it, and somebody puts the puck on and somebody puts a little sticker on it. And so we have a little assembly line that's very inefficient. It's just kind of bootstrapping right now.

00:53:41 Speaker 1

Yeah.

00:53:50 Speaker 1

So Dustin has the product.

00:53:52 Speaker 1

Stubbornly insisted on a BBQ scrubber that was both made and assembled in America.

00:53:58 Speaker 1

We're going to take a short break and then come back to the.

00:54:00 Speaker 1

Final part of.

00:54:01 Speaker 1

Our question, will anybody really buy this thing?

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00:55:31 Speaker 1

Welcome back to the show.

00:55:33 Speaker 1

Dustin and I met up late this January. He was visiting New York and he came by the studio and we looked at his BBQ scrubber together.

00:55:41

Yeah.

00:55:42 Speaker 1

You sent. I feel now. I feel like I'm in an.

00:55:44 Speaker 1

Infomercial I know that you see.

00:55:49 Speaker 1

The smarter scrubber, Dustin and John are selling it direct for 5999, which is expensive. You can buy a much cheaper wire scrubber on Amazon for 1999 made in China, although in Destin sales pitch, he'll tell you that that one will probably break in a couple of years and it might leave metal wires in your stomach before it does.

00:56:10 Speaker 1

Will people pay for the smarter scrubber?

00:56:13 Speaker 1

I asked myself that holding the finished product in my hand, thinking about all the people who solved all the little problems to make it real.

00:56:20 Speaker 1

It has a very sturdy it's a steel.

00:56:22 Speaker 2

Stainless steel.

00:56:23 Speaker 1

Very sturdy stainless steel handle, it feels like.

00:56:27 Speaker 2

Like a medieval weapon of war.

00:56:30 Speaker 1

It feels like something that you're not going to throw in the trash and 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 plasticky and broken. And then like.

00:56:43 Speaker 1

It's too cheap to give away, and this feels like something that you would just.

00:56:47 Speaker 1

Have for a long.

00:56:48 Speaker 1

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.

00:56:58 Speaker 2

To last, that was the goal. It's it's a weird thing to talk about, but it's.

00:57:02 Speaker 6

It's.

00:57:03 Speaker 2

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.

00:57:10

Right.

00:57:12 Speaker 2

Guy and he 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, he's like, this feels like something made in America.

00:57:18 Speaker 1

Begins too heavy.

00:57:22 Speaker 1

What does that mean?

00:57:23 Speaker 2

And I was like, you mean good? What does that mean? And he's like, it's just really like strong. And I was.

00:57:29 Speaker 2

Like that's good, right?

00:57:32 Speaker 2

And he was like, yeah, I guess so and.

00:57:34 Speaker 2

I was like.

00:57:35 Speaker 6

I don't like you anymore, but it's it's.

00:57:38 Speaker 2

Just really it's beefy.

00:57:39 Speaker 2

And it's made to not be.

00:57:40

Cake.

00:57:42 Speaker 1

I am not a BBQ 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.

00:57:55 Speaker 1

Dustin says if the smarter scrubber does succeed, he knows it will be in no small part because he has something almost no other random American inventor starts with a big megaphone.

00:58:06 Speaker 2

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 we'll sell, but ultimately the product has to stand or fall on its own. It's going to come down to.

00:58:19 Speaker 2

A A a lady in a in an aisle at a a store in Iowa looking at 2 items on the shelf and she's going to look at 2 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 the gross term that people say for YouTube.

00:58:39 Speaker 2

There's this trend.

00:58:40 Speaker 2

Where people will make a product and try to like rake in a bunch of.

00:58:43 Speaker 2

Money based on their.

00:58:43 Speaker 1

But the products always like. Yeah, very bad, right?

00:58:48 Speaker 2

And so we're hoping to to get it started with that, but ultimately it has to stand or fall on its own.

00:58:54 Speaker 2

The markets going to tell the truth.

00:58:56 Speaker 1

It's so scary. It's.

00:58:57 Speaker 2

Terrifying dude. And and the decision, like somebody puts 2 bolts in front of you. You can't tell the.

00:59:02 Speaker 2

Difference. You're like, hey, this one's this one's.

00:59:04 Speaker 1

It was more American.

00:59:06 Speaker 6

This one's.

00:59:06 Speaker 2

$0.35, and this one's nine cents. Tell me which one was in America and you can't.

00:59:11 Speaker 2

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 the most important rule is line.

00:59:31 Speaker 2

Go up. Yes, so.

00:59:32

Yes.

00:59:34 Speaker 2

We're doing it backwards and I hope it works.

00:59:44 Speaker 1

We'll find out how realistic Dustin's plan is soon. The smarter scrubber is quietly already for sale online, but this spring, Dustin officially announces it to his YouTube.

00:59:55 Speaker 1

Which is the real actual marketing push right now? Destin and John, they're pretty far in the red, but the hope is that the smarter scrubber will sell, largely because Dustin knows how to tell the story of why it should.

01:00:10 Speaker 1

If it works, there will still just.

01:00:11 Speaker 1

Be one BBQ.

01:00:12 Speaker 1

Scrubber just a single American made product.

01:00:16 Speaker 1

But the hope is maybe this whole process, this story, could be a kind of rough draft itself for other American engineers, inventors with ideas of their own, a process to look at, tweak, iterate on, improve. You never know. We'll see.

01:01:30 Speaker 1

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw productions. It was created by me PJ valid and Truthy Pittman Amy and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Mathos theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant. If you'd like to support.

01:01:48 Speaker 1

The show keep it alive and get ad free episodes 0 reruns and the occasional bonus episode. Please consider signing up for our Incognito mode. You can learn more at search engine dot show.

01:02:01 Speaker 1

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 Leo Reese. Dennis, thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello and John Schmidt and to the team at Odyssey, Jody Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox. Eric Donnelly.

01:02:21 Speaker 1

Colin Gainer, Mark Curran, Josephina Francis Kirk Courtney and Hillary Scott. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

01:02:28 Speaker 1

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.